Facebook marketing podcast
December 3, 2007
Ed Dale has recorded a great podcast on marketing with Facebook. I had read a couple of blog posts by people saying they weren’t impressed with Facebook’s new PPC offerings. Ed’s podcast sheds some light as to how Internet Marketers might be able to make money from it.
When you have something as popular as Facebook, you really need to learn how you might be able to leverage its popularity. I have some ideas as to how I could promote an ebook I have written.
One thing I didn’t know about was Facebook pages. You can create a page for free to promote your business. Here is one I just started to promote my Beijing Olympic site.
More on hub pages
November 8, 2007
I have written about hub pages before. I took a bit of a break from the site and then have come back again to it recently.
I had a feeling that it was hard to get traffic to the sites you create, then I saw this post. The fun thing I like about the site, that it really is a community site with people sending each other comments and helping each other out. The regular people seem to concentrate on producing quality articles, rather than just promoting their sites.
It is an excellent way for people who have no clue about how to make money on the internet to get started. It is great for testing new ideas. Better to write an article there and see how it goes before you go off registering domains and so forth.
The other thing which makes it fun is the scoring system. You may not be making much money, but the more you contribute the higher your score goes. The more traffic you can get to your hub, the higher score you get for the hub. It feels like a bit of a game.
I can only see the site becoming more popular and it could be worth investigating how you can profit from the site more.
Think in verticals not niches and a new website
October 28, 2007
Over about the past year or so, since I started creating multiple websites the advice has always been to create a website based on a particular niche. The theory goes that it is difficult for new players to break into highly competitive markets.
I think niches are still a good way to make money, but once you have discovered a successful niche, I think you then need to start thinking in verticals. One thing that has stuck in my mind was something which Darren of Problogger.net said in an interview. The question was if he had to start again, what would he do differently if he had to start again.
He replied that he would stick to the camera or digital camera vertical. He has run various blogs on a wide variety of topics, but it seems like his camera review site, his newly launched digital photography site and of course problogger are his main areas of of interest.
If you have one successful website it is much easier to piggyback off this website to launch a new website along a similar theme or vertical. For me the Tokyo/Japan vertical has worked well for me. From my Tokyo website, I have created a Japan job site and a Japan hostel booking site, both of which are doing nicely.
After coming to China I found ChinaRant.com and thought the idea was a good one, so I launched JapanRant.com. It has only take a couple of hours to put together, but if I spend some time marketing the site, I think it could work.
I have been out of Japan for nearly a year now and was thinking perhaps there isn’t much for people to complain about there, but read how the government is getting all foreigners living there and entering the country to be finger printed.
One valuable lesson I learnt in sales
August 10, 2007
I once had a job in retail. I hated the job, but I did learn some valuable lessons.
My boss told me about one employee she had who could not sell high priced items. The person was fine with lower priced items, but not the high end stuff - where the real money is at. My boss came to the conclusion that the employee could not afford the items herself, so she had trouble selling them.
I think you can apply this same lesson to internet marketing. Just because you might not like something (long sales letters, opt-in boxes), it does not mean you shouldn’t use it on your sites. Just because you might not spend a thousand dollars on an internet marketing course, there are plenty of people who will.
You need to test everything and use whatever works.
Thirty day challenge
July 27, 2007
I have signed up for the thirty day challenge and part of a team with people living in Thailand including Rob from Leave the Office.
I am watching some of the videos and while none of the stuff is ground breaking, Ed is an excellent presenter and teacher. There is nothing better than doing some kind of challenge to get motivated, network with like minded people and learn a thing or two. There is also a huge community of people participating. Nothing like a bit competition.
Anyone else taking the challenge?
World Internet Summit in Melbourne
March 4, 2007
It is kind of weird the timing of the World Internet Summit Melboure happening this week. I am still debating whether I should go to this or not.
The cost is nearly $1000, but you can bring a friend for free. Please let me know if anyone else would like to go to this, so we could split the cost.
It looks like the first day is for newbies and I am leaving the country on Sunday, so I don’t know if it is really worth it.
Update: I found someone to split the cost from Entrepreneur’s Journey so I will be attending the event. It is my first time to attend such an event so I am pretty excited about it. I am sure it will help to get me inspired and meet like minded people.
Advertising with StumbleUpon
March 2, 2007
I have created an ad campaign with Stumble Upon. I listened to a good podcast about StumbleUpon on Webmasterradio. The podcast details how you can utilize StumbleUpon to get traffic to your sites.
I have put $25 into my account as an experiment.
Testing article sites to get new links
February 15, 2007
I wrote my first article on Tokyo today, soley for submitting to article submission sites like ezinearticles.com. The idea is that websites can republish the article with your links intact.
I have always been reluctant to do this because of the work involved to write an article, which I won’t be using on my own website. It also takes a bit more time to submit the article to the different article sites available.
My goals are:
1. To get a higher ranking for “Tokyo”.
2. To get more links to the site.
Google says I currently have 2359 inbond links, and I am on the third page for “Tokyo”. I am also planning on purchasing a link which should also help to meet goal 1.
I will be checking back in a month or so to see if there is any improvement.
I have more ideas for articles to promote my other sites including an ebook I wrote on living in Japan. In this case success will be directly related to sales of the ebook.
The meat, the dessert and the icing
February 13, 2007
For me online income is starting to take the following three forms:
The meat
This is your fairly regular income which you can count on. This includes companies that advertise on your site and you deal with directly. As long as you don’t do anything to upset them, they will probably stay with you. I usually tell them from the start, I will never increase the rates if they continue on a month to month basis.
I also include subscriptions and 2nd and 3rd tier affiliate programs in this. It is more difficult to get people to sign up to services, but you usually get more signups than people leaving the program each month.
Dessert
In the dessert category, I would include any affiliate sales. It is almost impossible to calculate how much you will make on a given month from affiliate sales. You can probably get an average of 2-5 per cent of people who click on an ad to buy your product without actively pushing the products, but in general you will get large swings from month to month which do not necessarily depend on your traffic.
Icing
Even though I make good money from Adsense, it has been very difficult for me to increase earnings, despite adding more sites and more content. Some people would probably classify Adsense as their meat, but I find just too many factors outside of your control to make it my biggest earner. If you are running a single site on a popular topic, I believe it is probably easier to create a more stable income from Adsense.
Bum marketing
January 22, 2007
I have been concentrating so much lately on creating new sites, I haven’t been looking into ways to promote my existing ones. I often fall into this habit, but I know I have spend some time every day on getting links and promoting my existing sites to increase my income.
I have read a little on the “Bum marketing” method. At least the title sounded interesting! The information is free by signing up here. I suggest creating an email address primarily for these types of signups as you will get a tonne of email.
The author suggests writing articles and submitting them to sites like Ezinearticles and Goarticles. He also suggests using wordpress.com and squidoo.com. He suggests targetting longer search phrases with fewer search results.
With goarticles you can include affiliate links, where as ezinearticles you can only include a link to an actual website.
He also suggests using US Free ads to promote products. I have no idea how effective this would be, but for people who don’t have a website and can’t be bothered to write articles, it could be a way to get into internet marketing.
Nothing too original here, but I had kind of forgot about writing articles to get links.
