Internet Business Blog

As we’re already well into 2008, now would seem a good time to reflect on the past 12 months and to start thinking about the year ahead…

2007

Whilst this blog is intended to be primarily centred around the topic of making money online, it’s difficult to skirt around major life events that take up a significant amount of time and energy. 2007 was the year I got married and even though I spent a lot less effort working on my online endeavours around the big day, my automated income streams continued to work hard relentlessly whilst I was busy getting on with life.

At some point during 2007, I came to the realisation that running a small web design business where everything centres around me was continual hard work with no real exit route other than to sell the business. There’s an element of residual, recurring income that comes from hosting, but otherwise you’re basically paid for your time and that’s something that Rich Dad has really put me off.

I’d already started moving away from having such a big slice of my online portfolio dependent upon Google AdSense and concentrated on developing my own products instead. In a bid to free up more of my time, I hired several different freelancers.  2007 was the year when I got really fed up with useless freelancers wasting my time so product development ended up taking up quite a lot of my time.

To make my money work harder for me, I started having a real stab at investing in stocks and even buying into the behemoth we all know and love as Google.

Oh, and of course, I did some decorating!

2008

Whilst I don’t believe in making new year resolutions (if you’re going to do something just do it), there are a few things I’d like to accomplish this year.

The first is to focus more on completing individual projects. The problem, I find, with trying to work on lots of different things at once is that you lose a lot of time in the overhead that comes with re-focussing on distinct projects as you try to regain mental momentum.

In order to help me achieve this, I’m going to put more effort into planning. I’m going to map out my process flows and keep track of progress.

My second goal is to spend less time on Internet distractions. Feed readers, emails, blogs and forums all have their uses, but they also cause my train of thought to derail.

Thirdly, and this goes well together with my first goal, is to make use of the gigabytes of material I have at my disposal that can be monetised. This includes all of the software and info-products I’ve obtained with rights. One of the reasons why I haven’t been able to make use of a lot of it is because:

• I haven’t gotten around to reviewing it sufficiently to decide what to do with it or
• I’m not happy with the material and decided it needs work or
• it’s trash and would take more time to fix than starting from scratch.

One of the problems I face is that I can be very fussy. I like things done to a certain standard and that often means the only way I’m happy is to do things myself and there just isn’t enough time in the world to allow me to do this whilst achieving all that I want to achieve. Unfortunately, this has meant that, sometimes, there are too many possible channels for my effort and I end up getting distracted instead. I’m not one to procrastinate and I’ve no problem with taking action, but having too many open doors means spreading myself too thin as I try to do everything at once.

So, my plan for 2008 is to knuckle-down, plan and focus!

What are your goals for 2008?

If you’re going to be running high profile advertising campaigns on a Windows-based system then you must ensure you’ve got something in place to watch out for the unexpected.

Whilst walking through Liverpool city centre, I spied one of the new digital advertising banners doing a great job of promoting Windows’ reliability by displaying the infamous Blue Screen of Death. This banner happens to be located on one of the busiest shopping streets in the city and regularly sees thousands of people walking by.

Great stuff!

Are you still serving up the same drab sales pages? Want to spice them up with some eye-catching graphics?

I recently came across a fantastic collection of website graphics specifically designed for sales pages. I liked them so much that I bought resell rights to them!

You can get the Marketing Graphics Pro package for just $25. Over 2,000 individual graphics for use on any of your own websites.

cehe@internetmarketingfool.com

Here’s a tip for anyone hiring a freelancer; don’t part with any money until you get solid evidence that progress has been made on your project.

After recently completing a project with one freelancer, I’ve just had to fire another. Why? Well, to begin with, all seemed well. Although he didn’t have much feedback, what he did have was very good and the bid he tendered for my project seemed to be good value being neither the cheapest nor the most expensive.

The programmer communicated well during the bidding and initial stages of the project. His grasp of English suggested that it was his first language and being able to communicate easily is a huge benefit to any project. He asked questions about the requirements and was able to offer suggestions for improvements.

It wasn’t until well into the project schedule that cracks started to appear…

First, there was a sudden lack of email updates even though I’d stressed that I preferred to keep in regular contact if only to confirm that the project was still progressing as planned, then came the excuses about computers blowing up, being forced to use Internet cafes and other personal problems.

I can appreciate that the unexpected can happen, but in my opinion, it’s unprofessional to let personal matters dominate a working relationship and to leave the customer wondering about the state of their project. After all, I was depending upon him to complete the project and he wasn’t aware of what the effect of it not being completed on time was.

Things then came to a bit of a head when he emailed to say that the work was complete, that he would package up his work and email it in the morning. The ‘next morning’ stretched on for more than a week and eventually a reply came suggesting that his email had gotten lost in the ether some how. I suggested he upload the work and then email a link to me to download. He agreed it was a good idea, but that he needed reassurance so I submitted payment for his work into escrow.

More than a week went by without any contact so I raise a dispute and got my escrow payment refunded.

Next time, I will want to see actual progress!

Technorati Tags: Freelance, ScriptLance, time wasters, project management

Adblock Plus is currently the one of a number of Firefox add-on recommended by mozilla.org and it’s not difficult to see why. As well as being faced with potentially thousands of advertisements in their daily lives, website visitors also face an increasing amount of distraction from core content as more websites become monetised.

Using some form of ad blocking software can make for a more pleasant browsing experience, but there are those who take issue with having the ads on their websites being blocked whilst their content is freely consumed. Whilst I’ve participated in discussions about visitors viewing ads as recompense for the webmaster’s efforts, I hadn’t seen anyone actually take action to discourage it until now.

Danny Carlton has taken a very active stance against ads on his websites being blocked by users of the Adblock Plus plugin. In fact, Danny has taken it even further than just blocking these users and blocked all Firefox users completely from his websites.

If you’re an Adblock Plus user, how would you feel about being blocked from a website that opposed your blocking of their ads?

Try www.articlewagon.com in your Adblocking Firefox browser and you’ll be presented with the following instead of the regular website content.

This page cannot be displayed because ad blocking software has been detected.

I can appreciate the argument against ad blockers, but I also appreciate how much they can improve user experience. I’ll admit that I use the Adblock Plus Firefox add-on. Not only do I find it improves my general browsing experience by removing the more annoying ads, but it also prevents me from accidentally clicking on my own ads. There are even a few websites for which if it wasn’t for Adblock Plus I wouldn’t be able to bear them at all.

As an ad publisher, does it bother me that people might be evading ads shown on my websites? No, because I don’t rely on ads being seen in any way. I am a Google AdSense publisher, but I’m not dependent upon the income it brings in.

Let’s not forget that there are other forms of advertising that aren’t as intrusive, aren’t as easily blocked and aren’t rendered useless if they were to be blocked. Take Text Link Ads for example, the ‘ads’ are simply text-based links with no reference made to any central website (such as the TLA website itself) so they can’t be blocked by looking for a common denominator unless all links are blocked. Even if they were able to be blocked, they would still be visible to search engine spiders and still provide value to the advertisers in the form of link popularity.

Since the AdBlock detection process relies on JavaScript, simply disabling JavaScript using the Web Developer add-on for Firefox renders the blocking harmless and allows the visitor to view any pages that use such countermeasures.

So is ad blocking akin to stealing? Are people whose browsers are unable to render adverts (e.g. they use a screen reader because they’re disabled in some way) thieves because they consume content without ads?

I understand the concept of going into a shop and paying for goods, but if a website doesn’t make it clear that the non-blocking of ads is a requirement for usage then what’s a visitor to do? If visitors aren’t first made to agree to view ads as compensation for content consumption, are they really stealing when they don’t?

Personally, I think that preventing people who use adblocking software from visiting a website is short-sighted. Webmasters should be looking to diversify their website monetisation methods so that they withstand the shortcomings of each individual method and bolster each other.

Do you use an ad blocker? How do you feel about stealing from people? If you’re an advertiser or an ad publisher, how do you feel about people deliberately blocking your ads?

Technorati Tags: Danny Carlton, Adblock Plus, Google AdSense, personal crusade