You’ll find a low rumbling in the hacker community about how email is broken 1, 2 (or not broken 3, 4). Email is still the main communication medium on the planet besides Facebook, SMS, and the web’s attempts to change that. The problem is that it is still relatively unsecure, it is generally heavily filtered at the server and local level, and can’t do advanced (yet simple) things like embed video.

Attempts to *fix* email have resulted in new platforms like Google Wave or Facebook Messages, but people are so heavily invested in their current email readers (Outlook, Gmail) that making a new platform for email is not really wanted. So what I’m proposing is to make new systems for the people who DO want it and NOT for the masses.

I’m a web marketer. I want to be able to send out cool emails. I want my clients to be able to send out cool emails too. I define “cool” as being able to easily create and manage your own custom email signatures and be able to send active content like embedded videos (a la BombBomb email). This can be done through various services and programs today, but it’s piecemeal.

I’m envisioning creating a marketing portal like Salesforce.com for managing your online marketing. It’d be a cloud platform for people to login, send marketing messages, add to or edit their blog, manage their marketing message response rate, and other CRM-like functions from a marketing-centric side of things – instead of a sales-centric side of things. Maybe it’s not needed. It’s just an idea.

Read about my other idea of creating a reputation service for the Internet.

“In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable.” -Dwight D. Eisenhower

It’s easy to get caught up in the notion that a sound business plan and a strong marketing strategy will ensure your success in business. We’re taught in business school and in the media that if you want to be successful, you have to plan, but how often do things go according to plan?

Business Continuity Plans

Its wise to plan for various environmental or social events that could seriously impact the ability of your business to continue on afterward. Is your data backed up? Have the backups been restored to test? Would you be able to function if 30% of your staff became ill? How long could you remain in business without electricity?

When I was a business analyst, I was responsible for helping department heads create business continuity plans that outlined what their department would do in the event of a disaster. Hundreds of pages were printed, placed in a plastic tub, and never touched again. In the event of an actual disaster, the plans were not what mattered, it was the act of planning.

As an Internet Marketer and Technology Consultant, I help business owners create a plan for how they are going to use the web to market their business, be more efficient, and lower costs. We create a roadmap for how we think things will go, but things don’t always go as planned. The key is to know how to pivot and planning helps with that.

Does your business have a disaster recovery plan for business continuity? Do you know what your company would do if a single workstation, a server, or the entire building went ‘down’? These are the plans that are above and beyond baseline data back-up, which you should be doing anyway. If you’re not doing that, stop reading this and back up your data! It should always be in at least two locations with one copy preferably stored off-site.

Disasters such as earthquakes, fires, and floods are all too common in today’s world, but sadly, business continuity plans are not. Be prepared for not only a loss of data, hardware, and facilities, but also the risk of a pandemic where a third to half of your work force either can’t come in or are sick. How would your business continue to function? Would you still be able to serve your customers? What sort of steps are you taking to prepare for a scenario like this, or worse?

It’s easy to create a plan, the hard part is executing it. One trap a lot of people fall into is creating the structure around innovation or a new project in the hopes that once the structure is in place the new product will almost make itself. “After [that] it’s just ‘plug and chug’,” they say. Executors know that you have to do the plug and chug part too even if that means hiring or outsourcing to do so. The ‘plug and chug’-level work should be a matter of following procedures in a well-defined structure. The creators, designers, and innovators at a company usually like to create the structure, but have trouble filling it in. Either learn to get around this psychological gap or find someone else to finish/maintain the job for you.

Business Plans

Business plans are important because they summarize both your vision for the company and your blueprint for the company’s operating success. The business plan is a written guide that details the start-up and the future direction of your company. Who should write the plan? You, the entrepreneur. No one else knows your business idea and goals better. Yes, there are services that can do the work for you. However, you must present this business idea to bankers or other investors. Therefore, it is best if you are very familiar and comfortable with the plan.

Although there’s no set format, a good business plan typically includes:

• Cover page—Identifies your business
• Table of contents—Organizes information for the reader
• Executive summary—Provides a “big picture” view of the plan, highlighting the factors that will lead to success
• Business background—If it is a brand-new business, include your background and skills
• Marketing plan—Relates the business’s marketing strategy
• Action plan—Summarizes how you will create and deliver your product or service
• Financial statements and projections—Illustrates how the business will perform financially based on the plan’s assumptions
• Appendix—Includes statistical analyses, marketing materials, résumés.

Business success requires the ability to adapt to changing situations. Nothing ever goes as planned (SEE Business Continuity Plans). The world of business is full of surprises and unforeseen events. Using the habit of adaptability allows business owners to respond to circumstances with the ability to change course and act without complete information. Being flexible allows us to respond to changes without being paralyzed with fear and uncertainty.

Problems are a regular part of business life. Staff issues, customer misunderstandings, cash crunches- the list is endless. To achieve business success, look at both sides of the coin. Every problem has an opportunity. Being opportunity focused makes the game of business fun and energizing.

Marketing Plans

When creating a marketing plan, keep in mind the four P’s of marketing:

• Product—What good or service will your business offer? How is that product better than those offered by competitors? Why will people buy/want it?
• Price—How much can you charge? How do you find the balance between sales volume and price to maximize income?
• Promotion—How will your product or service be positioned in the marketplace? Will your product carry a premium image with a price to match? Will it be an inexpensive, no-frills alternative to similar offerings from other businesses? What kinds of advertising and packaging will you use?
• Place—Which sales channels will you use? Will you sell by telephone, or will your product be carried in retail outlets? Which channel will economically reach your market?

Regarding “Price”, I recenly got an email from a customer who told me a story about a friend of his who confided in him, his friend said, “I was desperate. I had to sell out my women’s apparel store, so I did a lot of expensive advertising at 50% off. I was going broke so in total frustration one day I said ‘Oh, #@& it, doubled my prices and sold right out!” I liked the story enough, but it didn’t really sink in until I ran across a similar story the next day.

In the book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, author Cialdini tells the story about a turquoise jeweler out West who, in the peak of tourist season, couldn’t sell her jewelry. The owner had priced the jewelry reasonably. She had placed it in a central display location. She’d even asked her staff to point it out to browsers. Nothing worked. Finally, the owner gave up and decided to sell the jewelry at a loss. On her way out of town for a business trip, she dashed off a note to a member of her sales staff – “Everything in this display case 1/2”. When the owner arrived back at her shop she was surprised to find that all of the turquoise jewelry had been sold. Puzzled, the proprietor asked her staff what happened. She had misread her hastily-scrawled note (deciphering the “½” as a “2”), and doubled the price of each piece rather than cutting it in half, making the jewelry seem better and therefore worth paying for. The logic from both of these stories follows that, “If it’s expensive, it has got to be good.”

A marketing plan should summarize your findings about the key target buyer description, market segments the company will compete in, the unique positioning of the company and its products compared to the competition, the reasons why it is unique or compelling to buyers. Determine specific goals, set a deadline for these goals to be achieved, then write them down. The old saying, “Its not real until its written down,” is true here. Next, share these goals with your employees and any invested partners. Get everyone on the same page so that they can all help work towards the goal.

Determine which tools can best help you meet your goals and how they will be used. These can include, but are not limited to, the web, direct mailings, email newsletters, hosted events, relevant trade shows, outdoor or print advertising, or social media. Next, create a plan for use of each tool. Projects are best not left open-ended. In the same way you assigned a deadline for the goal as a time restraint, the goal should also have a financial restraint. Work with your team to create a budget that reflects your vision and achieves your goals. If you end up under-budget, that’s one more thing to celebrate when you achieve your goals.

The easiest and hardest thing to do sometimes it to delegate responsibility for implementing each part of the plan. More than likely you won’t be able to do all aspects of the plan and so you’re going to have to divvy up the responsibilities. Make sure there are built in accountability measures to check performance. Monitor the results of your team members progress and the goal in general. Beware of project creep. Weekly meetings to remind those involved about the plan and its deadlines may help. Lastly, don’t be afraid to make adjustments as necessary. Being an agile company may be what sets you apart from your bigger competitors.

I recently met some recent Ball State graduates at a meetup in Broad Ripple, which led me to write this post on the current state of graphic design from my perspective and how to get noticed online:

Types of Design Work You Could Do

• Design book covers – people are self-publishing more (as ebooks and print-on-demand paperbacks), but they still need graphic design for the cover and possibly for the layout of the books themselves. Ebook platforms like for the Kindle simply use HTML so if you know that, you’re halfway more helpful than the average person. I have some resources for that here.
• Design custom Facebook pages and Twitter backgrounds – business owners usually know they need to be on Facebook, but don’t always know how or what to makes an effective design. Learning a little bit more about how to get people to click on the like button will help you sell the service. Remember to ‘sell the hole‘, which means to sell the value, not the product.
• Design materials to match a website design or vice versa – web designers don’t often make print materials and print graphic designers don’t always make web sites, so there is some opportunity to make a business’ brand match by filling in the gap on either side of that equation.
• Freelance – through sites like Elance, Odesk, Crowdspring, or Vworker. You could also offer your services on Craigslist or Backpage. Some web design and app design firms also hire freelancers for project. Kurtis Beavers has done freelance work for Silver Square (web design) and Expected Behavior (app design), among others, and would be a good example for you.

Web Design and WordPress Resources

• Web design websites for best-practices in design: Smashing Magazine and A List Apart.
• About the business of web design: Get free advice on this forum at Webmaster World.
• Free WordPress blog: WordPress.com – they have paid versions, but sub-domain versions are free.
• WordPress Support: WordPress.org – here you will find many resources about all things WordPress.
• How to get started making custom WordPress themes: this Web Designer Wall article gives good direction for WordPress newbies.
• Other popular web platforms: Joomla, Drupal, and Sharepoint.

Indianapolis Web and Graphic Design Firms

• Alpha Graphics – Carmel – they do traditional print and web graphics as well as social media graphics and social media marketing and SEO.
• SpinWeb - Keystone at the Crossing – web design and content marketing.
• Small Box Web – Broad Ripple – web design and online marketing.
• Slingshot SEO – Keystone at the Crossing – seo consulting.
• DK New Media – Downtown Indianapolis – all things new media.
• Watershawl – Indianapolis WordPress and Google Apps support.
• List of 70 Indianapolis-Area Web Design Firms.

Indianapolis Meetups

• Verge Indy – “The hottest startup event in the Midwest”.
• Indianapolis Marketing – Learn Marketing Strategies Tools and Best Practices for Promoting Your Business Online and Off.
• WordPress Indianapolis – Learn best practices, ask questions, and get answers on WordPress in Indianapolis.

Web Hosts and Free Blogging Platforms

• Web hosts I use: 1and1 and BlueHost.
• Free blogging tools: Tumblr, Posterous, Blogger, and WordPress.com.

Ways to Promote Your Portfolio Online

• Pinterest – invite-only, but very popular and growing.
• Twitter – post pictures in addition to text tweets.
• Flickr – be social here – treat it like a social network.
• Dribbble – a Pinterest for designers.
• Your own blog (SEE above for free blogging tools).
• Youtube – use software like Jing to show the world what you can do – remember to put a link back to your blog or portfolio in the description. It will turn into a hyperlink and help you with SEO.
• Vimeo – Anything you post to Youtube, also post here – it won’t hurt you and can only help.
• Facebook Pages – post pictures on your wall/newsfeed/timeline – it won’t help with SEO, but ‘go where the people are’.

Lean Methodologies: Product and Customer Development

• Steve Blank and Eric Ries have a lot to say about how to make products (and services) customer-centric (build your company around customer needs).
• Here’s my take on customer development.

Websites to Follow

• Ramit Sethi – I Will Teach You to Be Rich – advice on freelancing, job interviewing, and saving for retirement while you’re young.
• Michael Hyatt – advice on the publishing industry and how to build a platform to promote your business and services online.
• Chris Brogan – advice on social media and how to build a platform.

Please let me know if you have any questions. I’d be happy to help.

We’re only 3 weeks into 2012 and we’re already seeing these 7 Marketing Trends of 2012:

1. Noise Reduction – Being more mindful of what we share to reduce the numbness oversharing can create
2. Commitment - “Commit” is a word you’ll hear a lot more going forward and you’ll be expected to do so
3. High Value Content - This ties into Noise Reduction and Content Marketing, but means that what you create must have value
4. Humanization - This is not ‘corporations are people’, but a realization that corporations are not monolithic, but run by people
5. Case Studies - Showing how your company or product overcame obstacles and solved a problem is both High Value Content and Humanization
6. Stories - Storytelling has been around a long time, but the art of weaving it into everything from your About page to your office decor is a new trend
7. Do Something Great – Similar to High Value Content and a cousin to Committment, this is a push to use 2012 as a moment to make something great

Noise Reduction – I wrote about noise last week, but now that Social Media and Internet access has become somewhat ubiquitous a new rule has emerged: As the ease of sharing increases, the value of sharing decreases. Let’s call this Stauffer’s Law. You probably are already aware of this law even if you didn’t know what to call it because the people who post the most, often get read the least or blocked completely. It’s not enough to be creating great content, you also have to temper when you share it. This applies to your personal Facebook wall/newsfeed/timeline, your Twitter feed, or your company newsletter. Decrease what you share and increase the value of what you are sharing to keep your content from being filtered out like noise.

Commitment – Have you noticed feelings of drift? People saying they feel lost? Do you know people who can’t make up their mind or make a decision about what to do next? We hate it when politicians waffle back and forth, but most people and companies are no different. HP dropped computers, picked them back up again, and changed CEOs in 2011. 2012 will be looking for HP to commit to a goal – long term dedication to a cause beyond the next quarter’s estimates. And 2012 wants to see you commit to making something work, not looking for excuses for why it failed. This doesn’t mean you can’t pivot, but you must commit to something.

High Value Content – I recently wrote about writing what matters which talked about writing about solutions for your customer’s problems versus writing about your products. Very few companies can make a product that people care enough to buy for the products sake – even companies like Apple originally had to solve a customer’s problem by allowing them to carry all of their songs in their pocket. We used to call this type of writing a “white paper” and in 2011 we may have called it “content marketing”, but in 2012 it’s not enough to write content, you have to write what matters to people. Be impactful or risk irrelevance.

Humanization – Unless you’re using a computer to write your content, you need to show your human-ness. Humans make mistakes. Even the mistakes computers make are actually mistakes made by the humans who programmed them. In 2012 people are going to be looking to do business with other people like them – a.k.a. humans who have made similar mistakes. If 2011 was about being transparent about who you were, 2012 is taking that a step further by admitting your mistake and what you’ve done or are going to do to fix it.

Case Studies - Showing the customer how you’ve solved a problem like theirs in the past is a great way to “sell the hole”. It’s also a great way to show your human-ness by admitting your mistakes and how you overcame them. No one expects you to be perfect and those who think they are risk losing business. People like to root for the underdog and if you sell yourself in that light, it can help. There is a whole other piece of case studies that include customer interviews and solution interviews, which is a great way to write what matters, but that’s a separate topic for another day.

Stories - If you’ve ever had someone explain what a song means to you, you know the power of a story. Every time you hear that song you’ll remember what that person said and think of that moment. I’ve heard advice on how to tell a great story like, “Make the listener the hero”, but this is harder than it sounds. I’ve been trying to do it for the last 6 months. What I’ve found is that by practicing telling stories in non-marketing settings like blogs and emails to friends and family, you can practice the storytelling arts so that when you do pitch to a client, you can turn their use of your product into a story that makes them the hero in 2012.

Do Something Great - It’s never been easier to start something than it is right now. You have more resources at your fingertips than ever before. So why is it that the best we came up with in 2011 was a new timeline for Facebook and a new way to stream music (Spotify)? Sure, there are people in France trying to get fusion to work and others trying to find the Higgs Boson particle. And Bill Gates is both trying to eradicate malaria and create ways to reduce nuclear waste by reusing it in a new type of reactor in China, but what about the rest of us? Some would argue that the low-hanging fruit is already picked. We can’t just sit down and invent a paperclip before our benefactor comes back from lunch, but there are still big problems to solve – like how to replace Middle-Eastern oil, how to improve energy distribution and creation, how to standardize and distribute medical records, and of course, flying cars.

In searching for a way to close this article, I ran across this quote from Catchers in the Rye:

“Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them – if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.”
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Recently one of my board members commented on the sheer volume of posts I was making on Twitter. He recommended I review what Michael Hyatt said about how to post frequently without flooding your followers, “I use Buffer to spread these throughout the day, so I don’t overwhelm my followers.

Matt O'Dell, New Worship, image courtesy galerie Schleicher+Lange, Paris

I started using it and it’s been great, but I started to wonder if just tweeting links to my followers was actually helping anyone (including myself). I love to share things, but do people really care? And what does it mean to the messages I do want them to care about?

Chris Brogan, entrepreneur and social media expert, recently wrote a post entitled Our Responsibility as Media Channels where Brogan talks about how we are all media channels – no different than TV or radio stations – and we have a responsibility to our ‘viewers’ and ‘listeners’ to pay attention to both the content and the rate of what we are presenting.

You may not think that you are helping to curate the web, but every time you share something, you are categorizing it and sharing it with someone the same way a museum director takes a bone from the earth, identifies it, and displays it in a case.

Brogan says, “Attention is a currency, and if we spend too much of other people’s attention on frivolous posts and shares, we risk losing that attention…What if you look at this as your responsibility? What if you looked at all we just outlined with an eye towards making something bigger than just noise?”

Noise

Noise. That’s the word I’d been searching for to describe that feeling I had about sharing content that while useful, may be just, well – noisy.

Brogan encouraged me to “[not] just push the stumble, the retweet, etc, but give some value to the share by giving your points, adding your two cents, blogging a piece around it, etc.,” which is what I’m doing here.

Seth Godin, entrepreneur and marketing expert, recently wrote an article entitled, The trap of social media noise, “More noise is not better noise,” says Godin, who strategizes, “Relentlessly focus. Prune your message and your list and build a reputation that’s worth owning and an audience that cares.”

That was one of my initial questions: Do people really care what I’m sharing? Does less noise equate with more attention? Is less really more?

What Other People Are Doing About It

While Buffer is a Chrome app that allows you to spread out what you are sharing throughout the day, Handpick, which Jon Mitchell, a writer for ReadWriteWeb and former editor of NewsTrust, recently wrote about in Handpick: Selective Social Sharing Without The Noise, is an app that allows you to sum it all up in one email.

“The social Web is noisy,” writes Mitchell, who reviewed Handpick, a social Web app that collects things you want to share throughout the day and emails them to the contacts of your choosing in one email at the end of the day.

Pete Williams, entrepreneur, author, and marketer, created NOISE RE/DUCTION, which aims to, “remove all the noise [in the business and marketing space] to find the stuff that’s actually valuable.” In other words, they are curating content.

What are you going to do about it?

I’ve been building sites with the thought process that content matters more than SEO. I’ve been doing that by solving peoples problems. I look for those problems by finding sticky posts on forums, reviewing Yahoo Answers questions, and reviewing search terms for people finding my site (only works after you have content).

Here are some recent graphs of sites once I started using this method:

What I’ve learned from that is that there are direct search results related to doing this strategy and I spend very little time backlinking because I don’t have to. They customers find me because I’m solving a problem for them – they look for me instead of me trying to bait Google to make them find me over someone else.

After reading what this sales guy, Frank Rumbauskas of Never Cold Call (Again), has written and listening to his webinar, I’ve realized that the crux of his premise is that by creating content on your blog or in an email or fax that you send, you’re answering a problem, fixing something that your customers care about.

The result is that you’re spending more of your time finding out what problems your customers are having, solving those problems and publishing the results so that other people who are looking for the same solutions find you and hire you. You’re no longer selling, you’re taking business as it comes to you, and it will.

Don’t get me wrong, SEO is not useless. In fact it can be often be very useful as 70-80% of all traffic is organic vs. paid. I make part of my living from SEO web design, but I also make part of my income from affiliate marketing. Those are somewhat in juxtaposition as I make money from people who want more organic results and from people buying ads that display on my sites.

Andrew Hansen says he maintains 20 mini-sites that make anywhere from $300 to $3000 a month and together they make him “5 figures a month”. Lets assume that one site is making $300 and one is making $3000 and “5 figures” means $10K a month. That would mean that the other 18 sites would be making $373 on average a month or to put it another way, all 20 sites are averaging $500 a month (this is where averages really skew things).

In order to do this, Andrew follows a fairly easy process:

1. Find high traffic keywords with low competition that is something he can sell – this is a ‘go with the flow’ method where you go where everyone already is searching for something they want, but they can’t find it – and then sell it to them.
A. Use Wordtracker’s keyword tool and search for “does work” to find things that people say works or other phrases like this
B. Determine if any of the keyword results are products that you could sell as an affiliate
C. Use the normal due diligence to vett a keyword and competition.
2. Write 5-10 pages of original content and then build up to 10-20 pages AND backlink OVER TIME.
A. The 5-10 pages includes the home page (1), which should have no ads ‘above the fold’, the about page (2) – which should be a sales page as well, and 3 to 8 articles to begin (3-10). They should all contain original content and each page should be backlinked to, not just the home page.
B. Post one more article a week and backlink to the new article each week until you have 5 to 10 more articles (5 to 10 weeks). This does two things: matches what Google expects as far as backlink growth and site growth AND shows Google that your site is growing and therefore can be trusted.
Ideas for the about page: use this area to write about things like “how [your product] works” – stuff that isn’t sales keywords, but can grab traffic. You can also write about secondary (cousin) keywords here by saying how your product is like this other product and if you monitor your analytics you might see a desire for one of those other products, which could become another site for you.

Ideas for Blog Posts

If you have multiple affiliate vendors then you could make a post for each such as “Top 10 [Products] at Wal-Mart.com” and “Top 10 [Products] at Amazon” and on down the line. For products that overlap, you could compare affiliates and get paid either way, for example, “Compare [Product] at Wal-Mart.com to Amazon – Which is Cheaper, Faster, and Has a better Refund”. Basically what you want to do is mix and match, compare and contrast. Another example is to make categories that Amazon or Wal-Mart aren’t willing to do. For example, the retailer might just have a category for flashlights, but you run a flashlight mini-site so you have posts about LED flash lights, camping lights, pocket lights, and hand-crank lights.

Oh, I forgot to mention that Andrew’s goal is not to just earn money – he says there are easier ways to make more money. What he’s interested in is the amount of money he can make for the least amount of work because what he is interested in is traveling. Affiliate marketing allows him to travel one week a month so in essence he makes at least $10K a month by only working 3 of those weeks finding good keyword, low competition niches, developing original content, and backlinking it. That’s essentially what I’d like to do both with product marketing and app development. I like the freedom and the work-to-income ratio it has the possiblity to provide.

I believe that I can do this by pursuing a profession in Internet marketing and app development, which is a field of digital content creation and marketing that I call “niche publishing.”

Niche publishing has a lifestyle that can free me from the burdens (security) of a 8-5, office job and a traditional ‘boss’. Even self-employed service businesses like computer repair or web design involve bosses – the customer. Although niche publishing has customers, they are much more passive.

Digital content has the advantage of ‘build it and forget it’, ‘asset building’, and ‘multiple streams of income’, which service industries and typical 8-5 jobs do not provide. Imagine if every report or function you built at your 8-5 job would continue to pay you money over time and the more things you made for your job, the more money you made over time. That’s how Internet marketing and app development can work.

I’ve written about my meetup experiences here in the past so those who read my website may know I’m a member of the Indianapolis Affiliate Meetup hosted by Affiliate Summit. In the last meeting, I spoke about how to get started in affiliate marketing, but I was feeling bad because my site about nook covers was not doing so hot. Now part of this because demand in general was down, but part of it was because of duplication of content, Google put me in the sandbox for three months. The good news is I’m out now and the site is performing better, which makes me feel better about being an Indianapolis web designer and Internet marketer.

This morning I met a lady at the Carmel, Indiana BNI chapter who was interested in creating affiliate marketing relationships with local vendors so I invited her to the Indianapolis Affiliate Summit meeting. She didn’t know about it and was excited to come. The group has a good mix of seasoned affiliate marketers, those learning about it for the first time, and those with other related skill sets like copyrighting, authors, and web designers. There was also interest from a printing company out of Kokomo that has recently opened up an Indianapolis office in Fletcher Park near the old Indianapolis airport.

The last Affiliate Summit meeting was about how to start an Internet marketing business where I went through the 6 steps to making money online, but I didn’t go into how to find a niche or keyword metrics for success.  The next meeting will be about the Internet tax looming in Indiana and what we can do to stop it. We’re meeting at Buca di Beppo in Castleton and although most meetups don’t require you to buy food, the arrangement we made with the restaurant requires each person to pay $12 for a meal. This is not the norm, but if you’re coming for the first time this month, know what to expect.

Thanks to Affiliate Summit for the free pass to Affiliate Summit West 2012 in Las Vegas. I can’t wait to learn more about Affiliate Marketing, but in the mean time, I’m watching Affiliate Summit videos with Blake from Blaze Communications in Carmel, Indiana. Blake runs Blaze Communications as a creative marketing firm and BS&T as a business strategy and technology forum in Carmel. The BS&T forum has a sub-group of member who also attend the affiliate marketing group in Indianapolis, which is how I first met Blake. Thanks to Blake for sharing the DVDs he won from Affiliate Summit.

I recently wrote a blog post on my Indianapolis web design site about how to start your own web design business. I shared a little bit about how I got started, but I wanted to go into more detail here on my own blog, An Entrepreneurial Mind. When I first started, I had just quit my job (much like today, but more on that later) and had started working at a call center for a textbook publisher company (hey, at least I was closer to my dream of being a publisher there than while balancing transactions at the bank). While in training on how to interact with customers over the phone, I became friends with another new employee who had some web design experience. I explained to him how I’d had a couple of people ask me to make web sites with them and asked him if he’d like to help build a new web design company with me. Neither one of us had any experience doing so, but that also meant we weren’t afraid to try. When the call center gig ran out, we both started working on the web design business, Watershawl, full time. It was a blast, but our lack of experience caught up with us and I had to let him go. I was now on my own, sustaining the business by myself. I would meet with clients, pitch them websites, and about half of the time, get turned down. Eventually I branched into computer repair, but over time, moved into more of a consulting role.

Today, I can safely look back and say that I’m glad that I did it, that I learned alot, but it ultimately was just a stepping stone for what I really liked doing, which was building web sites to promote products for a commission, otherwise known as affiliate marketing. I write all about affiliate marketing success at my eRich Online blog. The things I learned about web design, SEO, marketing, and promotion for my customers I’ve been able to apply for my Internet marketing business where I get paid to promote products. One of the funnest parts for me is discovering profitable micro-niches, which are subsets of a niche, which is a subset of a market. The key is to find a product with high interest and traffic, but low competition. I know you’re probably thinking that all of the niches have been explored and exploited, but there are millions of micro-niches out there and new ones being created every day. For example, Farmville, the flash game on Facebook, wasn’t around 5 years ago, but it’s a huge niche market now. It even has it’s own magazine! You can learn on your own and sometimes that’s the best way, but if you’re like me, you’ll want help in learning how to do Internet marketing.

Oh, one more thing, I mentioned that I quit my job today. I did, actually, which really scared my wife, but we have been planning for this day for a long time, we know what it takes to be successful, and we trust in God to provide for our needs. Before I start the day or begin to work, I pray for guidance from the Lord. God is the foundation of my life, my family, and my business. Before I started this work session, I searched for a bible verse about work. I came across Collossians 3:23-24 which says, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.” In other words, Jesus is my boss – whether I work for a major corporation or myself I need to be working as if for the Lord. And just as I have meetings with my earthly bosses to get guidance and feedback, I am having meetings, through prayer and meditation, with the Lord, my boss.

Here are my Internet Marketing heroes:

• Ed Dale – Australian; started 30 day challenge; convinced Dan Raine to cash out all of his websites for millions
• Dan Raine – British; runs Immediate Edge with help from Ed Dale; male yeast infection guy
• Trey Smith – American; Internet marketer who recently started iOS app training business; friends with Ed Dale
• Matt Carter – the other Australian; not associated with Ed Dale; runs most popular Internet marketing blog; the beta fish guy
• Carey Bergeron – American; friends with Matt Carter; makes money from Adsense; runs Adsense Guild
• Ryan Lee – American; known for being a millionaire Internet marketer; starts out promoting other products, then makes his own versions to sell
• Greg Jacobs – Mage Monster, millionaire
• Mark Ling – known for Traffic Travis
• Andrew Hansen – online entrepreneur originally from Queensland, Australia – now living in London, known for his Affiliate Mini Site Strategy

By the way, I just finished reading The Greatest Salesman in the World by Og Mandingo. It’s pretty good.

How to find a profitable niche to start blogging about on your new mini-site

In a previous post I wrote about how to monetize your blog, but I didn’t mention how to find a niche market to promote. There are many ‘rules’ about this, but while I may point out some, not all are going to apply. One rule you can keep in mind though is that 7 out of 8 attempts may fail. If you’re willing to seek against those kinds of odds, keep reading.

When choosing a new micro-niche, there are three things to keep in mind:

1. Competition for the keyword – when you do a Google search for your keywords, how many root, top-level domains show up in the top ten search results? It’s very hard to break into the pack when competing directly with a home page of an aged domain, but if the search results show deep page listings instead you’ve got a shot.

2. The product – First of all, is there a product to promote? Goods are easier to sell, but some service industries like lawyers and business consultants can make more – much more. Second, what are the commissions on the product? You have to be comfortable with the commission level, which varies greatly between products, to Make sure it is worth your while.

3. Traffic (Visitors) – Even if you have low competition and a great product, if no one is looking for it then you’re dead in the water. You want to have enough traffic to sustain your business and make it profitable, but to not be in competition with the bigger niche market. The sweet spot seems to be around 20,000 daily searches for a given set of keywords. You can find this info out using Google’s External Keyword Tool or Market Samurai.

You want some competition. This is a sign that the micro-niche is profitable. You just don’t want TOO much competition.

How to Start

Knowing how to do the research is one thing, but what if you can’t think of anything to start with? What if you can’t think of any ideas to search for? Some advice I heard once was to browse a magazine aisle and look at the ads in the back. If vendors can afford to advertise there they must be making money and so you can too. Be careful not to chase a niche just because you like it. Do the research and be willing to say ‘no’ to yourself if it doesn’t pan out.

How to make money from a blog or mini-site

Previously I wrote about blogging for profit, but didn’t go into detail about how to monetize the content. In other words, how do you make money from a blog?

There are three primary ways to make money from a blog:

1. Ads – this is the easiest, but lowest-paying form of revenue. However, it can be a good way to get started and prove viability. Popular ad networks include Google Adsense and Chitka. Ads like these are pay-per-click or PPC which means you get paid regardless of if the advertiser makes a sale.

2. Affiliations – Affiliate ads are potentially more profitable, but require a well defined niche or else it is too hard to attract visitors that will actually buy the products you are promoting. Affiliate ads are pay-per-purchase or PPP, which means you only get paid when the merchant advertiser makes a sale.

3. Direct selling – This is when you are directly selling something on your site that you are responsible for fulfilling. This has more potential for profit than affiliate advertising since you can make higher margins, but its more risky and you have to do fulfillment yourself. Examples of this can be anything from ebooks to beef jerky.

4. (Bonus) Transform – the pinnacle of a website is when it can be converted into a book or television show. This means you have hit the big time, but its because your site has the two major ingredients listed below.

What do all four of those revenue sources have in common?

1. Original Content – some estimates say to post up to eight times a day. If you are just starting out, shoot for once a week, then move it up to once a day per blog.

2. Visitors – Don’t stop writing content until you have at least 200 visitors a day (track with Google Analytics). If you already have 50 or more posts, but are lacking in traffic, start promoting your sites.

Promotion

The easiest way to promote your site, like with SEO, is to start with your site. Make sure you are linking to previous posts with appropriate keywords (I call this ‘threading the needle’, but its also known as ‘siloing’) and displaying navigation correctly. Visitors should be able to find more content they want to browse easily, but remember the goal is to monetize by either promoting other people’s goods and services or by selling something yourself so don’t get too carried away in internal self-promotion.

Once you have fixed any issues on your site and made internal linking a habit, begin bookmarking your posts on social bookmarking sites like Reddit, Digg, and Delicious. After that is done, look to join a relevant forum to join and comment often. Soon you will be able to add a signature that will show up on all of your forum posts with backlinks to your site.

If you do all of these things and you are still not successful, try a different micro-niche.

Hate the Game, Not the Player

I set out to create a new “Home” brand of Professional Technology Consulting so that I could offer Indianapolis computer repair in homes without damaging the brand I was establishing with business customers.  I came up with “PTC Home,” but the domain was taken so I started looking around and trying different keywords.  I found that “codageek.com – The last geek you’ll ever need,” was available, but I kept looking.  I eventually stumbled upon “geekhand.com” after looking up synonyms for ‘friendly’ (handy).

I liked GeekHand enough to consider grabbing it, but I wanted to do a little bit of research on the name and domain first.  I found that it had been used prior by another person for personal use and had since been abandoned.  I liked that there were already a lot of backlinks to it from other sites, but because much of the links were from sites about gaming, I wondered if it was the right fit for my in-home computer repair business product I was developing for Indianapolis business consulting firm, Watershawl, Inc., where I am CEO.  It seemed like it might be better off as a part of my blog network at Cost Publishing Media Group as a board game micro-site.

I went ahead and picked up the domain, setup WordPress, the theme, the plugins, and the SEO.  I created a logo for it which consisted of a 0 and 1 which has both game and binary code meanings.  I used this logo as a background on Twitter and as it’s icon.  By the way, I don’t hardly purchase domains unless the username is also available on Twitter.  In this case, both were available and I took that as a sign before purchasing the domain.  While all of this setup is going on I’m thinking about content and products to sell or promote.  I did a quick search on Amazon and determine that board games, video games, and card games would be my primary products with the “news” of the site being centered around the geek culture of movies, television, and conventions like Comic-Con.

To promote the site automatically I did two things: I setup a Tumblr account to pull in WordPress posts automatically push tweets out to Twitter and a Facebook page to push out to Twitter anything I post there.  So I only really have to post in WordPress, then copy the link to the post to Facebook to post on what is now the Settler’s League‘ page there in order to have coverage to Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter all at once.  Sometimes I’ll bounce those around on my Facebook wall and on other Twitter accounts I manage for different brands.

The next step was to add content and put the promotional procedure into place, which I did.  I had a minor problem with links overflowing in the footer, but a quick CSS tweak fixed that.  I have a WordPress theme that I use as a base for most of my Cost Pub sites.  I also make custom WordPress themes and do web design and SEO for the Indianapolis area using Watershawl’s Growmotion marketing where we Growmote web sites–first we build them then we promote them; don’t just promote your business, grow your business with Growmotion.

Update: I have since converted Geek Hand into more of it’s original role of personal computer repair, but with a slant towards mobile phones – a play on the ‘hand’ in the title.  Here’s the link to the new Geek Hand Facebook page in case you’re interested and a link to Settler’s League’s home page.

An Entrepreneurial Mind is about Entrepreneurship, Technology, and Marketing; the personal blog of Erich Stauffer.

I’d like to propose an equation that I believe is a new way forward: Traffic + Conversion = $

If you’re still interested, keep reading.  I have written this guide based on things that I have learned over the last couple of months.

Using proven, repeatable techniques there is little risk and great rewards involved in marketing products for profit.  Much work has already been done for us in the form of processes and software tools.

There are two key phases to this process:

Research and Analysis – Identify a micro-niche inside a penetrable market that has profitable products that people are already selling.
Marketing and Testing – Promote the products and test the results.  If the traffic and/or conversions do not meet thresholds in a given time, start over.

The rate of success with this method is anywhere between 1 in 6 to 1 in 10 and marketing and testing can take anywhere from 1 to 30 days.  Success is defined as more money coming in than is going out each month and that includes all opportunity costs (time that could have been spent making money in other activities).  Tracking is critical not only with the data of the results, but with the finances and time spent.  If you are comfortable with this, keep reading.

Metrics and Rules of Phase ! – Research and Analysis

Micro-niches are identified as the #1 keyword receiving at least 80 clicks per day and websites containing that keyword being less than 30,000 globally.

Top-10 competition for the top 4 keywords has to be penetrable within the time allowed.  Metrics to consider are:

• Domain age
• # of back-links to domain
• # of back-links to page mentioning the keyword
• # of back-links from .gov or .edu domains
• Exists in Yahoo! Directory?
• Exists in BOTW (Best of the Web) Directory?
• Exists in DMOZ (ODP) Directory?

Check to see that related products are both available to be sold and are being sold by others.  If either is not true, stop and start over.

(All of the above can be done using the Market Samurai tool semi-automatically, but can also be done manually.)

You now have products in a penetrable micro-niche that are profitable to sell.  Move on to Phase II – Marketing and Testing.

Phase II – Marketing and Testing

Begin by setting up a place to place your products.  This is where your marketing efforts will point back to.  It can be a Squidoo page, a Blogspot Blog, or WordPress running on your own domain.

Once you have a place to put your products, begin writing copy for the site.  You will need to write the following:

• About Us page – use keywords and talk about the product
• Ad copy for the products – if using Market Samurai, there are built-in features for helping with this, but you can do it manually too
• Create posts about the keyword subject matter within the micro-niche

Next, begin to create back-links to your site by placing links to the domain, the blog posts, and the the product pages on social bookmarking, social media, and in blog comments in your related market.  Be sure to add links from .edu and .gov domains. You can search Google specifically for blogs on those domains manually, but you can do this semi-automatically with Market Samurai too.
Track the incoming page hits.  Testing for viability can begin only after your product’s page is receiving at least 200 hits per day.  If you are not getting 200 hits per day, then try these things first:

• Increase the number of blog posts on and off the site using other services like hubpages and squidoo – then promote all of the new posts again
• Make sure you are promoting on at least 30 different sites for each post – you can use services like ping.fm or trafficbug to assist with this task
• Pay to have your site listed in the Yahoo! Directory
• Pay for Google Adwords or Bing (Microsoft) AdCenter
• Add pictures with descriptive text to get hits from search engine’s image searches
• Add video to Youtube with links and comment on other videos in your micro-niche
• Make sure you are posting to Twitter and Facebook regularly and engaging in conversation, not just promoting

If after 30 days or at your own set threshold, you are still not receiving 200 hits or more per day, your product is not viable.  Quit and start over.  You have just found one of your 6 to 10 failures.
If you do have over 200 hits per day, but are not getting conversions, first try changing out your ad copy, images of the products, and/or placement of the two on the page.  Refer to Dan Kennedy’s sales letter technique.
If after changing all three of these variables and still your conversion rate (revenue) is below your expenses, then start over.  If not, you have a profitable business.  Consider selling it for ten times it’s worth and starting over.

References:

The Thirty Day Challenge
http://www.thirtydaychallenge.com/

The Immediate Edge
http://www.immediateedge.com/

The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures
http://www.amazon.com/Back-Napkin-Solving-Problems-Pictures/dp/1591841992

Turn $150 into $15,000 in 30 Days
http://www.15kchallenge.com/blog/

How to Make Money From Your Blog (61 page PDF printout attached)
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/05/how-to-make-money-from-your-blog/

Insiders Circle
http://dankennedy.com/

I will help anyone make money online. If you’ve ever thought about having a blog for fun and profit, I can teach you how to make money through pay-per-click advertising or by vamping a product in order to earn kickbacks.

Whether you have a blog on Blogspot.com or through WordPress on your own domain, I want to help you get to the next level by adding ads to your site through Google Adsense.  The first step is to sign up for an account using your Google Account here:

http://www.google.com/adsense/

Once you have an account setup, you can start to add the code to your blog, which serves up the ads.  When people click on the ads, you make money.  The more content you write and the more promotion you do, the more people will come to your web site, which increases the chance that someone will want to click on an ad.

I login to Google Adsense each day to see how much I’ve made from ad clicks and I can see how much I’ve made across all time, last month, last week, yesterday, and today.  It’s updated nearly real-time so it’s a very nice motivator.

I can also help you setup Google Analytics and start to do analysis on your blogs to help you focus more traffic to a particular niche, which you can use to start promoting products. In this way, you can start to make more money in different ways – in addition to the ad revenue from Google Adsense.

Please let me know if you or anyone else is interested in learning how to make money online by blogging for free.

Google ® is a registered trademark of Google.

Managing Actions, February 2009

We have gone through several changes in the last year including a major facelift, a name change, an identity crisis, and now a new way forward.  It’s time we stop managing our thoughts and start to manage our actions.

From now on you can expect to find fresh content daily on subjects ranging from self-development to happiness, from management to marketing, and from pop-culture to programming.  Where else can you find out how to delete a Digg submission and how to live a purpose-filled life in the same blog?

Zac and I are passionate about life and we want to help you become more of a success than you already are.  If you’re reading this article right now you have already chosen the first step in learning more about yourself, your purpose, and your life.

We want to inspire you, motivate you, and lift you up so that you can go do whatever it is that makes you feel strong.  Be better tomorrow than you were today.  Move up in the world.  Get exited about life.  Find your spirit and develop it.

Thank you for reading Managing Actions.  We are glad that you are a part of our life and look forward to bringing you great content for a long time.  Cheers.