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Making money during the Holidays

November 29, 2009 By Bruce Hopkins 7 Comments

I was just over at DatMoney where my good friend Jay posted about making money during the holidays. Its actually a pretty good post, but I’m going to have to disagree with Jay on one point.

Now Jay recommends using sites such as shopping.com to find a hot niche or product that people are searching for and then building a blog around the product. Now at the surface this is a good idea, but building a new site for each of these keywords can not only get expensive in terms of purchasing domain names, but since its a new site then its unlikely you will even start to get the traffic needed to make sales.

I’ve seen a lot of people say to build out a small site for each long tail keyword you want to target. I’ve even seen this mention for doing Trend blogging, but I never have really gotten the reason. It just does not make good business sense.

  1. If you purchase a domain name, then for a .com you will spend about 10 bucks or maybe a little less per year. Now with a trend, you may not even earn that amount back. Perhaps you could with an affiliate product depending on how many sales you can convert and whether the product continues to be searched for.
  2. Even if you don’t purchase a domain name, but instead use something like blogger.com to create your site, then you still have the time it takes to build out the site. Now this may not be much, but if you build out a lot of them then this time can really add up.
  3. Now you have either invested money or time or both and you still are not indexed in the SEs, so you are not going to get much traffic if any. So now you have to spend time building links, etc.. to get your new site indexed. I’m not sure if anyone has noticed, but its taking Google a little longer to index items lately.

Now we have another option to accomplish the same thing. Build a single site with a generic domain name. Then optimize individual posts for your SEO efforts. Really after all its not the domain that shows up in the Search Engines, but the individual page is indexed.

Then you can cut out all the additional overhead for each keyword as you only need to build a single page. Also any link building you do will help all your products not just a single product.

This strategy is one where you can also utilize some plugins to help you out. I like a wordpress plugin named ReviewAZON, which allows you to easily add Amazon products to your blog. This plugin not only posts the product, but also the comments left on the product page at Amazon. This allows you to appear that your blog is a lot more popular.

Now you may think that this is duplicate content, but that does not matter, plus if you spend a few minutes writing some keyword rich content at the start of the product post, then a lot of times you will out rank Amazon for the long tail. It may take a little time before you build up enough authority on the domain name to rank easily, but if you give it a little time you will have a domain that you can post almost anything to and it will rank on the first page.

I don’t care what anyone says, the bigger a domain is, they easier it is to rank for individual pages. Look at Wikipedia or Ezine Article. I’m sure you won’t disagree that these two sites seem to show up on the front page for just about any keyword phrase. People will say its because they are authoritive, but I say they are authorities because of the number of pages they have indexed. That is why new pages get ranked so quickly on these domains. Now don’t say that blogger is the same, because someKeyword.blogger.com is not the same as blogger.com/SomeKeyword in Google’s eyes. These are considered different domains.

You may not have the resources or time to build a site of the same size as these sites, but what you can do is to build bigger sites and that will help you. Whether its making money during the holidays or any other time of the year.

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Improving Efficiency

September 27, 2009 By Bruce Hopkins 3 Comments

One issue I’ve had since going fulltime with IM is with efficiency. Seems like sense I now have more time to work on my Internet Business, I’m not as effective as I was when I had less time since I had to spend 70 hours a week at my day job. This is very strange, but it is a problem. Perhaps the reason is I’m not under the gun as much and so I’m not as focused.

I’m sure this is a problem that a lot of people have. In fact I know it is since I see it on forums all the time. I’ve been working on methods to keep myself on track and ensure I spend my time effectively and I thought I would share them with you.

The first thing is actually going to work. I no longer sit around in the bedroom slippers and work on the laptop from the sofa. Instead I get up and actually get dressed. I’m even getting dressed in work clothes just as if I was going out of the house to an office environment. This includes shoes, but it does not include a tie. Just can’t make myself do that again. :-)

Another couple of things I’ve done is to create recurring task lists which I must accomplish every day before a certain time. This is very easy to do with Outlook and it has really helped my focus.

Of course even thought I have my tasks setup, there is always more to do than I really have time, so I’ve been working on efficiency too. One of the most time consuming tasks in my business is writing content. I do outsource some of it, but even if you get the cheapest writer around who still produces legible content you are creating an expense for your business, so I try to do as much of this as possible as it directly affects my bottom line.

One thing I did was to buy another monitor for by desktop computer. This additional monitor allows me to have my research up on one screen and write on the other one. This allows me to work a lot faster since I don’t have to switch back and forth between applications. This may not seem like much, but I’ve found that I’ve almost doubled my efficiency since making this change.

Another item is to really start using Dragon Naturally Speaking. For a long time this software would not work for me and my Southern English, but since version 10 it is very easy for me to train the software to my voice. Nuance claims the software can improve your output three times and I believe them. I have not ran controlled tests of this, but it does help quite a lot.

So do you have any tips for improving efficiency when working on your IM business, if so I would love to hear them.


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Do attractive women sell better online?

August 22, 2009 By Bruce Hopkins 7 Comments

This is a warning some people may think the following as sexist, but really its all about marketing. I know a lot of people as they are selling online will use images of attractive females to hopefully entice a response and get a sell, but does this really work? The reason I ask is because there was just a story on Fox and Friends about a study done in Australia about this very subject.

According to the study women between the ages of 18 and 35 where less likely to purchase from a female salesperson who may have been considered more attractive than them. They even asked a profiler on the show about this and she agreed. As a marketer my ears immediately perked up when I heard this as it goes against what most people will tell you about images of people.

Well asking my wife who is a little out of the studied demographic about how she would feel. She said that in some instances this may not be true. She said if she was purchasing a beauty product then its likely she would purchase form an attractive person, but at the same time if the female started flirting and perhaps her husband( me) was present then she would probably change her mind.

So what is the point? As marketers we need to understand our audience. If you understand your audience then you are much more likely to create sales copy that speaks to that person. If you speak to the person and connect with them then you are much more likely to convert. After all conversions are what we are all after, correct? It does not matter how much traffic you drive to any offer, if its not converting then you may as well not have the traffic at all.

So test your market, understand who is visiting your website and your conversions will have to increase. This is just common sense, but many marketers miss this point. They write copy like they would like to read it, but that does not always work. Understand your target demographic and you will make more money. If that female picture needs to be something else, then understand that and change it. Don’t just follow the current trend. Break out on your own and as Seth Godin says, be a purple cow.

Filed Under: Internet Marketing, making money Tagged With: , , , , , ,
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