Internet Business Blog

Love them or hate them, those long sales letters are here to stay by the look of things. For marketing products especially, they seem to work well enough that top sellers continue to use them.

Perhaps the market has gotten used to seeing sales information presented in such a linear fashion. When a story is being told, as these types of product sales websites often do, it seems logical to try and keep the reader focussed on the narrative and not be distracted by something which might detract from making the sale.

When the product is a software application aimed at web developers, does this type of long sales letter approach still work?

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Another reason why this blog might suck at the moment is the infrequent posting. I would like to spend more time on developing interesting content to share, but I’m currently preoccupied by a few things so I’ll just give anyone who’s interested a quick run down:

• The biggest thing that’s taking up much of my time and effort is that I’ve a major life event coming up very soon. It’s not something that I’ve discussed here at all, but I will spill more beans about it after the event. For now, I’m either preparing for it or tying up loose ends before it happens. More to follow…
• My web design business is attracting a lot more enquiries nowadays and even those that don’t turn into a paying project eat up time. I prefer to handle the client side of things so it’s not a task that can be outsourced and there’s nobody I can trust to delegate it to. Keeping control in this area also lets me choose which projects I want to take on so it’s not all bad.
• With things being a bit hectic right now, when I do get some free time I’m more likely to consume content rather than generate it. It’s easier on my brain which I need for other tasks!

Fortunately, whilst a lot of my attention is focused on the above, the automated income streams I’ve got in place are still doing their thing even whilst I’m not. That, there dear reader, is the beauty of online passive income streams. You do the work once and you reap the rewards on a continual basis. You can take a break whilst your systems keep on working for you!

Technorati Tags: Residual Income, Passive Income, AIS, Affiliate Marketing, Text Link Ads

Broke is probably the wrong word to use. Hammered would be better!

On the 9th April 2007, I wrote a piece about choosing Ubuntu over Microsoft Vista as a consumer operating system and it was referenced by a number of very popular Linux websites. The following 4 days saw a massive spike of visitors in my web statistics to the tune of over 7GB of bandwidth, over 20,000 visitors, and over 130,000 page views.

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When it comes to your blog, do you get personal? That is, do you openly publish personal details about your off-line life; what you do, why you do it, when you do it, where you do it and who you do it with?

This blog, in particular, was never intended to be a platform for the disclosure of personal information, but as someone who writes their own blog posts (I know some people don’t) it’s not always easy to write from a personal perspective without getting personal.

With the threat of identity theft hanging over each of us, just how safe is it to disclose personal details that others might use to impersonate you and just how much personal information are you disclosing without even realising it?

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When it comes to sharing your thoughts online, there are many options available to you. Two of the most popular forms of interaction are blogs and forums. Both have their own individual characteristics, pro’s and con’s, but in many way blogs are a better conversational platform and here are 7 reasons why:

1. It’s all about you

Your blog will only be about topics you’re interested in. It’s always going to be on-topic.

2. You’re the moderator

Imagine how annoying it is when you spend time crafting a well-written forum post only for some trigger-happy moderator to come along and delete your post. Whether you cause it to happen or some other participant in the thread causes it, the net effect is that the time you spent composing that post is wasted.

3. You say what stays and what goes

It’s your blog. You can accept submitted content if you wish and if you don’t agree with what someone submits then you can make the decision not to publish it.

4. You get to keep all of the profits

Want to publish AdSense ads? Go ahead. Want to add some Text Link Ads? Why not! If you decide to promote some products then nobody has any right to accuse you of spamming. If they don’t like it, they can go elsewhere.

5. You’re building up your asset and not someone else’s

Content isn’t king. Anyone can publish any old rubbish and label it content. The real value lies in updated, relevant content, but why should you spend time and effort keeping somebody else’s website fresh when you could be doing the same thing to your own?

6. You’re not reliant upon someone else’s hosting

When someone else’s forum goes down because of a hosting related issue then all you can do is wait until the forum owner gets things fixed. If they’re otherwise occupied there’s nothing much you can do about it. This actually happened recently to a forum I frequent. It was down for days because the owner was too busy to rescue the hacked database.

7. It’s easier to blog!

If you’ve ever tried to start your own forum from scratch then you’ll know how difficult it can be to keep participants active until it reaches a critical mass whereby it can sustain its own growth. Blogging, on the other hand, only relies on you for content and because of its personal nature it’s much easier to reach out and involve other bloggers.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Forums