Bank holiday weekend and as usual lately it seems I’m always working. The family have gone off to a local beach leaving me to do a little business, before having a BBQ this evening as at last it’s a sunny day in the north east of England.
I started the day, like every day, with a double espresso with added milk frothed to perfection, to make a beautiful latte. It’s not much of a breakfast I know but when coffee is this nice who needs food?
It’s taken me a long time to get the equipment right to do a “proper” coffee at home which equals or betters any of the chain or independent coffee shops that have finally taken off in the UK. I’ve spent a small fortune on manual grinders, automatic grinders, espresso machines and all in one bean-to-cup machines and I have now settled on a combination of two devices.
The first of these is a freshly ground coffee pod based espresso machine from the Nespresso range. I only recently got over my coffee connoisseur snobbery and finally gave in to the convenience of these devices after tasting a sample espresso in a retail outlet. This was produced in about 10 seconds and tasted fantastic. No messy coffee grounds around, no using the grounds before they go stale and no tamping with just the right pressure and still a perfect cup! I was impressed and thought to myself that I no longer need my finely tuned and self taught barista skills and I bought one straight away.
However good the espresso is though the mild frothing is equally important in getting a latte that is just right. Again I’ve tried all sorts of machines for this and disappointingly something called and aeroccino again from Nespresso, which was supposed to revolutionise milk frothing for convenience and quality, was a bit of a letdown which is a shame considering I got two of them! It did the milk not too badly but produces far too small a volume for a decent sized latte. Leading me to the second machine, a 700 quid bean-to-cup Gaggia Titanium, this with the use of small add-on device automatically draws the milk out a container and froths it into the coffee without any mess.
With another latte for lunch and by mid afternoon a single espresso to keep me going I’ve been toiling with java scripts and various codes to add some function to some of my web sites. I came across a very cool little program called MyContactStation which adds some forms to your website for contact, feedback, opt in to mail list and refer my site to others if you like it. This is very neat but I have to say it was not the easiest to install. Installation required editing two php scripts, a theme css file and manually inserting 4 to 5 code links on your web pages and adding the aweber opt-in code to another php file. It did work however and if you want to take a look at it in actions it’s at the top of my home page at www.ObtainSolutionsLtd.com . I’m still toiling trying to get it onto one of my other sites which is on my “My Affiliate Store” site www.TheGardenLovers.com . This is a bit trickier as the site is produced from a template that they provide so I am still trying to work out how to access all of the appropriate files that on a locally produced site would be straight forward.
The rest of my afternoon was spent again meddling with code with google analytics. This was relatively simple in comparison and involved simply getting the code from google and inserting it into the right place on the web pages. It was a little trickier installing it to my Wordpress blogger page and this required a plug-in which was a little tricky to get going but eventually worked.
So quite an intense days work all in all for the start of a bank holiday weekend. No proper work really in terms of developing the business although, I guess if the opt-in buttons work I may at least get a boost to my lists. I certainly learned a lot anyway about codes of various types, drank a lot of coffee and now I’m off to fire up the BBQ and start to smell the beer.
John
www.ObtainSolutionsLtd.com
August 24th, 2007
As I mentioned before one way to develop an online business, and probably easier to get up and running with, than developing your own products is marketing affiliate products.
Affiliate sales basically boil down to getting paid a commission for selling other people’s products. In the online arena this usually involves advertising a product via an ad link or feature on your website. These links and code are usually provided by the vendors when you set up an agreement with them and join their program. These arrangements are most profitable when you have a high traffic website and target the affiliate links appropriate to the website content.
Details vary between programs in relation to the level of commission, method of payments and tracking arrangements to ensure that you get paid for the sale.
Things can get pretty complicated pretty quickly having to keep tabs on all of these details and a lot of your web real estate can get used up with other people’s ads.
Choosing which affiliate products to market can be based on your website topics, likely good product sellers, high commission levels and just simply believing in the product. I have chosen this method for certain products which to me seemed likely to sell like hot cakes. An example of this is a piece of keyword research software Keyword Elite, for use mainly by online marketers. I was so impressed with this software that I actually dedicated a whole website as a affiliate link to this product, and you can you can have a look at this site here www.KeywordElite.uk.com.
Another novel and interesting affiliate approach is a project that I am doing at the moment which is called My Affiliate Store. I came across this at a Frank Garon internet marketing seminar in London in July 2007.
This is a subscription based system produced by two American online marketers called Len Thurmond and Bruce Safran. They provide a vast range of products from a host of vendors in a wide range of product areas already with pre-arranged affiliate agreements. They also provide a number of web templates to allow easy construction of a website that simply needs to be populated with products of your choice. It also incorporates built in search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to help get your site ranked.
The themes and topics of the site or sites is entirely up to you. I have developed one site on this system which is in the area of gardening. This has the advantage of being a big market, but on the other hand is a highly competitive market. How niche you choose to go is again entirely up to you. Popular wisdom is that the more niche the better as the market will be easier to dominate.
A key element in this system is keeping the content original including editing the imported product descriptions. This helps avoid search engine disapproval consequences but does make the process of building the site a bit more laborious. I have worked gradually at it spending about an hour every other day and grown the site steadily, which the search engines should like.
Traffic to the site is a major key in financial success and the founders recommend steady organic growth with a heavy emphasis on original content. As it becomes established google adsense can also be added to further monetize it. This though, has the potential disadvantage of taking the visitor away from the site so it is a double edged weapon.
Here is the result of my effort so far www.TheGardenLovers.com. I will post some updates as to how things go over the next few weeks and months.
John
www.ObtainSolutionsLtd.com
August 23rd, 2007
Two to three weeks now after my online marketing seminar season it is dawning on me rather abruptly that making money in online marketing is not as simple as the gurus would have us believe.
The adrenaline rush that you experience after the gurus motivational spiel soon ebbs away when sat at your own pc flicking through your accounts and while the expense column grows the income column shows a big fat zero. Still, I continue to live in hope (and expectation).
If there is one phrase that is repeated time and again in this business it is ‘that you get out what you put in’ and I truly believe that to be the case. It is just that, unfortunately you don’t get it out straight after you’ve put it in!
I’ve been working mainly on three projects over the past few weeks, and I know this itself breaks one of the golden rules ‘complete one project before moving on to the next’. This is easier said than done.
You see, at the start just getting to grips with the basic building blocks of an online business is pretty time consuming itself.
The mounting expenses also make it difficult to resist having a punt at some of the seemingly easier income generation techniques like affiliate product marketing and google adsense. These also to a newbie, at least, are not that easy and a bit of a horse and cart situation can arise i.e. A good adsense site needs to be highly ranked and to get a lot of traffic, but to get highly ranked you can’t just load a site up with google adsense. These projects can easily become distracting sidelines and although I am not giving up on them, they leave me convinced that concentrating on developing your own quality product is THE most important thing.
John
www.ObtainSolutionsLtd.com
August 22nd, 2007
A 2 hour flight delay! This is not how a budding newbie internet marketers’ supposed to spend his time.
Still, thanks to the gadgetry that is my pda and the mp3 file format I have just spent an enthralling 2 hours listening to a tutorial from the google awords guru Greg Cesar. What an eye opener, the things that he can do with keyword and adwords is truly awesome.
The holy grail of internet marketers is to use ads to get a high click rate (click through rate) by using adwords that don’t cost a bomb. That is what he does and perhaps why he is known as the adwords dominator. He can take a niche market in any area and take on the big boys, getting to top spot in google ads for less than a tenth of their costs and he drives traffic to his sites through the roof.
Of course, I want to do the same. Still it’s gonna take more than one tutorial to get me to that level. So here’s looking to the next 5 tutorials (webinars) in the set and I’ll keep you posted as to how they go and possibly even share some of his secrets with you.
Anyway, now I’m on the flight to London and again thanks to my beloved pda, writing this blog. I’m off to a 2 day master class by internet entrepreneur Nick James to try to get my business kick started. I’ve been working my ass off for about 6 weeks with a hundred and one ideas for web businesses and not yet got a live site. I’m not saying I’ve been messing around, quite the reverse. It’s just that there is a helluva lot of stuff to get in place before launching the web sites that hopefully are going to bring in all of the dough!
4 1/2 hours after leaving home I’m sat being bumped the hell out of on an airport bus to my hotel. Memo to self: At all costs avoid physically travelling when possible and stay by the pc cozy and comfy at home.
Finally arrived at my hotel and within seconds had added 30 quid per night to my bill being unable to resist the executive upgrade. This involved a better room, wi-fi access and, of course, the compulsory late night movie 
The Friday night was a membership evening for Nick’s website. This was ok and it was nice to meet fellow members of the forum but it was a little light on content. Still off to the bar afterwards to network, had a few too many beers, a late night and was dog rough for the meeting on Saturday morning.
I was delighted to discover that that this hotel provided proper coffee from the Nespresso range of convenient “pod” ground coffee and it was freshly prepared double espressos all the way, which played a large part in reviving my spirits.
The meeting then kicked of with what is most fundamental in internet niche marketing, which is research your niche and ensure that there is a suitable market. There were two host presenters, firstly Nick James himself who has presence, calm and charisma.
He was a fount of knowledge and experience and presented things in a very clear way. The second presenter was a much less well known entity to many of us, and his presentational style was a bit in your face and OTT for much of the audience’s tastes. He was very well meaning and socially very pleasant though, it has to be said.
The research material included how to come up with potential product areas, such as from personal interests hobbies, magazines and then assessing market size using keyword search tools, google ads and hot web topics etc. Then it covered some further market research survey tools such as askdatabase.com and how to offset costs partially by affiliate marketing.
Lunch was provided as a perfectly palatable buffet, the coffee continued to flow and people gradually overcame their inhibitions and networked more as the weekend wore on.
The content continued with product creation and covered how to produce text based material, audio and video and what the correct tools to use are in each of these areas. Important marketing strategies were also covered including the price funnel of increasingly expensive products.
A key area for success in most of these areas is knowing when and what to outsource to preserve one’s own time for where it’s needed most which is business development.
Next up was membership sites and marketing product licenses. Then there was a fantastic session on writing effective sales copy by a chap called Raja Hireker and it was emphasized that this is a critical area to get right to maximise sales revenue.
Then marketing your site and traffic generation and unusually for a web marketing seminar a fair bit of time was spent on offline methods. These included newspaper and magazine ads and direct mailing through rental of mailing lists from hot buyers in related product areas.
There was only a brief time spent on google adwords and this was presented by a relatively successful forum member.
The meeting was wrapped up by a brief summary of material covered and some generous freebies with a usb stick full of material and utilities and a tape set of a previous seminar.
As ever I after such a seminar I am reeling with information overload yet buzzing with enthusiasm and impatience to get a site up and selling.
Still first things first. That is get back to my wife and kids, chill (but not for too long) and have an even nicer double espresso at home.
Now two days after returning from the masterclass I have worked my ass off trying to get the building blocks in place to run my own internet business.
Now it’s supposed to be inexpensive to set up an online business, and it is compared with a traditional bricks and mortar business. Still almost 5 grand into this arena for me in a 6 week period it certainly doesn’t feel like it.
Expenses include relevant seminars, registering domain names, web hosting, web design software, various software utilities, market research tools, outsourcing some product production design and copywriting, auto responders, shopping carts, some new hardware, setting up a limited company etc. The list goes on and on.
Then there is getting to know all the new software tools and reading various forums which a major time commitment. Not that I am saying it’s not fun but both the time and the money soon mount up. This engenders a deep seated desire to get some money flowing back ASAP.
Nothing is ever as simple as it seems (or as you are told) and what I am finding is that the devil, as ever, is in the detail I.e. The nitty gritty little details at every level. Such as what, if any, additional options to choose with a domain name, how to set up a clink bank affiliate and how to interpret all of your google ads research.
John
www.ObtainSolutionsLtd.com
August 21st, 2007
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