Dave and Jay - Crazy Web Entrepreneurs

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…

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you probably know that Jay and I run a small, fairly successful classified site network in Oakville, Mississauga and Burlington. We’ve been running them for years now, and in fact they were the first sites that Jay and I developed together.

For a long time, we’ve been trying to get the script re-built from the ground up - and now finally after several false starts, we’ve managed to get it complete… almost. We’re in the final testing stages before going live. Part of the reason it took so long to develop is we were trying to get it done for fairly cheaply, and it was difficult to find a reliable programmer who could work within our budget. We actually started the project with several coders who eventually petered out on us, but fortunately they hadn’t been given a deposit and we weren’t out any money when they left us.

We finally found someone to do the script several months ago, and he has just about completed it. It’s really come together quite nicely, and I think our users will be very impressed. Not only does the site incorporate some neat AJAX functionality, but we’ve added features that will make both administrative tasks easier, and improve user experience.

Users can now register (optional), and if they do, they are able to see when their ad is approved and can delete it when they are no longer interested. Also, paying advertisers are now able to place automatically-posting text ads that will be posted once a week. We’ve also revamped the design to give the sites a fresh new look.

The real changes come into play on the admin side. Not only have we added several structural changes to increase the number of indexed pages Google has on us, but we’ve added a banner management tool (previously, adding banners had to be done manually, and it was time consuming).

Running classified ad sites for a few years has given us a unique perspective on the kind of repetitive problems that you run into over and over. The major headache is people posting ads that require a paid subscription… previously, we’d have to manually email them and tell them they must buy advertising to advertise their business. To solve this problem, we’ve added a 3 step system: once we flag a message business, the script will check an advertiser list, and if the post is not on that list, then it checks if the user has any warnings already. Finally, it springs into action. On a first warning, the user is sent a nice message explaining how our site works in terms of advertising. The second warning is a sterner message that informs the user that another infraction will result in a ban, and finally the third warning adds the poster onto the ban list and they are no longer allowed to post ads.

Jay and I are both really pleased with how this script has turned out, and we may even decide to package it as an electronic product and use it as a new product we can sell for money. I’ve always wanted to have a library of high quality scripts to sell from a website.

Good Profits.

I have to say, Dave’s take on Google’s recent actions was quite interesting…

The only thing I can really say about it this is: what about it really surprises anyone? Name one country or big corporation who hasn’t gotten a taste of real power and not changed because of it.

That being said, I’m not totally convinced that everyone has their facts straight. Given the way search engines operate, it is entirely possible that this “attack” is really just Google’s way of heavily de-emphasizing blogs and links from blogs.

A little over a year ago, blogs were considered the defacto SEO tool for both blog and ping style indexing tactics and link building - but now that blogs are so mainstream, perhaps Google simply decided a change was needed, and in this case the change was noticed by an extremely vocal segment of the online population… bloggers.

Another theory would be that services like Payperpost are essentially a variant of link brokers, so if Google is specifically targeting people earning money through this sort of monetization, is it really evil or just an extension of cracking down on link sellers?

Regardless of who is right or wrong, in the long term I do believe Google is positioning itself to be our online “police” - but the fact of the matter is, we all want them to do it. Their attempts to filter the information may suck for those of us who depend on their traffic, but for the common person who is just looking for information, all this effort is perfectly justified. Now if we start seeing people having trouble because they use YPN instead of Adsense, then we’ll know they’ve gone too far - but until then, I think we can cut them some slack.

The other day, I mentioned a problem I’ve had with Adsense Deluxe on The Ancient Standard, and upgrading seems to have lessened the problem, as I’ve seen less of a descrepancy yesterday and today. However, I’m still seeing more clicks reported in my stats than in Google Adsense, so I’m not quite ready to accept there is a problem with the stats quite yet.

My next plan of action is to switch to a completely different Adsense plugin. I’m going to try Shylock Adsense; one thing I really like about this plugin is that it allows you to schedule Adsense to show up later, after the fact. So, I can set it so that no Adsense is displayed in a post until it’s more than 7 days old or something.

This will allow me to keep the homepage Adsense free, without having to remember to go in later and add Adsense to each post.  I’m hoping that removing all Adsense from the homepage will help increase the conversion of new visitors to regular readers.

So, my quest to solve the mystery of the missing Adsense clicks continues, I will keep you posted!

Good Profits.

It looks like Google is all but declaring open war on the Blogosphere, attacking alternative sources of monetization that don’t line up with their idea of how the Internet landscape should run. The latest victim is paid postings. PPP CEO Ted Murphy has announced that the big G has started reducing the PR of blogs in their network to 0 from whatever they had previously. Penalties against other review post services can’t be far behind.

Google has been warning about the coming storm for a long time, but they are playing a dangerous game. Policing the Internet is an extremely ambitious and possibly impossible undertaking, but they seem determined to do their best to enforce their view of how website monetization should work on everyone.

The problem I see Google encountering in the long run is that ultimately the Internet is based on good content, not Google. John Chow’s blog is a prime example of this, he had been penalized heavily by Google long before the PR reductions hit, but people had interest in what he had to say and the Google slap he got didn’t hurt him at all. In fact, I bet it even increased his readership, because everyone was talking about it and building awareness of him. John believes Google is irrelevant, and one Blogger doesn’t really change anything despite how big they are, but if more and more people adopt that philosophy, Google may run into a problem.

I understand Google has a really delicate balance to maintain when looking out for the well-being of their advertisers, but more and more they are setting themselves up as the totalitarian dictatorship over the rebelling webmasters… and if history has taught us one thing, it’s that no empire lasts forever.

Good Profits.

I have to confess, as much as I tried, I just couldn’t force myself to watch the entirety of episode 12…

It’s not because I was bored, at least not in the same sense as Dave was “bored”… Some part of me found it quite interesting, however what turned me off was that a show in this genre picked such absolute horrible competitors.

The “IM” world is full of people of varying success, but there are a lot of people out there who try really hard and are successful, but just haven’t taken their business to the next level of actually being a “millionaire”.

So to me, seeing the finalists having so little credibility and having to create their own product seemed entirely superficial, showcasing exactly what is wrong with the industry as a whole!

/rant off

That being said, this article is supposed to be about who I think will win, not why I’m annoyed at the show. :)

My personal vote is for Charles Trippy - while I’m not going to buy his product, I do think it’s rather intriguing and I think it would appeal to a lot of people, even those who aren’t in the IM industry.

Normally, in competitions like this, I assume that when a male is going up against even a semi-attractive female… I know that sounds incredibly sexist, but that’s human nature - and consider that this is Internet Marketing… and on a geeky reality TV show, the demographic is surely mostly male.

However, in this case I think Charles will take the win because he has an interesting product (if I was 8 years younger and more socially adept I would buy it), whereas Jaime is presenting a product that really makes no sense - before the show, she had a government job and then she quit the job to come on the show. Now she’s qualified to teach people how to become successful in 12 weeks!!! WOW.

The sad thing is, Dave is probably right, and people will look at the bonuses and hit the buy button… *shakes his head in frustration*

Ah well, the world is rarely fair…

Over the past few months, I’ve been noticing a strange thing with the statistics reporting over at the Ancient Standard… the stats have been reporting more adsense clicks than my Google account was, and I’ve been noticing a lot of visits from blank pages of spam domains. I’ll have to admit, I’m a bit slow on the uptake, so it took me a while to surmise that something wasn’t quite right.

Last night I did a little searching and I found this page… I wasn’t able to find any other information about this exploit, but the words…

“This vulnerability reminds me of the the old Hacker movies, where a worm is released that steals random pennies from unsuspecting victims. This vulnerability is the closest I have seen to this scenario.”

…sounded way too much like what was happening with my stats / Adsense account discrepancy. So I’ve updated the script with the fix they posted, and I’m going to keep a close eye on things over the next few days and see if the discrepancy I was noticing on a daily basis is corrected now.

I hadn’t really heard anything about this vulnerability online or in the blogosphere, but I know Adsense Deluxe is used fairly widely, so this is something that could be potentially affecting many people. I also found no mention of this on the official Adsense Deluxe homepage, and the current version available for download seemed to be the exploitable version.

I’m lucky, the stats program I use just happens to track outgoing clicks as well as incoming referrers, something a lot of stats programs don’t do. If I hadn’t been tracking outgoing clicks, I would have had no idea anything was wrong!

If you’re using Adsense Deluxe, you really need to make sure you’re not suffering from this exploit!

Good Profits!

With all the “make money online” courses flying around out there, it’s a miracle that we’re not all super rich yet… or is it?

Well, a few months back, I stumbled upon a website where people share and jointly purchase all these high priced “guru” training programs. Now you’d think, “surely people who can access even the top $1000+ programs would be able to make some money online using this knowledge”, but after lurking about the IRC channel this site sponsored, I quickly discovered that almost no one was making any money at all.

At this point I got discouraged with the site and started trying to figure out how this could happen. After downloading every course I could get my hands on, I quickly found out something rather shocking: most programs were simply rehashing the same content or ideas, and then packaging them as something new or presenting it in audio format.

Some gurus are more blatant about it than others, but once you can read everyone’s content, it begins to become painfully obvious how repetitive it becomes - although this really shouldn’t be surprising. After all, there are only so many ways to fry an egg or build a website.

Since then it occurred to me: these so-called gurus are really no different than an “old boys” club. You have the powerful list owners at the top who make most of their money promoting the “next big thing”, and for the most part they get rich by doing each other favors - like “you promote my product and Ill promote yours” sort of exchanges.

At the end of the day, we’re left with gurus who really don’t sell anything besides “how to make money” courses. They’re not out there in the trenches selling e-books or creating websites like they tell us to in their programs.

I don’t know about you guys (and girls), but when I watch an episode of ‘The Next Internet Millionaire’, I come away feeling like I’ve just witnessed something criminal, like sitting in on a meeting at some sort of call center talking about how to fleece senior citizens out of their savings.

It’s sad, scary and pathetic all at the same time! For instance, in the last episode, we see Joel of Adsense Secrets fame coaching one of the final contestants on how to create a product on making money with viral videos, and at one point he asks the contestant “do you have any proof of making money doing this?” and the contestant responds “no, but I can show people how to do it.”

That being said, there are a few gurus who come dangerously close to breaking this mold. Ryan Deiss, for example, is probably the only “guru” who has kept my respect despite this revelation, but that’s another post for another day…

/rant off