A Prize You Can’t Even Calculate — Yet

My good friend Stuart over at www.pimpmypagerank.com has a really neat idea for a contest going on.

Unlike the majority of contests that have some fixed prize of pre-determined value, this one is at least as inventive as any I can remember.  Here’s the way it works.

How many times have you come across a site in a niche that you know something about and seen that the site owner is obviously having some success, making some money, and wished that you had thought of it first?  hmm, be honest now.

Well Stu, who by the way offers some really neat tools on his site, like a very innovative ‘niche finder’ for example, has already come across a nice niche …seems like it will pay decently, narrow enough without being impossibly narrow, etc.

He could just build the site up, rake in some money each month, make improvements, rake in a little more, etc.  Instead he decided to make a contest out of building up the site.  You merely have to link to the site …as many times as you care to, using anchor text that Stuart wants the site to rank for, and each link followed is automatically an entry.

(Beginner’s note: Link to the site, with anchor text?  huh?  Like this:

Cuisinart pasta machine

That’s all there is to it.)

Each link over the next few months will automatically make the site more heavily trafficked and better ranked, thus adding value.  In August, Stu will award the site to one of the lucky linkers.   The more you link the netter your chances and the better your chances the more valuable will be the prize.

I like that kind of thinking … so much different than the usual ‘pay me and I’ll reveal my trade secrets’ kind of scarcity mentality that seems to pervade the ‘Net.

You want a profitable niche site for yourself?   can’t do it much easier than to have Stuart build it and the rest of your fellow entrants build it bigger, now can you.  Rules are here.

Whatever you do today for your profit on the ‘Net, do something, do something right now before you go to read yet another blog post, from me or anyone else.   You’ll be glad you did, trust me.

Popularity: 4% [?]

How Does Darren Rowse Earn Six Figures?

Six Figure Blogging

Course background:

• Preview is April 2nd @ 8pm EST.
• 6 part course with Blogwild author Andy Wibbels and Darren Rowse from Problogger.net and the b5media Network.
• Six 1-hour calls starting in April + extensive, transcripts in PDF format.
• Archives of the 2005 run of the course are also available audio recordings
• Instant, anywhere, lifetime access. Archives are available forever from any Internet connection on any browser.

Main points of this course:

• How blogs make money – sometimes thousands of dollars.
• How to drive and convert blog traffic.
• Blogging as an occupation (not just a marketing activity) including blog networks.

I recommend nothing here that does not work.  I recommend this because the principals are well=known to me, their track record is proven and there is zero risk to my readers.

If you chose not to attend the free online intro and at least listen, then do not tell me you can’t make money online.  Sign up here, 100% for free, or wonder why you didn’t later when you sit and watch others making money!

Popularity: 1% [?]

It All Comes Back To You

For a long time now I have been reading and working with hundreds of folks who make money online and thousands more who want to make money online.  That’s why I decided to devote some effort to this site, where I systemize many of the processes, try to de-mystify a lot of the buzz words and "secret techniques", and even actually set profit systems up for you, for free.

One has to begin at the beginning, though.  About 99% of the people who read about making money online do not make money online.  Just recently I’ve had several long conversations with one of my friends/mentors who has been earning his whole income online for years now … and he’s been trying the same things I am … getting people to begin at the beginning rather than trying to make a million.  Sadly, the response to his work seems a little pessimistic.

I thought today I would take this issue back down to an even more basic level.

Can you … yes you, the very person reading these words right now … make money online?

The answer is yes you absolutely can.  I don’t care how old you are, how much education you have, what country you live in, or anything else about you … you can make money, and you can start today, this very minute.  If you got here to view my words and your intelligence and reading comprehension is good enough to get you this far, you can, in fact do it.

So why aren’t you?

Here’s some thoughts from my friend Jon Chow that will put things in perspective.

read them, think about them, and then tell me if you really want to make money, if you really want to be something other than what you are … and we’ll go from there.

The Biggest Problem Standing Between You and Success

written by John Chow

Have you ever wonder why you’re not as successful as you wish to be? How is it that a few people can achieve amazing results on the Internet while most people can barely pay for web hosting? It’s like there’s something standing in the way between you and your dream of financial freedom. Well, the truth of the matter is, there is something standing in your way and until you learn to deal with it, you’ll never reach your end goal.

The Biggest Problem Standing In Your Way Is..

You. When it all comes down to it, you are the only thing that is stopping you from achieving whatever it is your heart desires….

The unsuccessful person blames his misfortune on outside factors – it’s the tax man’s fault, the economy is bad, prices are too high, my wife won’t let me, etc. He’ll blame everything else except the one thing that is truly keeping him down….

They say successful people think differently than unsuccessful people. That’s not entirely true. They don’t think differently, they think opposite. An unsuccessful person hates failure. A successful person welcomes failure. An unsuccessful person works hard for money. A successful person has money work hard for him. An unsuccessful person takes. A successful person gives. An unsuccessful person think a job is safe and investments are risky. A successful person thinks a job is risky and investments are safe…

You Are Where You Want To Be

Making money online really isn’t that hard. So why is it that only a small percentage of the Net make any money at it? Because everyone is where they want to be. If you’re not truly where you want to be, then you would be doing something to change it…

It All Come Back To You

At the end of the day, it’s not going to me or any other make money online blog that’s going to make you successful. You are the only thing standing between where you want to be and where you wish to be. …

Go read the whole article, I challenge you too.  By the way, I left a couple of typos in there exactly the way John wrote them … not because I am trying to mock John … not at all … English is his second language (how many times have I heard that as an excuse for not making money?) … and you can pretty much figure how superior his English is to my Chinese … but because the minor errors illustrate the point better than I could on my own.  It doesn’t take anything close to perfection, and it doesn’t take "luck" or special skills that you, yourself, do not already possess.  It just takes you to make one simple decision:

Are you where you want to be, or do you want to move onward and upward? 

If you like this post then please consider subscribing to my full feed RSS. You can also Subscribe to Talar Systems – Profit Systems for Your Success by Email">Subscribe to Talar Systems – Profit Systems for Your Success by Email’>subscribe by Email and have new posts sent directly to your inbox.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Internet 101 — Google AdWords

Yesterday I wrote about some simple techniques for finding what a blog or conventional web site might be worth … or what Google thinks it is worth.

What Google thinks about a site is extremely important … no matter whether the site owner uses methods to monetize via Google, because Google is the Internet’s number one source of visitors to almost any site … often by a very large margin.

I talked about the principle of known to unknown in teaching folks how things work, and then I went ahead and violated the principle right in the same article.  Google, and in particular the two major money-oriented programs of Google, AdWords and AdSense are, to many folks, nothing more than  bunch of Googley-goop.  A great majority of bloggers and web writers, including me … sorry … seem to go around thinking people have a grasp of these programs … and the simple truth is, many folks do not …so trying to teach techniques to use the programs is sort of like trying to teach advanced knot tying to someone who hasn’t yet even felt a rope in their hands.

Let’s straighten that issue out and get you started on the road to understanding Google, and it’s close competitors, in a way that even some highly experienced "Internet barons" don’t seem to understand.

We’ll look at AdWords first, because in the study of nearly any complex business process, the real understanding comes from a basic knowledge of where the money is … and Google does almost no business that brings in revenue except via AdWords.

Did you read a newspaper this morning? (if not, borrow one or stop by the local library and read one).  Now riddle me this … how did that newspaper make money … money to stay in business, pay the reporters, editors, compositors, pressmen, etc. … all the folks who make a newspaper happen?

If you said via the money you paid to the paper boy for your subscription, or the change you handed over to the convenience store clerk … Bzzzzzzz.  Wrong.  Newspaper subscriptions and newsstand sales seldom even cover distribution costs of the newspaper.  A general circulation newspaper would go broke in a month on just their home subscription collections … that money goes to pay the carriers and the other costs of distribution … but it wouldn’t even pay the costs of ink, let alone the paper.

A garden-variety newspaper makes money from advertisements … those little two-inch ads for Tom’s private detective agency, the full page ads for Wal*Mart, even the Sunday entertainment "Supplements" an their paid editorial content.  Everyone from Tom the detective through Northwest Airlines to Mutual of Omaha Insurance wants their ad in front of your eyeball, in hopes that you will part with some of your money for their product.

Google AdWords is essentially just one big, gigantic Sunday newspaper … with an important difference.  Let’s take a look at our detective friend, Tom.  He can pay $500 a week for his little display ad and some of the hundreds of thousands of folks who read the local paper will notice it.  Perhaps some of those who notice it will have some need for Tom’s services and give him a call.  And if Tom can close the sale on a phone inquiry, Tom will have a client.  If one client pays for services that make Tom $500 profit, the ad has paid for itself … Tom got a return on his investment.  If he gets two clients out of the ad, Tom’s kids even eat that week.

Now let’s imagine that this week Tom decides to surf over to adwords.google.com and instead of paying his money to the Daily Bugle, to buy himself a little Google ad for his services.  How much will it cost Tom to get his ad displayed on Google?  The thrifty among you will like this … nothing.  nada.  Not one red cent.  Tom can put up an ad, have it seen by everyone online in the world, or everyone surfing in a certain country, or region or state.  Tom submits the ad and Google displays it, millions of times per day (via Google AdSense ads) but charges Tom nothing unless someone clicks on (clicks through) that ad and goes to the location Tom has set up for the ad … typically Tom’s web site sales or "landing" page.

You can see the similarity to the newspaper model, but you can also see the huge advantages to Tom.  For $500 he can get as many as say 5,000 "qualified" … that is people who want to know something about his services … viewers of his ad and he will only be charges one by one by the people who makes the ‘trip’ to his sales page.  he never pays a penny for people who aren’t interested in learning about his business offerings.

He can also change the ad as often as he wishes … even changing it on different days of the week, or running 6 different ads and keeping detailed records (Google does this for him. free) as to which of the 6 work the best. 

Fantastic tool, AdWords, and something you, as a blogger or web site owner need to understand, even if you never run a single ad. 

Enough for now, we’ll talk next about the "other side" of AdWords, the publishers who provide the "virtual" newspaper pages where Tom’s ads get displayed.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Fish Where The Fish Are

Associate site.  My friend and online money-making colleague Bob Martin got something started a week or two back with a case study/challenger type post about the possibility of making money online.  Bob’s conclusions, based on actual results with the site he experimented with are that it is not that hard at all to make money online.  I certainly concur.  This article is a companion pieces to his $1 Per Day project series, which premiered here

There are a few things you might want to look at when evaluating ideas for making money or evaluating the potential of a particular web site.  Because certainly all sites and all keywords are not the same.

The first reason I see people having problems making money online is that they are not fishing where the fish are … they are trying to sell something … or increase traffic and site popularity, which is merely a specialized form of selling … with products or in areas where very few other people have an interest.  Fishing where there are no fish, in other words.

This happens all the time when I see people following the advice, build a site or write about whatever your passion is.  This is key advice and it is almost never wrong, but you need to make course corrections to insure you wind up with a site that people are out there, looking for.

Let me take one of Bob’s penises … that you probably already have a blog or conventional website and you can make some money with AdSense (by the way, I’ve been an AdSense publisher for three years as of this month and there has never been a month I didn’t earn from AdSense, even with much of the negative talk you’ll see online these days, AdSense works!).  If you have an existing site, here is a tool which is dead simple to start out with that will tell you a lot about that site … including giving you a very good idea about how much effort you should put into the site to improve its’ income.

Just click on this link.  It is a free tool Google provides as an aid to customers of the AdWords program .. people who are planning to buy pay per click ads on Google.  Don’t worry, though, I’m not advocating you sign up for anything or buy anything … the tools is 100% free and no obligation.

The first thing you’ll see is an screen where you can type in the exact URL of a site or exact words you want to learn the value of.  For right now, type in the exact URL of your site … see the #1 in the picture, then make sure #2, Website Content is checked, in number 3, leave the box unchecked and in number 4,  type in the currency of choice and a large figure … say   $50 per click, so you know Google will dig up all the possible keywords and rank them usefully.

The first time you run this tool you will have to click on the Filter my results drop down and select the Estimated Avg CPC column in order to get intelligent pricing data.  You can also add or delete other columns to make you own view of the data more useful … and you can click on the heading of any column to sort the data by that column.  A slick tool, thanks Google.

Here’s a snippet of a page I got when analyzing a colleague’s website.  You can see Google will tell you the keywords that Google "thinks" the site is about, and cost figures for how much it would cost to make an ad appear on Google’s number one rated site for that word or phrase.  You can see two things from the list I have shown you.  First, this fellow’s site is not likely to attract really high paying ads.  I personally don’t "chase" any that show a cost of less than $6 on this tool  … else the payout’s are too small.

Second, this fellow’s speciality is a rather unique form of consultation work.  It appears nowhere on the list …so the tool has already given him a huge clue as to what he needs to do to earn money … make Google "understand" what his site is all about.

What is your site about and how high are the CPC (Cost Per Click) prices right now, today?

Next time I’ll talk about using the exact same tool to find specific keywords that will interest others … words that people pay money to search with … and thus words that will automatically pull visitors to your site, even if you never use AdSense or AdWords.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Yes, You CAN Work With Spreadsheets

I just got started on a somewhat comprehensive Case Study and techniques series of posts when I realized I was already violating the educational principle of "known to unknown".  You need to begin at the beginning if you are going to be of any use to those who want to learn, so I will correct that oversight here, from time to time, whenever I see the problem arise.

I wanted to write about a very simple technique to find out how profitable and existing website ought to be, and also to use to make decisions about focusing on or expanding existing sites.

The technique requires some simple manipulation of data with a spreadsheet and then I realized … I’ve been hearing about this problem for more than 10 years now, long before most of us were even online.

The problem?  "Oh, woe is me I can’t learn this technique because I don’t have Excel on my machine."  (believe it or not, 10 years ago there essentially was no Excel, the problem then was "I don’t have Lotus 123 on my machine."  The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Well, you can work with spreadsheet data, including Excel spreadsheet data right now, today, without spending a dime.  getting a free, legal spreadsheet program into your arsenal of tools is going to help with a lot more than the simple profitability analysis I was originally writing about, believe me.  Choices:

1. Excel Viewer 2003:  This is a free tool from Microsoft that lets you open, view and do limit3d work with Excel spreadsheets from the version in Office 97 up to the latest versions.  It is not the same as having Excel on your machine but it is very useful for looking at and learning from data … and the price is right.  (Microsoft also has viewers for free for Word, PowerPoint and Access … never use that "I don’t have" crutch again.)

2. OpenOffice:  A better choice than limited capability Microsoft-specific viewers.  OpenOffice is a totally free alternative to Microsoft Office which emulates and often exceeds the capabilities of the MSFT Office suite.  Really hard to beat … OpenOffice "Calc" does) what Excel does and more.

3. Google Docs:  I have definitely saved the best for last here.  Just go to Google Docs and presto, you have essentially an Excel, Word and PowerPoint equivalent tool online.  totally free, no downloads, you can even use it at a friend’s computer, Internet cafe, work from work and home alternately, etc.  The power of the spreadsheet tool is easily the equal of Excel for our purposes … even nicer in some ways .. and you will never lose data or forget where it is on your hard drive.  Working with a friend, business partner or mentor?  Then just sign them up for access and you can work on the same spreadsheet at the same time … ha, try that with Excel.

Okay, there’s my recommendations.  Stop making yourself the ‘before’ poster in the race for online knowledge.  Instead of using lack of money, tools or time as an excuse, learn how to improvise, adapt, overcome … profits will follow.

Popularity: 1% [?]

A Million

Popularity: unranked [?]