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.
If you liked this post then please consider subscribing to my RSS feed. Thanks for reading
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!
Posted by Brett on 31st, 2008
This week’s entrepreneur of the week is actually a team of two. Shawn Gupta and Reman Child are the co founders of Expensr. Expensr is a free online personal finance manager. It is explained in very basic terms so that anyone can use it.
In addition to that these guys have put a social networking component to their web application in true web 2.0 fashion. The idea behind the social networking aspect is depending on your tags and categories you can compare yourself against other persons similar to your financial situation and as a result determine whether your spending practices are good or bad. They have even developed a nice lite version of expensr for facebook, called iSpend so that you can have a similar experience while using your facebook account.
From what I’ve observed from reading the information on the site, Expensr makes its money like many social networking sites, through targeted advertising fuelled by the information and traffic provided by its users.
I really think these guys have got something going here. The finance and debt industry is a multi billion dollar industry and I think they are handling the niche well. You can read more about Gupta and Child at the expensr blog or in the September 2007 issue of Business 2.0.
Hope you enjoyed the post. Thanks for reading
Posted by Brett on 28th, 2008
Today I’ve decided to share 5 articles that I have come across that have really been inspiring to me. Some of them are just stories on the success of another individual while others are tips and strategies. I assure you that each one contains some knowledge and can be greatly beneficial to the reader.
1. 10 k ppc experiment part 1 and 2 by shoemoney
The first article is by our blogging friend Shoemoney. Its really two very extensive articles describing in detail an experiment he performed in affiliate marketing. He set aside $10,000 for advertising and tested a number of advertising methods and marketplaces such as adbrite and adword to help bring in money to his chosen affiliate programs. It’s really an excellent post and if your not inspired in some form by it I don’t know what will.
Ok I know what you’re thinking, another ordinary make money online blog post. Well that’s not the case this time. This article is actually different to the others you may have come across already. What Ben from blogging experiment has chosen to do here is give a general theoretical back drop so that we can put all the other make money online articles into perspective. Pretty nice and straight forward lives up to its name as being for beginners.
Entrepreneur’s Journey is a great blog for any budding entrepreneur. This article is just a slight reality check. After reading so many success stories I think its best to be aware of the hardships that must be endured and overcome before reaching that level of success. This article is a before you start here’s what u need to know kinds of article. Check it out.
This article applies to every type of entrepreneur, web or not. It shows how to take advantage of the internet to market yourself and build an excellent reputation. It is very extensive and very well put together. The guys and dosh dosh did very well on this post and I definitely recommend giving it a read
Last is this very nice video, that is really, really inspiring. It shows a bunch of established entrepreneurs and describes their importance and effect on society. Best way to describe it is touching.
Well that’s it for today. These are my blog recommendations, hope you enjoyed the post and thanks for reading.
Posted by Brett on 26th, 2008
This weekend I worked on a national event where I was in charge of the playing of advertisements on the big replay screen (I used to work for an ad agency so I have a soft spot for ads).It was quite a stressful weekend but I did learn some things that I will now share with you. As an Entrepreneur projects are our lives, each business venture we take up can be considered a new project as well any services we choose to provide. Project management is extremely important. Last week I mentioned some of this in my effective administration post. I want to dig a little deeper now.There will come a time, primarily depending on the size of the project when you will be forced to work with others. Established businesses often ask of your ability to work well with others, are you a team player things of that nature and trust me they wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important. Why is it important? Well if you don’t work well with others in a team effort then there will be chaos and the project will be a failure!
But back to my point. Normally when working in a team the work is split up amongst the constituents of the group, each person being put in charge of a particular topic, aspect, department, you name it.
What is important to remember here is that you must not undermine the authority of each other. Never cross over into the territory of another group member and start giving orders to the persons he is in charge of. If you recognise something fundamentally wrong with the approach he is taking then address it to him directly. This is the best way to keep everything in order. Persons do not take well to their authority being undermined, and there may be good reason (more times than not) why he is doing it in that particular way.
This is really just a quick lesson in team work. Trust each other’s capabilities and respect each other’s work and authority over the people they are in charge of. When there are too many chief’s in one tribe there can only be chaos. A clearly defined chain of command should be established and adhered to.
Hope you found this somewhat informative. Thanks for reading
Posted by Brett on 24th, 2008
It’s Monday again and time for developingeyes’ Entrepreneur of the week. Every Monday I post the story of a young entrepreneur as motivation and inspiration for myself and my readers. Last week the Entrepreneur of the week was Ashley Qualls of WhateverLife.com. This week’s Entrepreneur is Benjamin Sann of BestParking.com
Benjamin Sann is 19 years old and is already and entrepreneur with budding success. from his excellent domain name you could guess that he tries to offer the best parking for drivers. People who drive in big cities and commute know how hard it is to find good parking. Essentially BestParking.com allows drivers to find parking garages and lots, compare daily rates and also book the parking slots in advance. It currently covers four cities in the United States, namely Boston, Philadelphia, New York City and Washington DC.
Benjamin Sann has partnerships with the garages which allow him to offer the reservation services and rate guarantee services to the users of his web application which is how I think the business makes its money. If you think about it, it’s quite similar to affiliate marketing. He is providing a service which gives the parking companies more sales and for each sale he provides will make some sort of commission.
I think this is an excellent idea, especially with the wide use of google maps (which ofcourse is built into his web application) the site is definitely a useful tool. What do we learn from young Benjamin Sann? Consider something that you find somewhat irritating and wished there was a better way of doing it. If you can actually solve that problem to make it easier to accomplish then you have something to go on because there is no doubt that others want it be easier as well.
Well that’s it. Hope you enjoyed the post. Thanks for reading.
Posted by Brett on 23rd, 2008
Well I wrote a post complaining about my lack of traffic to my sites. Since then I did a little traffic building campaign for this blog and for one of my other sites. Today I will share the results of that traffic building campaign and the techniques I used.
I wrote that post on the 12th of March. Since then I
- Attempted to publish a post everyday starting from Monday 17th to 21st of March
- Stumbled each article after it has been published
In reality I succeeded in publishing a post four days out of the five. This one was actually supposed to be my fifth post to really sum everything up, so I guess in a sense I made it. The results are in and according to Google Analytics; I had 644 unique visitors from 12th March to 21st March (590 visitors coming from StumbleUpon). This is quite an improvement from the 32 unique visitors I had up to 11th March (a 2012.5% increase to be exact). There is also increased activity in my rss feeds as well as comments to my posts.
So that’s all I did to increase traffic at this point. I will continue this practice as well as try other traffic building techniques and will continue to update you as I go along.
Hope you enjoyed the post. Thanks for reading.
Posted by Brett on 21st, 2008
There is a model for the majority of internet businesses on stream, a model for businesses in general. Let’s face it, most of us are not geniuses, we’re not coming up with the next world changing, unbelievably great big thing. Most of us are just average folk with average ideas. I don’t see anything wrong with that but we still need to push ourselves a little beyond the average. Now I’m not saying we have to try and be geniuses but we do need something more.
When deciding on starting a business and choosing a particular niche, I think it is extremely important to look at businesses (successful or otherwise) that are currently operating in that particular niche and follow the model used but observe what can be done differently by you to improve it and provide a better service to your clients.
Digg.com
There really is nothing exceptional or outstandingly genius about the digg concept. Digg.com was initially a technology news website where the users submitted links to news stories. This already existed at Slashdot.com which was very successful at the time. What users of Slashdot.com were silently unhappy about was the fact that the site editors had the final say as to what would be shown on the website out of the submitted material of its users. So essentially what Kevin Rose did was give the social networking news site a twist by placing the power in the hands of its users.
Good ole Walmart
Everyone knows Walmart, the huge multinational chain of discount variety stores. The founder Sam Walton had worked in variety stores previously, like J.C. Penny prior to going into business for himself. How did Mr Walton add new tyres to the wheel? Well his concept was to mark up less than his competitors and take less profit per item but achieve higher sales per volume to make up the difference. I think it’s safe to say that these tyres are doing well on the original wheels of the old variety store.
Strangely enough while writing this post Yaro Starak from Entrepreneurs Journey wrote a post as well saying sometimes you have to re-invent the wheel. It’s an excellent article, very extensive and filled with advice. At the end of it all I think we’re saying the same thing where you have to do things differently to some degree. I call it new tyres, but he calls it reinvention.
Well that’s it; I hope you have enjoyed my post. Thanks for reading.
Posted by Brett on 19th, 2008
Last night I came across this article at ezinearticles.com by Matt Jackson or WebWiseWords. I decided to share the article with you. I think it has some nice advice about page relevancy and the importance of your landing page. Currently I am working on improving the landing page on one of my sites since I would like a better response from my visitors when they arrive there. I’m definitely going to take the advice given in the article and see how I can improve.
The article is below as an excerpt. Ezinearticles.com allow you to do that once you have the article source link at the end. I hope you enjoy the article and find it useful
Thanks for reading
Improve Landing Page Performance With Page Relevancy
The landing page is one of, if not the most important aspects of an advertising campaign but it is one that is often overlooked. Upon embarking on an SEO, PPC, or any other type of campaign it is easy to get caught up in bid prices, link building, and optimizing the ad itself. However, if the landing page doesn’t perform then all of that work is next to useless. A landing page must convert visitors into customers.
What Is Landing Page Relevancy?
While there are several factors in optimizing a landing page for performance, page relevancy is one of the more important. The landing page is the link between your ad and the purchase, click, or signup that you crave. It needs to effectively and naturally ensure that visitors progress from being interested to being completely sold and ready to take the next (usually final) step in the process.
Linking Your Ad To Your Action
Landing page relevancy, then, means that all of the content elements on your landing page need to be relevant to your website and your product or service. It also needs to prove relevant to the actual advertisement or other marketing technique that you employed. It needs to be carefully planned and written in such a way that your visitors will not only want to complete the desired action, but feel they need to.
Remember That Visitors Are Real People With Real Needs
Consider the way your visitors found your site - your actual advert. For SEO and PPC this means looking at the keywords that led visitors to your page. Think about the individual people that found your ad and what they were looking for when they conducted their search and clicked on your link. Are they looking for more information or are they looking to complete the purchase of your product straight away?
Keyword Prominence
Include the relevant keywords in a prominent position on your page. It helps to direct the mind of your visitors and ensures that they know they are in the right place. Structure your landing page so it contains a good number of the keywords that are most important to these visitors without being guilty of keyword cramming.
All Advertising Demands Landing Page Relevancy
Other methods of advertising, such as banner advertisements and article marketing, still allow a good degree of visitor analysis and page relevancy. Any form of advertising means that you know the content of your ad, or article. This allows you to inject relevancy into the resulting page and improve the performance of that page to give you better conversions, greater profits, and an improved advertising ROI.
As well as offering a full SEO copywriting service, WebWiseWords is also a provider of high quality web site content that converts and performs. See how the WebWiseWords service can help you today.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Matt_Jackson
