Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

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Could The Recession Be Good For Blogging?

Monday, March 16th, 2009

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Teamwork

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

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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Don’t Give Up Now

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

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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Looking Back and Thinking Forward

Monday, November 24th, 2008

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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T-Mobile Offers Lesson In How Not To Do Business

Friday, November 7th, 2008

Do you dehumanize your customers with one-size fits all Customer Service? - Image by Ray Smithers @ stock.xchngLet me preface this by saying my recent interactions with T-Mobile’s sales reps inspired me to share the experience here as a way of showing how not to handle customer service in my opinion. I should also point out the error is in T-Mobile’s policies and not with the reps I spoke with by any means.

This isn’t some angry blog rant by an unhappy customer, though the title might suggest it would be. I wouldn’t abuse my readers with such drivel and honestly have no ill feelings towards T-Mobile what-so-ever. In fact, I am actually glad they’ve given me a good example to share with my readers.

The fact is they’ve provided me with a great service and experience for several years now and I’ve never had any reason to complain over the service or support once in all that time.

In fact, I didn’t even complain when they denied my application to be an affiliate marketer for their services. It was their loss and I’ve sent a ton of business to their competitors this year. No bitterness on my part there, I still earned my commissions because there are always options out there.

But I have recently wanted to upgrade my hardware, a desire which was sparked when another provider offered me a much nicer device than I’ve been using for the past few years. And really, the big feature I was looking for was a full QWERTY keypad since I use my cell mostly for email and text-messaging these days.

T-Mobile offers similar devices, so of course my first thought was to contact them and say “hey, I’d like an upgrade. I see you offer such-and-such device for X dollars on your site, is there any deal for a long term customer?”

Now, to explain this situation clearly I have to say that I’m on a month to month contract with T-Mobile because my 2 year commitment that I originally made has long ago expired. So of course I expected to be asked to renew/extend my commitment by another year or two and was perfectly ready to do so.

What I never expected was to be told that my long term patronage and loyalty wasn’t really appreciated by the company, and that my history with them wasn’t worth any sort of deal over their posted online pricing at all.

Now again, I’m not writing this to rant or vent on T-Mobile. As with the affiliate situation in the past, I don’t care which provider I’m doing business with as long as I get what I want from the deal, and that applies to who I’ll be making my calls through too.

The reason I’m writing this is because for my readers who have started their own business, or are planning to start one, there’s a serious lesson here on customer service when you’re doing business in a global marketplace.

With a world full of options for consumers, there’s nothing dumber in my opinion than to tie the hands of your sales force (or yourself with a home business) and remove the ability to make personal connections and relationships with your customers. After all, that’s what a sales force is supposed to be doing.

But, as multiple sales reps explained to me, T-Mobile doesn’t give their associates the flexibility to reward long time or loyal customers in any way so they are not just going to lose a long time customer to a competitor, but have also lost a minimum of $1,300.00 in future business had I renewed.

Here’s the ironic perspective on this: to gain a new customer they’re paying affiliates in their program up to $70 for leads. I’d have remained a loyal customer for far less than that in a hardware upgrade–if only their sales force had been allowed to offer it.

Does that make any practical sense at all? T-Mobile will pay up to $70 to affiliates for a new customer lead generation, yet are unwilling to offer even a $1 direct customer comp to save the relationship with an existing customer of several years.

To me, that’s clearly a stupid policy and displays exactly how you shouldn’t go about doing business. If you approach me directly for my products or services and I’m paying affiliates up to $70 to bring me new customers, there’s no way I’m going to let you leave the table without making you some sort of offer… and if you’ve already been a long time customer for me, that offer is likely to be even higher than what I’m giving affiliates for new customers.

Of course, that’s just how I do business. Recognizing that my customers are people and their loyalty as worthy of reward. Since a lot of my income is due to repeat and recurring business I’d say there’s a valuable lesson here.

And when you do deal with repeat customers–especially if any portion of your business is in providing recurring services–you must keep the relationships personal. I go so far as to send Holiday cards to all of my recurring clients every year. That kind of small detail and personal touch goes a very long way in retaining clients who could easily find similar products and services to mine at cheaper rates online.

The fact is I’m never the lowest priced and I refuse to compete on pricing in any market I enter because I don’t approach transactions as me selling a product, I approach them as me selling a mutually beneficial relationship–and you might be surprised how much extra customers are willing to pay for that.

There are simply too many options for your customers to turn to today, and at-least 1 or more of your competitors is going to understand the importance of a personal connection in the current business environment. This is (or should be) even more critical if your business is tech related.

I understood why T-Mobile takes the position they do after multiple sales reps “reminded” me that even though I could get a hardware upgrade cheaper (free) from their competitor, I would have to pay an activation fee that would negate the savings… so I should just stay and pay T-Mobile the full upgrade price for the hardware I wanted. It was obvious that the reps are instructed to give that reminder to customers like myself. It’s a nice little strong-arm tactic that I’m sure works with some customers who are shopping on price alone.

But, all that really reminded me of was how little they value the existing relationship with me as a long time customer. It isn’t about the money, sure I like to save a buck whenever I can, but what is more important is that I feel appreciated and valued as a customer.

If I don’t feel like someone appreciates my business, how am I ever supposed to feel confident they’ll support me if there was a problem with the service one day? I either have value to the company or I don’t, and the impression their policy gave me was clearly that I don’t.

If there’s anything I’ve learned in the years of owning my own small business, it’s that treating customers as friends has a higher ROI than anything else you can ever do.


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Making Money Online Is Still Easy

Friday, October 17th, 2008

Even when the overall real world economy is falling there’s always money to be earned online by anyone willing to work for it, and the process is amazingly simplistic. It just requires that you put in the effort, which is where most people I’ve seen give up failed.

I don’t care what you do or sell, or whether you monitize your site with sales or advertising, there is a basic formula to making money online with a web site that is basically universal:

Your web page plus some way to earn money on it (sales or advertising), plus quality content and backlinks from other sites to yours will equal indexing and ranking in the search results and traffic–which will bring you revenue.

It doesn’t get easier than that, and it really isn’t more complicated than that either. Yes, there’s a zillion little things that you can learn and do to improve your site’s performance on-page and off-site, but those are all just “in addition to’s” and not the core formula.

It all starts by having the above basic things in place. Once you have those you should be earning money with your site. And once you’re earning money with your site you can amplify each thing and start playing with those “in addition to’s” to make more money.

Web page

I’ve written plenty about building web sites and pages already, feel free to browse and search around here for those postings. Here I’ll just gloss over this by saying you just need to pick something you’re interested in and start building a site about it.

It can be a static HTML web site or a blog, whatever you want to do. Grab a domain and hosting and get the ball rolling.

Pick a way to make money on your site

Depending on what topic or niche you decide to build a web site about there may be affiliate products or programs you can join and promote on your site for commissions.

There is also always contextual advertising through Google’s AdSense program and the publisher’s network on Yahoo!. And there’s a bunch of other contextual ad networks too that you can look into and decide from.

Finally, there’s always direct advertising sales too. You can offer other webmasters and site owners graphic or text based advertising on your site pages by contacting them directly or having an “Advertise Here” page on your site for them to find you.

Direct advertising is great if you have a lot of traffic already on your site, but can be nearly impossible for a new site so I’d suggest keeping this method on the back burner when starting your site but be sure to revisit the idea down the road once you have steady traffic coming in.

Content

Some people find this to be an obstacle, but you need quality content on your site pages; and if you want the best reach for search engine traffic then you’re going to need lots of quality and fresh content.

Recently I’ve made a free tool available here for help with creating lots of quality article or blog posting content that may help you. It’s called Article Factory and you can access it from the forum of this site.

Article Factory is good for static content, but people and search engines love dynamic and constantly updated content even more so there’s another tool you can use that builds large pages of fresh content instantly based on your topic and keywords called NIMS (Niche Instant Mashup Sites).

Exactly what kind of content you’ll want to use and which of the tools will be better for you to use is going to depend on what you are building your site about and what visitors to your site might expect to find there, but the tools above should give you plenty of help to get your web site up and running fast.

Backlinks

Links drive the web. Everything is based on links and that’s why the search engines place such high value on the links pointing to a page when determining where to rank it in their indexes.

And links don’t connect web sites, they connect web pages. It’s important to think of it that way because a lot of people spend all of their time building links to their home page and then get frustrated when that doesn’t seem to help them very much with their search engine rankings.

The search engines don’t see links as connections between sites, they see them as connections between pages, so you have to look at it that way too in order to develop a strong link building strategy that will work out.

What you need to do is build links to your individual pages. All of them! If you really want to climb the search engine rankings (assuming your pages have quality content on them).

So, by looking at links as connections between pages rather than sites it helps you to view the link building process from the right perspective. It’s also good to think of link building as a multi-purpose process.

Every link you get has 2 purposes for you, first to hopefully bring you some human traffic and second to help support your on-page keyword targeting for search rankings.

I like to see link building as a sort of hour glass with my site at the center point and with each link existing both above and below my site. The top half represents my “reach funnel” from which human traffic can be obtained and guided to my page–and the bottom half represents a rising foundation of support for lifting my page up in the search rankings. Hopefully that isn’t too confusing, and here’s an illustration of what I mean:

Hourglass Link Building

The yellow block is my page, and each link I get for it is represented by a gray block above and below my page showing the dual purpose I see each link as having.

There’s plenty of places to gain legitimate links from such as: social bookmarking, web directories, article marketing, web 2.0 publishing platforms, blogs you comment on, forums you participate in… the list is endless for the creative.

There’s also several posts on my forum under “Link Building” with over 100 different resources for high quality link opportunities on low and high ranking sites, many of which you can use to get deep links to your individual pages rather than just home page links so that should give you a good start in developing a link building plan.

SERPs and Traffic

It’s easy to miss this, but your search engine rankings and traffic don’t “just happen” because you’ve put the things above into place.

By creating pages with content and getting links to those pages you have built your rankings and traffic.

In other words, at the end of the day it is you and not the search engines who is in control.

So it’s vital to spend some time learning the basics of keyword research in order to have the best chance of ranking high for the right terms.

You don’t need to become an expert, just get a handle on how to pick decent keywords to focus on from your pages and then use what you learn as you build more new pages for your site.

$$$

If you’ve done everything above, created a web site with some form of revenue earning, filled it with good content and developed lots of backlinks for your pages then you should be getting some targeted traffic very quickly…and some of that traffic should be converting into revenue for you.

I don’t care if you earn $0.01 or $10,000.00 — the point is once you’ve earned some revenue then you know that you have the foundation pieces in place. Now you can move on to expanding on them, tweaking what you’ve been doing, playing with all of the “in addition to’s” I spoke of early… testing and improving your site performance.

And all of that will be easier once you’ve realized that the biggest hurdle, learning how to make money online, wasn’t really that big of a hurdle at all. It only takes a willingness to do the tedious grunt-work required for getting those key factors like content and backlinks in place.


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