O`Bannon's Leap

Building for Growth

Posted on July 21st, 2008 by Scott

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I got a question about site/business building after making this post asking what’s your goal, and I wanted to touch on something I think is really important to long term success whether you’re building a hobby site or a full online business.

Everybody’s heard the term scalable. Often it relates to software, but it can also relate to the foundation of a web site or business model. Basically, it’s a measurement of the ability for a site or business to grow and expand in accordance with visitor or customer demands.

Now, of course it’s vital to think ahead on scalability when planning your site or business, and most people do this; but where a lot seem to “miss the boat” is in planning for their site or business to scale upwards without their actual time and investment having to grow at an equal rate.

I’ve done this myself in the past and it’s a real heart breaker when you suddenly realize that a project is growing popular, yet you can no longer provide the necessary time into it because you didn’t plan ahead for the growth properly.

Many blogs are great examples of this. Often as a blog becomes more popular the blog owner feel’s forced to put in more time on posting to his visitor’s needs, replying to lots of comments, replying to every email contact and etc.

Without thinking ahead from the start and placing firm limits on what the blogger is willing to put in to his blog, he can quickly find himself in a vicious cycle of chasing his own popularity while it grows, and sadly more bloggers than not aren’t ever going to earn a fair return for their time investments from their blogs.

The opposite side to that coin is the blogger who realizes that as popularity and visitor counts rise, so will expectations from their readers–and the smart blog owner will have planned ahead for that increased demand in ways that won’t further tax their time.

For example, they may have established relationships with other bloggers whom they’ll tap for guest postings, or they may have searched out a decent ghost-writer to hire once demand began to rise. Whatever they have ready to go, the important fact is they are prepared for when the time comes.

These principals can be seen and applied with just about any web site or business model in that when you’re planning for future growth, don’t just plan to get that growth, but also plan for how you’ll handle it when it comes without having to become a slave to the project.

Technorati Tags: growth, scalability

Posted in Business | No Comments »

What’s In A Name?

Posted on July 21st, 2008 by Scott

I was reading an interesting post over at ReadWriteWeb about how mainstream web users will often type the URL they’re looking for into a search engine (or their browser’s search box provided by a search engine) rather than directly into their browser address bar.

In-fact, they show that over 10% of the searches for the top 10 dating search terms were full URLs of popular dating sites. And trust me, 10% of the dating market search traffic is huge!

Just for kicks I decided to see what would come up in Google if I typed in the URL of one of the top dating sites and guess what I found? No less than 3 of the top 10 results were affiliate blogs. Obviously created by marketers who understand people’s browsing habits well enough to know they should target popular dating site URLs instead of honest keyword terms in their copy.

Is this ethical? Legal even? That’s not for me to say. What I will say is it’s obviously and understandably profitable for those who do it.

Will it work with other niches? Absolutely. Pick any popular product on the market right now, I know there was a recent release for Traffic Secrets so Google trafficsecrets.com and see what comes up. Lots of affiliate sites in those results…

Again, should you optimize your affiliate pages to the domain names or titles of the products or services you’re promoting? That’s not for me to say. Can you make good money doing so? Yes, I’d say you can.

Technorati Tags: names, search results, urls

Posted in SEO | 1 Comment »

A Job To Do or Passive Income Wealth, What’s Your Goal?

Posted on July 18th, 2008 by Scott

I know some of the readers here are just looking for ways to earn a little extra income each week online. Whether for beer money or to help pay some bills, build some savings or whatever. This post really isn’t for you.

This is for those who intend to build a full-time income online, and the need to ask yourself a crucial question (the earlier the better).

Is your goal to create daily work for yourself that’s profitable, or do you want to build completely passive income streams to ultimately generate income for you while you play at the beach or travel the world.

I have to insert a word of warning here, the term passive income makes me ill. I absolutely hate the way it gets thrown around in sales copy by marketers who want to sell their systems of “free money” making to enthusiastic, desperate and motivated people.

The notion of passive income online as it gets touted too often is almost a myth, and is certainly not a reality for the average Joe starting out. Almost nothing you do today will continue generating revenue for you over several years without some additional input and upkeep.

However, you can build projects and alliances today that will be profitable for years to come with minimal input and upkeep, but that’s not truly passive income. You work for it and you earn it. For example, my web sites earn me money from around the planet 24 hours per day. I’m not online 24 hours per day, so some of that income is made without direct input by me at the time of transaction, but I still created the earning opportunity and generated the sale with my daily work.

I work every day on my sites. Not every site every day, I have nearly 200 web sites online right now and that would be too much. But I do give a few minutes to upkeep, maintenance, updating, promoting and etc. for almost all of them each month–plus I’m constantly developing new sites or products; and that makes up my daily work that I’ve created for myself.

In other words I haven’t built a business that just makes me money, I’ve built a job for myself to do every day that earns me a living. In my mind there is a distinct difference.

Now to shift positions…

If you’ve read this far you probably think I have some adverse feelings towards honest passive income, but I don’t. In-fact, my future plans depend on it.

In about 7 years I’m planning an early semi-retirement for myself. This has been my goal for a long time, and I’ve shaped my business so that when that time comes it will continue generating a nice income for me without my having to put much more than a couple hours per week into it at most.

While I work long, hard hours every day now, I do it with this future goal in mind so that I make the right decisions which will help me achieve it on schedule.

If you read my blog then you’ve heard me refer to Heather, Chrissy and Bobbi as partners and associates. Which is exactly how I view each of them. I’m not a business owner today, I’m a partner with the people I’ve surrounded myself with.

In 7 years I’ll be a business owner who relies on them to get the job done and keep things going forward. I’ll have a hands-off position in the daily operations at that point.

I can do this because I decided early on what my goal would be and have molded my business all along to be in position for that transition, and to have the right people with the right knowledge and experience ready to take over.

So, you could say that when I answered the question of this posting for myself, that answer was “sort of both”. I created a daily job for myself to do that would lead into a passive income for me down the road.

What’s your goal?

Technorati Tags: goal, online work, passive income

Posted in Business, Development | No Comments »

Free and Easy Traffic

Posted on July 17th, 2008 by Scott

I talk often about how social networks are a great source of quality traffic for my niche sites, and every time I do it seems someone is waiting in the wings to jump out and challenge my claims.

The most frequent opposition I hear is “that traffic is easy, but it’s garbage that won’t convert”.

Well, that’s absolutely true if you pull in the wrong people with your efforts, and unfortunately because it’s so easy to get an instant traffic bump of the wrong people and then assume all of the traffic from social networks will be equally poor this conclusion is prevalent among Internet marketers.

But here’s the deal, there are people of all ages and all walks of life on nearly every social network you can think of. From MySpace to Facebook, from YouTube to StumbleUpon… every demographic you can imagine is there.

How can having instant free access to virtually every known demographic be anything but good?

It’s not the traffic that’s bad, it’s the methods for targeting it and the content they target that traffic with that people get wrong.

Recently I’ve been following my online friend, Caroline Middlebrook’s free course on using StumbleUpon effectively that she calls Stumble Rush with a close eye because Caroline is someone who does very well with traffic from social networks.

She does well with it because she understands the networks and how they work, she understands the traffic and she doesn’t abuse either. She gives people what they want and in the way they want it served up.

If you doubt the effectiveness of social traffic, or you’re just starting to get your feet wet with social network marketing I’d suggest checking out Caroline’s free course. It’s focused on the StumbleUpon network, but much of what she’s included (that I’ve seen so far) can be applied across other networks too. In other words, once you understand the network and traffic at one place you’ll be able to see it properly in others too.

The free course is available at www.stumblerush.com, check it out, follow through with it and then come and tell me what you think of social traffic.

Technorati Tags: social marketing, stumbleupon

Posted in Social Web | 3 Comments »

Don’t Block That Goofball on FriendFeed

Posted on July 16th, 2008 by Scott

A friend of mine was just telling me about how many “goofballs” she’s blocked at FriendFeed because they post what she deems to be silly or insane comments to her remarks.

That’s all well and good if FriendFeed is a purely social venue for you, who wants to hang out with goofballs after all?

But, if you’re like my friend and do business on the web, and it doesn’t matter if you make products, sell products, or self-promote your services as an expert/consultant/etc. then blocking people seems like a stupid idea in my opinion.

Those “goofballs”, no matter how silly or insane their comments may seem at times, represent a portion of the audience or marketplace you’re always talking to, so listening is just polite and getting their input and gaining perspective on why they may view certain topics in certain ways (even if you disagree or think they’re nuts) is valuable data. If you block them you lose that.

To me, social venues like FriendFeed, Twitter and the like are fun and informative. I don’t just view them as tools for my business efforts because they’re not and that would be missing the big picture, but I also don’t overlook them as resources for my business either. And by resources I mean from seeing what people of all different perspectives have to say on various topics I gain insights and understandings that can be helpful to me.

So, don’t be so quick to block that next goofball, (s)he may be your next potential employer or customer.

Technorati Tags: friendfeed, goofballs

Posted in Social Web | No Comments »