Blog Income – February 2010

11 March 2010 - By Ryan - Filled in Make Money Blogging, Make Money Online

It’s been a while since I posted an income report. I know different people have different thoughts about whether or not one should post up your earnings. I personally feel like it’s a good thing and doesn’t create illwill, but instead provides motivation and inspiration, not only to me, but others who aspire to make money online. I figure this blog is about making money and finding success (in whatever form) online, so why not throw it out there.

Here’s a breakdown of earnings for February 2010:

Banners – $80

Adsense – $40.47

LinkXL – $36.00

Infolinks – $10.51

Total: $166.98

Top Commenters

  1. Marksteve
  2. nunotu
  3. Nicole Price
  4. Andrew@BloggingGuide
  5. essay topics
  6. Metin2 Hile
  7. travel
  8. Andrew Jason
  9. Article Directory
  10. ilovemay

Want a permanent link on Blueverse.com? Just post some comments and shoot for the Top Commentators list. It’s really not that hard. In fact, 4 comments or more would have made the list for February.

Want to get some more exposure to others interested in the same niche? Post some VALUABLE comments. Give some thought, insight or viewpoint. Lots of people read the comments.

Thoughts and what I’m working on

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I’m just getting back into writing more regularly on Blueverse.com. I’m also working on some site-wide upgrades and updates to hopefully enhance the experience and ultimately help you make more moolah online. One of the things I love about Blueverse.com is it forces me to put down into words what I’ve learned, sometimes take for granted and what generally rumbles around in my head. It causes me to evaluate what I do and why on a regular basis. Everyone should be doing that frequently.

As always, feel free to send me any questions, comments or ideas you have. If you really want me to see it, send it in using the contact form. I read every one of those and try and respond to them personally.

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“Guru Status” = The Ultimate Selling Tool

09 March 2010 - By Ryan - Filled in Internet Marketing, Make Money Online

I was reading a post by Zac Johnson (check out his blog at ZacJohnson.com) last week titled ShoeMoney System: One Month Later & Why It Works, and was quite honestly a little baffled by what I read. Zac was giving his two cents about the new ShoeMoney System that opened up, sold the 500 seat max within a day, then opened back up about a month later for those still interested in joining.

As it turns out, Zac joined when it was originally opened up. This isn’t necessarily a big shocker. For those of you who don’t know Zac, he’s easily considered a Super Affiliate and has been earning money online for a lot of years. He also has several big wins under his belt as well and is a respected expert in the industry. I’m not surprised he joined the ShoeMoney System at the full $197/mo price tag.

What does surprise me is something Zac mentioned in his post: “If you are somewhat new to affiliate marketing, this is the perfect program for you. If you are experienced and already making some serious money online, it will most likely take a couple months before you see some useful video tutorials.”

“What’s the big deal?” you ask? Well, Zac, a Super Affiliate in his own right, is paying nearly $200 a month for content he really hasn’t mentioned as being all that useful for him so far. What’s more is he’s pimping the ShoeMoney System to other people. Sure he’s making money on the referrals, but I still find it interesting that he is willing to continue spending $200 every month even though the first few weeks were “pretty slow and introductory.”

It got me to thinking about the amazing power that some of these Internet Marketing gurus (and gurus in other industries for that matter) wield over their audiences. Is Shoemoney some spell casting crazy man duping his audience into buying vaporware? Of course not, but he has reached a level that transcends logic to some degree.

I’m sure Zac is correct in saying things will continue to pick up and even he will get benefit from Shoe’s training, but I still find it interesting that he’s willing to wait it out and recommend others do the same. I just think it represents an interesting phenomena that takes place in the sales process between gurus and their followers.

We see the same thing happen with guys like Darren Rowse , John Chow, Alex Mandossian, John Reese, Frank Kern, etc. All heavy hitters in the Internet Marketing/Make Money Online space that have an extremely loyal audience who have proven to be buyers of whatever products they happen to crap out that week (and I mean that in the nicest most respectful sense of the word).

All I have to say is I want to be an Uber Guru. Maybe the ShoeMoney System can make me into one!

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How To Add A Google Buzz Button To Your Blog

23 February 2010 - By Ryan - Filled in Blog Design, Blogging

In my effort to embrace Google Buzz in preparation for it’s future takeoff (who knows if it will happen), I’ve added a Google Buzz button to the blog. Now you can “Buzz” a post you find interesting, stupid, off-the-wall crazy, or whatever.

In case you don’t already know how to add this to your blog, I thought I’d throw this up. It’s a SUPER SIMPLE process and took me less than 5 minutes to download, upload, install and configure. Here’s what I did:

  1. Download the Google Buzz Button plugin from Wordpress.org here: Google Buzz Button Wordpress Plugin.
  2. Upload the plugin to your blog using either FTP or the Plugin Upload feature in Wordpress.
  3. Activate the plugin
  4. That’s it!

If you want, you can change where the button shows. I personally like it at the end of posts as that feels most natural for people who are going to “Buzz” something you write.

Today’s the day to embrace the Google Buzz trend!

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Yes, I was a Google Buzz killer…until…

22 February 2010 - By Ryan - Filled in Blogging

Google Buzz

I admit, I wasn’t (and still am really not) a Google Buzz fan. Probably the biggest reason is because I hate feeling like I have yet MORE messages waiting for me to go through. I like keeping my inboxes tidy and I’m a terrible multi-tasker with the biggest offender being email. So when Google fired up Buzz and started feeding random crap into my account, it kind of pissed me off. I even went as far as shutting it off. BUT….

I turned it back on after a day of being Buzzless.

What changed me from being a Buzz killer to a Buzz tolerator? An email that happened to hit my inbox from Darren Rowse over at Problogger.net (a great blog you should be reading if you aren’t already). He mentioned Google Buzz briefly, but said a couple of important things in the few paragraphs. The most important was, “Remember the principle of ‘build your network before you need it’ – I suspect this will be the case with Google Buzz.”

That alone was enough for me to jump over to my Gmail account and turn Google Buzz back on. Do I love it? Heck no. But I am learning a little more about it every day and have been playing with it pretty regularly.

I suspect that Darren is right about Buzz being one of those things that will be worth being in on the ground floor of. Not necessarily because it’s a great product/service, but because it’s freakin Google. Seems like they’ve got a pretty good batting average, and even just the Gmail users alone represent enough of a mass to get Buzz the notoriety it needs to succeed. It may take them a while or a few iterations to get it going, but it’s got a good shot at taking away some share from Twitter and Facebook.

Regardless of whether you like it or not though, now is one of those times in your life when you have the opportunity to embrace something new from the very start. In a couple of years instead of saying “I wish I would have gotten in on that from the start”, you’ll be saying “I’m glad I didn’t dismiss that from the get go”. It’s a good habit to get into that can have a huge impact on your web projects in the future.

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State of the “Blueverse.com” Union

18 February 2010 - By Ryan - Filled in Blogging, My Projects & Startups

“It’s been a crazy few months.” A typical response you hear from people when they haven’t made something a priority. I’m not going to try and come up with anything better since when it really boils down to it, I just haven’t had the motivation to post on Blueverse.com the past couple of months.

Why? Lots of reasons. Not going to get into them now because most people really don’t care. We all just want to make some money online…right?! Well, about that……

I wanted to throw up a quick kick off post to let you know that Blueverse.com is far from a dead blog. Starting tomorrow, I’m going to be posting more regularly. I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the direction of the blog and I’m going to try and focus on something I personally enjoy reading about on other blogs which is practical ways to make money online. This will come out in a number of different ways, from ways to get traffic, things to try for monetizing your blog (frankly, I still really struggle with this one), ways to try affiliate marking, thoughts on blogging/business/etc, to name a few.

I also still plan on posting my monthly income from this blog because it’s motivating for me personally to talk about what the blog is doing and hopefully motivating to those of you trying to earn literally ANYTHING from your online projects. I hope to report increased earnings over time.

As always, I would LOVE feedback from readers about what you want to hear about on the blog. I don’t think that reading Blueverse.com on a regular basis will revolutionize your life, but I hope it motivates you a bit to try new things, and provides a little eduction to help you in your journey online.

Thanks for reading and taking part in what we’re doing here!

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Think Local…Act Local!

08 February 2010 - By Ryan - Filled in Internet Marketing, Make Money Online

This guest post was written by Christian Arno, founder and Managing Director of global translations company Lingo24. His company has operations across four continents and translated over thirty million words in 2009, covering clients in over sixty countries and every industry sector. Their turnover in the twelve months to September 2009 was $6m USD.

With the advent of the Internet era, the smallest of home-based business can effectively ‘go global’. There is, of course, a lot of countries out there and knowing what geographical regions to target takes a bit of research to begin with.

You’ve probably heard of the BRIC countries – Brazil, Russia, India and China – referred to as the best countries to place commercial focus given that they are fast-growing, developing economies – emerging markets, in other words.

But an emerging market is ANY market that is currently untapped. This can be a particular demographic within your domestic market just as easily as it could be a number of Eastern European countries, the US, Scandinavia…anywhere where there is a growing demand for a particular product or service.

Your key target markets depend very much on your service offering – there’s little point spending a lot of money targeting the BRIC countries only to find later that there’s no demand or, indeed, your entire approach to these countries was wrong from the start.

Take Apple for instance. One of the best known consumer brands in the world, with the ubiquitous iPods, iMacs and perhaps the daddy of all gadgets the iPhone. Pretty much universally applauded in every market it has been launched, Apple unveiled the iPhone to China in November 2009 but the reception has been fairly muted so far.

Apple has been widely criticised for not localising its all singing, all dancing device for Chinese consumers – in effect, they failed to consider specific local consumer trends within China.

For example, people in China tend not to like entering into long contracts – they prefer charge cards because it’s less hassle and it’s easier to track their spending. Similarly, Chinese consumers love the newest technology, but because Apple took so long to release the iPhone in China, many local consumers had already procured ‘cracked’ versions of the phone – so in effect, most people who really wanted an iPhone already had one.

Throw into the equation poor marketing – many of the posters didn’t even mention the name ‘iPhone – then it’s perhaps easy to see why they have shifted little over 5,000 handsets at the time of writing.

Of course, your small to medium sized businesses won’t be trading anywhere near the level of Apple. But this helps to demonstrate the importance of knowing your international markets – much in the same way as you do with your domestic markets.

So how do you identify which markets you’re going to target? First of all, you must recognise a demand for your wares in a specific country. It doesn’t have to be too painstaking either, simply check for other companies operating within your industry in each country – check how long they’ve been going for, try and find as much information as you can about them. If they are thriving, then there’s every chance you can too – however, be wary of market saturation, as too much competition doesn’t bode well.

Now that you know what countries you are going to target, you can begin the process of building an online presence in these countries – and this process is two-fold. First, you must have a fully localised website in the language of the target country, then you must optimise it so that it stands out from the crowd.

The process of translating your website is reasonably straight forward. You have to ensure that the person translating the website is a professionally qualified translator who’s working INTO their native tongue. Any translation company that’s worth its salt will only hire translators who translate into their native tongue, so ensure that this is the case. If they translate into a language that they are simply ‘fluent’ in, there is likely to be subtle mistakes that will be spotted by local consumers.

Similarly, if your service or product has some highly technical terminology attached to it – for example, if you’re a B2B company that sells electrical components, you’ll need to ensure that the linguist on the job has experience of your industry. Again, translation companies should record areas of expertise against each of their translators so they should be able to identify someone who fits the bill.

You also need to consider the local dialect of the country your targeting. It’s easy to lump France, Belgium, Switzerland and French-speaking Canada into one category under ‘French’. But there are many dialectal differences between the markets. In Canada, they tend to use literal translations of English terms for many phrases, such as fin de semaine for ‘weekend’ (literally, ‘end of the week’), whereas France tends to import English terms directly – they use le weekend instead.

There are many such examples between the various French, German and Portuguese dialects of the world. Even closer to home, the differences between US English and UK English are substantial enough to merit individual marketing campaigns. Though for the sake of ease, it’s probably best to stick with one English language website and just ensure there are no colloquialisms that might not be understood in all the English-speaking countries of the world.

From an optimisation perspective, rather than translating your English keywords, you will need to research your keywords for each market. A literal and correct translation of a keyword may not be what people use to search for a product/service locally – they may use any number of variations of the phrase, including abbreviations, colloquialisms or something else entirely that means the same thing. Be sure to choose a translation company with knowledge of the SEO process, as they can help identify keywords and phrases for each of your target markets.

Armed with your fully optimised foreign language website, you may actually find that you rise a lot quicker through the ranks of in-country search engines such as Google.de, or Google.fr than you did on Google.com or Google.co.uk – simply because the saturation of the search terms is nowhere near what it is on the English language Internet.

Ultimately, don’t get lazy like Apple did. Treat each of your markets as a separate entity, don’t assume that because something worked in one country, it’ll automatically work in another. Localization is the name of the game and is at the very heart of the internationalization process. Don’t think global…think ‘local’.

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Rule #1 For Everything You Do

09 December 2009 - By Ryan - Filled in Bloggers, Blogging

shoe-chow-vs-invesp

If you read either Shoemoney.com or JohnChow.com, you’re probably aware of the little brewhaha they have with Invesp.com. If you’re not up to speed, the quick and dirty story is invesp.com started an informal survey last year of the Top Online Marketers of 2008. They give you a list of nominees and you vote for your favorite. They’re running it again this year for 2009.

Of course it’s just a great link bait idea and really serves no purpose other than getting traffic out to their site. I don’t think the winner gets anything except some bragging rights (emphasis on “some” since this thing holds no real value).

Well, Shoemoney and John Chow (who are both on the list of nominees, btw) decided to vote up a guy who goes by the name ZK and get their blog readers behind it. ZK regularly comments on their blogs and sounds like a decent guy. Without their backing, he likely had zero chance of beating out the other big guys in the Internet Marketer space. They each created a post on their blogs saying “let’s vote this guy up and make him win”. Harmless enough…right?

The result? ZK CRUSHED it. He was winning by an absolute landslide. Until Invesp.com decided to intervene. Now whatever their reasoning or motivation, it doesn’t really matter. They really can’t come out looking good from this situation and it further drives down what little credibility their “survey” had in the first place.

Which leads me to some points/observations:

1. Rule #1 for EVERYTHING you do: Be honest.

I’m not saying Invesp.com is intentionally being deceptive, but their actions don’t look good. Just let the guy win and enjoy all the traffic you’re getting from 2 heavy hitters having a little fun with your survey. I’m sure they’re pissed off because they feel the results are falsely skewed. Whatever. It’s a two-bit survey that doesn’t mean anything…who’s whole purpose is to get you some free traffic and inbound links. Is that really worth your integrity being compromised? No way.

Personally, I think integrity and honesty are two traits the Internet Marketing space could use a little more of. There are lots of shady people out there who want to make a quick buck. Don’t be one of them. Don’t even flirt with the line by being partnered with someone on something that is shady. In fact, don’t do anything that even looks shady. You get the point.

2. Don’t piss off the big guys.

Sure Shoemoney and John Chow are not the end-all be-all in blogging or Internet Marketing, but do you seriously want those guys and their readership who tend to be VERY loyal to them and what they have to say upset with you or think you’re jacking with them? Why not play nice and get them on your side. You’ll be a lot better off in the long run.

That said, nothing is worth compromising on #1. Even if that means pissing off the big guys.

3. Remember the “little people” and help them out whenever you can.

The real winner, either way here, is ZK. That guy just got some serious exposure that I hope helps him tremendously. I love that Chow and Shoe both got behind him.

As you grow in your experience, knowledge, success, etc., every step along the way there will be people newer, smaller, less experienced, etc. than you. Look for opportunities to help them out whenever you can. Remember we all had to start somewhere and just because you’ve made a 4, 5, 6 figure check in a month from your efforts, doesn’t make you better than anyone else.

Pay It Forward (I loved the premise of that movie).

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