Passions to Profits - New Free Ebook

Just wanted to let you know I just finished up my new free ebook called:

Passions to Profits: Using Your Own Interests and Skills to Make Money Online

This ebook is focused primarily at newbies who are looking for ways to generate ideas to make money online. I think most people struggle with this issue of where to start.
What was most interesting about writing this ebook was the free tools I was able to use to create it completely from scratch - including the writing, layout, pdf generation, e-cover image, 3d ebook generation and image editing. Yes, all free!!!
I would guess this book took me about 10 hours to write, 3 hours to edit, and about 2 hours to package. It shows that you can do this pretty easily now.
If you're interested in what I used - just download the ebook and look for the Bonus Chapter. It has links to all of the tools.
Enjoy! You can get it here: Passions to Profits

Internet Marketing 101: Website Hosting

This is a first in a series of Internet Marketing entries that, I hope, help you with your online businesses to make better choices. I plan to write more of these over time to eventually end up in an internet marketing how-to section of this site.

Ok class, here it is up front - I've got to tell you that I hate website hosting and hosting centers. Frankly it has been the bain of my online existence. Exasperating, frustrating, and downright mad, the website hosting world is a morass of insanity these days.

Costing anywhere from $1.99/month to hundreds of dollars a month, picking a hosting center can be a daunting quest. But, the good news is that I think we're reaching the end of this era soon.

So let me step back a bit to tell you my own experiences with hosting. I've currently used five different hosting centers since I started online. I've paid anywhere from about $6 to $20 a month depending on features. Over that time I've had system failures, outages, lost files, 85% uptime in one case, virtually no support, and slow page response.

Now I can't really say that everything has been negative. There have been moments of stability, support and good feelings. But, really not that often. And, so far in my book no one has stood out for me. And when I'm trying to make money online this is a huge impact!

What are the basic steps for hosting? Let's start with that. Let's say you've purchased a great new marketing package that consists of .php files and a MySQL database. Sounds simple, you're excited to run it - all you have to do is find hosting that supports this. Easy!!

Almost all hosting centers support PHP scripting, MySQL and a bunch of other utilities on their Linux servers. All you have to do is sign up with your credit card, create an account, use a utility to create your database instance, upload your files and launch! (Ok, easier said than done!)

Now comes the real trouble. The files you uploaded don't work, the database connection is failing and you're getting security setting issues for the file system. You try to contact support but they're offline - now what?

Top Hosting Problems

What is the problem here? Well, there are multiple reasons but the top ones, I think, are:

1. Many hosting centers are not very good at managing many sites on single servers. I think that many don't even care for the price you are paying.
2. A lot of these centers are fronts for a larger, offshore company that sells virtual centers. These are divied out to buyers to act as virtual hosting centers. (Funny story, I happened to use a center like this only to find another center that had copied the pages from the first one that still had the old company names and copyright dates.)
3. Your price is mostly a direct reflection of the support you'll receive. Paying $3/month doesn't pay the salaries of a large support staff.

I could go on here but my point is this: if you are going to use a hosting center then I would suggest the following:

1. Make sure the hosting center is located in your own country.
2. Find a center that offers 24x7 support preferably by phone - but a quick response ticketing support system will work too.
3. Try to talk to the sales people first - ask them about support, features, how many people work at the center, uptime - even ask them where they are located (do they work for the center directly?)
4. Make every attempt to use a month by month plan rather than a 6 or 12 month plan if you need to back out. If it is bad - get out!!
5. Use the internet for hosting reviews to see how other's experiences have been. Choose a center with a high rating.
6. Choose a host that seems large, well established with an extensive infrastructure. This helps assure your site's uptime.
7. Don't forget to check that your site supports your website files - php, asp.net, cold fusion, etc.
   

The good news that I refered to earlier is that this model is dying out. Small hosting centers will start to dissappear. The reason? The big guys are moving in and they're cheap; real cheap.

Amazon, Google, Yahoo, EBay and Microsoft are starting to see the value of a massive, shared, flexible infrastructure that can be extended to you, the user. Their own huge computing network can be partitioned in small chunks as virtual hosts allowing customers to deploy websites for pennies. Things like the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud is an example of what is coming. Even Blogger from Google is a kind of free host.

Get ready for the future, but for now - use my advice above. And, hopefully, you won't quite a jaded as I am with hosting.

Top 10 Mistakes of Internet Marketing

Many of us have tried to learn how to make money online using all kinds of inputs: ebooks, forums, videos, audios, trial and error, etc. If you're like me you find yourself constantly second guessing or just being frustrated when you see an Internet Marketing guru use a new bag of tricks to make yet another five million dollars in days.

Recently I polled a list of internet marketers on what they felt were their biggest mistakes made in their own online careers. I seeded the question with my own mistakes with the intent to get a discussion started.

What was revealed was extremely interesting coming from many who are very experienced. I decided to collate the list and rank them in what I thought is the best order based on the number of responses I received.

So, here we go - enjoy the list, and, use this to power your own online business!

Top 10 Mistakes of Internet Marketing

1. No Autoresponder - I think almost everyone responded to this one. Not having an autoresponder means no email list to work with. No list means re-marketing for every new product or service. The gurus make the BIG bucks here because their lists are huge!

2. Product Pricing Too Low - If you have been following Frank Kern's latest endeavor you'll see this is one of his emphasized points. Many are afraid to see the price point high thinking you'll lose customers whereas the opposite may be true. The psychology may be that something expensive is valued whereas something cheap is not.

3. Not Using Your List - Much like #1 even if you have a list you may not be marketing to it. Your list is your lifeline according to most. Use it!

4. Too Many Projects at Once - Ah, the age old story. I'm completely a victim to this - losing focus on a single project to start another. Yes, it is good to have ideas but keep them on a pad of paper by your side and leave them for later! There was a lot of noise from everyone on this one.

5. Test Marketing Before Jumping In - Well, there isn't much more to say about this other than do your research and plan carefully.

6. Offers to Never Seen Products - Whatever you do, don't do this. You must either buy or barter the product you are going to sell. If it is bad you definitely want to stay away and keep your customers away as well.

7. No Affiliates for Your Product - One marketer responded that he estimates he lost over one million dollars just from this simple mistake. Use your affiliate network to help sell your own product - it is like an exponential web, that, if good will grow your income at a massive rate.

8. Bad Sales Copy - Borrow, beg or just pay for this unless you are a great copywriter. This can sink a great product faster than anything.

9. Knowing a Niche is Profitable - Again, much like #5 this mistake is very common. You're excited, build a site, promote only to find out that those hours and hours of work went to waste. Ouch!

10. Not Outsourcing Faster - This is truly the power of many vs. the power of one. Outsourcing means getting help to build your site using such services as Elance.com or Amazon's Mechanical Turk. It is inexpensive and can accelerate your effort.

Some of the runners up were:

11. Bad Adwords Ads
12. Not Using Freebie Lists
13. Poor AdSense Testing

There you have it. If you can take away some of these lessons to use in your own work you should be better off and be able to make money online. Enjoy!

Time to watch the Oscars.

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.