Entrecard will buy back your credits for actual money! Why is this such a big deal? Well simply put, because Entrecard has just been a way to drive traffic until now. And most of that traffic NEVER converted ANYTHING! Well now, you don’t need to have them convert, you just need the Entrecard Credits because Entrecard will buy them back from you!

No word yet on what the rate will be, apparently a couple of things with this plan are still up in the air, but its pretty good news in my book! Especially for those “power droppers” that can rack up points pretty quickly!

In the same announcement, the good folks over at Entrecard also put out the word that they are going to be making their ad spots available to outside advertisers in a CPM modes. The revenue derived from these ad sales is what they will use to buy back our credits

I’m sure there will be much debate and much more info coming on this topic. Stay tuned for more!

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I’m interested in hearing your results with Entrecard. How many credits you stack up in a month, how much time you put into getting them, etc. Oh, and any tips you have for getting them, that would be awesome too!

Just comment below and let us know! Later,

- Thom

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My First Go-round with Entrecard

It Can’t Be That Simple Can It

But I Don’t Care About Page Rank and SEO…I Just Want To Blog

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Big kudos out to Dave2point0 for launching his new product, Niche Store Writer. This post is to help Dave get the word out about this fantastic product!

This is a couple of steps ahead of my most recent series on Building My Online Business, but I’ve had the privilege of helping Dave test this product before launch and I wanted to get the word out. If you own and run stores built on BANS (Build A Niche Store) software, then you NEED Niche Store Writer product!

First things first, please note that I said stores, plural. If you have a couple of BANS stores and you like to customize them and make them pretty and you spend a lot of time working on them, this product is not going to help you. On the other hand, if you’re like me and you have dozens or even hundreds of BANS sites, Niche Store Writer is the answer to all your content problems.

The concept is simple. When you’re trying to optimize your new BANS site for the search engines, the single best way to do that is with content built around and about your niche. Plenty of keyword references on every page, you know the drill. Well if you only have a couple of BANS sites, no problem. But when we’re talking hundreds of sites, the task can sometimes seem so large that, well you just wind up not doing it.

Enter Niche Store Writer

Niche Store Writer was designed by a BANS user for BANS users. With Niche Store Writer you can make quick work of creating fresh new content for your BANS sites (or other sites…hint hint…again!) by doing keyword replacements in a template you design. Here, instead of telling you, I’ll just show you.

You get started with Niche Store Writer on the Template tab. Here you can load your previously written templates to re-use or write one from scratch. This was the most tedious part for me because I wanted to make sure my new Niche Store Writer templates would work for a wide variety of sites. For instance if you have several BANS sites built around clothing, your Niche Store Writer content template should talk generally about clothing. Then as you are writing, you can plug in your TAGS. Think of tags as keywords that Niche Store Writer will replace for you in a few minutes. Here’s a screen shot of the Niche Store Writer Template tab.

In the screen shot you can see how the [Title], [word2], [work3] and so on tags being used in the Niche Store Writer template. Now lets get some details on the Tags tab.

On the tags tab you will define the keywords and values to be substituted into the Niche Store Writer template. In addition to having a title and up to 15 keywords, you can also define certain character attributes of the html output. Put all that together and you get the Niche Store Writer edition tab…

This is where all the magic happens! The Edition tab of Niche Store Writer not only shows you the results of the template / tags merge but it also shows you a quick report on keyword density! How cool is that! Armed with that information you can always go back to the Niche Store Writer template and add or take away a few non-keywords to adjust your keyword density to suit.

So how does all this work save you any time? Remember way back up there close to the top when I said you should create general content for your Niche Store Writer templates then plug the tags in? Here’s why. Lets say I have BANS sites for ladies shoes, three different sites for three different styles, boots, sandals, and pumps. Once I’ve written the Niche Store Writer template, all I have to do is plug my keywords into the tags tab, click on the edition tab and I have new content! Copy from Niche Store Writer and paste into BANS, next set of keywords, copy/paste, next set of keywords, copy/paste… and I’m done!

Now, I can hear you screaming from here… what about below the post? What about the store pages, thats too many templates….!!!!

Hang On There Skippy!

The way I’ve been using Niche Store Writer (yes, using…its good to be a beta tester!) is to put all the content blocks in the same Niche Store Writer template, then just copy and paste the part that applies to the page I’m working! See, where there is a lazy blogger, there is an easier way!

And Now For The Other Shoe…

Now that I’ve gotten you all pumped up and ready to drop the few bucks Dave is asking for Niche Store Writer…you’ll have to wait! Dave is making the final tweeks to Niche Store Writer this week for a full on launch next week. The Good News is that its only a week. Now, here’s a tip for you. If you want to be one of the first to know when its ready to go, be sure to subscribe to my feed. I’ll put out a quick post when its ready with a link to the website.

*** UPDATE ***

Niche Store Writer is now available! Read All About It!!!

Also…

Keep you eye on Niche Store Writer Templates. My friend Vinny is putting together a pretty awesome collection of pre-written Niche Store Writer templates to make your BANS building even easier. Wow, with all these tools…what’s gonna be left? Well, hosting, niche selection, link building… there’s plenty you can spend your new found time on! Stay tuned! Great things are on the way!

Peace

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Sometimes it takes a good swift kick in the pants to get your attention…

…and that’s what I got this week while reading some of my favorite blogs. This site started as a journal of experiences I encountered while living and working in a connected world. Looking back over my last dozen or so posts, it has been anything but and I need to get back on track. So here goes. Let’s talk about…

Building My Online Business

For the first fifteen years or so of my professional career I worked in a wide variety of businesses; an international natural foods network marketing company, the second largest telecom company in the country, a printing company, even commercial software development. One of the reasons I was able to move from industry to industry so easily was because the underlying principles of technology were not dependent on what kind of widget was being pushed out the back door. A similar principle applies here.

Just because I have moved my business online doesn’t mean that those same underlying principles of good business practices and monetization don’t apply anymore, in spite of the way some online entrepreneurs act. Take the recent purchase of one mans goal dot com for instance. The buyer paid over $10,000 for a website with no organic product, no long tenured customers, no established monthly recurring revenue… just a name and a quasi-loyal following of readers. That’s like paying $10,000 for a convenience store that doesn’t sell anything but they have lots of people come in and look around everyday.

So How Do They Translate?

Good question. Off-line business principles make good online business principles. Things like keeping a low overhead, diversification, and return on investment still apply. Some are easier than others, take low overhead for example. It would be very easy to run a successful online business with a laptop and a digital camera. Neither are cheap but they are one time costs that will last for years. And even with a somewhat larger tech base than that, my overhead costs are very low…pretty much just the cost of Internet access.

Another of those principles that very few online business owners pay attention to is diversification, or having multiple streams of income. Why diversify? Oh, I don’t know. Lets say you are one of the eBay entrepreneurs and you’re making boatloads of cash off their affiliate program. That’s great. Now what if they pull the plug on it tomorrow, or at the end of the month? Would you be able to replace that income in 30 days?

Diversification of your online business simply ensures sustainability, another solid off-line business principle. If you had an off-line business selling widgets and you depended solely on one supplier for those widgets, what would you do if they went out of business? You have to bring the same mentality to your online business ventures.

How Am I Diversifying

Like most folks who decided they wanted to make money online, I threw up a blog and slapped some AdSense units on it, sat back and waited for my check! And waited…and waited…OH, A CLICK…for 2 cents. I got frustrated and moved on to something else. Now, with the help of the three wise men, I am working my way toward a better understand of AdSense and developing it into a significant stream of income…and it is quite a learning curve.

So while I’m working on that, I’ve recently taken a pretty large bite of the affiliate pie and added eBay to my online business portfolio. Now this is not really new for me, I’ve been signed up with the eBay affiliate program for several months…posting links and banners for them all over the place. But two things happened in the last month that have totally changed my outlook on eBay and their affiliate program and the part it plays in my online business.

The first is that eBay has brought management of their affiliate program in-house and out of the hands of Commission Junction. Now, I’ve never really had any beef with CJ, they’ve just never done anything for me…not one red cent. So I’m kinda happy that things are moving in-house with eBay. That said, they are experiencing some growing pains during the transition but hey, its eBay! Nuff said!

The second big development was my discovery of BANS or Build a Niche Store. BANS is a software designed to be loaded on your server to publish a “store like” website populated with products currently listed on eBay. Again, in the interest of full disclosure, I bought BANS back in March and built my one little store and sat back and waited for the money to start falling out of my PC. Needless to say, that hasn’t happened yet (but when it does you can bet I’ll shoot a vid and post it on Revver! lol). Anyway, back on April 7th, Vic over at BloggerUnleashed.com challenged us to build 100 BANS sites. That really got me thinking and I took the challenge!

The next day was my birthday so I made my present to myself everything it took to get the 100 sites built. I can now say that I have added 103 BANS sites to my online business and will be adding a few more each week.

So What’s Your Point?

The point is this. If those sites only average $1 a day each then that’s $103 per day and almost $3,100 / month or about $37,000 a year added into my online business coffers. Do I have your attention now?

Am I sitting back now with a bigger bucket waiting on money to start falling out of my PC? No, remember diversification? Now that I have the 100 BANS sites up, I’m working to improve my AdSense results, I’m looking for other affiliate programs, oh, and I’m getting links all over the freakin Internet!! And on the off chance that all of those options might not pay-out…I still have the bulk candy vending machines!

The bottom line is that an online business is still a business and you have to treat it that way. Its not a cool way to get to stay at home and work in your shorts, t-shirt, and flippies (but if you need any of those things, be sure to check out BloggerUniforms.info!) Seriously, you have to work like your next meal, or the light bill, or the cell phone bill depended on it.

Ok, I know this has been an epic post like you’d find on How To Make Money from Griz so I’ll go ahead and knock off here…but don’t stray too far because I have lots more online business tips to share. Things like getting a reseller account versus a regular hosting account, all the fun I had setting up BANS and at least one more post on some nifty little tools to help with all those sites.

Thanks for sticking with me this far and since you did I want to leave you with a challenge. If you are serious about having an online business, write down your goals for this year and three concrete steps you will take for each goal. And if you want to share them with the rest of us in the comments, we’ll all be pullin for you! It kinda works that way around here.

Peace.

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Last week I wrote about How Blogging Should Be Like Selling Kiwi. Enough of the metaphors…

In the post I talked about the three types of bloggers. Bloggers who try to be all things to all people I call Wal-Mart Bloggers. Then there are the Homeless Bloggers who shout very loudly that they are the “experts” of blogging, but have nothing to support their claims. Then there are the Kiwi Stand Bloggers, the ones that specialize in one area and do that one area VERY well. Today, I’d like to introduce you to one of those Kiwi Stand Bloggers.

Victor Franqui a.k.a. Vic, ran BloggerUnleashed.com and finding his site has made a huge difference in my on-line life and that is beginning to translate into my off-line life.

See, Vic isn’t like all the other “blogging gurus” extolling the virtues of writing great content, fishing for high subscriber counts, and selling them a eBook or some other crap to make money. This guy actually knows how to maketake money online and he’s sharing it with anyone who will listen over at BloggerUnleashed.com

Now I guess I should qualify that preceding paragraph. Without a doubt you CAN write great content and have lots of subscribers, browsers and regular readers. You can have guest posters and run contests to reward your faithful…and, as Vic would say, “You’ll starve while you’re doing it!”

Instead, Vic is a proponent of creating highly targeted web sites that may only generate a trickle of traffic but that trickle is motivated to click or buy from that web site. Maybe to the tune of only a single dollar per day! How then are you supposed to make money from a trickle of traffic? By volume my friend! One dollar a day from 200 sites will generate $6,000 a month! What? You can’t handle 200 sites? Check out BloggerUnleashed.com before you say that!

Vic is a former black-hatter who has turned from the dark side and is now looking to put together a portfolio of set-and-forget income streams not to be rich but to enable him to pursue his life’s passion. I don’t want to steal his thunder about that passion, he can tell you way better than me anyway. Check out his Challenge to get Mad vlog post and if that doesn’t tell you something about this guy, you’re missing the point!

I should also warn you about two things. First, Vic has, um…”salty” language and doesn’t hold anything back. Consider yourself warned. Second, learning from Vic is kinda like trying to drink from a fire hose. There’s just so much you have to go back and re-read / re-watch over and over.

So if you’ve come across this site looking to make money online or trying to figure out this blogging for bucks thing everybody is talking about, take a word of advice. Ignore the main stream and look to BloggerUnleashed.com. Then come back and tell me what you think, good or bad. I bet you’ll thank me!

*** UPDATED ***

Vic over at BloggerUnleashed.com is running a contest beginning May 6th to see who can generate the most organic traffic. Now, it’s too late to get into the contest but I was fortunate enough to make it. You can see my entry blog at A Jar of Skittles (http://jtrigsby.bloggerUnleashed.com).

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I was sitting around tonight thinking about this whole making money online niche and something occurred to me…we’re working really hard to re-invent the wheel here! The very first rule of retail is this…if nobody is buying, I’m not making any money! The same rule applies online!

Look, if you owned a brick and mortar business you would do retail one of two ways. The first way is to be everything to everybody, always have what the customer is looking for. I’ll call that the Wal-Mart way. Alternatively, you could focus on a very small segment of the business and be very specialized. I’ll call that the Kiwi Stand way. These are not new principles, they are time tested over hundreds of years.

The real irony here is that because we’ve switched from brick and mortar to click based retail, we thing all those principles don’t apply any more. We’ve even introduced a new “principle” that I haven’t quite named yet. It mainly consists of standing there proclaiming yourself to be an expert at something and pointing people in “the way they should go.” Its kinda like the homeless guy giving me home buying tips. Wait…THAT’S IT! The Homeless Way!

Wal-Mart didn’t start out as the largest retailer on the face of the planet. They started small just like everyone else. They got to where they are by huge volume and taking advantage of suppliers. I mean come on. Don’t most mom & pop store owners have to ask their suppliers what a widget costs? Wal-Mart gets to tell their suppliers what they will be paid for the widget…and the suppliers are so desperate for Wal-Mart’s business (i.e. validation) that they agree…whatever the price.

Now the kiwi stand guy is willing to pay a little extra for his kiwi because he want the best. He is willing to invest in providing the best, most specific product his customer is looking for. In return he is rewarded with customers who are willing to pay a little more to get exactly what they are looking for. The kiwi stand owner is also the most likely to help out the store owner around the corner because he knows the value of a good relationship with fellow retailers.

And then there are the Homeless guys, who have neither the most, nor the best…hell, no product at all…but he knows where everything is and has no problem telling you where to get the best kiwi…for a dollar! Oh, and he know about all the fruits too so there’s no reason to ask anyone else…he is the final authority.

So what? What does this have to do with blogging or making money online?

Well, I’ll tell ya. If you haven’t already figured it out, I’m going to draw some parallels between these retail principles and bloggers.

First, the Wal-Mart’s of the blogging world, yep you guessed it. These are the John Chow’s of the blogosphere and his ilk. Doing massive volume and taking advantage of everyone that crosses their path. And while you may find a few really good items in the inventory, they are the exception. Most of it is just crap, and for some reason, people keep going back to get refills of the same crap!

Next, we have the Homeless bloggers like Caroline Middlebrook. No real experience, no real product, just self-proclaimed experts who, for just $99.95, will tell you everything you need to know to get where they are! (which, by the way, you’re probably already there!)

Finally, we have what I want to be, the Kiwi Stand Guy. If you’ve ever been to or lived in NYC for any amount of time, you’ll get this. Vic from BloggerUnleashed would be a perfect Kiwi Stand Vendor in NYC! You’re laughing but am I wrong? (“Hey, ya need a friggin kiwi?”) Vic along with Griz (How to Make Money Online) and Court (Internet Marketing) round out the Three Wise Men of Internet Marketing in my book.

I’ve been trying to get started making money online for well over a year and in the past six weeks of listening to the Three Wise Men of Internet Marketing, now I’m actually making some progress. Not a millionaire (yet, maybe never) but lets just say the months of $0.90 AdSense are over!

Vic, the vlogs are the best and it’s like I said in some comment the other day. Your stuff is golden but sometimes its like trying to get a drink from a fire hose! I’m glad I can go back and play them again. Thanks for all you’ve done for me and for the rest of the blogging community!

Court, you are the keyword master! Your latest on Keyword Sniping was actually a real encouragement to me, you know, finding out that even the master can get sandboxed! Thanks man!

Griz, wow, talk about pay it forward! Not only do you make it seem so simple, you’ve got no problem sharing and helping us noobs get started. You are one of the good guys.

If you don’t read these three blogs and you want to make money online, you should quit now. You may make a little money, but you’ll starve before you make any real income.

If you read these guys you will now understand my retail analogy and the Kiwi Stand.

You don’t have to have 100,000 customers a day that come in, look around, and leave. You just need the 10 or 20 who come in and BUY a kiwi! (remember…if they don’t buy, I don’t make any money?) Oh, and you need a couple of thousand cheap fruit stands that sell what people want to buy (kiwi, oranges, limes…whatever) on the the streets where Wal-Mart won’t bother to go.

Blog on Three Wise Men of Internet Marketing…and thanks!

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The really sad part is I can’t for the life of me remember / figure out how I signed up for it before. So alas, Griz got a referral click from me today…you’re welcome!

Project Payday is a IFW scheme for generating WebMoney (IFW stands for Incentivized Freebie Websites). Griz did a much better job explaining this than I could in his post Project Payday Review – What’s an IFW | How to Profit but here is the meat and potatoes…

You have all no doubt seen a ‘get a free ipod’ promo or a ‘get paid to take surveys’ blurb or ‘get paid to shop’ advertisement. You know the spiel – sign up for a free or small fee promotion and you will receive a brand new ipod, flat screen TV or whatever. The promo you have to sign up for is usually something like Columbia House CD’s or efax or a credit card company. The gist of it is that the website giving away the free ipod gets paid for each person it refers to the vendor (Columbia House pays the website for getting you to fill out the promo offer). It turns out that this isn’t a scam as you might first think – I know I did. The website actually gives away free ipods – the catch is that to get the ipod you have to refer 5 or 10 friends to sign up for the new Columbia House promo as well. The website gets – lets pick a number, say $25 – every time they refer someone. They make you refer 5 people to get your free ipod. The website makes $125 and gives you an ipod that they bought for $50. Everyone wins, Columbia House gets 5 new people to bombard with CD’s (for the rest of their sorry lives) the website makes a $75 profit and you get a brand new ipod.

All of that is well and good and it is in fact why I signed up for Project Payday many many moons ago, the problem was that I’m lazy and doing all that is a lot of work. I realized today however that there is a much easier way to make a little WebMoney off ol’ Project Payday…sign ups.

See the good folks over at Project Payday are willing to pay $1.50 just to get a name and email address (and I don’t think they even take the time to verify the address, hint, hint). In other words, if you click on my Project Payday link, enter a name and email address, I get paid $1.50.

Whoop-tee-doo, what’s in it for you? Hello… McFly…

I shelled out a grand total on $1.95 today to get signed-up and verified by Project Payday. By clicking on my Project Payday link (or any of the Project Payday ads on the site) you can do the same thing and add this revenue stream to YOUR site(s) and add a little WebMoney to your purse! After all, that’s why you / we’re here isn’t it? Yeah, sure I get a little scratch off of it, but hey, Griz made some off me today so pony up!

*** UPDATE ***

There is a new website out called Project Payday Review. I wanted to give you the link so you had a fuller explanation of the whole program. And in the interest of fair play and equal time Project Payday Scam.

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There is another contest out there on the net and I thought I’d let you know about it. The good folks over at EzMoneyOn.net are working the make money online theme and they are sponsoring this contest.

Its pretty simple to enter, in fact they give you some choices about entering. You can write a post about the contest and link back to their blog (eg. THIS post). You can subscribe to their feed via email or a reader. Finally, you can write recommendations for the blog on Entrecard. All of these get you various numbers of entries into the drawing.

The contest runs through March 11th so head on over and drop your name in the hat. What could it hurt? To get more details, be sure to check out their blog and read the post on Great prizes on EzMoneyOn.Net first contest.

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And that’s precisely why I’ve decided to include the following, which discloses the information gathering and dissemination practices for this website.

Log Files

Like most standard websites, this website uses log files. These include: Internet Protocol addresses (IP addresses), browser type, Internet Service Provider (ISP), referring/exit pages, platform type, date/time stamp, and the number of clicks to analyze trends, administer the site, track user movement in the aggregate, and to gather broad demographic information for aggregate use. IP addresses, etc., are not linked to personally identifiable information.

Web Cookies

Web cookies (also known as HTTP cookies, or just cookies) are parcels of text that are sent by a server to a Web browser, and then sent back unchanged by the browser each time it accesses that server. In other words, a cookie is a piece of data stored on a user’s computer that is tied to information about the user.

This website does not use cookies. However, some of my business partners (for example, advertisers) may use cookies. This site has no access to, or control over these cookies once I’ve given permission to them to advertise on this website.

If you wish to disable cookies, you may do so through your individual browser options.

Links

This website contains links to other websites. Please be aware that I am not responsible for the privacy practices of other websites. I encourage you, when you leave this website, to read the privacy statements/policies of each and every website you visit, as this particular privacy policy applies solely to this particular website.

Advertisers

I use outside advertising networks and companies in order to display ads on this site. These ads may contain cookies and/or web beacons in order to collect data in the ad serving process. These such cookies and/or web beacons are collected by the companies and/or advertising networks, themselves. I do not have any access to this information.

I currently work with several advertising networks and companies, such as: Google Adsense, Project Wonderful, Yahoo Publishers Network, Commission Junction, Amazon, eBay, and EntreCard. If you have any questions, please check their websites for their respective privacy policies.

Webmaster Contact Information

If you have any questions or suggestions regarding the Life In the Internet privacy policy, please feel free to contact me at webmaster [at] jtrigsby.com.

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