Wow, we’ve been busy here lately, kicking butt and making money :) Yay, us!

I thought it was time to drop an update though, and there’s some exciting news to share for those of you who are members at our forum, and if you’re not a member–why is that?

First, we’ve added some new sections and HUGE shares there for folks who are serious about growing their sites or business, if that’s you then check it out!

Next, our “Code-Master” has been busy building virtual assistants lately. Little spiders and bots to do some of the niche researching and link building grunt work that most marketers and site owners find time consuming and even annoying; and he’s begun sharing them openly on the forum for others.

Also, Heather just shared an impressive Twitter 101 for people who struggle with getting value from their time spent tweeting, don’t miss that in the Web 2.0 section of the forum. When it comes to “getting the most” out of social media I don’t believe there’s anybody out there that does it better than Heather, and the proof is she doesn’t waste her time trying to hawk “How To” manuals to newbies for a living, she just does what she does in her niches and makes a killing with it! So, any time she’s willing to share some insights like this my mouth starts to water.

For almost a year now my NIMS scripts have been doing great for me and others using them, but I’m never satisfied with anything and have been working on a new version of the script that’s going to blow the socks off of everyone who has seen the original in action. That’ll be released in the next week or two, and may even end up being free for VIP members of the forum, you never know…

That’s what’s going on around here and what I’ve been up to. How and what have you been doing lately? Seriously, I want to know so tell me below.

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Like so many people right now a good friend of mine is out of work, and this weekend we were talking and she asked me if there were any money making online models that weren’t scams and didn’t require a ton of up-front investment.

Now, I want to preface this by saying this is not an instant cash machine scheme that I’m going to lay out here. This will take a little time to ramp up into a revenue stream that pays the bills. If you have zero income right now I wouldn’t suggest trying to build an online income for yourself, but if you have a window of time with unemployment benefits or some other income stream that provides you with a cushion then this could be an option to consider in addition to looking for a new job.

This is a super-easy to understand model, it only requires you take the time to implement it. There’s nothing too technical involved, in fact if you can write an email you can do this. You just have to invest the time.

What I’m going to describe is a simple advertiser sponsored content publishing model. You’re going to use a simple script to create content rich web pages, place a few lines of special text on the pages that will display advertising related to your page topics, and then step in front of existing traffic online to get visitors to your site.

When people visit your site and click on your ads or make purchases you earn commissions.

Believe it or not, it really is this simple to make money online. You don’t need expensive courses, ebooks or software to do this, those only make money for the people who sell them, rarely for the people who buy them.

Step #1 - decide what your site will be about. You need a general “theme” that will encompass the topics for all of your pages. For example, if you’re interested in things like ghosts and Bigfoot then “paranormal” would be your basic theme for the site, and your individual pages will each focus on one topic from that theme, so you might have a page on UFO’s, a page on Bigfoot, a page on ghosts and so on.

Step #2 - you will need a domain name. You can read older posts here for help with picking a keyword based domain, but honestly with this site we’re not focusing on search engines for our traffic, that will come naturally on its own over time, so I would suggest just picking a domain that is short, easy to remember and perhaps even “sounds cool” or fits your site theme in some way.

For example, GhostPics.com would be a great keyword domain for targeting search engines, but since the focus here is going to be on pure human traffic and our site will cover more than just ghosts I’d rather have a domain such as AmazingMysteries.com or TruthSeekers.com because those are memorable and will create curiosity that helps to bring traffic for us.

Don’t spend a lot on a domain name, you can get one for around $10 at GoDaddy.com or NameCheap.com — or even better — you can even get your domain for free if you purchase your hosting through Dot5 for just $3.95 per month. I’ve used Dot5’s hosting and they’re a great service that I don’t think you can beat for the pricing.

Step #2b - if you do buy your domain on your own and don’t want to use Dot5 as your host, then you can always check out Build The Dot Com for information on a bunch of hosting providers that are reliable and affordable.

Step #3 - getting advertisers. This is an easy step, you just need to sign up with advertising networks like Google AdSense, Amazon.com, Yahoo! Publisher’s Network, AdBrite or any other advertising/affiliate network you like.

I would suggest signing up as an Amazon affiliate and then also with either AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher’s or AdBrite. When you sign up for any of these they will explain how to get your “display code” for putting their ads on your site pages.

Step #4 - setting up your website. This is the part that I think scares most people, but trust me I’m going to show you a super easy script for creating content rich pages around your topics that will be quality resources for your visitors and designed to make you money from your traffic.

Visit www.nichemashups.com and you will find a script called NIMS. This isn’t free, but at under $30 it’s well worth the investment; I know, because I’m one of the developers who worked on creating this script.

There is a small but thorough manual with the script that tells you how to create content rich pages in just a minute or two each, so I won’t cover that here. The manual also shows you how and where to paste your advertising display codes from the networks you joined in Step #3, and you will only have to do that once for the whole site, not on every individual page you build.

The main feature of the NIMS script, other than being so easy to use, is that it pulls information and resources from multiple locations to create comprehensive mashup pages that are helpful to your visitors. By giving your visitors value you will get more value back.

If you don’t want to spend the money for NIMS you can always use WordPress and make your site a blog. This can be very effective too, but setting that up and adding your advertising to it is more involved than I want to get in this posting. The rest of the concepts in this post are the same though, so if you decide to go the blog route that’s fine you will just need to use the documentation from WordPress to guide you in getting your pages online.

NOTE: While this seems like a lot of material, the truth is if you have an idea for what you want your site to be about you could have the domain name, hosting and first few pages setup and online in under an hour. The real work is getting traffic, covered in the next few steps.

Step #5 - “talking traffic to your site”. This is the most involved and time consuming part of the whole model.

Once you have your first few pages online with the NIMS script you need to bring some visitors to them. This is where you make money, building web sites doesn’t earn you money, bringing traffic to them does. Traffic is the currency of the web.

Over time as the search engines find your web site pages and start listing them in their indexes you will begin to get free traffic from them, and that’s great, but right now we want to get instant (and no-cost) traffic to our new site so we’re going to go out and find existing pools of traffic online with people who are already interested in the topics our site covers, and we’re going to attract visitors from them to our site.

You’ve probably heard a lot of people use buzz-words like “social media”, “social networking online” and “social marketing”… if not you will over time as a site owner. I use those terms a lot myself, but what they each are doesn’t really matter, it’s what they collectively imply that’s important.

People are social. Online just like in the real world, people like to socialize and gather together with others who are like minded and have shared interests.

As a site owner that’s great news for us, because it means we will be able to find those places online where people interested in our site topic are already gathering.

Perhaps you already know some of these places since you may be interested in the topics you’ve built your site on? I’m talking about forums, blogs, Facebook or MySpace groups; any place that already exists online for people to learn about or discuss the topics we’ve covered.

By joining these forums and groups, you can add your site link to your user profile so that it is displayed whenever you post something on the forum boards, and then just be social. Engage in conversations that are already taking place. Ask or answer questions, be informative and entertaining.

People will see the things you post (and your link that you added to your profile) and if they find the things you say to be helpful or entertaining they’ll click through your link to your site.

Find other blogs where people are writing about the topics your site covers, and make comments on their postings. You are allowed to add your web site URL when you leave a comment, so again if you post interesting or entertaining comments it will encourage readers who visit the posting later to click your link.

This may seem like a lot of work, but think about it this way, the actual work is just “talking traffic to your site” by chatting about topics that you built your site on, and are hopefully interested in yourself. That’s not really a lot of work at all when you think of it that way.

The trick is to always be interesting, informative and entertaining. Never just flat-out say “visit my site”, people will respond poorly to that. But if they read what you say and are impressed then they’ll seek out more from you by visiting your link.

Another great place for “talking traffic to your site” is at Yahoo! Answers. If you know a lot about the topic you made your site on, then visit Yahoo! Answers and find questions that people have about your topics and post answers for them with your site link.

Be creative, find every place online that you can where people who share an interest in your topic are already gathering and join in the conversations. Spend some time every day posting in discussions and commenting on blogs. Use Google to find additional places, groups and portals online where people are already discussing your site topics and participate on as many of them as you can.

In addition, don’t forget about social networks like Twitter where you can find people talking about the topics your site covers, as well as social bookmarking sites where you can bookmark the pages of your site and let others know about them.

Your goal is to just “talk traffic to your site”, so the more you’re talking the more traffic you’ll be getting, and soon others will begin talking about your site too, and that’s when the snowball really starts rolling.

That’s it! Just keep adding a new page or two every day to your site, and then spend the time required “talking traffic to your site” and you will begin to see traffic and revenue levels rise.

I know folks (and “gurus” selling expensive systems) like to complicate all this stuff and make it seem like rocket science, but it’s not. Traffic is currency online, and people are social which makes talking traffic to your site fairly easy to do if you just find the places online where interested people are already gathering and add value to the conversations that are taking place.

I have to add that nobody, including myself, can guarantee that any web site you build will earn money. There’s just no way to predict what topics everyone who reads this might decide to build their sites on and if those topics will be popular or not. So take this to mean that I make no guarantee or promise that you will earn money by following the steps in this posting (to cover my legal behind).

However, if you follow the steps here and build your site on a topic that has even moderate interest levels and you are interesting and entertaining while “talking traffic to your site” then I am confident that it should be a profitable money making online model.

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Teamwork

I just spoke with 3 popular bloggers who have told me some exciting news about themselves. While each one is popular and successful in their own right, they’ve all seen a slow-down in advertising revenues recently on their individual blogs.

So, in the near future these 3 guys will be consolidating their separate industry related blogs into one joint-venture project. Their hope is that through consolidation and partnership they’ll be able to provide a much better overall product for all of their readers, and that this will translate into increased overall readership levels, and then higher advertising dollars.

I told them I wanted to post about this and they’ve asked me not to disclose their blogs/names since they’re still working out the final details for their project and haven’t made an official notice to their own readers yet, so I will respect their wishes on that as it’s the general idea of bloggers partnering which interests me more anyway.

This makes a lot of sense to me. I think I offer some good information for folks who are just starting out with their first online projects, but I’m not capable of covering everything that would interest my readers all by myself, and I can only offer my own perspective on the themes I do cover. If there were a few more people with experience contributing with me on the blog, wouldn’t that give readers more information and ideas to work with? Absolutely.

Now, I don’t rely on this blog for any income, but if I did then I would probably be considering the idea of partnering with additional bloggers to build it into a bigger and better product.

Global Partnerships

It got me to wondering if more bloggers were considering similar partnerships, especially since the online economy is losing ground just like the real world economy recently? I don’t mean joining some blog network where you basically become a paid (often underpaid) blogger, but rather joining with other bloggers who cover the same general themes and rolling 2 or 3 or more individual blogs into one.

My first concern with considering a move would be how the finances are divided. I asked my 3 blogger friends how they’re planing to address this and thankfully they were kind enough to elaborate for me.

Basically, they’re planning to use the OpenX adserving platform to equally distribute advertising on the new blog. Each of the 3 bloggers will have their own advertiser’s account in the OpenX software, plus there will be a 4th “Default” advertiser running limited AdSense ads from which the earnings will be used to cover the site expenses like hosting.

This way, each blogger can have an even share of the advertising displays across the site, and use them to display whatever type of advertising they want. From AdSense to direct paid ads from individuals or companies, each blogger will fill their advertising display spots on their own. That means blogger #1 can sell advertising opportunities on the site to whomever he wishes, and blogger #2 can sell them to whoever he wants… or they can each just display ads from their own accounts with networks such as Google or Commission Junction.

To be honest I’d worry about placing AdSense in an OpenX display because there doesn’t seem to be a clear answer on if it violates the AdSense TOS or not, though I know lots of folks are doing so and haven’t heard of anyone losing their AdSense account because of it. But still, if you rely heavily on AdSense for your income then doing anything that might be ‘close to the edge’ with your AdSense code is risky.

I do like the idea of using a software like OpenX and giving each contributing blogger an equal share of ad impressions. It keeps the revenue divided to avoid any dangers of 1 person becoming greedy, however the flip side is if the partners don’t view each other as equals it could lead to resentments like “Hey, my posts attract more readers than yours, so I should get a larger percentage of advertising impressions to sell”. That’s the thing about partnerships, they can be advantageous but they aren’t always easy to maintain harmony through.

Another concern for me might be that with a partnership you give up some level of control over the final product. As a very simple example, you couldn’t just go and change the blog theme on a whim like you might with your own blog on a partnership site. The same would apply to installing plugins or other tweaking that might affect the whole blog and visitors.

Again, this is really something that boils down to the partners being able to work in harmony. If everyone gets along super well, or if you can establish a democratic process for decision making that everyone agrees to, then you may be able to avoid major frictions and focus on building a great site and following.

Every situation would be unique, but personally I really like the idea of multi-contributor blogs. Some of my current favorite blogs already have multiple authors, and some began as multi author projects.

And at a time when it could be financially beneficial for more individual bloggers to come together on projects I see a lot of opportunity here for a blogger who is having trouble growing their current blog, or even retaining readership and revenue levels in the current markets.

With more people turning to the web for ways to supplement their income, or replace their lost paychecks after corporate cutbacks, collaborative blogging is an avenue that I think is worth considering. It doesn’t require partners who are already established with their own blogs, a few people who are blogging for the first time could find an easier path to entry and a faster growth of readership and revenues by partnering in some manner.

What do you think about it?

Image Credits “Teamwork” by Playingwithbrushes and “Global Partnerships” by Pablo H of Flickr - licensed under the CC

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Technorati Tags: Blogging, partnership, teamwork

At the request of a friend I met today with a small group of young, aspiring webpreneurs. These are exactly the kind of people I hope to be connecting with here on the Leap blog, so I was excited about getting a more personal interaction and some instant feedback.

The meeting was very productive, the people were great and I learned a little about how the things I was talking about (the same things I write about here) were being received. Not all of it as I expected or intended, so that will help me do better here going forward.

Here are 2 things I took from it that I wanted to share right away here.

Where’s The Beef?

The big question all of them had for me was did I think now was a bad time to start a web business of any kind?

That’s a fair question and I had anticipated it might come up. Attempting a very poor Senator Ted Stevens impression, I coldly yelled “NO!” to the room. They laughed, but I’m not sure they really knew why.

Here is my reasoning as I explained it to them. Right now lots of small operations are going down. Heck, lots of big companies are dropping to. It’s a terrible time to be an established business with operational costs that were budgeted long before this current down turn hit.

It’s a fact of business that the bigger and more established you become, the more intricate and detailed everything gets, the more you have to operate on a projected budget and the harder it becomes to react to real time conditions.

So when things get tight they have to trim costs in areas other than where they really want to. So people lose jobs, service and support levels decrease, the company image takes hits… it just snowballs. And ultimately, some go completely under.

And while all of that is sad, remember that we’re talking about real people losing their jobs, but the flip side to that is these companies which go under leave a void in their marketplaces, and for the nimble startup who isn’t working on projections from numbers of last year yet that’s an opportunity to launch from.

This applies to companies and startups of all sizes, even the lone-ranger home based startup.

Right now, I assure you, there are a lot of people who have been struggling to make a go at Internet Marketing–maybe you’re one of them–and they are debating with themselves over giving up or plowing forward.

Some will quit. It’s sad to see someone give up their dreams but completely understandable. There are bills to pay, hungry mouths to feed. A steady paycheck from anywhere becomes very attractive when everything seems to be going against you.

But some will stay with it. Those who do will find new elbow room in their niches as others leave. Suddenly they go from being Guppies to Sharks in the same tank.

My point is that if you can afford to do it, then I believe this is a opportunistic time to start up.

It isn’t an easy time. Just because someone else left a void in the marketplace doesn’t mean customers who weren’t spending money with them will buy your products, they may still not spend money for a while and you’ll have to be ready for that.

But, with less crowded waters it is an opportunity for the noobie to really learn how to swim them. To become intimate with your market and get to know your customer’s needs and expectations, so you’ll be fully prepared for the inevitable economic upswing when it comes and they start spending again.

AdSense is great for site publishers! Except for most of the time when it’s the wrong choice…

I talked with the group today a little bit about adsense. And after a few minutes I realized that I was giving them the wrong impression (in my opinion) that adsense is always a reliable and safe revenue stream.

In-fact, I think it is when used on the right kind of web site. But I also think it’s a waste and counter-productive for a majority of web sites.

Here’s what I really think about it in-case I’ve given the wrong impression here on the blog in the past.

If you run a web site where visitors might be looking for a service oriented solution to some problem, then adsense is a fantastic way to monetize your pages.

Put yourself into the mind of the common visitor to your site. What problems are they going to be facing and seeking solutions for? Are the solutions to those problems typically process or product based?

If the answer is process based then you have a good site for running adsense on. Especially if the process is usually performed by some type of professional.

However, if the solution is typically product based, meaning any sort of tool or even a learning aid that would help your visitor eventually perform the process for themselves with no professional help required, then you would be foolish to put adsense on your pages and earn pennies for clicks where you could have earned dollars by putting an affiliate ad for the product in that same place.

I know adsense is easy to setup and start seeing fast money with, but it’s small potatoes compared to what you could earn with the same page real estate through an affiliate product.

So, when appropriate I love adsense, but most of the time I just don’t think it’s appropriate.

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Technorati Tags: AdSense, internet marketing

I spent most of this morning in meetings with partners and associates whom I work with on a wide variety of projects. The focus of these meetings was on what we’ve done together in 2008, what worked and didn’t, what to continue doing or not, and what new things would we like to try/accomplish in 2009.

It’s something I like to do every year just before Thanksgiving because December gets too crazy with holiday retailing and marketing, and January is too late to do it in my opinion. By January I want to already be knee-deep in kicking off the new year and projects, not still reviewing the previous year.

I have to admit that I’m a little disappointed with the looking back part today. Not for the reasons you might think though.

I’m not disappointed by earnings, in-fact despite the economic status of the world 2008 has been a record breaking year for my business.

However, where we fell short and what leaves me disappointed is in some of the more important goals and challenges we set for ourselves during these meetings last year.

I’ve been clear on this blog about myself over and over. I’m an ideologue with a bleeding heart. I don’t care about my business being disruptive and innovative in the marketplace nearly as much as I want my business to be disruptive and innovative in my neighborhood. In my community. In my world.

Yes, I want to make money with my company, but I could easily make money working for someone else without having all the leadership headaches. In other words, making money isn’t what motivated me to start a business, take on all of the additional responsibilities and liabilities nor put in the 16 (sometimes more) hour days through the first few years.

My motivation was to create something bigger than myself that would be able to do more than I alone could do in helping others. An entity that could be a real pillar in the community. A springboard for doing good. A benefit to the world for having existed. A resource for its clients. And a way that I could earn a decent and honest living with pride. Mostly in that order.

It’s come a long way from those early years, and I’ve accomplished much of what I intended at the start. By no means am I unhappy about where my business stands in “the big picture” of what I want it to be.

But it’s a few individual goals for projects that we established for 2008 where we fell short of what we wanted which have me perplexed and disappointed in myself for losing focus here and there, for not driving harder when I probably should have.

Again, not because I lost potential profits on those projects, but because the people who may have benefited from the success of the projects didn’t; and it’s impossible with such “what could have been’s” for me to not feel as though I’ve personally let some people down along the way.

It isn’t that we weren’t able to do good things in 2008. For instance 17 children from low income homes received free musical instruments and free lessons from professional musicians because of one program we sponsor. That’s a great thing and I’m very proud of it. But, our expansion goals were to reach 30 children with this program in 2008 and we fell short by nearly half–that’s hugely disappointing to me.

And several other projects had similar results which fell short of our desired goals, as well as a couple of projects which we weren’t able to get off the planning boards as we’d hoped this year that will now carry over to (hopefully) projects for 2009. Sure, it’ll be satisfying if we can get those launched in ‘09, but since we didn’t get them done in ‘08 that means there’s less room for other projects in ‘09 now.

It’s a struggle every year, trying to balance a profitable and socially responsible business model, and we’re always playing catch-up.

I suppose that’s a good thing in some respects because it forces us to constantly be looking for ways to “do it better” and do more with less which spawns creative innovations and efficiencies.

But it’s also hard to really feel good about what you do accomplish when you look at how much that you didn’t or couldn’t in comparison.

I realize this is probably sounding like I’m a bit depressed or having a case of “the Monday’s”, and that’s not so. I’m very happy with my life and work, both in the moment and the big pictures.

Being disappointed with some aspect of my production or performance yesterday doesn’t mean I’m unhappy with myself nor my business overall by any stretch, it only means I recognize where I believe I could have done more and gives me the opportunity to be better tomorrow.

That’s why I hold these “Looking Back and Thinking Forward” meetings each year. So that I’m always on track to be better tomorrow. And I’d encourage others to do the same in their businesses and lives too. Even small or home based business owners who are operating alone or as freelancers. You don’t have to hold a meeting with anyone but yourself to just take a few minutes to see where you’ve been, where you’re at and then plan where you want to go.

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