A Make Money Online Reality Check
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I’m writing this primarily as a reminder to myself, but if you’re trying to make money with an online business, you may enjoy it as well. It was taken from Shoemoney’s latest Q & A session:
Marty asks:
When you first got started, how long did it take you to start earning significant money online? Significant meaning when you started earning let’s say at least $1,000 a month.
Thank you,
MartyShoeMoney: 7 years
7 YEARS!!!!!!!!! Not 7 days, or 7 months.
I guess the take away is that it takes time, there is a lot to learn an assimilate. The other thing is to favor the long term in all your techniques and methods, if you go short term, you’ll likely have to redo most of the work.
Pay Per Play Audio Ads - The Next Big Thing?
When I first heard about these new ads my first thought was, “ya right, as if music blasting every time I visit a MySpace page isn’t bad enough, imagine an advertisement!”
But then I remembered a post by Darren @ ProBlogger’s post called How Not Throwing the Baby Out With the Bath Water Earned me Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars. When I read that post is did hit home. I have, quite a few times emphasized the negative aspects of my first impressions when something new came along and decided to dismiss it, or take a wait and see approach.
So, when I heard about Pay Per Play ads, I had the same sorts of negative impressions going on inside me. Like I mentioned above images of horrid MySpace pages flashed in my mind. But remembering Darren’s advice, I decided to check them out.
Surprisingly, when I read the site and listened to the sample ads I was won over.
They are called Net Audio Ads and they are essentially 5 second contextual audio (voice) ads that play when a page is loaded.
They are compatible with AdSense and the publisher is paid per pay, no click or any other action is required from the site visitor.
Are They Effective?
I was amazed at how they caught my attention and drew my focus away from a standard visual orientation to a listening mode. This was especially true when the advertiser was a well known creditable national brand.
QUESTION: How have these 5 second audio ads been performing for advertisers?
ANSWER: We have consistently outperformed, radio, television and paper ads plus the fact that we spider the website just like Google does, we only deliver ads that are directly related to the contextual nature of the site.
What Problem Do They Solve?
When I started the dream of my blog network, I realized that the real money was to be made if I could scale up to having enough sites to attract major advertisers.
Ironically, the web is fantastic for long tail approach to advertising, but it isn’t that well suited to traditional mass marketing. It is relatively easy to market Bart Simpson’s Fimo charms online, but it is much tougher for Ford to advertise it’s latest car model. On the web it can be tough to scale out to the masses.
That’s one of the main problem that Net Voice Ads is trying to solve. Unlike AdSense and other contextual ads, Net Voice Ads don’t need to be strictly contextual to be successful. Since they briefly pull you out of ‘text mode’ and grab you attention via the human voice.
How Are They Different?
That is the most interesting question with these type of ads and the reason that I’m glad I followed Darren’s tip and gave them a try. The audio ads are different because of the human voice. The voice ads are much more powerful than text based ads (for certain types of advertising at least).
Text ads are excellent when the advertiser wants you to click through to their site or offer page. But does Coca Cola care if you come to their website, or Budweiser, or Taco Bell?
Not so much. They care about brand re-enforcement and this type of opportunity has been lacking on the web.
Are Audio Ads Better Than Video?
It occurs to me that voice or audio ads may have a distinct advantage over video ads. Like I have mentioned above, voice ads are secondary to the text on the page. You can listen to them and still read the web page you were on, with a video you require 100% attention, therefore the content of a video has to be far more engaging to create an effective ad and even then you are still competing, every second, with the many other possible information sources on a web page.
First Impressions:
The leader of “Audio Ads…” and then a beep before the actual ad plays seems unnecessary. Imagine when you’re watching TV, a one second “This is a commercial…” BEEP playing before each ad, that would make it worse and more intrusive.
On the web, people are more ‘touchy’ about advertising, so I guess some type of message indicating an ad is required, maybe we can just loose the “BEEP”.
Since the opportunity is brand new, things are a little rough around the edges behind the scenes. Also, they require you to post the audio code on your site (presumably for free) from now until Feb 1, as they try and establish an auditable user base, which they can then use to sell the “numbers” to advertisers. As they are targeting larger companies, these type of stats are necessary.
Yes, there will be push back on these type of ads, people crying out “oh, my god they’re so intrusive!” but that has been the case with every new ad format.
Bonus Training
These ads are being promoted by Charles Hefflin, the creator of University 20/20, who is friend of mine and a long time and well respected Internet Marketer.
One of the hidden bonuses of the program is that Charles provide a complete set of online marketing training lessons to ensure the publishers have success. These lessons are very similar to the training at University 20/20, so this is a decent value just for signing up as a publisher for these ads (which is free).
Conclusions
I think that these audio ads may just be the Internet’s real banner ads. Meaning that they can accomplish what the banner ad attempted and never could in terms of branding for larger advertisers.
I urge you to give them a look, and don’t make my previous mistake of judging something new without giving it a try. One of the success lessons that I’ve learned recently is it is irrelevant what I think, try new ideas and let your customers (or the market) tell you what works and what doesn’t.
Due to the 2 level payout system, there is a big opportunity here. Since the ads and the affiliate program has only been live for just over an hour, you can get in at the top of the food chain and promote this system. Since they have had a low key launch many of the top Internet marketers have not even heard of it, if you can pull someone influential in, you could literally make a mint.
For lot’s more information take a look at the signup page.
More Facts & Figures
QUESTION: Will this offend or cause people to not come to my website due to the audio ads?
ANSWER: We are currently running these ads on 550,000 web pages, because the ad spot is only 5 seconds, complaints have been rare.
QUESTION: What is the compensation structure for this program?
ANSWER:
- 25% of what the advertiser spends on PPP ads you serve on your own website(s).
- 5% of what the advertiser spends on PPP ads played on the website(s) of those you refer.
- 5% of what the advertiser spends on PPP ads played on the website(s) that your direct referrals bring on board.
QUESTION: How is it that publishers get to keep 100% of their traffic (by not requiring a click)? Aren’t you losing money?
ANSWER: This is a common misunderstanding and this is why PPP is so revolutionary. The advertiser has paid to have a 5 second audio ad played on your website. You are paid just for the ad playing, no clicks or action from the website visitor is necessary.
We are not losing money, we actually make more because the ad is triggered on 100% of the website’s traffic. In essence the website owner is then paid for 100% of their traffic.
Best of all, the visitor never leaves your website so you have the chance to monetize even more. All other forms of media require a click or some kind of action that leads people away from a website. As you can see PPP is quite different.
QUESTION: Is Net Voice Ads accepting new members directly, can I start making money with PPP before February 1st?
ANSWER: No, up until the first of February we are establishing the marketing foot print. All major advertising sellers live and die by published results. During the expansion phase BPA will be conducting the audit and validation of traffic and publishing the findings.
QUESTION: Can I hear examples of what my websites visitors may hear?
ANSWER: Yes, click here
6 Established Travel Blogs For Sale
As I continue to hack through the forest of clutter that I’ve created around my business I am finding more and more sites that need to be sold.
The latest ones are being sold individually or as a batch on Digital Point. These city based blogs are all from my blog network which I am in the process of dismantling. I’ll talk more about why I pulled the plug at some point, but the Reader’s Digest version is something like: many hours for little dollars.
My loss, your gain.
6 Established Travel Blogs For Sale
These are well linked and indexed, 5 of them are Page Rank 3, and just ready for further development into profitable niche sites. They currently have a combined monthly income of $47 and only one of them is selling Text Link Ads to this point, so there is room to push up revenue right off the bat.
Take this killer marketing idea of building a local niche directory site using WordPress and apply it to any or all of these sites and you’ll be out of the rat race in no time! 
Low buy-it-now prices and a special price, of course, of $450 if you take all 6.
Check out my auction on Digital Point, where you’ll find more info, links to the sites and detailed stats.
Jon Symons
Blog Network Owner
Ultimate Blogger’s Survival Guide
WordPress Blogger’s (and My Sanity) Survival Guide
As someone who sold videos that taught people how to install their own blogs, and now operating my blog installation service, I get A LOT of questions about WordPress and blogging in general.
Quite frankly being a typical computer geek, these questions mostly drive me nuts, but I know that they are a part of learning a new and complex skill/art like blogging. So rather than resent everyone who asks me a question, I decided to compile them and the best answers I can come up with into a guide and give it away as a promotional tool for my service.
Very experienced bloggers will probably know most of this stuff, but newer and non-technically inclined folks will likely find some useful reference material in The Ultimate WordPress Blogger’s Survival Guide.
It has 2 main sections. Part 1 is errors and problems and what to do about them and part 2 is “how to” for almost all common problems or situations that a blogger may encounter.
Yaro’s Blog Mastermind Course is Closing it’s Doors
My friend Yaro’s very successful Blog Mastermind Course is closing it’s doors on December 10th and Yaro is doing a last push to bring in new members.
As an enticement he has released a free lesson called Blog Marketing Through Conversations, which I understand is one of the most popular lessons. Even though I’m a member of the course, I haven’t made it that far
I especially like the section on building traffic that applies to blogs or any other sites:
I’m going to cut to the chase, there are only four ways you can get traffic to your blog -
- You can buy it
- You can get it from search engines
- You can take other people’s traffic
- You can do or create something that generates attention and word of mouth
We will cover all four methods through the upcoming lessons. Note that you don’t have to use every single method, in fact many people focus on becoming proficient at one method only. Obviously the more you diversify, the less dependence you have on any one source, which is important because no technique remains effective forever and the environment constantly changes…
As with all the lessons it ends with a set of clear action steps that you can take to immediately improve your marketing efforts. Check out this valuable free blog marketing resource and if you haven’t already, download Yaro’s extensive Blog Profit Blueprint (also free).
Killer Example of a Domain Name as Affiliate Redirect
A while ago I posted my 7 Reasons to Use Domains for Affiliate Links and reason number three was “they can get listed in search engines.”
Today I was going over my affiliate stats for the University 20/20 affiliate program and noticed quite a bit of traffic coming from Yahoo.
I investigated a bit further and discovered that my affiliate link (the domain name BuildingProfitableWebsites.com) was ranking number one on Yahoo for the term, you guessed it Building Profitable Websites.
I’ve seen this type of thing before and it amazes me that it happens, but I’m not complaining. Yahoo has picked up the title and meta description for University 20/20 site and listed my link (which doesn’t even have a website of it’s own) as it’s top search engine result, for this phrase.
Granted it isn’t a high traffic phrase, but this certainly is a way to add value to your affiliate marketing efforts. Not only do I get more traffic to my affiliate link, but the value of my domain name is increasing as well. If I was going to build a site about making money on a website, this domain name is very well primed.
You may want to read the other 6 reasons to Domains for Affiliate Links.
Where’s Jon?
Yes, I’m still alive and I have been resisting the “why I haven’t been posting lately” post, but I guess it’s only polite to provide an update.
A couple weeks ago I realized that the current trend that my online business was on, just couldn’t continue. The central problem was the I was spending more and more time doing maintenance tasks rather than moving forward. Yes, income was increasing but way too slowly.
A quick inventory revealed that I had something like 35 websites, 100 domain names, 15 email accounts, 6 hosting accounts and 7 places where I had domains registered. I began to feel sick, but more importantly I realized that I was not on the road to wealth and success.
I don’t know what the long term solution is, but short term I know that I need to reduce the number of pieces of online debris that I am attempting to juggle. I’ve begun to sell websites. I’m on my third auction at SitePoint and the current offering is my Real Blog Videos (see auction in progress).
I’m not sure how deep I will continue to cut, but I am VERY tempted to sell everything and start over completely. I’m fairly confident that it would only take me a couple months to replace a full time income starting from scratch, especially with a decent whack of cash in reserve to use to hire out tasks, and a complete lack of distractions.
Reflections About Blogging
There are some other reasons why I haven’t been blogging. The idea of just taking a break seems to have developed out of a growing resistance to writing on a regular basis on this site. If I was ProBlogger or CopyBlogger, I’d work these into a well thought out thesis about the life of a blogger, but I’m far too busy selling stuff.
Blogs Promote Clutter
It has occurred to me that blogging promotes Internet clutter. I’m not a newsy blogger, so I really only produce articles with my idea on a certain topic. While a lot of bloggers seem to be able to cover the same topic over and over again (hopefully from a unique angle each time) I can’t.
I can’t help thinking that if blogs had better information architecture, I could just write one article on market research and I wouldn’t have to talk about that any more. Possibly add to it, but not a constant re-inspection. With this format a good niche blog would thoroughly cover a topic with about 25 to 50 high quality articles, rather than an endless parade of tepid posts.
Blogging is a Treadmill Activity
I don’t like treadmills and blogging can feel like posting just for posting sake. Who says you need to have 5 articles a week, or that you can’t just take a week or 3 off? Does a blogger inherently make a promise to ride the treadmill for his/her readers?
I began to question the need for constant new stories, better to disappoint the treadmill watchers and write only when I was really moved to it.
It’s Good to Step Back & Reflect
My blog was lacking in direction and this is partially caused by riding the treadmill and not taking the time and space to reflect on bigger picture stuff.
Despite larger than ever economic pressure, that’s what I’m doing now.
I Don’t Like The Blogging Clock
Related to the treadmill is the “blogging clock”… you know the one. It gets re-set every time you post a story and begins to ring loader and loader the longer there hasn’t been a new post on your site.
I think I began to enjoy defying that voice in my head saying “IT’S BEEN 4 DAYS AND YOU HAVEN’T POSTED.”
Now, after a couple weeks of not posting, I seem to have broken the blogging clock’s grip on me. It doesn’t mean that I will magically want to post daily again but it does mean more quiet in my head.
In some ways this de-connect from blogging was in-evitable, I never really have had the right personality type for a blogger. I’m erratic, inconsistent and not particularly social.
I do value the readers of this blog, and so I do hope that you don’t feel disrespected by what I’ve just spoken of above, it was certainly not intended. Hopefully you’ll stick around or drop in once and while to see if I’ve come out of hibernation.
In the meantime, I’m going to try and line up some “best of” posts. Like I mentioned above, blogs suck at information architecture and the best posts are almost always buried in the archives, so I’ll pull out some of my favorites (and yours) and highlight them in case you missed them the first time.
All the best & feel free to leave a comment or question,
Jon Symons
Monday Morning SEO Tip - Google Exaggerates
Here’s a little tip for you, for when you’re doing market research of if someone is trying to tell you how fantastic they or their product is for search engine rankings.
Haven’t we all heard people say, my ABC SEO killer product is so great, “I’m the number one site in Google for the term blankety blank out of 1,630,000,000 possible results”?
Here’s how to debunk this one, preferably in the face of the braggart.
- Make sure your Google results settings (go to advanced settings) are set to display 100 results per page.
- Enter your term in the search box.
- Press Enter
- Google will display: “Results 1 - 100 of about 1,630,000,000 for internet business.”
- Now scroll to the bottom of the page, and where the page counter is click on the number 10 link.
- Google will now display: “Results 901 - 930 of about 1,630,000,000 for internet business.”
That’s it, not 1.6 billion, but actually Google only considers there to be 930 results for the term internet business. Scroll down to the bottom of the page again, and notice that there are no numbers or “next” after 10.
It doesn’t mean that it is easy to rank in the top 10 for internet business, but just to take a little air out the balloon of the SEO hype-sters.
Another way to use this information is in market research. You will get a much more accurate picture of the amount of effort required to compete in a market by looking at the “real” number of results rather than the giant inflated numbers.
Where do the BIG numbers come from?
In the earlier days of search, when Google and AltaVista were going head to head there was a “my penis is bigger than yours” type competition based on the number of pages each search engine was indexing. The numbers eventually became so silly that they were dropped from the home pages of the search engines, but I suspect these silly “…of 1,600,000,000 results” are a throw-back to that testosterone war.
U.S. Inflation is Costing Online Entrepreneurs
I went to my bank today to deposit two Clickbank cheques and for the first time since I was a kid, the Canadian dollar was worth more than the US dollars that my cheques were issued in. Which meant that I had to pay a subsidy to be able to deposit them into my Canadian dollar account.
Same thing goes for my AdSense earnings, and every other source of funds in my online business; they all come from US dollar banks which I’m beginning to see is becoming a serious risk and expense in my business.
Check out the graph of the US dollar verses the Canadian dollar for the last 3 years that I have been earning money online.
Careful, This Blog Rush is Going to Hurt
My prediction is that Blog Rush will be just another form of Internet gentrification. It benefits the biggest and best blogs the most. Which means that the more you, the little guy, use it, the poorer you will be.
Since ProBlogger, John Chow and ShoeMoney are all better bloggers than you and I, our traffic will eventually end up with them the more we use Blog Rush.
They write better headlines, offer more actionable and higher quality content, and know how to make more money from their visitors than you do. By participating in any type of traffic sharing program with them, you are only going to lose market share.
The more you use it, the more traffic will be funneled away from smaller blogs and towards larger blogs. Is this bad? No, it will happen eventually anyway, Blog Rush just speeds up the process. Can you see where they got the name from?
Blog Rush, in terms of its affects on the Blogosphere will function similar to AdSense. It becomes a massive Hoover that will go out to all the smaller blogs and dredge traffic up to the better and larger blogs.
The real question isn’t “How can I get more traffic?” but rather, “Do I deserve more traffic?” and the closely related, “Do I know what to do with the traffic I already have?”
For Blog Rush to not function as leverage tool benefiting bigger bloggers, more of the larger bloggers would have to be more generous as ShoeMoney is with his offer to rotate people who sign up under him into the impressions on his site. In the long run, he’ll still steal your traffic, but at least you’ll have a chance to improve while you get a temporary boost in visitors.
Hopefully this explanation will help you understand why all the big guys are SO FAST to jump on board with this (any any other pyramid style) promotional tools. The bigger you are, and closer to the top you get in, the more you are licensed to steal $$$ from the rest of the users.
[LOL...if you just got the a version of this post with BoguS rather than Blog Rush in it; honest it was the spellchecker ]
Speedlinking - The One Where It’s All About Me
My WordPress Upgrade Tip
On my WordPress installation service site, I linked to an amazing plugin and created a video to show you how to make WordPress upgrades a snap.
My Link Building Notes
On my SEO notes blog I have some notes from the latest University 20/20 course about link building. And I also posted about a very cool market research tool that is based on Wikipedia (worth checking out).
Shout Outs
One Man’s Goal and SlyVisions for linking to my WordPress hosting page and for the One Man’s Goal review of my Ninja Blog Setup service.
I’m a Winner
I won, thanks to Random.org, a free copy of the Street Smart Internet Marketing book over at Blogtrepreneur. I will let you know more once I receive the book.
Guest Blogging
I took a spin as a guest blogger on the very popular E-moms At Home site. I shared my best tip ever for making WordPress theme changes easier by putting you counter and stats code into a widget rather than in the footer.
Blog Pulse Rush…wtf?
Can anyone explain to me what’s so great about it? Everyone is jumping on the bandwagon like it is the latest, greatest Internet market product to flog, but there isn’t even any money in it…peculiar to me. Seems like most people are a lot more interested in promoting it than actually using it…which I take as a very bad sign. When I have seen it in action, it looks like it is full of commercial or spam sites. Is there something going on here that Mr. Reese isn’t telling us?