Are You Ready to Make Money Online this Year?

You were probably wondering what happen to me over the last month. As with the usual holiday craziness, part of my problem was dealing with the death of my father two months ago. Trying to keep the family going, manage my business dealings, (lose weight, ha!), and all of the other tasks were really quite daunting.

However, over the last two weeks I made my New Year's resolutions to get my products out the door and add more value to you, the readers. If you are like me you spend too much time thinking and spinning over so many ideas that just getting one done seems like it takes forever. I spent almost every day this year going back over my entire library of ebooks on Internet Marketing and how to make money online. This has been a challenge but also extremely enlightening.

If you have as many ebooks as I do then I bet you haven't gone back to read them again. It's a good idea since it generates similar thoughts from all the authors. When you look at it there are about ten common rules to making a living online. No doubt the single most important rule is having your own product. I would suggest you go dust off your old ebooks if you have the time - it might get you going in 2008.

So, who will be the in the class of 2008 for new Internet Marketers? Remember to dream big - hopefully it will be you!

Use the 80-20 Rule to Make Money Online

I don't know how many of you have worked in a Fortune 50 company before. But, if you have you know how much large companies focus on squeezing the greatest benefit from every dollar spent.

This type of value can come in many ways - reduced expenses, more sales, faster delivery, etc. Any way you look at it, large corporations understand the need to keep the financial statement friendly to their stock owners.

A common theme running in many companies is the idea that the first 80% of any work is easier than the last 20%, and, it is that last 20% that usually doubles the total cost of the effort. Plus, it is usually the first 80% that provides a majority of the need. When you apply this to a large effort or a combination of efforts the savings is staggering! Companies will work on 10, 50 or 100 million dollar projects and can realize 32 million in savings plus get the benefit sooner just using those three examples

How can you apply this to your own online marketing endeavors? You have probably invested quite a bit of time and effort to make money online, and, if you're like me, want to perfect all of your work. This includes articles, websites, blogs, ebooks, graphics, lists, etc. Are you burning the midnight oil on fine details?

If you took a step back and analyzed your own work would you be able to strip away some of the most difficult and time consuming steps but still get most of the benefit? In my own work I have found that trying to complete a site down to the finest details probably did nothing for any additional revenue. If I had worked on only the core 80% I could have spent the rest of the time on traffic building.

Take a look at it a different way. Perhaps you are writing your first ebook and have 12 chapters on your specific topic. Do you really need all 12 chapters? Will some of those chapters make the difference in the overall quality or sales? What if you cut it down to 9 or 10 chapters - maybe the other chapters can wait for the next ebook.

By no means am I trying to suggest that you not complete anything to the point of it being non-functional, poor quality or simply useless. You still have to do the majority of the work that gets you to that threshold. The balance is benefit vs. effort and cost with your goal to still have quality products, services and information.

The bottom line is every hour you spend working on fine tuning your own online marketing process could be taking away potential profits from other endeavors. The more revenue generating projects you have, the higher the potential is to make money online.

You can always use your first earned dollars to hire talent later to tune, modify and perfect your past work (take a look at Where to Focus Your Marketing Dollars). This gives you even more productivity with business acceleration!

Top Internet Sites by Time Spent Online

Recently, I stumbled onto a page by a site analytics firm that measures how long users spend on a site rather than pure hits. They wanted to understand which sites generate long sessions with users. When you look at their results you see some pretty interesting patterns - all which revolve around content.

Before you look at this list take a moment to think of the sites where you spend the most time online. I'm not referring to how often you visit a site but one where you actually keep your attention and spend a duration of time browsing, reading, purchasing, socializing, etc.

Are you ready? You might be surprised. Here are the top 10 sites with longest attention share:

1. Myspace.com 11.9%
2. Yahoo.com 8.5%
3. Msn.com 3.7%
4. eBay.com 3.7%
5. Google.com 2.1%
6. Aol.com 1.7%
7. Pogo.com 1.6%
8. Facebook.com 1.0%
9. Amazon.com 0.7%
10. Craigslist.com 0.6%

Interesting list - I would say I spend most of my attention share on eBay, Google and Amazon as well as Youtube (which is number 12). I have never even looked at Pogo.com and hardly ever look at Msn.com. Some surprises in the top 20 - Adultfriendfinder.com and Neopets.com.

Looks like I need to spend some more time researching avenues on how to make money online with Myspace and Yahoo. More information on this list can be found at:
Compete.com Attention List

Tracking Heat Maps

As you probably noted in my last entries, my focus lately has been on high volume keyword phrases. The more I have worked with this concept the more I want to research it. As with any site optimizing its performance should always be on your checklist. Part of optimizing my high volume sites to make money online was to take a look at how people were navigating around them. What were they seeing and clicking on?

Recently I came across a wonderful site called CrazyEgg.com that has an excellent interface for tracking clicks and click density over a period of time. I could easily see if my AdSense ads were being ignored, what articles were being read, if any promotions were focused on and what part of my pages were generating real interest.

CrazyEgg.com is a very cool web 2.0 application that basically creates a simulated overlay on top of any web page. This overlay is triggered by a simple javascript line embedded on the page you want to measure. Basically it is keeping track of clicks, click location, and density. What I really like about it is the ability to adjust as the page adjusts. So, if you have a blog you don't have to worry about the content locations changing (although I'm sure a drastic change would probably affect it.)

This tool is particularly helpful with Adsense ads allowing you to visually understand if you ad positioning is working. I was easily able to optimize my placements by viewing the heat maps and rearranging the ad positions. For my high volume sites this has been extremely beneficial. In fact, there were ad placements I definitely thought were in the correct position that turned out to have no clicks at all! I was floored! It seems that users are tuning out ads in various locations that I had no idea were poor screen real estate.

If you have any page that gets some traffic you should try it out for a test drive. A possible option would be to use a very low bid Adwords campaign to get clicks before the page has been promoted so you can tune the layout sooner rather than later. Whatever way you want to test, tune and monetize your site, I strongly suggest that you try this tool out soon.

The Big Leap - Waiting for the Improbable Event

Sometimes just building your online business is not enough to make the next leap. Can you be prepared for improbable events to make money online? This is a question I asked myself after reading a recent book (which I won't name right now until I am done).

I think that many of us start building online businesses the way you would build any regular business - by starting out slowly and growing it organically over time using proven techniques. However, using this method has a tendency to blind us to what might occur online - that is, the sudden, unexpected event that would propel us up into the stratosphere of internet marketing - something so big, so viral that you would never see it coming.

The thought has occurred to me that this might be the reason why some marketers are where they are today. I'm not saying that they didn't put any effort into what they did - but, they had a vision into something where most people have blind spot - that is, the improbable event.

Think of it this way - imagine you spent thousand of hours buying stock based on advice from the experts thereby slowly and carefully building a large, diversified portfolio. After some time (probably many years) you would see the fruits of your labor with consistent, secure profits. This is obviously something very scalable - the standard method, hard work, no chances, etc.

Now, imagine you tried to see the future by investing in only very small, risky, low cost stocks that focus on new ideas that haven't really caught on yet. Most likely you would see most of your money not doing anything at all - in fact, it would probably decline over time.

However, in the small stock example there happens to be one company whose ideas will spread like wildfire in the future - a kind of viral growth. When that happens suddenly your one investment amongst many may jump 1000-fold - guess what, you just become a millionaire! What just happened? You've prepared for the improbable event.

What if I wait and the improbable never occurs, you might ask. If you only look for the improbable you may or may not be successful - that's really not the point. But, if you mix your normal growth with an eye on the improbable I believe you get the best of both - building your business with mindset to what is invisible, improbable, of future potential, possible viral and simply amazing.

Tuning Your SEO For the Mythical Google Sandbox

Time to clean out your online garage this fall? If you're like me you haven't spent the time to go back and clean up old site pages, links and broken, worn out HTML. What a surprise it was when I went back to some of my old posts on this site and other sites only to find a batch of bad links that had either expired or moved. Once I noticed that, I then started thinking about re-examining my entire portfolio.

Part of the reason I embarked on this effort was due to an article I read about the mythical Google sandbox, that is, the temporary place where you live in Google's search engine space when building out a new website, blog or community mashup page.

The deeper issue posed by this article was the effect of proper search engine optimization on your site's ability to jump out of Google's sandbox into a higher ranked page. Whether or not the sandbox exists I still believe that the Google algorithm to change my site rank is what happened to the site I mentioned in my last three articles on The Online Money Making Secret You Shouldn't Know. I happened to notice that my search volume jumped last Feb without really knowing why. This was exactly six months from the time I created the site.

Could I be on to something here? Typically, I can get some faster page rank on new sites (about six weeks) for low volume keyword phrases. But maybe things have changed a bit with Google's formulas. Leaving the mythical sandbox might take longer now. Nevertheless, trying to improve your site is critical to your search engine optimization success. You should always revisit your sites, blogs, lenses, etc. to build for the future.

So here are the things you should do in your fall cleanup:

1. Fix all broken links - if the link is gone then remove the hyperlink tags and just underline the link with a broken link annotation.

2. Check your site's HTML and CSS consistency - have you been fiddling with your site layout but forgetting to check if it is completely clean? Did you happen to leave out an end tag?

3. Optimize for SEO - do your pages have titles that are keyword friendly? Are your page titles optimized to remove the site or blog name on every page?

4. Get your critical section headers optimized - be sure all keyword focused pages have H1 tags on the section or paragraph headers. Move any unnecessary H1 tags away from deep within the main flow of the html - in other words, have the title and H1 tags be near the top of your page source.

5. Highlight keyword phrases - be sure to add bold headings around your optimized keywords.

6. Add alt keys to your images - always add descriptive keywords as alt tags to your site images.

The Online Money Making Secret You Shouldn't Know - Part 3

After getting back from a long vacation in the desert Southwest I was startled to find that my high volume search keyword site had shown some significant growth in the last 2 months (if you haven't read Part 1 you can find it here, or Part 2 which can be found here).

If you remember I mentioned that having a site devoted to a keyword phrase that has extremely high monthly search volume can be a great way to make money online and boost your online marketing strategy. After reviewing one of my own sites I thought I might show you what kind of results you may get (DISCLAIMER - your results will vary!).

I initially built my site on August 21st, 2006 with just a couple of pages but focused on three extremely high volume keyword phrases in the entertainment industry that I thought might work well. I really didn't spend much time on it for the first two months or so but then picked up in October by promoting it as much as I could (as noted in Part 2 of these articles).

My AdSense revenue was limited with my first revenue click occurring on November 4th and my November average revenue being $0.60 / day for a total of $17 - not bad considering I only put two hours into it. Now, this is a bit unfair considering the search engines had from Aug. 21st to about Oct. 20th to index my site before I really pushed the search engine optimization. I'm not sure how long the engines would have taken had I started pushing the site sooner.

In December I focused entirely on adding content with about 7 more pages of site articles and information really ignoring backlinks from external directories, forums, blogs, and articles. My AdSense revenue stayed about the same until about Feb. 12th. I'm not sure why (my guess is my search engine rankings went up) but my visits jumped by a factor of about 8x. This didn't really increase the revenue because the clickthrough rates were low.

After reading some of Brad Callen's books (be sure to subscribe to the Agile Marketer Newsletter to get a free SEO ebook from him, or, really become a SEO expert and buy SEO Elite probably the best SEO package available) I decided to modify my ad placements based on his research. By the end of April I was nearing $1 / day on one site with only five hours of total work.

By continually adding content , promoting and reorging the ads I now had a site that was curving upward in daily hits (from about 30 a day in late 2006 to 700 a day by June 2007). Well, to make a long story short here are my results from August:

By Google's Terms of Service I can't show you the clickthrough rates or page impressions. But you can see the daily earnings for just this single site (I've filtered out all my other AdSense earnings).

So, what's the moral of this story? With NOT a lot of work and some patience, diligence and focused high volume keywords you should be able to do the same fairly easily. If your goal is to work from home then this might just be one part of your arsenal to get started. Just be sure to keep the content flowing.