Dave and Jay - Crazy Web Entrepreneurs

At least Google is doing more than laying the smack-down on “innocent” bloggers. Slashdot reports that they’ve recently removed over 40,000 malware sites that had gamed the system to achieve top results for thousands of random terms. I wonder how much money these black-hatters made before Google found out about the problem. Fortunately for Google, there are companies like Sunbelt Software, who pick up the slack when Google drops the ball.

In other Google news, Wired has posted a recent article about the state of spam on the net today. Brad Taylor, Google’s head spam fighter, says spam to gmail accounts is flat and may even be declining for the first time ever. He attributes this decline to Google’s advanced spam filters.

Not surprisingly, Google will not release any statistical data backing this up… so take the information with a grain of salt. It’d be nice if spam was not growing anymore, or even decreasing… but it just sounds too good to be true, and you know what they say…

Good Profits.

You’ve probably heard the saying, “set yourself up as an expert” or something along those lines when reading about how to run a successful blog. It’s true, being viewed as an expert in your field is going to help you… presuming you know what you’re talking about.

Otherwise, you’ll only be able to keep the facade up for so long. This principle translates to almost any other business. I picked up my car from the garage yesterday. I took it in because there was a whine coming from the rear wheels, and my Dad thought it might be the wheel bearing. When I dropped it off, I said that we had thought it was a wheel bearing, and asked them to take a look.

About $200 later for replacing the wheel bearing, the noise is no different than it was… and I’m quite irate. I took the car to them because I perceived that they were experts at what they did, and that I could trust them to properly diagnose the problem and fix it.

Instead, they fixed something that probably wasn’t broken and the problem still exists; now they have a customer that won’t be giving them any return business and they made maybe $50 off the job (most of the cost was for parts). Let’s look at the direct result of this: not only have they lost my business, but it’s highly unlikely that my parents will return to that garage either. So they’ve lost repair work on my vehicle and both of my parents’ vehicles.

Not only that, but I’ll probably tell this story to friends and business associates from the area, so there is a potential for even more lost business there. A happy customer will continue to do business with you, and maybe tell one or two people about your business. An unhappy customer will likely tell 10 or more people about their experience.

So now because of one simple mis-diagnosis, there has been a direct impact on their business immediately (the loss of maintenance work on my vehicle, and my parents’ two vehicles) and the possibility of losing potential clients (anyone who talks to me about my bad experience). This type of far reaching consequence is why it’s so important to treat customers like gold, regardless of whether they’re purchasers of an electronic product or are a customer of a brick and mortar store.

I plan on giving them a call tomorrow about this issue, and perhaps we’ll have a story about answering complaints and customer service as a follow-up.

Good Profits.

With my recent foray into online publishing, it’s become increasingly obvious that with new products, it’s a real challenge to convince buyers to actually click on the “buy now” button without having testimonials on the site.

When you think about this, don’t assume the product is complete BS, but think of a well thought out product that was written after much research from experienced sources.

You see, when writing sales letters, it’s very difficult to project yourself or your product as someone knowledgeable about your chosen subject - especially if you’re a nobody in the field.

Common sense would argue that to appear knowledgeable, you should structure your letter to talk about things in the field that only someone who is an expert would know, however in doing so, you lose the ability to tell a story or keep the majority of your viewers interested enough to keep reading.

So for the average publisher, we’re left with two very unappealing options: either we write the sales letter as pure copy and hope the buyers simply assume we are knowledgeable, or we’re forced to use fake testimonials to convey how “good” our product is, and simply plan to replace them with real testimonials as we receive them…

I was recently speaking with my sales letter writer on the topic, and her suggestion as an alternative was to visit a number of forums dedicated to the topic of the product. This would be done for the purpose of soliciting opinions about experiences that have to do with using professional services related to your product… and then use those as stand-ins.

However, I feel that’s a rather morally gray area in and of itself, as you’re obviously going to have to remove some text from this opinion in order for it to be relevant… and if someone puts a company’s name in the “opinion”, that has to be removed, and so at the end of the day, you’re still left with a “testimonial” which isn’t based on your product but could be construed as being about your product… At which point I ask, how is it any different than me writing up a bunch of fake testimonials?

Unfortunately, the only way to get around this issue is if you already have a name that’s easily recognized or are well-known as an expert, so that you can use actual reviews about your service.

My question to anyone reading this is… How can a morally right person tell people how good their product is without having to resort to such tactics? Any ideas out there?

So, the results are in, and as I predicted (though I think Jay had a sneaking suspicion that this would happen): Jamie beat out Charles Trippy. Viral Video Fever made $39,000 in the first week, while Jamie’s book made $79,000. Technically, that means that I was right in my predictions… but let’s cut through the crap and look at the real results.

In seven days, Jamie and Charles earned Joel and Co. over six figures. I’m sure there were a lot of expenses involved in this, but if the books were laid open, I’m sure Joel made more net profit than the commissions they paid / will pay out. This doesn’t even take into account their “Secret Classroom” package that will be released in just under a week.

There is very little information, but the Secret Classroom is probably just another one of those high-priced online video tutorial products that rehashes all the same information that’s been floating around the net for a while. The ‘Gurus’ will get richer (I guarantee every one of the teachers will be getting a cut of the profits), while poor shmucks who just want to make a living online will get sucked in by unrealistic promises.

I am still willing to bet that, with the amount of exposure NIM provided, the 10k seed money and an all-star backup team, any one with half a brain could make just about anything a successful product. Think: “Hobo Dan’s ‘Begging for Dollars’ e-book - Earn up to 500,000 a year, making your own hours! Be your own boss!” or “Jojo the Blogging Circus Monkey - Nonsense Words = Adsense Profits!” or maybe even “Bag-O-Poo.com - $49.99 for your own bag of fresh poo”.

Just listen to the pitch at the end of the last episode, where Joel tells the viewers that this is the exact information that Jamie and Charles used to make their first products wildly successful… notice how he fails to mention the $10,000 seed money each of them received, and the arguably more valuable support services from Joel’s company which is made up of veteran Internet Marketers.

Don’t get me wrong, there is money to be earned online… a lot of it, but an expensive training package isn’t going to teach you anything you won’t learn from a less expensive product like SEO book, which is really just a collection of the knowledge from industry publications and forums. If you’re really resourceful, you can probably learn all you need to know without spending a dime… and resourcefulness will serve you 10 times better than an over-priced training package.

Good Profits.

This post is going to sound incredibly geeky, however… it’s true. Last Thursday I purchased Mass Effect for the Xbox 360, and ever since picking it up, I’ve played it pretty much non-stop until Monday morning - when I finally beat it with 20 hours played.

What is so amazing about this game is the emotional impact it had. Most games you play just for entertainment or to see some cool graphics, but this one really did feel like a 20 hour Sci-Fi movie, and quite possibly the best Sci-Fi movie ever, at that.

Since the story is much longer than the average movie, it really gets a chance to see the characters’ personalities, and then just when you feel you know the characters, it suddenly presents you with a moral dilemma - and the developers really stick it to you by making these moral dilemmas focus around the characters you interact with the most, or who have the most speaking roles.

A great example of this is when you’re forced to choose who to send on a possible suicide mission, and both your character’s love interest and the character who has been with your crew since the beginning volunteer for it… who do you choose?

Most people will play games like these and just click through moments like this, but I eat this sort of stuff up - and it was definitely a different experience going to bed last night feeling solemn with the fact I’d sacrificed two incredibly fleshed out characters with my decisions.

As for the reported bugs, I personally never experienced any of them - however, reading the BioWare, forums it appears that some people either have huge problems with bugs or don’t have any problems. It makes me wonder if they fixed something after going “gold”, and if the first copies sent out were bugged…

All I can say is, hats off to BioWare, and Dave? I’ve got more gamertag points than you AGAIN.

Jay has led the charge in changing the shift of the blog a little bit, and has started talking about gaming somewhat frequently. Since gaming is a fairly big part of our lives (and Faith’s too), I thought I’d chime in with my thoughts about a game we’re playing through right now.

Faith and I have been playing through Assassin’s Creed the last week or so, and the game’s locale and visuals are absolutely stunning… and maybe I’m a bit odd, but the stealth wrist blade just doesn’t get old!

Assassin’s Creed is supposed to be a stealth / assassin game (duh), and it can be played that way. When it works, the game can be very satisfying. Nothing beats sneaking up behind a guard and sticking him with your knife blade, then sneaking through a door that was guarded until the guards left their posts to investigate their recently fallen comrade.

The problem is, there is no motivation to play this way. There is absolutely no penalty for running around in a very un-assassin like manner, killing every guard you see without thought of stealth or the sneakiness that is supposedly part of your creed. Out of curiosity (and desire for more Gamertag points), I decided to see how far this extends… and unfortunately, it seems that you can literally kill every guard in the city by any means (often taking 10 - 20 on at a time), and then run around unhindered.

This would be alright if there was any sort of difficulty involved in fighting large numbers of guards, but it’s easy enough that I could teach my grandma to do it. Any health you lose will quickly regenerate back during combat, and dispatching your foes in open battle is as simple as timing a single button press to your foe’s attacks. As the player, I’m supposed to be controlling an expertly trained assassin, but it often feels like I’m controlling Arnie in an 80’s action movie, where it’s me vs. an army and they don’t have a chance!

Don’t get me wrong, Assassin’s Creed is enjoyable to play, and there is “fun” to be had. The problem is, this is a sad case of what could have been a classic game, reduced to a merely good one. I think part of the problem was the scope of the game… they just planned a little bit more than they could pull off.

This is apparent when you look at some of the minor game decisions that seem to be rushed or just slapped in. For example, you play an expertly trained assassin, but apparently they don’t teach you how to swim at the academy, because a two foot drop into water will kill you… what?

Assassin’s Creed is a fun game that sadly could have been so much more with a little more development time, or more man-power. It’s a nice diversion, but don’t expect a challenging game unless you have the discipline to force yourself to play it as the stealth / assassin game it should be.

Hullo Folks,

Writing “make money online” content is hard, especially when there are so many other blogs out there doing it that practically anything you write has been covered before (think: a million monkeys typing on a keyboard coming up with Shakespeare, only Jay is the hairy one). So I thought I’d take a little break from the ordinary and help you with the particularly hard to buy for people on your Christmas list this year.

Everyone has one of today’s subjects in their life: that guy… who doesn’t really do anything “wrong”, but you just get a bad vibe from the way he looks at your girlfriend, and he’s kinda weird looking. He may live on your street, or if you’re from a smaller town, he may just be everywhere. His habits include spending hours in coffee shops, taking pictures on the beach in the summer, and digging through trash bin of the college girls who live on your street… that’s right, it’s THAT GUY.

How do you pick the perfect gift for that creepy guy who has everything? Does he want a mint condition, life size Xena: The Warrior Princess cutout? Nope, he’s already got one! So, how do you put a smile on his face Christmas morning? Two words: Binocular Camera.

Digital Binocular Camera, w00t!

If you think about it, this really is the perfect gift… when the weather gets warm next summer, he’ll be able to pick up his favorite pass-time (taking pictures of girls on the beach) from a safe distance. No more getting beat up by angry boyfriends! He’ll never be able to thank you enough for getting him this gift, and maybe he’ll even stop scoping on your girl… probably not though.

This Christmas, give the creepy guy on your street the gift that keeps on giving, the digital binocular camera!

Merry Christmas!

One of the most disappointing aspects of online work is: for the most part, you’re not going to earn $1,000,000.00 in 30 days or less.

It’s ok… Take a minute for the shock of that statement to pass.

I recently purchased Affiliate Elite, and part of their “bonuses” was a 30 minute consultation phone call with an “expert” that really got me thinking, just not in a good way.

During the phone call, the “consultant” - and I use that term lightly - asked: “So what are your goals with your online business?”, to which I replied with what I thought was a well reasoned goal of saying: “Well, I’d like to earn an extra $600/month more online than I am now”.

What was his response?

“Well, how would your life change if you were earning an extra $100,000 a month?”

LOL.

At that point, I knew this wasn’t someone who actually knew anything, and of course it turned out to be just a disguised sales call for a $4500 training program - thanks so much, Brad Callen. Anyway, I requested a refund on Affiliate Elite the very next day.

The point I’m trying to make is, I believe many people out there are getting lured into this business by claims of being able to earn ridiculous sums of money for little or no effort, only to discover the truth is that it’s alot of work getting started… and revenue takes a long time to take off.

Sure, there are some overnight successes or people with the next big idea like “Facebook” or “Youtube”, but in general, websites take time and nurturing to grow into anything meaningful.

But… when you’re promised overnight success, it can be a hard pill to swallow when your first website starts off earning you $1.50/day.

My line of thinking is:

Sit down and add up all your bills, take everything into account, and then ask yourself: “how much more does it take to better my life in some way?” I believe if you really think about, it the number is actually quite low.

An extra $200/month of income can make a surprising difference in many peoples lives, and that breaks down to only $6.66/day (assuming 30 days) - and the real beauty of it is, once you know how to make $200/month, it’s usually not all that hard to make another $200 and so on.

If you set yourself up to believe you’re going to be the next big thing, then you could be right… but chances are you’ll be wrong. Start low and build yourself up into something, and if you surpass your goals, great!!! If not, well at least it’s not the crushing defeat from having believed that you would make much more after things don’t pan out.

Of course I’ve been told, repeatedly, that I am a pessimist, so…

A few months ago, I launched a new website for my company, and in that time I’ve been focusing on targeting local search terms in my small area - mainly “Cityname Web Design” or “Cityname Provice Web Design” and variations on that. My main domain has a lot of trust in the search engines already, and I’ve been building some good organic links and I’ve had a lot of success.

Currently, I have almost 60 page one rankings and that number is going up all the time. These rankings were relatively easy to go after, and while they don’t send more than what could be called a trickle of traffic (by conventional standards) the results have been pretty amazing.

The main benefit of this traffic is that it’s highly specialized, and usually comes from people who are looking for exactly what I’m selling. So while the amount of traffic is low, the conversion rate is extremely high. I’m getting at least 5 prospects a month from local searchers, and sometimes 2 or 3 in a single week.

I’m currently in the process of making this into a marketable product for my customers, but I’ve found the biggest hurdle is to sell the value of the package. Clients have trouble wrapping their head around the concept… but it’s really just math. Any company like mine whose base price for products / services starts at around $2000, you don’t need to make too many sales to make the investment in the search engine marketing worthwhile.

To be completely honest, like any SEOer, I’ve developed a few tricks of my own to find quality links… and unfortunately we usually keep those secrets close to our vest, but hey, at least I’m not promising to teach you how to make $100,000 a month for only $49.99 [this will make more sense when you read Jay’s next post :) ].

At the end of the day, these local terms are still much much less competitive than top level terms, and can bring in real business value - so don’t discount local search terms.

Good Profits.

This week has sure opened with a bang for my online business… To start things off, I accepted the latest offer on my first digital product, and while I did sign a NDA (non-disclosure agreement) I can tell you it was a very fair offer that will go a long way towards my dream basement home theater project. :)

/bragging off

The other side of the news isn’t so hot, I’ve been advertising my new product for about a week as of today, and to say it’s under performing would be an understatement.

First it was the lack of traffic (was only pulling 8 clicks/day), then I changed some ads and opened up search and content advertising and that went up to 70+/per day… Finally, over the weekend I added Yahoo and MSN to the mix and ended up with 132 clicks today (Monday).,

With that number of clicks, I should be selling 1 e-book every day, two at the most. However in 1 full week I have sold nothing.

Now to be fair, I only solved the traffic issues late last week so the decisions I made today are based on roughly 400 clicks, which isn’t really that large of a test. But I was getting a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, so I decided something had to be done.

Now the one thing I want to avoid at ALL costs is a price war, but my primary competition dropped its price on the day I released my product… and while I might generate some sales by matching his price drop, it would take a lot of sales to turn any sort of meaningful profit at that point.

So if I can’t lower my price to compete, what can I do?

Make a better product & offer!!!

I actually got the idea from reading one of Ryan Diess’s products a few months back - this can take several forms, really:

A) You could switch mediums and have your book printed and generally go the “premium” product route.

B) Add more bonuses and a more compelling offer.

For myself, I do plan to go the premium route if I can sell at least 10 copies of the ebook a month, but for now I don’t want to take on the risk so I chose to go with B.

What this entailed for me was buying up a number of related e-books; my original product deals with dogs so I bought some books on dog food recipes, puppy training and holistic healing.

What I will now do is a little time consuming, but using the lessons I learn from reading these books, I will now create 2-3 bonuses. Ideally, the bonuses will start off with maybe 1/4th of the content a traditional ebook would have (say, 50 pages instead of 200). However, this will also enable me to build up a good back-end offer, should there actually be enough customers to justify the time to develop the “bonuses” into full-fledged products.

My goal right now is to write up the equivalent of 150 pages of written content before New Year’s; in the meantime I will test a few website variations in one to two week test periods to see if I can generate some sales.

‘Til next time…