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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After a bit of my daily web surfing yesterday I stumbled across a new little gem of a WebMoney widget called Money Magnet. It is so simple that it only took a few minutes for me to see how easy it would be to make some extra cash with this Money Magnet thing.

Making money online is the brass ring of the Internet and the Money Magnet guys have found a cool way to do it. Very simply you purchase a Money Magnet widget with PayPal from a site or blog that is displaying one (like THIS BLOG, hint, hint) for as little as $10. After you pay, you are taken directly to the page with the HTML code you need to put the Money Magnet widget on your site.

The cool thing is as soon as your PayPal payment clears, the owner of the site you bought from gets paid IMMEDIATELY! No waiting for minimum payouts, you don’t even have to wait for the end of the month. Your commission is deposited to your PayPal account INSTANTLY!

Another interesting thing about the Money Magnet widget is that you can buy widgets in different monetary amounts! I bought the cheapest at $10. The higher the dollar amount you purchase, the more you earn. For instance, with the $10 Money Magnet widget I will earn $5 for every sale originated through my site, even if the sale is for a $100 widget. Bummer right? Well, not exactly because with the $10 widget I can sell ANY Money Magnet widget ($10, $20, $30, $40, $50, and $100). If I bought the $100 widget I’d earn $50 per sale but I could ONLY sell the $100 widget.

So go ahead and add the 125×125 Money Magnet widget to your blog and see what kind of cash you can receive. All that’s left is to get the traffic! Check out more information and buy your own Money Magnet to start earning at www.GetMoneyMagnet.com.

Enjoy!

- Thom

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The InterWorld is never short of new ways to earn a little scratch, and I’ve discovered one. You should be seeing a little yellow widget to the right over there entitled Money Magnet. This is my newest webmoney widget. The idea is simple…

1. Buy a Money Magnet widget by clicking on my widget over there->
2. You’ll get the code to put a Money Magnet on your web site or blog
3. Encourage people to buy Money Magnet widgets from your site

There are several denominations you can buy from $10 to $100, I bought the $10 widget. With the $10 widget, I get $5 for each Money Magnet widget that is sold from my site(s). If you but a higher denomination, you get more per sale (it’s all explained very well on the Money Magnet site).

So go check it out. It’s simple and looks like it could be a pretty easy way to make a few bucks.

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Back in December I was inspired by Daniel’s 2008 Goals blog writing project over at Daily Blog Tips, and I published my blogging goals for 2008. Well, I’ve made at least one of them already!

Admittedly, back in December I was a bit unsure what my goals should be, after all I had only gotten serious about this blogging thing a couple of weeks earlier. But that didn’t stop me from laying them out there for the world to see.

I has planned an update on the goals for the end of this month to mark the end of the first quarter but I got such a great surprise yesterday that I decided I couldn’t put it off any longer!

Goal Number 7: Break into the top 5,000,000 on Alexa (currently 8,167,786). I blew past the 5,000,000 mark weeks ago but seemed to be stuck just over 1,000,000 for forever…till yesterday. When I opened my browser and looked at the Alexa Rank I was rewarded with 958,194.

Now it doesn’t take much surfing (um, or mathematical acumen) to know that there are still almost 1,000,000 sites ranking higher than mine…but hey I thought it was worth celebrating!

Ok, so here’s the update on all the rest!

Write at least one post every day. I’ve definitely not been making this goal on this blog alone, then again I have about a million times more blogs than when I wrote this goal too. Realistically, I’d like to post 2-3 times a week here so….there’s my UPDATED goal for 2008.

Network with (not just link to) other bloggers. I’ve done ok with this one I guess. I’ve been working diligently in the local niche arena lately and I’ve been in touch with lots of folks there. I also had the pleasure of making a guest post at The Writers Manifesto entitled 3 Tips To Make Working At Home Easier. Thanks Monika for the opportunity!

Average at least 100 daily unique visitors. Wow, just went to calculate this and I’m embarrassed to post it… maybe next time! (As kind of a consolation I will say that my local niche site East of Huntsville is averaging 44.4 per day!) (Another side note, my series on LOST on ABC has helped a lot)

Average at least 300 daily page views. Again, too embarrassing to print. (East of Huntsville, 82/day)

Have at least 100 RSS subscribers. Today the number is 13. I don’t watch this one every day because it is the least dependable and often most depressing number. I am satisfied with the progress overall in this category though because the trend is up! (BTW, if you’d like to subscribe to my feed…)

Average at least 3 comments per post. Well, this number isn’t very good yet either but here tis: .38 per post, yes, you read that correctly. The average is less than one…but it’s not zero!

Break into the top 5,000,000 on Alexa (currently 8,167,786). Already addressed this one (yeah!) but since I’ve hit on East of Huntsville, I thought I’d mention that EOH’s Alexa page rank is 986,715 today! Not bad for a site I hadn’t even created when I wrote my goals!

Generate at least $500 monthly. Well, progress here is slow but it is still progress! January and February were still less than $10 each and the trend is increasing. I’ve added two new revenue generators this month, ProjectWonderful ads and Yahoo! Publisher Network ads. We’ll see how they go.

Ok, there’s my update. As always comments with praise, ideas, or just to say hi are always welcomed and encouraged. And remember, you can be sure to get future updates by subscribing to the feed.

If you follow BloggerUnleashed.com then you should already know about the Mission Possible contest that Vic is putting on. If you haven’t, stay tuned here at jtrigsby.com and you can follow my progress at jtrigsby.bloggerunleashed.com, that will be my blog for the contest. thanks for your support and see you soon.

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Over the past year I’ve been on a quest to find the way to make money from home/on the Internet… and I’ve seen plenty. Everything from bogus ads on Craigs List to mortgage brokering. During that time I’ve also done lots of reading on finances, debt, and getting things done. Through all of this I was beginning to piece together what I thought was a pretty original framework for how to work my way out of debt, build some residual income, and not have to work 26 hours a day. Then I found Brian Lee’s blog, Genius Types.

If anyone else had been home they would have seen me sitting slack-jawed in front of my monitor reading all the things I had just moments ago been so proud of as original thought! But instead of being mad, upset, or disappointed… I was thrilled! Brian had just confirmed my ideas and gave me even more confidence in my own. The link that got it all started was to his number one article, Five Ways to Create Passive Income With Little Or No Money. For the better part of the remaining day I wandered around through Brian’s posts gleaning nuggets of wisdom and encouragement. Wow!

Brian doesn’t just tell you how, he proves that it works!

While there is no shortage of blogs that will tell you how to make money online, some even promising huge payback in a couple of weeks, Brian is a bit more practical and doesn’t mind proving it.

First, Genius Types is all about passive income, what I call mailbox money. Little or no effort for a regular, recurring income stream. Without a doubt there are ways to make your Internet business pay off quickly, but from what I’ve seen they take lots of time and effort…and then they’re gone. I’m willing to make the trade-off of slower start for longer return!

Second, and this has been the kicker for me, Brian posts a detailed breakdown of where his blog income comes from each month! Granted, I haven’t read the whole Internet yet, but I have yet to find anyone else bold enough to do this. This also means Brian is complete transparent about how much he makes. While he hasn’t broken the $1,000 a month plateau yet, he does grow his income each month and that is the name of the game.

All Part of the Plan

Finally, Brian is using the Internet as one source of income that is part of a larger plan, one that will free him from the mouse wheel of working for debt and allow him and his family the latitude to pursue their joys and passions. This is the reason I like Brian and his approach so much! He’s not out looking for the quick buck, he’s put together a plan and he’s working the plan.

So many times people get into a temporary bind (like charging up credit cards for Christmas?) and go out looking for a quick payday to get out of that whole, only to dig a new one the very next day. That’s crazy, but it was me and 98% of the rest of America. I hope that by drawing attention to Brian’s blog that more of us Internet citizens will wake up and see what we’ve been doing to ourselves and maybe glean some great pearls from Genius Types to help jump off that treadmill!

Thanks Brian for all your work on Genius Types! Keep up the good work and good luck.

-Thom

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Write at least one post every day
Network with (not just link to) other bloggers
Average at least 100 daily unique visitors
Average at least 300 daily page views
Have at least 100 RSS subscribers
Average at least 3 comments per post
Break into the top 5,000,000 on Alexa (currently 8,167,786)
Generate at least $500 monthly ($4.11 last month, I know, long way to go, right?)

Wish me luck!

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For those of us that live our lives in cyber-space, we’re used to wading through a bunch of junk mail everyday, every once-in-a-while finding a gem even. But most Internet citizens think of it as the worst the web has to offer. Too bad, because it can be a very useful communication tool with the businesses you want to hear from, say Super Suppers or Creative Courtroom (just to name a couple of completely random companies).

Email Marketing is simply using email to distribute your marketing message, instead of (or in addition to!) the newspaper, magazines, or (Heaven help us!) telemarketing!

I actually do quite a bit of Email Marketing, almost 10,000 emails a month, and all of it with one vendor, Constant Contact!

Constant Contact is a service that gives me the tools to manage my contact list, design email from very simple to very elaborate, and automate the sending process. They also spend a lot of time working with ISP’s to make sure as many of their emails get through as possible AND making sure they stay off the RBL’s (real time black lists!). No small feat my friends.

I’ve included a link below if you want to try them out. They have a 60 day free trial going on right now so don’t miss it. You can also email me if you have any questions about how it works or how to make the most from your email marketing campaign!

- Thom

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While reading through the various links that came through my GoogleReader page today, I came across this one… and I quote:

“Let’s see if I have this right. Google places links to other people’s web sites on my site and they pay me for each hit. WHY? What’s in it for Google? How does Google know if the hits are coming from me…just to increase my check from them?”

It was then and there that I decided to write this article, so Ralph, here you go buddy!

If you look down the right margin on this page, then again at the bottom (and probably several more locations as well) you’ll see links grouped together with a small tag line at the bottom that says, “Ads by Google”. I have reserved these spaces and use a Google AdSense component to display these links to other people’s web sites. In return for letting them use my screen “real estate” Google pays me a few cents per link clicked. That’s pretty much how AdSense works…in a nutshell. But now the better question of Why? What’s in it for Google?

I have forgotten who said it but I think the quote goes, “If in doubt, follow the money.” Well that certainly applies in this case. Google is in business to make money, right!?! In addition to AdSense, Google has a program called AdWords. People with websites that want people to visit their site (eg, Joe’s Pumpkin Patch) create an account with Google AdWords and bid on certain key words (eg, “pumpkins”). When a website (like mine) mentions that keyword (pumpkins) frequently enough, and has space reserved for AdSense ads, then my site would display an ad for Joe’s Pumpkin Patch. Now, when Joe setup his account with AdWords, he agreed to pay $.05 to Google every time somebody clicked on a link to his Pumpkin Patch website. Google in turn pays a portion of that revenue out to the websites that display the ads. And there you have the magic of Google Advertising!

And finally, Google knows the hits are coming from my site because the link doesn’t go directly to Joe’s Pumpkin Patch, it goes to Google, THEN to Joe’s website.

Now don’t think Google is the only player in this game, or even the first. Yahoo! (and others) were doing it long before the Google search engine even went live. Google has however become the top dog for many, many reasons.

So this non-authoritative, non-comprehensive, (yet lengthy!) post leaves us with a couple of take aways.

First, create a Google AdSense account and get some ads on your website/blog!!! It is FREE and only stands to make you some money. Worst case, it won’t cost you anything and you won’t make anything.

If you have a website to promote, use Google AdWords. There are literally volumes out there on picking the right keywords, how much to pay, etc. Here are a couple of good places to start:

AdWordsHowTos

Besting AdWords
(This site makes EXTENSIVE use of AdSense advertising!)

Earning Thousands With AdWords

And finally, this is just the beginning! There are hundreds of ways to make money off your site/blog. None of them may make you rich by themselves, but as I’ve always said… nickles make dollars! Happy hunting and good luck!!!

-Thom

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If you are/have then here is a great article on maximizing your landing pages by Jon Rognerud. It comes from his blog SEO World.

Enjoy.

- Thom

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