There’s no out of the box for making money
I hope this isn’t one of those posts that repeat’s something I’ve already made clear, even if it is it’s probably worth saying again. So we all know that there’s loads of get rich quick scams on the net and I suppose to an extent most of us are immune to them (I hope). However the question remains, is there a way to earn money online out of the box? Well the short answer is no for one main reason, out of the box implies easy with no work. If it’s that easy then everyone would be doing it, and by proxy it probably wouldn’t work anymore.
I’m not trying to say that everything needs to be complex to work but I can guarantee if its point and click it’s unlikely to produce results on its own. That doesn’t mean simple ideas can’t be part of a much larger money making plan, for instance:
- WordPress CMS, 5 minutes and you have a website.
- Cheap web-hosting that’s point and click to setup.
- Contacting other webmasters to promote your site, time consuming but simple.
The thing is I keep seeing people starting up these out of the box ecommerce sites selling the exact same products at the exact same prices as everyone else, why bother? Everyone seems to think that “internet” is a magic keyword that results in instant money. You look at some of the most successful net businesses and while the infrastructure they used was simple the concept and idea were unique and original.
I really think that in order to put together a collection of ideas that work you need to try a lot of things that don’t. This too is another stumbling block as fear of failure can be a major hurdle for anyone starting a business on the net.
Foundation 07 // Chris Sacca from Kevin Rose on Vimeo.
Also on a slightly unrelated note I wanted to post this great video by Kevin Rose I found. It’s one of a series where he interviews successful entrepreneurs and tries to decipher their methods. It’s quite long but I promise its worth a watch, only problem with these kind of videos is they can be quite addictive, information overload can be a real problem!
Do you have to be unique to make it online?
Here’s a concept I’ve been thinking a lot about lately and that’s how unique or new does your business have to be to make it online? On the one hand you have the really big successes like Million dollar homepage which was a unique idea marketed perfectly, it was even on the news where I live! The problem with many great web ideas is that they don’t have the marketing strategy behind them to turn them into money spinners. I remember the guy on million dollar homepage generated lots of publicity at the start by contacting radio stations and newspapers about his site, he then sold some of the space at the beginning to family and friends. People often underestimate the value of hype because that site would never have gotten off the ground with it.
In some ways it does depend exactly what idea you’re trying to get off the ground because not every site is competing in the same type of market. However the principle of getting what you’re doing out to influential people holds firm no matter what your site is about. To me the basics are:
- Contact other bloggers, don’t just ask for a link but explain what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.
- Forums are a great way to get in touch with real people. But not just any forum, try to find one which is related to your industry, you need people who are engaged.
- Twitter/Facebook/Youtube have changed the game in terms of how fast you can become popular. It’s now possible to reach millions of people in a matter of hours, but only if you have viral content (that’s a big if).
You see whether you’re the exec at coca-cola or your some local mechanic trying to rank your site in your home city, the principles are the same, it’s just the scale that changes. At the heart of this game web promotion is a popularity contest and there’s a million ways to become popular (just like the real world).
The reason I’m pointing all this out is that so many people do have great and unique ideas for websites and ways to earn from them. But unless you have your marketing/seo/ppc strategy 100% then you’re going to fail. The problem still remains that even in 2011 internet marketing is the afterthought post web-design. Honestly id rather spend ¼ of the budget creating the website and the rest promotion, at least that way I have a real chance of making money.
So that’s it for this post, what crazy methods do you have for promoting your idea?
The skills required to be a great webmaster
So building a website is no longer the great mystery that it used to be, but there’s a difference between building a website and building a website that’s successful and makes money. To me it’s a complete package of skills and you’re only going to be successful if you master (at least in part) all of them. Here’s a rundown of what I think it takes:
- Some technical knowledge. Note I’m only saying some because you don’t really need to be able to program to build a website, most out of the box platforms look great from the start e.g wordpress, but it is handy to know a little html.
- Design know-how. Again I’m not really talking about this from a technical point of view, just from the viewpoint that you know what looks good and what doesn’t. Having an eye for creating something that people find easy to use is also very important.
- Marketing. Probably the most important factor and worthy of more than just a paragraph here. However you really have to know what you’re doing here if you’re investing money into the business, the only real way to learn is to practice so it’s best to start with a small project/site before going crazy.
- Perseverance. Also very important and actually the one that causes the most failures. It can take much longer that you expect to create a successful site so how are you going to keep going? Also what if it fails completely, do you have the willpower to start again, most people don’t.
- Analysation. Fancy word but all it means is the ability to figure out what’s working/not working for your site and why. This could be anything from what your seo efforts are not successful to why visitors aren’t converting into sales. It’s that ability to interpret stats into action and to adapt what you’re doing that separates great webmasters from the rest.
Five points seems a bit sparse for what can be a huge process, still you always need a base to start from so I hope it helps. Part of the problem I’m finding with trying to document a lot of this website building process is there’s just too much to cover, plus the fact that everyone has their own process for doing things and overloading people with too much info could do more harm than good! Still I hope the tips above help if you’re thinking about starting a site.
An online business for an offline world
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about just how clueless so many offline businesses are about the web. Its bit of a generalisation I have to admit but when you look a little closer at the way so many companies are trying to adapt their business to net the net it’s a bit scary. Granted most businesses have a website but often they are so bad I want to cry, and it’s not just design mistakes I’m talking about, its factors that directly affect how well the business is going to do online i.e. marketing.
So this has got me thinking about a way to in-directly earn money online by providing services to these “lost” businesses. It’s true there’s a million and one people doing web-design these days but how many companies actually have the promotion and marketing thing working well? I’ve always thought there was money in marketing smaller businesses for two main reasons:
- They are usually competing in a smaller market so it shouldn’t be difficult from a technical point of view to deliver results. Think making them No1 for “Mechanic in Birmingham”, how hard is that gonna be?
- Everyone else is overlooking these smaller businesses in the race to land the big fish. Imagine if you had a load of these small companies paying a monthly fee (£50) for promoting their site online, that can really add up.
I suppose the point I’m making is that while I love affiliate marketing, seo and all that stuff often you can make more leveraging your skills to real world businesses, the key has always been to interpret and adapt to what’s happening, it’s what all great entrepreneurs do.
What it all comes back to though is acquiring as skill that the market demands, whether that’s graphic design, seo or programming its only possible to leverage what people need and what your good at. It’s a common factor they don’t talk about in the get rich quick ebooks, if you wanna make money on the web you need to be bringing value to the table in one way or another.
One very important point that I can’t miss out is how much time your average “business to business” provider spends dealing with people. I can tell you first hand from the web design industry that sometimes you can spend more time dealing with a client and all their “issues” than building the site. The problem is you often don’t know that you have a difficult client until it’s too late. At the other end of the scale though it is possible to get clients that are great to work with and it’s even better when they have regular work, its kinda like hitting the lottery when this happens (for them and you).
Still with all that being said I’m sure the mixture between offline/online business is going to appeal to some people for the reasons listed above. I do like listing all these different ideas I have to admit, when it comes to earning money online there’s a million methods and a million variations on each one. Everyone always puts their own spin on any money making idea (they have to). Until next time…
What is Pay Per Click? It’s not cheap and not easy
I promise this is going to be a short post, mainly because I’m not that experienced in pay per click and also its way too detailed a subject to explain in a single article. At a basic level PPC is where you pay a search engine directly for traffic that has searched for a specific keyword, the only difference between PPC and SEO is that you’re paying, it’s the same visitors searching for the same things. I suppose there is one other really crucial difference and that’s that you can lose money with PPC in a way that you can’t with just organic rankings. When I say you can lose money what I mean is that you could buy this traffic for any keyword but there’s no guarantee the traffic is going to convert into sales, it’s a risky business.
So it may sound quite simple so far, i.e. all you gotta do is give google some money and they display your ad on the search results, but it’s not so easy. For a start there’s a few mystery formulas that decide how much you per for each click on your ad. Google weighs up the quality of your site and your account history to work out how much they want to charge you (I told you it was strange). Another big headache is picking the right keywords because if you pick the wrong one (doesn’t covert into sales) then you’re going to be out some money. Also bear in mind that to do a proper test to see if a keyword is profitable you’re going to have to stick with it for a while, I heard on average £400 before you can call it a day.
As far as I know there are two basic forms of PPC for earning money that marketers are using. The first is where your selling something online directly to people and you want to increase both sales and awareness of your store. The second method is where internet marketers create landing pages for offers provided by affiliate companies, i.e. they don’t actually sell the product they just forward you on. I suppose the second method seems pretty simple but the reality is that finding traffic that converts can be very difficult and also expensive if there’s lots of competition. However I do firmly believe that when it comes to income the top affiliate marketers who work with PPC are the ones making the most money on the web out of all of us. I’ve heard stories of PPC gurus making upwards of £500,000 on a single offer!
One common theme I do see with all PPC people is they are stats junkies! You see the margins in pay per click can be very close, quite often people are relying on scale to make any money. For example if you have a campaign where you spend:
75p per click X 10,000 clicks = £7,500
Conversion ratio of 5% = 50 sales
Commission per sale needs to be £150 + before you make a profit.
As you can see there’s a few scary numbers there, the most important one though is your conversion ratio. Even a 1-2% swing can be the difference between a profit and a loss.
I suppose it’s the “loss” factor that has so far stopped me from getting into the PPC game, with organic marketing the most I can lose is my own time, and while that is valuable too I can live with it. So that’s all I have on pay per click for the moment, let me know if any of you guys are having success with it or thinking about trying.