Internet Business Blog

I’ve not posted here for ages and in theory that should decrease this site’s Alexa ranking.  Well, it has!  Strangely enough, traffic figures haven’t dipped very much so it makes me wonder how much of that it actually bot visits.

Anyway, where have I been?  Since rediscovering photography earlier this year, I’ve basically been out and doing more with my life and my wife.  When you consider the alternative of slaving away in front of the computer all day it’s not a bad thing!  That doesn’t mean that I haven’t been earning anything from my online endeavours because they were always developed with automation in mind.  So whilst, I’m not earning as much, I am still earning passively.

Okay, so I am still spending a lot of time in front of the computer, but it’s more so to do with post processing photographs I’ve been taking and so doesn’t feel like work at all.  I must admit that I have been thinking about ways to combine photography with making money online and I have been using IM techniques to promote my digital photography blog.

So, how to make money passively with photography?  Obvious methods that spring to mind are to sell the end product i.e. the photographs or to go the advertising route and sell space on ‘niche’ photography sites I could set-up, but I’m looking for other ideas.

Any thoughts on making money passively with photography?

One simple reason…  It works!

One of my websites offers an information product using the 7 Dollars script and anyone can promote it without needing to sign up to anything.  All they need to do is to append their PayPal email onto a special version of the website URL and then they receive the proceeds of any sales from their referrals.

One particular affiliate decided it would be a good idea to spam a large number of people with his affiliate link. Judging by my website stats, if only a single-digit percentage of people actually followed his affiliate link then at least tens of thousands of people would have received his spam email.

Of course, this kind of action goes hand in hand with being reported to blacklist controllers such as SpamCop and eventually my host came knocking on my door asking me to deactivate the affiliate’s link.  This, I duely did.  Anyone following his link was then greeted with a message informing them of the situation, but also giving them an unaffiliated link to the products sales page just in case they were interested in it.

This resulted in a number of sales of which the proceeds went into my pocket instead of the (spamming) affiliate!

As his emails had been reported, I got to read a copy and was surprised that anyone would actually click through and buy, but they did.

So, there you have it.  Spam pays.  Period.

I’ve read suggestions from many Internet marketers that the best way to make money as someone selling their own products or as an affiliate is through a mailing list. That said, it doesn’t mean that you can’t make any money without a list. It just means you have to take a different approach.

The benefit of having a list is that you have the opportunity to build a relationship with a subscriber and perhaps even an existing customer. By opting into your list, they’re literally giving you permission to send them emails and who is to say those emails can’t sometimes ask for money in exchange for goods and services?

The process is simple, you send subscribers interesting and useful newsletters to read and occasionally recommend a product you think the reader will find beneficial. Rather than report your email as spam, your reader might just snatch your affiliate link right out of your hand and run towards the checkout with their credit card in their hand.

Make no mistake, an established mailing list can prove to be a very valuable resource. They aren’t bottomless wells of gold, though. They need nurturing and they can take time to build. Send too few emails and they might forget who you are. Send too many and you’ll just drive them away. That all seems like hard work. Maybe even the kind of work that holds no interest for you. After all, not everyone wants to build a relationship with their prospects through direct email.

Fortunately, there are other ways of making lots of money as an affiliate; ways that don’t have to involve mailing lists.

Some people say that the period around Christmas tends to be slow for sales. Christmas a slow period for sales? The same time of year when the stores are packed with crazy shoppers hunting for the perfect gifts? People aren’t just crafting gifts from junk they find in their garages, they’re spending money!

Personally, over the past 2-weeks or so I’ve made over $600 in affiliate commissions alone and no lists of any kind were involved.

“How?” You might be wondering.

The exact methods I use don’t really matter. Most will be using methods you’re already familiar with or can read about on numerous websites and ebooks. The biggest influencing factor I’ve found to affect my affiliate income is the audience I target with my promotional efforts. Rather than trying to convert people into buyers, I like to target buyers who have already made that decision to purchase and are on the way to complete the transaction.

Think about that for a second. Instead of trying to make a buyer out of someone who may or may not want the product you’re promoting, why not find the people who are already wanting to buy the product you’re promoting and then help bring the product closer to them?

Here’s a digram showing you the concept of how to position yourself for really easy affiliate income,

It’s that simple.

There’s no need to build massive lists and try to convince them to spend money. If you’re better with search engines than you are with lists then this is a great way to make money. Your target audience have already got their minds set to shopping mode. All you need to do is guide them through your affiliate link on their way to make their purchase.

If you’re still wondering how to do this, let me give you just one example of how to position yourself in between the buyer and the product.

A lot of people who are on the cusp of buying a product will use the a search engine to carry out research and often they’ll just search for the product name. This is just one opportunity for you to position yourself in front of the buyer, by presenting something in those search results that will attract their attention. It could be a review of the product or it could be some information revealing a problem with the product, but then offering a solution to that problem.

Just use your creativity, put yourself in the shoes of the buyer and ask yourself what you’d be looking for. Then promote your information so that it gets in front of the buyer using SEO, Pay Per Click, article marketing, etc. and that’s all there is to it.

Useful Tools

There are numerous tools that can help you as an affiliate and here is a shameless plug for one that’s helped me a lot; it’s my very own Affiliate Link Tracker; an affiliate link cloaker and tracker all-in-one that I developed after trying and deleting others on the market.

As well as the easy link management element, the tracking features are just as important in helping to improve promotional efforts and reducing costs on dead-end channels.

Some merchants provide more statistics than others. It’s important that you have some mechanism of tracking not only so you can determine which of your promotional campaigns are attracting clicks, but also to ensure the data provided by merchants is accurate. Without any form of measurement of your own, you’re left to rely on what they report and they may not necessarily always get it right.

Affiliate Link Tracker makes it easy for you to stay in control.

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?

Domain name prospecting can be a very lucrative source of income. Every day, domain names are traded for thousands of dollars. Considering the cost of registering a domain name can start from as little as under $10, it’s not surprising why people can see great opportunities.

I’ve registered hundreds of domain names over the years, but my experience in trading domains is limited. A lot of the domains I’ve registered were destined to be partnered with an idea, but most were to become virtual real estate/advertising platforms. I’ve sold a number of domains, some with and some without websites attached. More recently, I sold a domain name without a website for a 4-figure sum, which I think is an excellent return on the $18 it cost to register it for two years.

Done badly, domain prospecting can land you in hot water and make you the recipient of a letter from a lawyer. Done well, you can quite easily make a nice return on a speculative investment, turning a pizza meal into a mortgage payment or more.

So just how do you find a winning name that you will be able to register and sell without ruffling anyone’s legal feathers? Well, I’m not an expert on the subject, but one thing for sure is to steer well clear of other people’s registered trademarks unless you want to risk legal action.

What I’m going to show you is a tool that I use to find all of my domain names. As well as making it very easy to come up with great domain names, it also tells you whether or not a domain name is available to be registered or who it’s already registered to.

The following has nothing to do with the domain I sold, but here is an example of me searching for a domain name based upon three distinct keywords; London, Olympics, 2012.

The tool I use in this video is Domain Name Pro and it’s the best piece of software I’ve come across for checking domain names even though I probably use less than half of its functionality.

Once you’ve registered your domain name, you need to let potential buyers know it’s up for sale. That’s where the likes of Sedo come in useful. Not only do they have a very active marketplace where you can list your domain and take you through the entire selling process, but they also allow you to display a sponsored parking page and offer you a share of any ad clicks.

If you’ve got any spare domains that aren’t being used for anything else, you could do worse than parking them with Sedo, collecting a share of any click-throughs and potentially finding a buyer for them just like I did.