Archive for the ‘Starting a Business’ Category

How To Write A Good Internet Marketing Book

Written by Brandon on April 6, 2008 – 5:26 pm -

American Chronicle has created a helpful list of tips to get you underway with your own ebook project. If you’re not familiar with ebooks they are a liberating way for authors to tackle a particular niche of information that people need. Ifyou are an expert on any focused topic, you should consider writing an ebook. Even if it doesn’t sell, it’s a great tool to show prospective employers.

Internet marketing books are a hot selling property today with almost everyone and anyone taking to internet marketing in order to earn some extra income. One can therefore make a lot of money by writing and selling a good internet marketing book. Writing a book is not a difficult task at all, but writing a good internet marketing book that makes money and is helpful for its readers is definitely a Herculean task. Given below are some tips that will help you in writing your book:

American Chronicle | How To Write A Good Internet Marketing Book

Posted in Building Blog Revenue, Starting a Business | No Comments »

Create a Rapid Wealth Generating Web 2.0 Style Business with Wordpress and 4 Simple Plugins

Written by Brandon on January 28, 2008 – 5:45 am -

I know you’ve heard this story before: “Create a Rapid Wealth Generating Web 2.0 Style Business with Wordpress and 4 Simple Plugins”, but a few recently created plugins for Wordpress have really opened the floodgate for creating rapid, wealth generating blogging businesses. But before I get into the nuts and bolts of the business model, I would first like to introduce you to a website currently using this business model: Trendhunter.com.

photo by Joe Shlabotnik

The Trendhunter Business Model

Trendhunter.com is essentially a multi-user blog where thousands of users have contributed articles to the site. According to my recent check at Alexa.com, Trendhunter is the 9th most popular design website on the internet The main focus of revenue for the site comes simply from the sheer volume of contributions which number in the dozens each day that are posted to the front page, and the ability of the contributors to promote their posts. How does owner, Jeremy Gutsche, get so many contributors?

  • He shares ad revenue with his users.
  • He encourages bloggers to promote their own content by contributing to Trendhunter.com
  • He edits each post that makes it to the front page which, unlike Digg.com, means only the most interesting trends make it. This helps maintain strong content quality that is on topic.
  • He promotes and encourages contributors to promote the site using web 2.0 tools such as blog widgets and old-school viral tools like emailing friends.

I believe that sharing the ad revenue is the strongest incentive for making such a popular blog because Mr. Gutsche makes it so easy to make extra money. How does he make it so easy? By making the ad sharing easy. All you have to do to make money is have a Google Adsense Account. When you sign up for Trendhunter.com, you are prompted to enter your AdSense code. Now, every article that you write that appears on Trendhunter.com will show your adsense ads, and any ads that are clicked on generates revenue for you. For most articles, only a dollar or two revenue is generated, but it is possible to generate up to $50 for articles that are viral and extremely popular. And, of course, the more popular the site and the more articles you write means the more money you make. All of this along with the collective power of all the other people on the site wanting to make money means explosive expansion once the site has built some popularity.

Although Trendhunter.com has developed really strong growth and requires a very small staff which has developed a relatively low impact revenue stream, there are some areas which Trendhunter.com could improve. I want to focus exclusively on rapid content generation, though, which is essentially the heart of Trendhunter.com’s business. So, how do you add content currently to the site? You have to go through a fairly excruciating process that involves filling out a half-dozen text fields minimum and tab through 4 tabbed pages. At any given time during this process, if you accidentally click on the wrong link surrounding the entry form and you’ve lost your data.

Adding the Tumblr Method of Rapid Content Creation

Trendhunter.com’s content creation could be so much more fun and easy if there were some sort of bookmarklet that you could add to your toolbar, so whenever you’re at some website you want to write about you could push a button, write a few sentences, and boom! your post is done. Enter the Tumblr.com Bookmarklet. This bookmarklet lets you press a button, and all the images pop up on a new screen. Then, you can choose an image, write a couple of sentences, and hit “post”.

A quick comparison of the Tumblr.com content work flow versus the Trendhunter.com content work flow reveals that the same quality post can be created with the tumblr bookmarklet method in 25% of the time it takes to create a Trendhunter post. The work flow savings you get with tumblr.com are:

  • automatic uploading of images and videos
  • 10-20 less clicks needed per article, which saves your hands
  • more incentive to write an article because it only requires one click on the tool bar
  • quotes can be added by simply highlighting the desired text you want to quote.

Trendhunter.com would surely benefit from adopting this model, and the Trendhunter tool bar that already exists seems ripe for including this in their development schedule. But if you are as ambitious and motivated as Jeremy Gutsche, you may be able to beat him to the punch by creating an even more effective and simpler version of Trendhunter.com using Wordpress and a number of simple to implement plugins.

So, what are these plugins that can make Wordpress as popular and powerful as Trendhunter.com? We should start by analyzing what Wordpress is missing that Trendhunter has:

  • First, Trendhunter has a stronger user customization, so Wordpress needs a plugin that allows users to add a photo of themselves, add their Adsense information, and add whatever other information you care to follow. To fill this gap, I use the Cimy User Extra Fields plugin which allows you to add any number of extra fields to your users’ profiles. More importantly, you can also recall the information in these fields using the Cimy template tag. For instance, if a user provides his Adsense account number, then I can put this account number into any post that this person writes using a small amount of PHP code. This guarantees that the writer will get all ad credit for his posts.
  • Second, Trendhunter gives each contributer his own sort of miniblog within the overall site. This miniblog includes an image of the person, the contributor’s stats, as well as the person’s own URL which he can send to friends. Again, all of this can be created using the simple template tags provided by the Cimy plugin.
  • Third, Trendhunter is missing a way to create posts quickly and easily. A new Wordpress plugin that recently became available that has proven incredibly powerful is the Quickpost plugin provided by twelvehorses. This plugin allows you to create posts very quickly. You can also offer this to your contributors and they can add posts equally quickly. This is the major advantage you would have over Trendhunter using Wordpress.
  • Fourth, Trendhunter gives readers ways to spread posts virally to other sites. You can accomplish the same things that Trendhunter offers with a couple of useful plugins. One is the Social Bookmark plugin which allows you to bookmark an article to any number of dozens of social bookmarking sites. The other plugin of note is the WP-email which allows readers to email an article to friends.

There are some definite advantages of using these Wordpress plugins, however, there are also some hurdles that you should be very aware of:

  • First, it’s not completely clear if you are following the Google Adsense terms of service agreement if you exchange out user ad accounts . This is because when you have a generic Adsense code where you substitute other authors’ Adsense account numbers this may be seen as altering the code. The Terms of Service says you are not supposed to alter this code in any way, however, I personally do not consider this violating the TOS because the end javascript code really is not altered than the intended code. I highly suggest reading about this and using this at your own risk. However, judging Trendhunter.com as a test case, using this method is acceptable as long as you do not alter the code in any way and just the account has changed.
  • Second, the Quickpost Plugin has a bug where you have to sign in before the plugin works. I’ve informed the plugin writers, but you may have to hire some outside help if this plugin becomes an essential part of your business.
  • Third, the Quickpost Plugin posts direcly to the site no matter what your user status is. That means contributors posts go live immediately without being approved by an editor. This, again can be quickly fixed by a competent Wordpress developer and a couple hundred dollars. You don’t necessarily have to offer the quickpost plugin to users, but it is so handy it’s hard not to offer this option. My suggestion is to only allow posts on the home page in a category no one would ever choose. This might deter getting unwanted posts on the home page.
  • Finally, the Cimy Extra Fields plugin can be very powerful yet tricky to set up with Adsense. You will want to consider writing a very well thought out conditional statement in PHP that assures that you have received a valid Adsense code. This is not for the amateur to attempt.

Overall, if you’re willing to try to learn from Trendhunter’s great strengths and shortcomings you may find yourself with dozens of contributors and ten times the traffic. If you need any help fleshing this out or need further instruction on implementing this feel free to leave a comment or email me at bbaunach@yahoo.com.

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Posted in Adsense, Blogs, Building Blog Revenue, Building Web Traffic, Experimental Techniques, Starting a Business | 1 Comment »

Starting a For-Profit Blog Part 1: Research Your Niche

Written by Brandon on December 14, 2007 – 3:52 pm -

As I mentioned in a previous article, there are a number of online businesses that you can build your wealth from. I’ve listed the businesses from least risky to most risky, and today I’m starting with the least risky which I will call the media company. Media Companies would be composed of such businesses as blogs, podcasts, video blogs, news agregators, and even things like how-to sites and fan sites. Their primary money making opportunities include:

  • Advertising
  • E-book Sales
  • Premium Content
  • Fan Sales
  • Affiliate Sales

Let’s take the most common business as the very beginning starting point: the blog. How do you start a business? I will give you broad steps at first, and then cover specifics in later articles.

Your wealth

Phase One: research your niche topic

Before even starting the blog you should choose a handful of niche topics that you are interested in. Let’s say you’ve chosen bicycling. Now, you will want to start to search for bicycling in Google’s Blog Search or at Technorati to find out what bicycle blogs are popular. Next, you will want to write down a number of blogs on your topic.

I then like to go to Alexa and compare blogs in my niche to blogs in very popular niches to see how they stack up. So, for instance, here is a link to two very popular design blogs and Engadget which is arguably the most popular blog in the world. What this might start telling you after doing a bunch of searches is that tech gadgets are more popular or that Engadget has some features that could be better done in your niche. There is a lot to infer which I can help with in future posts.

Also, I highly suggest using Google Trends to start to see if your niche is a heavily searched topic compared to other topics. A simple starting point is to check the trend on “cycling” versus a random topic like maybe “jewelry” and a topic you know must be popular like “ipod”. What you find is that iPod is, in-fact, a much more popular search term, and surprisingly, jewelry is much more popular than cycling. This might give you more insight as to what topic you want to blog about based on its overall popularity. Maybe jewelry is better than cycling. This might also clue you in on topics that people often search for, but no good media outlet has developed for that topic.

Regardless of what your searches begin to tell you, do something you like. Again, this is just scratching the surface of how you might prepare for your blog, but I will cover more in the near future. AT least this gives you a simple base for how you might choose your topic.

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Posted in Blogs, Creating Wealth, Fundamentals, Starting a Business | No Comments »

Starting an Online Business Part One: Choosing What To Do

Written by Brandon on December 13, 2007 – 2:02 am -

In the next few weeks I will consider the five business model types that are good general categories for starting an online business. I’ve ranked them in order from least risky meaning you could, in theory, make a living without investing much money, to most risky meaning that a significant amount of capital, time, and/or coordination would need to be invested. All business models can bring in a fair income, but in general, the more capital intensive the company the more wealth you can build for yourself. I will go into great depth in the future, but for now, let me just list the five models:

  • Media Company
  • Sales or Affiliate Marketing
  • Services
  • E-Commerce
  • Web Applications

Media Companies would be composed of such businesses as blogs, podcasts, video blogs, news agregators, and even things like how-to sites and fan sites. Their primary money making opportunities include:

  • Advertising
  • E-book Sales
  • Premium Content
  • Fan Sales
  • Affiliate Sales

My general feeling is that small media companies are not huge wealth creation vehicles themselves, but are best suited to create large audiences for future businesses. In other words, the media business builds your voice and your future businesses build your wealth.

Sales and Affiliate Marketing Businesses are things like e-malls, niche product shops, and online incentive shops where you give back savings to the customers or offer prizes for shopping. These businesses can be much more nebulous as well where you don’t even have a website and you wealth is made simply by creating effective Google ads to attract customers to a site. I will go into great detail in the future about how this model works, though.

Services are an awesome way to make your income online especially if you can find a particular skill that you can exploit. These services can be vastly diverse. One example of a service you might provide is logo design or graphic design services. If you have a good voice, you might provide announcement services. If you speak a foreign langiuage you might do translation services. The possibilities are endless. The essential rule is that anytime you or a friend or someone in a forum says why does’t anyone do (whatever), this is something that could be exploited as a service if properly marketed to the right people.

Real E-Commerce sites are where real money begins to flow into and out of your pocket. E-commerce again can take a multiplicity of forms and I hope in the future to identify untapped niches, but I will definitely focus future articles on affective marketing, curating your stock list, and building a loyal brand follow whatever products you decide to sell.

Finally, web applications are ventures that should not be approached without some knowledge of how to write a software specification, and who to have create the software per your specifications. If you do not know what a specification is, then stop right here. I will say that you DO NOT need to know how to program to create a great web applications. You just need to surround yourself with the people that do know how to program. Web applications as an example include things like Flickr, a site where you can upload and share your photos to things as simple as a really handy financial calculator. The key here is do you have an idea that would just be so damn useful that you’d want it desperately yourself. But making something useful does not mean you’ve made it user friendly. I will spend eons on this subject in future articles. We all know the reward of making really useful things, though. Once people find it, they will come back again and again. And they will tell alltheir friends.

That is my quick introduction to the five basic business models I will discuss for starting a business. Now, on to the meat!

Posted in Fundamentals, Starting a Business | 1 Comment »