Blog Archive

Apr 09 2016

Born For This

Last night was the fourth stop on the book launch tour for Chris Guillebeau and his new book “Born for This” at the Eureka Building in Irvine. I’ve. been following Chris for a while and bought his program on maximizing your frequent flyer miles. I guess because I bought one of his programs, I got put on the gift list for a pre-publication copy of “Born For This”, with typos and poorly phrased sentences included at no extra charge. (That’s what the letter said. I just thought it was cool to get a pre-publication copy.)

Then, to my surprise, on the release date I received a free copy of the released book. I wasn’t about about to miss someone a chance to go see somone who works that hard to keep their raving fans raving, So, when he was in town, I was there.

The Main Presentation

Harry Campbell of theRideshareGuy.com (see page 149 of the book) lives nearby in Huntington Beach, and he showed up too. Harry looked a little surprised that someone in the audience actually applauded when his name was mentioned. I’ve been following his blog for a while and am quite impressed with how he has actually turned it into a full time business. And, I am especially impressed since he only started it about two years ago. So, yeah, when his name was mentioned, I thought some polite applause was appropriate.

Chris did a nice slideshow presentation that summarized and complemented the book nicely. I can’t really do it justice here. Just try to catch him on the tour.

In the question and answer session, I commented to Chris that “The nice thing about being in a cage is that you get fed regularly.” a metaphor for being trapped in a job by the fear of losing your steady income. I felt very proud of it and Chris even mentioned that he would like to use it at some point in the future. (You’re welcome to it Chris, just credit it please) But he pointed out that you can start with a side hustle – it might even turn in to full time business like Harry’s did. He also pointed out that entrepreneurship may be more secure than a job. Frankly, I know hes right about that. I’ve been there before. I crashed and burned and have been afraid to fly ever since. But the reality is that I was more secure with multiple sources of income through my business that I am with a single employer. To be fair, I have several side hustles going on now and my real problem is that its really hard to grow them while having another job that takes up most of my time.

Chris, being the author of “The $100 Startup” and the founder of “The World Domination Summit” is a superstar in the blogging and entrepreneurial communities, but Harry is more approachable. He’s doing well, but not so well that he is swarmed by people when he shows up to an event. There was a ring around the table as Chris was signing copies of his book, but only five or six of us around Harry. For me, Harry’s talk about what he did to get his blog going was more valuable that Chris’ talk. (Ok, Chris, you created the whole thing and you brought Harry. Its not that I don’t love you and the book, its that my problem right now is TRAFFIC.)

The Rideshare Guy and Traffic Tips

Funny thing, when it was Harry’s turn to talk, he stood on the floor rather than getting up on the stage. He said he preferred the “baby stage.” When you can drive 500,000 page views a month, its time to step up to the big stage.

Now, Harry picked an opportune time to start his blog. He said he searched the internet and didn’t find anything like it, but there were already about 100,000 drivers on the road. My guess is that somebody out there somewhere HAD started something, but hadn’t taken the action to really get it going. Regardless, rideshare was still young, and its good to get on the train before it leaves the station. But massive action is crucial, and Harry clearly took action. This wasn’t the first blog that Harry had done, he had maybe six projects before that had not succeeded, but at least they honed his writing skills.

The key to building traffic, he said, was thinking about where his target audience hung out and going there. So, for example, Lyft and Uber had online forums for their drivers. Harry also found that the customer support wasn’t very good, so he made a point of finding the right answers to the most common questions and posting them in his blog. Then when people would ask about it, he would give an answer that he had written about it in his blog and include a link.

I had an opportunity at the end of the event to get a picture with Chris and/or Harry. For some reason, I was taking pictures instead of getting them taken. I think I have a fear of looking like a groveling groupie, but a picture or two would be better for the blog.

Takeaways

1) Life is too short to be doing work you hate. Search for a combination of Flow, Joy and Money in your occupation. Persistence is important, but don’t be afraid to change course if it isn’t working. (I think this really should be persist in taking action, but don’t be afraid to adjust your course) Buy Chris’ book for more details.

2) If you’re starting a blog, you need to put some boots on the ground to get traffic. Don’t expect it to start flowing from Google. Write regularly, but promote more regularly. Go where your potential fans will be and help them. Let them know where to find you. They will start to follow you.

3) Get over your stupid fears and take action. Get pictures with all the people you meet. Get video for that matter. Don’t let the risk of appearing awkward stop you. In the future, when you become hugely successful, they will appreciate being able to say they knew you when…and having photographic proof.

4) Go to events. Meet people. Network. You will be inspired and it will help you create more. Plus, the connections you make will be crucial to help you in whatever you do.

Feb 04 2016

Bloggers You Should Follow

I was at a “Dot Com” luncheon a few weeks ago with John Chow and his trusted sidekick Oscar Gonzalez and was discussing the people I followed on web to learn about internet marketing. I realized that a concise list of them could be helpful to a lot of people. (I also realized that such postings could very likely be beneficial to my rankings.)

Frankly, there are a lot of good blogs but it does take some time to discover them. So here I plan to create a list of bloggers that I think will be very useful to you for various aspects of your internet business.

I will create a short post about each and then link that post here with a quick summary about why you should follow each of them. I’m starting out with Pat Flynn because he is the first blog that I found when I started out online and even though he gives very general information, its from him that I found most of the other great bloggers that I follow.

Each entry will consist of three parts – the name of the blogger, which will link to my page on them, the name of the blog, which will link to their blog and finally their tagline if they have one and if not, my tagline for them.

Pat Flynn, Smart Passive Income, “Let’s See What Works”

Check back, because I plan to update this page regularly.

Dec 09 2015

There’s No Easy Money

I get email all the time asking me” “How can I make money fast on the internet?” The answer is: “You Can’t.”

Yes, You Can Make Money Fast

No, you can’t. Well, you can, but you can’t. Let me explain.

I have a friend that came up with a system for generating leads from YouTube. It doesn’t really matter what the system was because it does’t work anymore. The first time they put it up, they brought in 40,000+ new leads to their email list in just a couple of days. So many leads that their auto-responder service provide called them up and was going to suspend their account because of fake signups. Fortunately, they managed to convince them that they were trying something new and legitimate.

A list of genuine email addresses collected in an organic way and properly followed up with is worth between 50 cents and $1 each per month on the average. And they properly followed up and made the money that can be expected from a list of that size. So, that’s $20,000 per month, starting to come in a few days after they started.

Easy Money, Right?

Wrong.

They didn’t start out on day one, come up with this idea and start making money. They built a number of other lists first. They already know all the basics of how to build a website, a landing page, a lead magnet, a good auto-responder followup sequence. They know how all the systems work. They knew how to followup and build a relationship with the leads they got. They had a good relationship with their email provider. That took years to build.

They were an overnight success, after 4 years of hard work.

They didn’t buy the technique from anyone. They sat down, thought outside of the box and came up with something they thought would work and then tested it. And this one happened to work spectacularly. Many don’t, but this one did.

“But, I see people all over offering their systems…..”

Ok. My friend had a great system. What do you think he did with it? Do you think he immediately turned it into a product for sale to tell others how to do it? Would you?

Of course not!!

He used it and used it and used it. He cranked the handle of his money making machine until the handle wore off. Then, when it started to get harder to make money with it, THEN he decided to make a product. And of course, he pitched that product to the appropriate list and made a bunch of money with it. He had great proof that it worked because he had made a ton of money with it. The trouble is that by then, the system was getting burned out and didn’t work like it did in the beginning. It might work well enough for a buyer to feel they didn’t waste their money (If they were one of the few that actually implemented it after they bought it. Most don’t.) And that is assuming, of course, that the person who bought it already knew how to do the technical stuff that I talked about above. It certainly wasn’t going to work anywhere near as well or as easy for anyone who bought it as it did for my friend.

You might consider buying some systems to see how the work, And to think about how they might have worked at an earlier time. The most important thing is to help you learn to thing up ideas that will work before everyone else gets to them. But if you think someone is going to sell you a money printing machine, you’re just wrong.

Conclusion

Here’s what you need to remember:

If someone has a system that is making easy money, they aren’t going to sell it to you.
It takes experience and work to put a system together, even if someone gives you the framework.
Easy money comes only after a lot of hard work.

So, stop chasing easy money and start working to build your niche. Try to understand how to think up clever ideas. When you come up with one, test it out quickly. If it works, milk it for all its worth until it runs out. Its not easy money, but it can be big money if you put in the work.

P.S. There IS easy money in Las Vegas

Here is the system: Play roulette. Put $1,000 on the green “00” Let them spin once. If it hits, you’ll have $36,000. It probably won’t hit, but if it does, you’ll have made a lot of money fast. It’s easy. it doesn’t take any knowledge. Just remember to bet it all and on a single spin. The more times you bet, the closer you will come to the average payout of 94.7368%

And look, I gave it too you for free.

Oct 25 2015

Blog frequently

This is a short but very important post.

I’ve been studying the performance of the sites I operate or am involved with. Its become very clear that two factor have a very significant impact on the amount of search engine traffic I get.

The number of pages on a site.
The frequency of posting.

Everything that I read, tells me that I need to write epic posts, but the data tells me otherwise. I believe that epic posts will help improve the links that you get back, but epic posts take a long time to write. On one of my sites, the posts are very thin, but multiple posts are going up every day. That site has been steadily gaining organic search traffic. I have another site that is similar, but only gets a post a day. Its gaining organic search traffic faster than my other sites. Not as fast as the one that gets multiple posts a day, but still faster than the ones that get a post a week.

The conclusion that I’ve reached is that you should make a point of getting out at least a small post a day. Don’t worry about the word count, but try to make sure it has some actionable information.

And the actionable content here?

You guessed it. Blog frequently, daily if possible, or more.

Oct 23 2015

Celebrate your unsubscribes

Lost a subscriber from your list?

Celebrate!!

You want to grow your email list. So you’re always happy when new people subscribe to your list.

But here’s a good reason to be happy when people unsubscribe from your list as well.

You see, the objective is to get a happy engaged list. The total number of people on your list isn’t that important. What’s important is that the people on your list are interested in what you have to say.

There is a major retailer who got me on their list. I’m not sure how I got there. I think at some point I put my email on some transaction with them and they decided that since I have done business with them, I’m fair game their email broadcasts. And under the spam laws, they’re correct. I’m a former customer so its technically not spam.

Then their marketing staff must have read an article somewhere that says, “the more you mail your list, the more money you will make.”

The trouble is, I find the company completely uninspiring and their email is a major annoyance. It would be less of an annoyance, if they sent it weekly. But they send it daily. They send it often enough, that I decided “hey, I’m tired of this junk. I need to unsubscribe.”

So when I click the unsubscribe button, they put up a message that says it may take up to seven days to take me off their list.

Really? Seven days? How hard is it to remove my name from their list. Now I know that not only are they an uninspiring company with annoying and irrelevant email, their IT staff is a bunch of idiots. Well, that or they just want an excuse to try to send me a few more emails before I’m gone.

Why would you do that? I’ve just been good enough to let them know I’m not their target customer. Now they want to leave a bad taste and make me think of them as a spammer as well. Maybe I, and a few thousand other similarly situated people will hit the spam button n response to some of their emails. That could create deliverability issues for the people who are on their list and want to receive the emails. If they use an independent service, they might get banned.

When somebody unsubscribes from your list, you should celebrate!! They helped you focus your list to people who really care about what you have to say. They saved their time and yours.

If somebody wants off your list, make it easy for them. If you don’t want people to leave your list, send them stuff of value far enough apart that they have time to digest it and make use of it. But when they want off, for God’s sake, LET THEM GO.

Both you and they will be better off for it.

And that is a reason to celebrate your unsubscribes.