Money Making
Christmas Is Here…What Will You do?
The time has approached once again, Christmas has popped its little head around the corner, and millions of people will be out buying gifts for their loved ones. So I ask the question ‘What will you get out of this holiday season?’. Now its easy to think that you will get presents from various family members, but I’m talking more on a ‘making money online’ level. This is the one time of year when people spend the most amount of money, so its quite feasible that you might be able to get some of that ‘pie’, no? Well, what if I told you that by looking at Christmas a bit differently, you might be able to make even more money than just ’selling’ at people? Sound good?
How To Knock £100 Off Of Anything
Ok, before I go into this, let me state that I have not done this – its a wee bit naughty if you ask me, but the theory itself is sound as a pound…just don’t let the lions know I let on to this secret. This idea can, in theory, allow you to get £100 or more off of a lot of things, yet it borders on the realm of the unethical. I’d like to hear your views on it, although I probably know what they will be, lol.
Ethical Protection Statement: I only provide the following below to give you an idea of how susceptible some ’systems’ are, and to allow you to possibly protect yourself against it
Yet Another Amazing Idea
After the success of revealing an all so amazing idea, I thought I would share with you all another potential money making idea I had. Now this is an actual idea with potential, or at least a lot more potential than my other idea, haha.
So why am I revealing it here? Well, a number of reasons. Basically I get ideas to generate money online all the time, yet I rarely have the time to actually go ahead with any of them, and some of them are quite big investments that would take me a long while. So by sharing them with you I may be able to help one of you guys start up something, or even start a joint venture! Also, after initially thinking it hasn’t been done, I accidentally stumbled across a site which is very similar to my idea, so the ‘unique’ potential has already flown out the window. It could be I haven’t searched hard enough and there are already sites offering this without me knowing – if that’s the case please leave me a comment letting me know! Another reason is the fact that I want you guys to come away with good information, and I don’t want this to be a blog with lots of ’secrets’, where I give you crap and keep the ‘good’ techniques / ideas to myself.
Anyway, enough with the tension, lets get to the actual idea:
Make Money From Blogs With No Readers
I’ve been reading a lot recently how blogs are essentially ‘nothing without readers’. Strictly speaking, this is true in a sense. I mean, what is the point of blogging if your not blogging to anyone? Well, if your not looking to make money online, then there are lots of reasons – keeping track of your life, sharing things with family and friends etc. Yet if you are blogging to make money, readers should be your biggest concern right? Well…not necessarily
How I Made $150 On My Second Website Sale
When I first was introduced to website design, it was at a young age and I didn’t really get to terms with it. I was more about the ‘flash and pizzaz’ of the site, and because of that I had a hard time starting out. Obviously as a beginner I wasn’t going to be anywhere near as good as many of the professionals out there, but at that age I had the attitude that if I wasn’t amazing at something on first try, it wasn’t worth my time. I have now since learnt my lesson from that, and in university I picked website design up again – namely as I didn’t have a choice; it was part of my course.
So I learnt various bits about designing sites, about HTML, PHP, CSS, but never really saw it as an avenue making money, so I let my knowledge on the subject grow stale. Its only when I started looking to make money online, I found out about people selling websites online, and the various places that you can do it. Immediately I saw a gap for my old experience with building sites, and decided to take it. I looked around on Sitepoint, the first place I was introduced to, and started looking at websites I could essentially ‘copy’ to make the same type of profit on them. This led to me building a ‘favicon generation’ website, and selling it for $70. However, the building behind that took quite some time, as I was rusty with my old skills, and there were still a couple of bugs in it as I released the site – luckily they were fixed shortly after going live with the auction (first tip here, don’t rush into the auction just to get it ‘over-with’ like I did).
So I wasnt too set on my first website sale, I wanted to do something bigger and better, yet something that could potentially be less complicated, and something that no-one else was selling. Not asking for much I know! lol. Now I’m not sure how the idea popped into my head, but I came up with a website idea that, as far as I could see, had not been sold on sitepoint before and had definate potential – a route planning site. Now when I first thought of it, it sounded foolish as it seemed like such a lot of work to do – however I remembered that google had a route planning service on its google maps, and I know people have included google maps on their websites before, so why not google route planning? I dug a little deeper and found that essentially by ‘borrowing’ javascript code from their example pages, and putting it on my own site – wrapping it up with a logo and some design – I had a route planning website with little effort on my part. Now before we get acrried away here, I will state that this is legal, as the google maps is part of a freely available ‘API’ that allows people to incorperate it on your site at no cost. Just before anyone accuses me of stealing, haha.
I published the site for auction at 1am UK time – you can see the details here. I initially put a BIN of $200, but after a couple of private offers I lowered it to $150 and sold it within 12 hours of the site being up. Not too bad for my second attempt? All by finding something that is available free online, and putting it into a nice little ‘wrapper’. So to those of you looking to make a quick bundle of cash – try and look for something you can get for free that isn’t on sitepoint; or more importantly, you cant find recently on sitepoint. If you sell something as ‘unique’ or ‘rare’, you want to make sure that when people search for it in sitepoint, they don’t find any other sites like yours – even if they have been sold on sitepoint before. It’ll diminish the value of the site. Be sure that whatever ‘free’ thing you find to sell though, you make sure you are allowed to do so. I just profited from the website ‘wrapper’ surrounding the google API, not googles technology itself.
Now most bloggers would leave it there, and you would go off attempting to replicate what I did, with me remaining quite cool for making $150 off of something free (would I be cool for that? lol). Yet I’m not like most bloggers and I want to share my full experience. I did try selling the same thing again, however this time I made the site design even better with the same basic premise. You’d think that Id make near the same, maybe more with it being ‘prettier’ and better laid out. Yet maybe because of the time I posted it, maybe because of the fact I had sold a site like it before, or maybe because I wasn’t being looked on favourably by the gods of sitepoint that day, it only sold for $51. Now that’s not to say its a bad outcome – the fact it sold for more than it cost to create is good, but that site which is ‘essentially’ better than the one prior, should have sold for more in my books.
So in essence, originality and creativity is the best chance to make a big sale on sitepoint (at least in the ’startup websites’ auctions), but after the intial appeal of the originality is gone, it could be hard to make money off of it again. Let me know your experiences with Sitepoint, and what you feel has worked the best!
Dan
Why Writing Guest Posts Is Good For Beginners
I had a revelation recently about guest posting on other blogs, and am very thankful for it – so I thought I would share the experience with you.
When starting out in the blogging world, you might not know what to expect – some may own blogs for fun, others to educate, and a few(!!) to make money. Yet whatever the reason, the blogger always wants readers to come and read their posts, join their feed, and hopefully be entertained / learn something valuable. Yet how do you know what your writing is actually of any worth to these people? Why would they come to your site over others? More importantly, how are you going to know without any actual visitors?
Guest posting allows you to extend your ‘reach’ onto another persons blog - by writing up a post and sharing it with the readers of that blog. The benefits of guest posting have been outlined many times, in that they can provide you with a new source of readers, and possibly more guest post requests. The larger the blog you guest post on, the larger the possible surge of traffic.
Yet in order to be allowed to post on anothers blog, what you write must be worthy of their standards. You can’t write up a simple ‘i make teh monies lolz’ post and expect it to be placed on some of the high standard blogs that are out there. At the same time you can’t write up an intricate piece on a blackhat technique and try and get it posted on a whitehat blog – just ain’t ganna happen. You need to know a bit about the blogger themselves, and what they like to post about, only then can you make your first attempt to provide them with a post – and this is the advantage for new time bloggers.
You see, when you post on your blog, a few people may read it – a few may even comment on or about it – but you won’t get yourself essentially ‘a review’. By submitting your ‘work’ to another human being to show on their own blog, they will have to judge if it is worthy enough to be submitted. This allows you to get a real review of your writing capabilities, and possibly some helpful hints into how to improve your work in the future. If your post isn’t written well, they’ll tell you; if the subject isnt covered enough, you’ll know – and it will be much more useful than just the ‘post and see’ attitude. A persons’ blog is very personal to them, and therefore you will be able to get a real opinion.
A possible arguement to counter-act this view could be that you could simply ask your commentators to tell you what they think, yet if you look at various other blogs you can see what most comments boil down to. People can happily say ‘Good post man, I really enjoyed it’ because its not on their blog, and they have nothing to essentially gain from it – whereas in creating a guest post you are creating a piece of work that should benefit both you and the blog you are posting to.
Another argument could be that the blog you apply to guest post to might have low standards, yet simple matter to sort out, as you only apply and send your guest posts to ‘worthy’ blogs, bloggers whose opinion you value in this big ‘ol wide world. If you have what you think is a ‘quality’ post, try sending it out to a couple of the big timers out there and see what they say about it!
Now its possible that you could get a response back criticising your work to pieces, and saying that it is awful (its unlikely, but it might happen). Don’t respond out of anger, but rather ask what was wrong with the post (if they haven’t stated) and maybe try to make some improvements. Maybe they will highlight on some real issues and it will help you to learn this, or rather maybe they will say that the post is ‘unsuitable’, in which case you can thank them and approach another blog. If the latter is the case, you can even ask what posts they might be looking for, as if they can give you a post that they want, its more likely to be accepted!
Now I’m not going to get into how you should go about sending your guest posts out and convincing people to show them, as Adam over at Creadiv has already done that for you, so you can check out his rules of guest posting and increase your game to the higher levels!
In summation, I believe that your blog can, and will, grow from writing guest posts – not just in the terms of readers, but in the quality of what you write. Having someone giving you advice and help for ‘free’ is something that should never be frowned upon.
Dan
Success On Halloween
It is officially Halloween today. OoooOOoo. Scary no? As you can see I made a delightful little banner up there to wish you all a happy Halloween – it’s not as good as Adams’ Creadiv pumpkin or SuiteJ’s self-portrait (very good), but I thought a little ‘festive’ cheer might brighten (probably the wrong word) up the page. Only problem is now I’ve done it, I’ve gotta stick with it, so have to think a Christmas themed one now as that’s just around the corner! lol
So what does Halloween mean in the world on online blogging, entrepreneurship and money making? Well, for one it means decorating your blog to show its Halloween (for some, not for others), and two – anyone who has a fancy dress shop should be laughing, although sadly this isn’t always the case (sorry Clog).
Now I’m quite tempted to get in on this whole Halloween thing, I think the possibility of starting up a website to sell Halloween goods (or something else that I haven’t thought of) could prove to be a money maker (and quite fun to design). Now I can hear a sudden uprising of people shouting “um, your too late, its Halloween NOW” to which I reply that yes, its Halloween, but no, I’m not late, I’m here at just the right time.
See, I beleive the best time to start something for a holiday period is actually just before (or just after) it has happened. The reasoning behind this is two-fold: one, you can get a lot of ideas from websites that have information about the holiday season, and build up some knowledge. Two, it gives you a whole year to advertise and get yourself to a ‘natural rank’ etc. through legitimate means. Now this doesn’t sound very exciting, as you would have to design and advertise the site for a year before you make any profit from it potentially. However, think of the positives of doing this – you have a lot of time to build up ‘natural’ search rankings, saving you having to pay for click-through links; you can visit many other sites over the year and tweak your site to work ‘just like the big players’; and more importantly you can take your time over it, its not a rush to get it done – I mean, you have a whole year!
As I said previously, I’m thinking of taking on this mentality and starting up a Halloween website…not exactly sure what I would sell / advertise on it yet though, but I like the idea of taking a ‘long term’ project. Hell, I might even try doing one for Christmas as well! Although, that is a much bigger, more competitive market and relies a lot of ‘niche products’ of the year to get your advertising right. I mean, this year the top Christmas toy might be a stuffed lion (now complete with opposable thumbs!) but next year it could be an army issued grenade launcher (courtesy of McCain industries). A market that volatile is hard to plan for a year in advance, unless you stick with the ‘core’ values of it, and do a kind of ‘all-rounder’ site, which might offer Christmas food, a selection of goods etc. Once you’ve built your position, and once you know the years Christmas niches, you can advertise accordingly, keeping your position (or even increasing it) in the holiday.
Altogether I think that the idea is very sound, and could enable you to become a force in some very big markets! It does have its problems; the fact that you can’t make any ‘real’ profit from the site until a year later, and even then your site could flop (it shouldn’t, I mean, you had a whole year to make it!) and make little money. Yet think, that if you put the little work in bit by bit over the course of the year, and the site was a big success, not only would you have the profits to show from it, but you would also have to do very little to the website to make it profitable again for next year – the site might almost be self-sustainable!
Let me know your opinions guys, I appreciate them all and would like to know what you think about this.
On a side note, I realised I made a political joke in my post…blimey!
Dan
Why Great Ideas Are Useless
What a title I know! It will make sense to you though, so don’t worry, I haven’t lost my marbles (yet).
When you have that ‘award winning idea’, everything clicks. You realise the potential of what you have thought of, what you could attain through it, and you get excited. You get motivated. You sit down and work out all the little bits and pieces that you need to do, maybe on paper, maybe in your head. A week later, and you’ve moved on from that project. Why? Well, in my opinon the main reason is boredom.
Take me for example, I have two great ideas in the pipeline that are pretty much guaranteed to make me money with a bit of hard work, but every time I try to get myself to the point of doing some work for it, I fail at the first hurdle – I lose all motivation in it. I know that it will make me money, and I know that it will be worth it, but it just seems like too much hard work. I know that sounds stupid, but its true!
Now lets look at my latest site – in my pants. Now this site has a little monetisation potential, but nothing guaranteed, yet I have almost spent two days building this site, along with an admin console back end, and have plans to extend the amount of features on the site. Why on earth would I be doing this? Because strangely I am really enjoying it. Im learning new things by building it, it does have ’some’ prospects, and its quite funny (personally speaking). Whereas I stand to gain less from this site, I’m more inclined to carry on developing it because its something Im enjoying, whereas the other two seem like I have set myself up for almost ‘too much work’. I know they will be good earners, but it is getting myself motivated to do something that I’m not looking forward to.
Most great ideas end up this same way, people find amazing niches and ideas, only to be defeated because the project seems too daunting, or too much like hard work. Ideally, we would find something that we would enjoy doing, that would make lots of money, and focus our attention on that. Some people are that way driven, but it is ever so rare to find one.
So what do I suggest? Well, have a look at the things you actually ‘enjoy’ doing, and see what can be had from that! Well, at least that’s the answer everyone else gives, however its not strictly speaking true. One of the projects I want to start is about something I very much enjoy, and have for a long while, yet I cannot find the motivation to do it.
So what are your views on the issue? Do you think you should try to motivate yourself to these ‘boring’ tasks, or look towards things you enjoy more? Have you ever experienced what I have written about? Let me know…as for me, I am heading to bed as I have to be up at 5am to check that my companies system is still up and running…joy!
Dan
My New Amazing Idea
Ok, so you may know me for my astounding ideas, and yet again I have struck one and actually acted upon it! So what is this idea you may ask? Well…its in my pants!
Ok that might have been a bit crude, lol, let me explain. There is a game called ‘in my pants’, in which you take a movie name and add ‘in my pants’ afterwards. So for example, you might have ‘Grease…in my pants’ or ‘Top Gun…in my pants’. Its an extremely childish game, but one where you can have lots of fun.
So what I have done am currently working on, is my websitewhich displays random movie titles, followed by ‘in your pants’ to give readers a bit of a laugh. I can already feel your love and admiration for this idea flowing through, lol.
The truth of the matter is yes, its a silly site, but I am quite enjoying developing it. Once I have got it a bit more established (I need to add some graphics and a rating system), I’m hoping to market it out. It is one of those sites that people can visit for a ‘quick laugh’ and not have to trawl around for much else. In that sense it has limited appeal, but if I can get a steady income from it for long enough, I can sell it for a lot more than its cost me.
So I hear you ask; how are you going to make money with this site?! Well, the obvious thing is AdWords, however I hate the thing to pieces sadly; I feel it makes website look 10 times worse than they actually are. It might come down to me placing some AdWords on the site, but I’m going to hold off as long as I can. My money making scheme for the site is quite sneaky, and I will let you figure out exactly how it will work (I haven’t implemented it fully yet). I also have some more ideas for it so stay tuned and I’ll let you know how it pans out!
Dan
Secrets Of Lists And Reports
As I write this, my inbox is currently being bombarded with ’spam’ email. It seems that someone has used my email address to send information about a Russian dating site to almost everyone in the world (Therefore if anyone has recently tried to contact me via email, you might want to try sending the email again because I had to go through a mass deletion – literally over 500 emails last night!). Doesn’t seem to be going well for me lately, I might rename the blog ‘Wheres my luck?’ lol. However, first thing I thought when the emails landed in was ‘He’s not going to make money like that, it’s not exactly targeted is it?’…hence the post!
So why should you ‘build a list’, and what should that consist of? Well lets take it down to its very basic level – if you are advertising an eBook which helps people learn to do the twist (for example), then ideally you dont want to advertise that book out to everyone, but rather people who might be interested in doing the twist. Even then, its possible that they might not want to part with their money on a book that might not have sufficient information. However, if you had a list of emails of ‘twist enthusiasts’ who knew of you already, then its highly likely that a lot of them might buy some of your work. This allows us to not only target our demographic audience, but also gives us a list of people who have already ‘been in contact’ with us, therefore giving them a larger sense of trust with parting money for our book! It sounds brilliant, but how do we go about it?
Recently I wanted to build a list to promote my new eBook to (that I’m currently writing atm). So, to test out some advertising, I created another eBook (a lot shorter), a landing page, and a simple email submit form. I offered the eBook for ‘free’ to the user, saying that I would send the link to them via email. Once they placed their email in, they would receive a confirmation to join my ‘newsletter’, and once confirmed they would receive a link to the eBook. Now everyone who has got this far has expressed their interest in the free ‘taster’ almost, without even knowing about the other eBook that is in development. Each person will also have received a quality ‘free’ piece of information regarding the niche being advertised in. Now we have a targeted audience that we can send information about our new eBook to, and if these people enjoyed the free ‘taster’ they are going to be a lot more willing to part with their money on the ‘better’ eBook!
Example 1: Lets say you advertise a sales page with a $20 eBook, and 100 people click through at $2 a click. Lets say you have a decent sales letter, and 30 out of the 100 people buy your eBook – that would send you into a profit of $400. Not bad at all! However, lets say instead of advertising a $20 eBook, you advertise a ‘free’ eBook report with a decent sales letter. Now because it is ‘free’, your a lot more likely to have more people sign up, so lets say 70 people out of the 100 sign up to your ‘free eBook’. Now after 3 days of signing up and reading your free eBook, you send a series of emails (we’ve all received them…) hyping up your new product, and then eventually sending these 70 people the link. Now with already reading some useful information from your last eBook, lets say 50 people now decide to buy your eBook (the other 30 are either bad emails, ignorant people, or lions who signed up because they were testing out their new mail order oposable thumbs). That’s given you an extra $400 profit, all through creating a smaller ‘taster’ eBook. However this isn’t perfect, we have still lost $200 through advertising…so how would we rectify this situation? Well, the genius of ‘free’ eBooks is that we can create more than one, in more ‘targeted’ demographics…
Example 2: Lets say we have created an eBook about gardening, and that to get some gardening keywords it would cost us $2 a click…bit expensive there. However, lets say we create two ’spin-off’ free reports, based on the art of using a trowel and the way to get the greenest grass. Now the relevant keywords might only cost us $1 a click for those free reports. Lets say we bring in 100 people through these ’specific’ reports, which sets us back $100, whereas those 100 people through the gardening keyword would have cost us $200 (and we may of had less conversion rate without the free report!). Then, we know that these people we have targeted enjoy forms of gardening, and can then market them our gardening product via our list!
The key in the previous example is that if you can pull out specific things about your niche and create ‘free reports’ for them, you will be able to specifically target cheaper keywords, but more of them depending on how many reports you have. You might have a ‘make money online’ book, so you make three free reports about forex trading (never ever ever do that, trust me), eBook selling, and article writing. You then contact all the people who have bought these books and say that you have a new release coming out with all different ways to make money, and the book that you sell could just be a combination of all three things you previously offered! The article people get information about forex and eBook selling, the ebook people get information about forex and article writing etc.
Building a list with free reports is a very useful tool in limiting expenses and maximising return and when done right can produce amazing results! You don’t have to just create ‘free reports’ either, you could offer them information through an email newsletter, which would slowly build up to the release of your product, or a link to a video showing them how to ’cut their lawn perfectly’ for example (obviously the content of the video would change depending on the targeted niche!).
I would provide actual quotes from keyword searches on google etc. but it is 6am here, and I am writing this while working from home (until 8, and then I have to go into work!!). Therefore I apologise if the post is possibly a bit jumpy (and long) but I hope you get some use from what I have shown! Now I must go deal with some Russians…
Dan
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