Archive for April, 2008
Posted by Brett on 30th, 2008
I know most of you may have heard about this by now but if you haven’t here goes. Brian Campbell of Internet Marketing University has made the claim that he will make $10,000 in 37 days from facebook. Even further he has invited everyone to join his group and follow him as he goes along.
This is pretty interesting stuff. He’s either going to be a huge success or embarrass himself horribly, either way its a good way to learn. I’ve already joined and became a fan of Brian on facebook so I can see what he does. I have some ideas as to how he might do it but I’ll still wait until he reveals his plans.
This post is of course a bit late. The end of the 37 days is May 16th 2008 which really just gives Brian a little over two weeks left to generate the money. Let’s see how it turns out!!
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Posted by Brett on 28th, 2008
Good day readers, I must first apologize for my absence, I had to go away on business for my 9 to 5 job and I did not prepare adequately by writing posts in advance :s. But let’s get back to business.
It’s another Monday and we will begin our week with a motivational article about a young entrepreneur doing what we all hope to accomplish someday to some degree.
Today’s entrepreneur of the week is Brian Taylor of Kernel Season’s. Kernel Season’s began out of the dorm room of this 29 year old. The company makes seasonings for popcorn ranging from white cheddar to marshmallow chocolate. Imagine marshmallow chocolate popcorn, sounds good to me :-).
Brian says he made popcorn every night and created his own personal spice blends to add to it, his friends loved it and people came knocking on his dorm room door asking for the special seasonings.
Brian hired a team of flavour specialists to help perfect his seasonings and now has his seasonings in a reported 70% of groceries and movie theatres in the U.S.
This is some pretty good stuff here. Making money from something as simple as popcorn seasoning. You can read more about Brian Taylor and Kernel Seasonings here and maybe even try out some of his seasonings for yourself. Oh and his company reportedly made $5 million in sales in 2006!
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Posted by Brett on 11th, 2008
Well this officially ends my first business week of making money online. I got accepted to Adsense on Saturday, and have been running Adsense on one of my websites for the past seven days (today included). I am pleased to announce that I have officially made my first dollar online.
It is actually my first independent income since the beginning of my journey toward financial independence. My income thus far has been a staggering $1.12 
. Of course I can’t go running off to buy my Gulf Stream private jet just yet; I must say I am very proud of the out come.
Mostly, this week was a testing week, to see what users ads users are clicking and what areas of my site get the most impressions. Next week I intend to do some more experimentation with ad colours and placement as well as ad size.
In addition I have been planning a marketing strategy in my never ending quest for more traffic. This too will be explored and put in place and I will naturally inform you of the results.
That’s it for now, just a short update. Thanks for reading and feel free to subscribe to full RSS feed.
Posted by Brett on 8th, 2008
Time.com has released its first annual top 25 blogs index. They have chosen what they consider to be the best 25 blogs on the internet from the millions that exist.
From millions of blogs about nothing, we’ve selected the 25 best about something—from politics and global affairs to shopping and sports. And, yes, we’ve got a few about nothing, too.
The avid blog readers will recognise most of the names on this list. It features names like Life hacker, Boing Boing and The Huffington Post to name a few. Check out the article and see if you agree with their choices.
Alternatively they also have a top 5 most overrated blogs index. This list has some very big names on it as well.
Regardless if you could get your blog on either list that would bring you some serious traffic and popularity. Let’s see if any of us can make it some day
Posted by Brett on 7th, 2008
Hello readers, it’s Monday and time for a motivational story about a successful and young entrepreneur. This week’s entrepreneur I have lots of respect for, I really have no idea how he manages all his businesses AND still goes to college at the same time. The developingeyes’ entrepreneur of the week is the talented 22 year old Neil Patel of Advantage Consulting Services (ACS) and Crazy Egg.
Businesses
Neil Patel is an internet marketer who is co-founder of ACS the consulting firm which does Internet Marketing, Business Consultancy and Creative consultancy for businesses such as HP, Samsung, and TechCrunch to name a few.
CrazyEgg is an online web analytics application that offers a number of features for webmasters to see how their sites are performing. Users can create tests to figure out what people are doing on your website; view a heatmap which tells you what’s hot and what’s not, on your website and many more interesting concepts to help analyze the performance of your website extensively.
Time to spare
Amazingly enough, after running these two companies and going to school he still has time for a personal blog called Quick Sprout which gives good internet marketing tips on things like building your own brand. I’ve already added quick sprout to my RSS reader and I would advise others to do the same. I also recommend using Crazy Egg services, the free account is pretty extensive and can work for most of us still under 5000 visitors monthly.
Livin’ large
You’d be keen to realise that Neil is sporting the elitist invite only American Express black card in the photo above. In this blog post he mentions receiving the card as a gift from being on the board of advisors for the company known as Affiliate Programs. Just to keep the card Neil has to have minimum charges of $250,000 a year! If this isn’t large living I don’t know what is.
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Posted by Brett on 3rd, 2008
The question I’ve been asking myself for quite sometime is “when does one make an attempt to monetize his business?” Of course there are a lot of factors which will come into play, particularly the type of business model you are employing. Currently I still remain in the category of a web entrepreneur and my business model to be employed would be advertising. Advertising profitability of course relies heavily on traffic and conversion of that traffic to click on ads (in most cases).
So I’ve decided to make an attempt at monetizing at least one of my websites. I am currently waiting patiently for approval of my website by Google into the Adsense program. I should know by this weekend if I am eligible and I will let you guys know as soon as that happens.
What made me think it was time to monetize? Well besides feeling a little eager I had set a few personal milestones that I wished to accomplish before even considering any type of monetization.
Steady Traffic
I wanted to wait until I had a steady stream of traffic coming in before I attempted to place any ads on my sites. Some experts feel that bombarding your visitors with ads when your site is relatively new discourages persons from giving your service a chance. I see the point but at the same time any surfer should be accustomed to seeing ads on a site so much so we have the term banner blindness where persons hardly acknowledge the presence of banner ads as if they were not even there.
My personal milestone was to reach 1000 visitors in a month, a meagre 33 visitors daily on average. For the month of March this new blog received a total 1041 visitors thanks to my traffic attempts. My other site is a little below but the SEO is kicking in and I’m seeing some very promising results from search engine traffic which I expect to get better as I add content and market more.
Projections
I really mean two things from this, content projection and traffic projection. I use the tool Adsense Preview for firefox to get an idea of the types of ads that would show on my sites given the amount of topic that is presently available. When I first started out the tool could only give me ads that are related to the domain name, since there was very little content on the site itself. For example this blog would have been showing ads about eyes and eye specialists and nothing about entrepreneurs or business or marketing, i.e nothing relevant to the users. This is why it’s very important to have domain name that has keywords in it as well, but that’s another post.
I now see very relevant ads using the adsense preview tool, so I know now my content has reached a point where it can generate something useful.
When I say traffic projections I not only mean how much my traffic will grow but also the potential for the money earned to grow with it. This is something I just did on my own, no specific tools. For example, John Chow’s income report for the month of March was approximately $31,000 from roughly 152, 000 visitors. Being the ultimate optimist I am, if I take the traffic I have now and consider myself lucky to have as good a conversion rate, my 1041visitors for March had a possibility of bringing in roughly $214 for me from this blog. I’m not a greedy guy; I think this is a fairly good starting point. But that’s just me and my optimism.
I’ll make sure to keep you updated as to how everything goes from here on in. I’ll see if I get accepted to the Adsense program and how the ads are performing on the sites I run them on.
That’s all there is today, hope you enjoyed the post, Thanks for reading!
This week’s young entrepreneur is Sam Altman of 
