Author Archives: jay

Can I make money online?

Posted by on January 14, 2012 7 comments

Talking about making money on the internet has a bit of a stigma about it these days. This is probably because of all the hyped up ‘get rich quick’ schemes that are advertised so heavily on so many less than desirable sites, however, the fact of the matter is – Yes, you can make money on the internet. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry.

Now before I continue: Don’t worry I’m not going to try and sell you anything. There’s no affiliate links, no CPA products, no ebooks, nothing. The only way we will profit off this blog is if we one day decide to advertise.

So now with that little disclaimer done, lets get to the reality of the situation. As much as would-be internet millionaires who try program after program trying to make their millions so they can live on a beach and never have to work again don’t like to believe, for all intents and purposes making money on the internet is just like running any other business except, you guessed it, on the net.

There are several ways people can do this, whether gaming Google with blackhat SEO techniques (not recommended!), eBooks (which can range from extremely informative to just plain rubbish), selling products on eBay, or mastering the art of getting cheap google AdWords traffic through split testing and optimisation; at some point along the line you’re going to realise “Hey, this is hard work!”.

You’re going to be making spreadsheets and entering all sorts of data to calculate which of your numerous split tests is performing the best and deserves your full budget. You’re going to be sending and receiving emails every day to customers, product suppliers, or content writers. You’re going to be carefully managing your finances because every time you run that $10,000 campaign you stand to lose thousands of dollars.

But the news isn’t all bad, you’ll get to work your own hours, be your own boss, and be able to tell people that you are that guy who actually did it. Also, being that you are by definition an entrepreneur you’re not constrained by the chains of a ‘salary’ and can stand to add a couple of zero’s to that bank balance and pay off the mortgage.

There are of course two distinct reasons why you’d take a normal business and put it on the internet.
1. The increased connectedness brings together people with niche interests in a way that they never before could. If there’s a cat collar enthusiast community, suddenly it might become profitable to create luxury cat collars and sell them to the community. The product has nothing to do with the internet, but it’s being on the internet that makes the entire business viable.
2. Internet ads are much more efficient than the old print and television ads. You can target very specific demographics including individual users who have visited your site before but not purchased. And once targetted you can measure the exact performance of your ads with statistics as useful as dollars spent vs dollars made (if you give the formula the value of a sale). The power of online advertising is killing traditional media and bringing normal non-internet industries online.

Your limit rests only on that one factor, how hard are you willing to work for it? This scares off 99% of the people who are typically attracted to internet riches. The ones who are attracted to it for the wrong reasons. The question is: which type of person are you?

Your turn
If you’re just starting out leave us a comment with a question about anything at all, we have heaps of experience and want to see new players succeed. Also feel free to sign up to our rss

Good luck

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Who comes to your site and why?

Posted by on March 14, 2011 Comments Off on Who comes to your site and why?

One of the perceived problems with marketing through the web is the fact that you can’t see your customer.

For example, a business might spend a significant amount to put up a website, and even more resources in time to write articles as well as referring people to their site, never to know if that last customer was a result of their now increased web presence or if they simply looked them up in the yellow pages. Unfortunately for many this encourages a ‘blind faith’ in your website, and those of us who run businesses know that blind faith won’t get you far, facts and data are what make conversions.

Enter ‘analytics’.
For those unfamiliar with the term, analytics are research and statistics reporting tools that tell you everything about the people that visit your site including (but not limited to) their geographical location, whether or not they are a return visitor, which pages they visit, where they come from, and how long they stay. Now that we can watch what our visitors do on our websites we can design it to ensure maximum usability and sales.

An example of this could be an alternative medicine clinic and online store. While they have been making a reasonable amount of online sales, it seems to be random chance that determines whether they have a great sales week or bad one. What we know for sure, however, is that nothing is random. They have been handing out flyers and writing articles on their site consistently but don’t know which of these methods to concentrate on. With the installation of analytics the store could discover that majority of their traffic isn’t in fact coming through their articles, one’s on back pain in particular. Even more so, the people who come through the articles may be three times more likely to make a purchase than those who began at their front page (presumably visiting because of the flyers). It immediately becomes obvious that back pain is an issue that people are searching for online, and therefore one which is delivering the highest quality traffic to their site. They could then focus their time writing articles on that subject in particular, focussing in and making their marketing campaign more effective. Business managers and entrepreneurs have been doing this offline as far back as we can remember, and now online managers can do it with even more precision.

Most people who have heard about this technology tend to think that it is a tool only available in the highest end of websites, those that can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Once again, this isn’t true, it is simply that the best web designers are the ones who implement it correctly and the best managers who use it. The tool is in fact available free of charge through Google, and once set up is surprisingly user friendly.

There really isn’t any good reason not to implement some kind of analytics on your site, whether it be full conversion tracking or simply a head count to see which is your best quality traffic. As a rule we include it in every system that produce for a client and make sure they know how to harness the power of these statistics to use in their favour. Once you’ve tried it, you’ll never go back to the ‘dark ages’ of and guess work with internet business. It doesn’t have to be a black art. Welcome to a new market.

Did you like this article? Check out the free task management tool I’m developing at teamsgo.com. You’ll love the simplicity, and your colleagues will love how much more orgnised you are. http://www.teamsgo.com