A Common Online Business Mistake
// One of the most common online business mistakes I see (and have seen over the past 10 or so years) is when individuals put all their eggs into one basket and concentrate on just one online business and one online income stream. For me this has never been an ideal option and quite frankly, in my opinion, it is risky beyond belief! The Internet changes at an alarming rate and what works today may not work tomorrow. Believe me, I have owned websites which were earning £3000 a month on Friday but due to a Google update were down to £300 a month by the following Monday! At the time, if that had been my only website and my only source of income, I would have been seriously worried. As it was, the site was only one of several which I owned at the time and although it was incredibly irritating/frustrating/annoying, it wasn’t the end of the World and I wasn’t going to lose my house over it. I have said it before and I will say it again, it is far better to have multiple streams of income. I would always prefer to have ten websites each earning
How the South Africa World Cup could affect your business…
// In case you hadn’t noticed, the World Cup has started! Now, I personally have very little absolutely no interest in football whatsoever BUT despite this, the World Cup could affect the profitability of my businesses over the next few weeks… Football, in the UK at least, is one thing that will drag people from their computers to in front of the television and if people are not in front of their computers, they are not spending money with me (or you). Therefore, if you are planning any kind of promotion or launch over the World Cup period you would do well to ensure that it doesn’t coincide with one of the major matches. Even if you don’t run an online business, it is possible that the World Cup could affect you. Do you sell on eBay? Do you buy on eBay? If so, avoid posting auctions which will end during a match and if you are buying, lookout for auctions which DO end during a match as there is every possibility that you could grab yourself a bargain. And don’t think this is just a bit of theory on my part, I learnt the hard way some years ago
iPhone Apps – Developing Apps Without Programming!
// As iPhone sales (and now iPad sales) continue to grow, the demand for new iPhone apps is growing at a similar rate. Although I have been busy with my web businesses over the past few months (mainly on account of the fact that I have had nearly three years ‘off’!), I have had one eye on the iPhone apps market as I think there is considerable opportunity to make some serious money over the next few years. Now I am no app expert but I have been reading a fair bit about the marketplace over the last few weeks and have followed a couple of individuals as they have developed and released iPhone apps onto iTunes. There are two main ways of ‘selling’ an iPhone app, either for free or for a fixed price. My initial thoughts were that the paid apps would be the best way of earning however this does not necessarily seem to be the case. With a free app it is possible to include adverts (a bit like Google Adsense) which earn you money whenever someone clicks on one. This means that you could potentially earn something every time a user opens the app whereas
Writing for Info Barrel can make you money!!
// If you can write articles, this might be one of the most important things you read over the next 12 months! Info Barrel is a revenue sharing website. What this basically means is that the site acts as a location for people to publish articles in return for a share of any revenue which these articles may generate. The revenue generated tends to come from Google Adsense adverts which are placed on the article page so that when a reader finds the article via a search engine or other link, the hope is that they read it and click on an ad. Info Barrel also allows you to place a couple of affiliate links in each article and will also display Amazon adverts with your affiliate link. There are many similar sites around for example, eHow and Squidoo, both of which are very well established sites with many many writers and articles already online. Info Barrel is slightly different in as much as it is relatively new BUT it is growing at a considerable rate and shows every chance of succeeding in giving the big boys a run for their money. I only heard about Info Barrel a couple
Google Adsense Section Targeting
In my last post, I touched upon something which I had learned from John Chow’s book, Make Money Online and that is, section targeting. Section targeting is relevant to anyone who uses Google Adsense to earn money and that includes me! In fact, I have been making money from Adsense pretty much from the day they launched the service which was way back in 2003 (I started using it in July,I think they launched in June). I therefore thought that I knew everything there was to know about Adsense but it turns out that not only was I wrong but I was not aware of a fairly major feature! I don’t know when they brought section targeting in but I bet not using it has cost me moolah! In simple terms, when you put Adsense ads on your web pages, Google crawls the pages to see what the content is about and then displays adverts which are relevant to this content. For example, if you have a page about weight loss, chances are the ads Google displays will be for weight loss products/supplements and so on. The thing is though that Google isn’t always that good at knowing which information on
