Yesterday, I spoke in short detail about why you need to focus on breaking even on each project that you undertake, which in good part is done by testing your market and looking for signs that the market has commercial potential. Today I am going to share with you a few ways that you can to that as easily as possible.

First thing that you need to understand is that all markets behave in different ways. For example, this blog has a steady stream of new subscribers to my list, and receives upwards of 1000 unique visits every single month. However, on the other side of the table, my year old WordPress theme directory has the same level of traffic, and only receives around one opt in a month, with income being generated more from affiliate sales from posts promoting themes. It is in this sense that you need to understand your market, what they are responsive to, their behaviour patterns, and what will motivate them to take that commercial action. From here, you can break even. continue reading…

Just to get it clear, no… I am not referring to this website. I am referring to the question that you most likely ask yourself every single day when you wonder if the website, or one of the websites that you are running is actually worth your investment of time and money. To be honest, I have a ton of these websites in my back pocket, and I am certainly not the poster boy for working on the right task at the right time, however, I am going to talk to you today about something that I think we all need to practice a little more. It is what is going to help you get ideas off the ground, and realise the potential in your websites. Lets start by figuring out how much your website costs… continue reading…

This post is a response to the post by Collis T’aaeed which can be read here.

Recently, Collis from Envato answered the question, “do more blog posts equal more traffic” on his blog. Sure, I do test this theory from time to time, more posts certainly do mean that I will receive more traffic to my blog, which is a great thing, right? Is it really?

Before I go too much further, I am going to talk about Content. Content is a great thing, is it what brings people to our blogs, and encourages them to participate in what it is that we do, plus, it provides and answer to our visitors problems, or simply serves to entertain. Content will always determine in large part a variety of factors: continue reading…

So, you are setting up your own online brand, you do something special that caters to the needs of a specific market or niche, and one day, something unusual comes through your Google Alerts. It is something that you knew was coming, and were dreading the day that it would happen. You get a ball in the back of your throat, butterflies in your tummy, and feel physically sick because unlike everything that has been coming through, this is the first time that anyone has openly hated upon you. I am speaking about trolls. Those people that live on controversy, have opinions that they like to make known whether or not they are right or wrong, and all around, have a lot of fun in the process. Bottom line is this. Don’t feed the trolls! Here is why… continue reading…

I want you to ask yourself that question in regards to your current set of websites that you are either selling or attempting to sell on Flippa. No BS, are you actually selling established websites on Flippa, or are you just trying to hock a website that may have some potential with quite a lot of work to be done? This really needs to be considered something terrible at the moment, especially with the introduction of the new feature on Flippa that allows sellers to go ahead and select whether or not their website is a “start up” or an established website, however the one problem is that there is no real guideline on what constitutes an established website. continue reading…

Consider this above all else. The method of monetization that you choose for your blog should not be designed to fill your pockets. It should be designed to fulfil the needs of your visitors. Whether or not this is by fulfilling your visitors desire, or injecting an income stream into your project to better improve it, this is a much better approach than simply wanting a cut of the income pie, and doing it by any means possible. Sure, you earn an income online, or are struggling to make an income, however, your ability to earn an income from your blog will only ever be determined by how well you fulfil the needs of your visitors and your market.

Even though my market is buying and selling websites, this information could not be more relevant to this market and your positioning if I tried.

In the first post in this series about blogging income, you learned about two great methods of monetization that are actually quite common and quite easy to learn. Today, you are going to learn continue reading…

You have a blog, and you want to make money, right? How much more blunt could you be about it? Its true though, you put in a lot of hard work on your blog, making it look great, creating the absolute best content possible, but that just is not enough, is it? Sure, it is great having a great readership, but you know better than anyone else that those visitors can be converted into profit. You know it, and boy do I know it.

There are many methods that you can use to monetize your blog, however, that really is half of the problem isn’t it? I am going to start this excuse by asking you to do something for me, and it really is simple. Stop thinking about your pockets, stop thinking about what methods of monetization are available within your niche, stop thinking about how to get a quick buck, and instead, ask yourself this question. What exactly is it that your viewers want?

Consider for just a moment exactly what a customer is. No, they are not just someone who walks into a store, they are someone with an unsatisfied need or desire. They are after something, whether it be a product, a service, or just an answer. All customers have commercial potential, regardless of whether or not they are “just browsing” your store, or whether or not they simply found your website based on an information phrase rather than a buying phrase. And I bet that right now you are asking yourself how someone who is not going to buy can be monetized, right? Lets put it this way. As long as a set of eyes are on your blog, they are monetizable.

Lets go over a few basic methods of blogging income.

Adsense Income

This is probably the most well known method of income for bloggers alike, due to its simplicity, and due to the amount of income that van be generated by those who are actually good with this particular method.

Adsense pays based on the keyword that your page is optimised for, and how competitive that phrase is in the bidding wars. For example, if you advertised using my name as the keywords, chances are, you would be paying nine cents per click, as no one in their right mind would have a reason to advertise using my name as the keywords. However, if you had a good website that was optimised for some highly competitive terms, such as a stock market website, then you would see a much higher return on your CTR (Click Through Rate). One of the golden ways that I recommend for you to check the competition of keywords that pay out well is to use Market Samurai. This is most likely the best keyword research application that you will ever use (heck, even Darren Rowse was recommending it at the ProBlogger seminar that I attended yesterday!).

Care needs to be taken with Adsense though, as one wrong slip will result in a lifetime ban. I know the feeling, I was banned for linking to a website that was banned (without any prior knowledge of the ban), and with the team behind Adsense being notoriously impossible to contact, being reinstated is impossible.

Affiliate Marketing

This is another very common method of monetization involving linking to products using an affiliate link. What this means for you, is that you will earn a cut of the sale of any products that you sell. This can range anywhere from a few dollars, to several thousand dollars depending on the product.

It is not as simple as throwing up a few links though, as the quality of traffic that you bring in to your site greatly impacts your conversion rate. For example, if you are attempting to eRn an affiliate commission selling a photography e-book, chances are, it will not convert all that well on your blog post about how to play a pentatonic scale on the electric guitar.

This is also where you will benefit from buying phrases more than plain information phrases. For example, if a customer comes in to your store and wants to know where the guitars are, they are going to me much less inclined to buy compared to someone who asks you where the new Schecter C1 is located.

It is in this sense that you are going to want to optimise your posts for keywords that have a much higher chance of converting your visitor. As an example, the difference between the traffic from the keyword “guitar” compared to the keyword “how to play guitar“.

Now, I will be back in a few days to continue on this post with a few more methods of monetization that you can use for your blog, in the meantime, you can feel free to sign up for my mailing list below, where I share even more gold nuggets than I do on this blog. You can also follow me on Twitter to be notified about when e next post is live.

A few times on the Domain Name Investing Insights podcast, we have spoken about how it is appearing as though the website flipping market is slowing down somewhat, so naturally, I have an opinion on this matter, and a few insights into where the market is heading. Naturally, you are going to want to read this, as this could be the make of break of your efforts.

What Do Website Buyers Want?

As I spoke about in my last post about customer targeting, you are going to need to get into the head of your buyer, and really source out continue reading…

Creating content is easy. It’s really easy. In fact, I can create a piece of content in about 20 minutes flat, but do I actually take that long to create a informative piece of content? No. You see, the truth is that for some time, I just created content, marketed the products that I sell, and this was all without any form of customer targeting at all. It was as simple as me telling a story with no target market, just a simple message that I wanted to pass out there with no one in mind to receive that knowledge, or take that commercial action that I wanted them to take.

It was my BIG missing link.

Let me give you a quick intro here. When I create content, I create content for two separate places. First is the search engines, and this is the text that is present in the title tag and the description. Second is the content on page, and this is what does the hard work. Most importantly, all of the content that I create is created for one type of person. The person that is going to take the action that I want them to take, whether that be sign up for my list, take that recommendation and purchase that affiliate product, and so on and so forth. This is what I call my avatar. continue reading…

I have been sitting and silently watching the progression of the .co launch, and what a launch it has been. With some 340,000 domains registered up until this point in time, the question that really is being passed around left right and centre is this. Should I buy a .co domain?

Truth be told, I registered two domains, and have plans to register a few more shortly. I have two absolute corkers as well. When registering, the first thing that I noticed is that you can almost register anything that you want, as the availability is so damn high! But, the bottom line is this. Is it worth my time to invest cash in a .co domain, then invest time in developing the site, or trying to sell the domain to a separate buyer? Here are my thoughts on the matter. continue reading…