Keyword Research with a little help from our Google

I’m currently researching the keywords I want to promote over the Christmas buying season, as my gadgets site is established and already does pretty well from the search engines my primary promotion method is going to be SEO. I’m not going to write about the products I’m promoting here (as that would be rather silly) but I will share the tools and process I use in my research.

As a working example I’m going to pretend that I’ll be promoting satellite navigation systems, which actually wouldn’t be a bad product to choose, they are a relatively high value and a potentially popular Christmas present. So first off is researching the most popular search term for these and looking to see if they have been popular for Chrimbo in the past.

Checking Trends
I always refer to my satelite navigation system as a sat nav as I expect most people do, but I want to market to a global audience so I’d like to check that. This is where Google Trends helps, it doesn’t give exact search figures but does let you compare the popularity between terms.

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SEO Checklist (for Dummies)

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a fan of checklists and after seeing some of the comments or our recent site reviews I thought it would be a good idea to create an SEO checklist. If you have any suggestions on things that we should add to this list please let us know.

I like to break the process of SEO into 3 different parts:
On Page - This is what should be done on individual pages
On Site - These are things that can be done across your entire site to improve overall SEO
Off Page/Site - Influencing factors on other sites

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Long Tail Searches by Example

Ranking for a single keyword can be very lucrative (just ask Scott and his tattoos) but ranking for any semi-competitive keyword or phrase is both difficult (especially for new sites) and may not be the most profitable of rankings. Whilst doing a bit of stat research last week I found I was getting a bit of traffic for the term inflatable water slides, after checking on Google I saw my site was currently in the #2 spot but the year old page was getting twice as much traffic as that ranking was generating, time for a bit more research.

In the past two weeks the page has been found 1,435 for the term ‘inflatable waterslide’, however Google Analytics was reporting:

This page was viewed 2,794 times via 147 keywords

So it was getting nearly the same amount of traffic again from 146 different phrases. I won’t list all the phrases here as that would get somewhat repetitive however here’s a selection of the top and bottom. (more…)

Backlinks Backlinks Backlinks

No, the title of this blog post isn’t designed to be keyword stuffing, it describes probably the most important ranking factor and single thing every webmaster has had great trouble with, more so today than at any previous point in the history of the internet.

The history
Some of us started many years ago with sites that were not monetised and like any information portal like a tourist information office that had leaflets to related attractions, events and accommodation most websites freely linked out to other sites of interest or relevance. Logical capt’n.

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Analyzing Stats to get More Money and Traffic

My last bout of traffic analysis resulted in two posts here (long tail searches and one on optimising Adsense positioning) and a bit of extra cash (which is always nice). It was also successful in two other ways, one of which should bring me a bit more traffic and the other a bit of extra income.

Remonetize Popular Content
Using Google Analytics it’s easy to see which of your pages are the most popular. I find you never really know which pages are going to become popular in the search engines but statistical analysis does sort of give you the benefit of hind sight. Once I see a page is bringing in a bit of traffic I’ll revisit it and see if there are any suitable affiliate programs I could promote. You know what people are searching for to find the page so if you can find them a suitable product everybody benefits.

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Trialling a Feed Advert

I’m after a bit of feedback on this idea, so all thoughts and suggestions are very welcome (and there’ll be a bonus for commenting).

I’m trying to get more visitors to my site from my feed, so I spent an hour over the weekend creating a plug-in for WordPress that lets me display an extra sentence or so at the end of each post but only in the feed and not on the site. I intend to put an advertising link back to the main site where I can push visitors to affiliate pages with relevant offers.

If you want to see it in action subscribe to the SMM or CG feed.

After creating the plug-in it got me thinking how it could be used in a few different ways:

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Taking Your Site Mobile

I travel a fair bit on both business and pleasure and when away I become totally reliant on my mobile phone, I don’t use it so much for calls but I do use it extensively for checking email, news (mainly football results), my sites and making the odd blog post.

I use the mobile version of GMail as my mail client, they do have a Java version especially for mobiles but I find their mobile enhanced web version works a treat especially since it’s been improved so that you can perform the same action on multiple messages via check boxes. As I do so much browsing on my mobile I think it makes perfect sense to include a mobile version of some of my sites (the fact that Adsense for mobiles is now live also helped kick me into action).
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Automatically Increased Affiliate Revenue by 15%

Last week I got round to one of those jobs that I’ve wanted to do for a while and that’s making my affiliate links a bit more visitor friendly and readable. I’ve mentioned before how I automatically convert links to sites that I have a relationship with to their corresponding affiliate links, I’ve now taken this a stage further and have created a Word Press plug-in to make it easy to add new affiliates as I find them.

The way the plug-in works is it searches for the domain of merchants that I have an affiliate program with adjusts it accordingly, for example http://www.thinkgeek.com/ would be converted on the fly to the equivalent affiliate link of :
http://www.anrdoezrs.net/se121lnwtnvACIJCEHEACBEGHEDF?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thinkgeek.com%2Fgeektoys%2Fgames%2F7eaa%2F&sid=cg-http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thinkgeek.com%2Fgeektoys%2Fgames%2F7eaa%2F/geektoys/games/7eaa/

As you can see the affiliate link is pretty darn ugly and to the (slighty) trained eye it is obviously an affiliate link which does put some people (especially tech savvy webmasters) off clicking it.
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My First $1,000 Adsense Day

Over the past month I’ve been pushing affiliates sales with varying levels of success and I’ve been pretty much ignoring Adsense and even removing it from some pages to concentrate more on sales, so I’m some what surprised to be sat here on Cyber Monday writing about hitting one of my Adsense goals, the $1,000 Adsense day .
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Make it Easy, Make it Obvious

So far this month I’ve had 15 record days, in terms of both profit and traffic. I’m hoping for this to continue until just before Christmas so as you can imagine I’m a tad on the busy side looking for new things to promote and ways to make the most of the traffic I already have.

This next tip is really really simple, so simple in fact that it’s easily overlooked (well it was by me anyway). At the moment people are in buying mode so make it easy and obvious for them, one thing I did was add the following button to some of my affiliate pages:

It’s a hack of one of the buttons found on Amazon (which even my limited graphical skills could do). So far the results look really good with conversions on the pages involved 50 - 100% up (how much of that can be put down to it being a day closer to Christmas I’m not sure).

So it’s a short post today, but if it’s suitable for your site could prove to be a very profitable one.

That’s another wrap!

Coming soon Adsense changes without altering code from your control panel,

For instance, you can quickly change the borders of all your 300×250 medium rectangles from red to blue with just a few mouse clicks

via the Adsense Blog

Loren comments on how Google have had 1 million job applications a year.

Acorn add an auction area to their forum so feel free to pick up a bargain

The big SE story of the week is Google slapping a load of page rank penalties on numerous sites, including mine (PR6 down to PR3), Engadget (PR7 down to PR5) ProBlogger (PR6 to PR4), Andy Beard (PR5 to PR3) and the list goes on…

There’s lots of views and speculations on this latest update, check out Tech Crunch, Twenty Steps, Search Engine Land, Courtney Tuttle, Daily Blog Tips, the news even got into more mainstream media like The Guardian.

As far as I’m concerned as long as I’m still getting traffic I don’t give a shit about PR, which touch wood at the moment is certainly the case. So I’m a proud PR3 site owner .

If you’re fortunate enough to have site links (otherwise known as authority listings) in the SERPS you can now tell encourage Google with which ones to display via Webmaster Tools (found via webmaster central).

This weeks game was submitted by one of our readers, check out Gravitee, golf in space, thanks Steve.

Finding What to Write About on a Product Based Blog

When blogging on CG I often get asked how do I find new products to write about, I won’t provide exact sources but I will share how I found the sources that I use.

In the gadget niche there are a hundreds (if not thousands) of sites reporting on all the latest and greatest gizmos. I subscribe to about 200 feeds and monitor them though out the day, especially the less popular ones which often pick-up on new stories that the big boys haven’t seen yet. If I see something that’s new and hasn’t be covered on a load of other sites yet I’ll write about and link to the source I first saw it on.

Trade shows are a great excuse to get out and about and meet the people behind the products that you’re writing about. They also give you the opportunity to get your camera out and create 100% unique content. I went to CES in Vegas this year and will be doing so every year for the foreseeable future which is a great way of enjoying a bit of the revenue I make before the tax man sees it.

I also buy a load of newspaper and tech related magazines, again if the cover anything I’ve not seen much of else where I’ll write about. I find the Sunday papers are often a good source of material (through you do have to wade through a load of crud and celebrity gossip).

Next off are the many gadget shops on the Internet, some have RSS feeds so it’s easy to see when they have new products whilst with others you’ll need to check the “What’s New” page or if that don’t have one of those then they may show new products on the homepage.

Contacts, having contacts at relevant shops is great for getting press releases and early notification of new products. Once your blog is established you’ll find company reps contacting you about their products (a nice source of freebies and competition prizes).

Encourage readers to send links to new things they’ve found interesting, if it’s reader submitted there is a good chance other readers will also like it.

When I’m really stuck for inspiration, I’ll visit any one gadget blog follow a link from there to site with an interesting product and then browse that site for anything else that I think my readers would enjoy. Products don’t have to new to be cool they just have to be new to your readers.

This is how a find things to write about on a product based blog, an information based blog like this one is totally different and maybe a subject for another post.

I’m flying off on holiday this afternoon so comments as always are more than welcome but I may be a bit slow responding.

Getting your Subscribers to visit your Blog

Having a high feed subscriber count is great from an ego and getting the word out point of view but not so much for your profit line. Feeds are notoriously hard to monetise well, whether that will change with Googles recent acquisition of Feedburner, time will tell. I find the best way to profit from feed subscribers is to get them to the site, which is what this post is about.

Links
Relevant internal linking is both helpful to your readers and will provide an easy route back to the site for your readers to follow. As well as linking to individual posts also link to categories e.g. “I came across this really cool traffic building tips“, this is also a great way to create keyword rich internal links that the search engines love.

An automated way to add relevant links is to install a “Related Posts” plugin, this will create links to related posts at the end of new ones. Most plug-ins only seem to this on the site and not on the feed so you might need to do a bit of manual tweaking.

Videos
The majority of feedreaders don’t show embedded scripts, which is a great excuse for a “Can’t see the video, click here” link.

Feedback (again)
Make you site encourage interaction, feedback via comments or polls again, need a site visit.

Titles, titles and titles
A fair few feed readers and RSS portals (like personalised Google homepage) can be set-up to just display post titles which link back to your site and actual post, so making attention grabbing titles will maximise the chance of getting that extra visitor.

Summary Posts
Depending on your post frequency you could do this every day, week or month. It’s useful for your readers as they might of missed an earlier story and it gives your site an extra post with more SEF links for very little effort. I do this on CG with an thumbnail image gallery (plugin for WordPress over here).

Whilst writing this post I wondered about coding a plug-in that would automatically create links based on textual content. So in an admin screen you’d enter phrases and corresponding links and then when any page is rendered it would automatically create those links for you. If anybody is interested in this let me know (via a comment ) and that will be the push I need to do it.

Grow your traffic by over 300% for FREE within 3 months

If you build your traffic to say at least 200 visitors per day for example which is a very achievable target for any new website then the next step would be to watch that grow rapidly if you spend time implementing strategy to make your website sticky, yes you may have read that term many many times but taking the time out to analyse your website and look at your numbers tells you whether your doing it correctly or not.

Firstly check your new versus repeat visitor numbers, growing your repeat visitor numbers not only helps waterproof you from any sudden ranking drops by Google, it also lets you grow rapidly using your existing user base.

I would aim for somewhere in the high 20’s, even for a well monetised website if you do a good job you should be looking for at least 20% returning visitor percentage. For my tattoo website it is 22.25% and I noticed from Al’s post yesterday his is around 25% for his gadget site.

If you can make 20% of your visitors return then after a week of getting 200 visitors per day you could be looking at an extra 280 visitors in week 2 for FREE! Extrapolate that through 3 months and you could go from 200 visitors per day to 640 just using the same new 200 visitors per day that arrive to your site and retaining 40 of them.

At the start refraining from using adsense and instant monetisation is important as that very quickly takes your new visitor off site when you need to be building a good user base, most of the methods are very simple but can have a huge influence over your traffic numbers over a short period.

To demonstrate we are talking about retaining 40 visitors per day from 200 visitors being fresh traffic so basically adding 280 visitors per week to your current stats.
Week 1 1400
Week 2 1680
Week 3 1960
Week 4 2240
.
.
.
Week 12 = 4480 visitors - that’s going from 200 per day to 640 per day in 3 months!
Apply that to a larger website and it like going from 1000 visitors per day to 3400 per day, therefore probably one of the most important jobs to focus on and it is free for the most part.

Things that can make a difference in my experience

• Having an ‘Add to favourites’ link or button, make it prominent and have it throughout your website, traffic arrives into all your pages not just your homepage, have it in the navigation and at the end of ALL articles or pages, don’t make people look for it.
• Reduce monetisation like adsense while you build the userbase up
• Have a Favicon, quick and easy to add and lets the bookmark stand out in a browsers favourite list potentially alerting bored users to the bookmark and returning.
• Get user involvement, if visitors add comments, images, text or suggestions they are far more likely to return to see how other visitors feel, this can be rating images, voting, polls, comments, suggestions and competitions.
• Have a mailing list if applicable, a mailing list is a great way to alert previous users of new changes and additions thus surging returning users.
• Add a forum, again if you feel it will work a forum offers a great incentive for users to return.
• Empower your visitors, letting visitors decide in certain aspects of how your website works empowers them and offers a great incentive for them to enjoy your website and return so try and let them decide as much as possible how they experience your site, this may be allowing registered users the ability to affect ads, colour schemes, navigation etc
• RSS feeds allow visitors to subscribe to the latest content from your website but if you run a blog do not presume your readership will all be tech savy, guide your visitors through the process.
• Most importantly, give them what they are looking for! Trickery and misinformation is great maybe for short term gain but if your here for the long haul and want that one website to do well over a long period of time then give users what they are looking for, at the very least offer a certain amount for free and offer subscription paid services for more content & features.

Aside from forum based websites I think most website showing around 20%-30% repeat traffic numbers would be doing a good job of encouraging return visits and in turn building a safer future from the source of current traffic, any less than that and I’d consider it high on the todo list.

Buy for 2 years income and repay yourself in one year

Still bargains to be had
I bought a website with an old friend who wanted to invest money with me last month, he doesn’t work online, the most important point being that it was zero maintenance as it would be unfair for me to have to run a site and him profit so we bought a site advertised on Digital Point for 24 x monthly income which needed zero maintenance and cost us in total USD $7000. Making just under $10 per day the site would take a full 2 years to pay itself back which for an established low/zero maintenance site is about right in my opinion. (more…)

Learning the Hard Way - Check Your Affiliate Links

This is a fantastic time of year for Christmas product related sites and it’s where the work you’ve done throughout the year can really reap rewards. Over the last 2 weeks I’ve seen all income streams increase between 50 and 250%, which makes checking stats every morning a very exciting time. Each day I’m looking for and pushing new affiliate products to my existing visitors and feed subscribers and I’m checking stats for pages that are getting bit of traffic to see if there are any related products I can push there.

The Clickbank product I mentioned a couple of weeks ago has now generated just over $600 in commissions, which considering I just added an extra paragragh and affiliate link to an existing page is a pretty nice return IMO. However by my own daftness I’ve managed to lose in the region of $5,000 over the last 6 weeks or so by giving away my traffic.
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Mini Sites don’t always make mini money

I love mini sites!

Definition: A mini site is a small website with a very narrow subject focus and have their own identity often on their own domain name.

Mini sites offer several functions and can be used for PPC Adsense adverts or affiliate sales or product promotion, they tackle one narrow subject with an article and can be a single page or a few pages in size.

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Make More Money by Analyzing Your Adsense Stats

I am something of a stats head and can easily spend hours going over traffic graphs, Adsense screens and referral logs. One of the great things about the web is the shear amount of stats available, you don’t need to employ mystery shoppers or send out surveys to your customers, you can simply install a script and find out more information about your visitors than you’ll ever need.

One thing you need to be cautious of is checking stats for the sake of checking stats. Like most webmasters when I first started out with Adsense I’d be checking income every hour or so to see if there’d been any clicks, a complete waste of time but difficult to resist. As income goes up it does get easier though I still find myself checking at least once per day, especially when approaching milestones.

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Adsense Goals

There are plenty of income streams available on the Net with Adsense being the most popular and easiest to get started with. One of the things I’ve found that has really helped me grow my Adsense earnings is the setting of goals, I didn’t set goals at the start which is probably one of the reasons I got off to a somewhat slow one.

A chart clearly displaying your goals with dates is a great motivator. With my goal chart I have it clearly visible at home, this serves as an ongoing reminder and was a great motivator in the early days when friends snigger at the low earnings.

This is my chart so far.

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Accidentaly Improving Adsense Income

This is another of those posts about sharing experiences and experiments. A couple of months ago I reported on the revenue streams of one of my sites and how the biggest slice of pie revenue was taken by Adsense and how I wanted to increase other income sources to minimize this dependency.

One of the other revenue streams I looked at was Tribal Fusion. They are a CPM ad network meaning you get paid per impression rather than per click. I implemented them a couple of months ago and placed a 468×60 banner at the top of each page, a vertical banner on the left navigation bar and rectangle in between posts on index pages. These ad positions were previously not used for anything constructive so any income generated should just be an addition, thus reducing the Adsense percentage and increasing the income to boot.
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Finding Paid Writers

When I first started out blogging I used to write all the content myself, it didn’t take me long to realise that this is exceedingly time consuming and puts limits on how much you can produce in any given day. I’m also somewhat dyslexic so I have to triple check everything that I write (spelling and grammar checkers are my friends) . Investing in paid writers makes it a lot easier to maintain regular updates to a site or blog and help it grow, but finding good paid writers can be difficult, in this post I’ll share where all the writers for CG came from. (more…)

When to monetize a new site or blog

Many a website or blog are started with the sole purpose of making cash (and if you’re reading this blog I’m sure you know what I’m talking about), I know a lot of new and aspiring webmasters and questions I get asked a lot are:

• How can I make money from my 3 hour old blog?
• Are my ads blended enough?
• My brother and his pet dog have been banned from Adsense how else can I make money?
• How many ads should I put on my page?
• I haven’t got any subscribers yet so how should I monetize my feed?

I’m a pretty helpful guy (maybe a bit selfishly helpful due to my belief in karma) and the answer I almost always give is:

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Which blogs have the most feed subscribers

I’m a bit of a stat head and enjoy trawling through log files and looking at pretty graphs. One statistic that I’m particularly interested in is the number of subscribers different sites have in different niches.

FeedBurner offer a great service for managing your sites feed and provide all sorts of interesting stats. You can also put one of their chicklets on your site to boast share with the world how many subscribers your site has.

I thought it would be both interesting and fun to create a top 100 (or so) of the sites with the highest feeds, so spent Saturday morning doing a big trawl around. (more…)

Organic links and how to get them

When it comes to getting traffic to your blog (or most other sites to that matter), the most important thing you can get are plenty of inbound links. Inbound links will both send you traffic from the originating site and more importantly they serve as a vote for your site which will influence your site’s position in the search engines.

There are various ways to generate inbound links:

• Buy them - using services like Review Me or Text Link Ads or source direct in forums
• Exchange links - this is were you link to one site and in return they link to you. You can contact similiar themed and sized sites or again use a forum
• Organic links - these are when other sites link to you on their own accord and what this article is all about.

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Encouraging Visitor Interaction - part 2

In the previous post we said how contests are a great way of encouraging interaction from your readers and gave a few samples. In this post I want to cover the basics, so to speak, of getting your readers to put fingers to keys.

Make it easy
Don’t make your readers jump through hoops to leave a comment as they probably won’t. Make it as simple as possible and clear, i.e. no mandatory registration and to a lesser extent captchas.
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Getting your Subscribers to visit your Blog

Having a high feed subscriber count is great from an ego and getting the word out point of view but not so much for your profit line. Feeds are notoriously hard to monetise well, whether that will change with Googles recent acquisition of Feedburner, time will tell. I find the best way to profit from feed subscribers is to get them to the site, which is what this post is about.

Links
Relevant internal linking is both helpful to your readers and will provide an easy route back to the site for your readers to follow. As well as linking to individual posts also link to categories e.g. “I came across this really cool traffic building tips“, this is also a great way to create keyword rich internal links that the search engines love.

An automated way to add relevant links is to install a “Related Posts” plugin, this will create links to related posts at the end of new ones. Most plug-ins only seem to this on the site and not on the feed so you might need to do a bit of manual tweaking.
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New Tool for Checking Links to your Blog Posts

I’ve just received an email from my friend Patrick telling me about a new tool he’s written (well knowing Pat he probably got somebody else to write it) and it’s so cool I’ve had to break our one post a day tradition and share it straight away.

The tool is called Blog Storm and it tracks how many links your blog posts attract. That way you can see which of your posts are getting the most attention (or not). It produces a league table of your posts and a couple of pretty charts. You can see the stats of our recent posts over here, or the graph below.

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Analyzing Stats to get More Money and Traffic

My last bout of traffic analysis resulted in two posts here (long tail searches and one on optimising Adsense positioning) and a bit of extra cash (which is always nice). It was also successful in two other ways, one of which should bring me a bit more traffic and the other a bit of extra income.

Remonetize Popular Content
Using Google Analytics it’s easy to see which of your pages are the most popular. I find you never really know which pages are going to become popular in the search engines but statistical analysis does sort of give you the benefit of hind sight. Once I see a page is bringing in a bit of traffic I’ll revisit it and see if there are any suitable affiliate programs I could promote. You know what people are searching for to find the page so if you can find them a suitable product everybody benefits.

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Finding What to Write About on a Product Based Blog

When blogging on CG I often get asked how do I find new products to write about, I won’t provide exact sources but I will share how I found the sources that I use.

In the gadget niche there are a hundreds (if not thousands) of sites reporting on all the latest and greatest gizmos. I subscribe to about 200 feeds and monitor them though out the day, especially the less popular ones which often pick-up on new stories that the big boys haven’t seen yet. If I see something that’s new and hasn’t be covered on a load of other sites yet I’ll write about and link to the source I first saw it on.

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Professional writing, grammar & proofreading 1.0

The schools may be closed here for the summer holidays but this post will be your dose of double English so sit up straight, dust down your dictionary, switch of you mobile phone and pay attention in class.

The internet still takes a written form for the most part and as many of us ‘publish’ content for the web we are in effect professional writers with a duty to make sure our work meets an acceptable level as far as spelling and punctuation.

With text shorthand on phones & spell checkers prevalent in today’s society you have to fear the worst for the next generation, parents can usually calculate sums in their head better than their children due to our reliance on calculators and so this cycle may carry on and evolve as we rely on machines instead of knowledge for spelling and punctuation.

With this in mind I asked Charlie of Perfectly Write whether she would be so kind as to answer a few questions I had on basic grammar, spelling and proofreading.

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Business ideas & how they did it.

I have 2 new business ideas for you to ponder over and give your thoughts to their viability sent in from readers of our blog. A good idea often comes from the ability to look at something that is done already and find a way to do it better.

I started reading a book called “How they started ”(Amazon UK) yesterday, which covers 30 well known businesses that were started without any large existing capital or family connections, basically one person or a small group of people that had an idea and how that was transformed into a successful business. Looks very good from what I have read so far so may be of interest to some of you, not sure if it’s availability outside of the UK as yet.

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Finding the Idea

Some people seem to come up with new business and site ideas really easily whilst others struggle to see an opportunity when it’s staring them in the face. I find if you put your self in the right mindset ideas and opportunities spring up all over the place.

To me the right mindset involves having an open mind and actively looking for inspiration. The following are a few examples of ideas I’ve thought of but haven’t taken any further (yet).
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Get ahead of the game with your next domain

It might come as no surprise to some of you but I have to say I have caught the domain bug, it is a bit like gambling on future events really and for me I am happy to place money on the fact that these are land prices that shall rise in value for some time to come.

I’m never really content just following a huge crowd of people on safe bets when it comes to making money, in the world of making money online through website and domains I think it is fair to say there is a very large crowd nowadays and it is growing all the time. Most forums are so heavily diluted with poor domains and duplicate turnkey sites it’s hard to see anything of value at times. What I have done recently applies to possible website ideas as well as looking to put some money down on domain names for future profit.

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There’s profit everywhere!

Sometimes you look for ways of making money and sometimes they find you.

Last month my better half gave me the good news that she was pregnant with our second child, yikes! It wasn’t long after I had heard of a test you can do online, is it a boy or a girl?

In the UK it is a sad fact that at the 20 week pregnancy scan they can no longer tell you the sex of your child as it leaves them open to being sued {sigh}. So they won’t say anymore unlike first time round when we had our son, some people prefer a surprise, I don’t, I prefer to plan ahead so when a company offers the ability to send away a blood sample and tell you to within 99% the sex of your child at 8 weeks into the pregnancy I find that appealing!

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Adsense: Finding good ideas for a tool based Mini Site

2 Months ago I revisited the subject of mini sites breaking them down into the 3 main types being, product based, information based & tool/calculator based.

I think it is pretty safe to say one of the most successful method is a tool or calculator based mini site. A tool or calculator does a simple job cleanly and quickly that is of use or service to the visitor thus making it extremely bookmark worthy and link worthy through social sites such as Digg/Stumble etc etc

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Site Idea - Must Read Thread Reporter

Over the years I’ve learnt a great deal from various forums, websites and blogs. One of the motives behind the Friday roundup is to share links to useful information and not so easily found posts so as to minimize the cumulative time spent browsing through the crud. I find forums like Digital Point have many really knowledgeable members who have contributed to some excellent threads that many entrepreneurs would really benefit from reading. However for every good thread there are hundreds that are a complete waste of reading time and if you bring General Chat and the Politics section into contention then those 100s of pointless time draining posts could easily turn into 1000s.

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Site Idea - Resort Guide

I’m into week number two of the holiday, I’ve ran out of clean pants and am currently sat in some Turkish café playing a lottery to see what today’s pizza will be like. Which got me thinking, what would be really cool is an online resort guide.

The way I’d see it working is as a user submitted review site, where tourists could write about the various places they’ve visited and eateries they’d got food poisoning at (only happened to my girlfriend once so far this year).

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Rinse and Repeat

Databases are cool! That may sound like something that only a total computer nerd would say but I don’t care as they make me money.

Just over a year a go I had an idea for a site that I thought would be fun to do as a joint project with my daughter (I often look for projects that I can get the whole family involved in, a/ For fun and b/ For the cheap labour )

The site required the gathering of a vast amount of data so I decided to take a shortcut and purchase a database from Oddity Software. As the same database could be bought by anybody and I wanted mine to be unique so I combined it with another freely available database. This gave me unique content as well as adding value to the readers. As you’ve probably guessed I’m not sharing full site details in this post but I’ll to give a similar example of what I did.
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Starting from scratch: The reflective approach.

How did you start out?
What sites do you build?
Do you just build lots and see what sticks?

Personally I took a different approach when choosing my first genre, many years ago I subscribed to Wordtracker who offer a free email service whereby they email me the top searched terms, I still get this today. This would be more a reflective approach to look at what is already out there and what is already profitable and then to try and jump on the bandwagon by looking to obtain a piece of the action.

In this email you get

1/ The top 300 surge report
These are the top 300 queries from the last 48 hours, which represents the complete queries from the largest Metacrawlers on the web (Metacrawler/Dogpile etc..) for the last 48 hours.

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Domain Leasing - Become an Internet Landlord

First I have to quantify this post by saying I don’t know anything about domaining so these are my thoughts on the subject but that doesn’t mean anyone should take it as advice or the like

Domain names, well certainly the good one’s, brandable one’s and generic one’s are all snapped up, more and more people come to the internet each day looking to make money, build websites and start businesses. It seems to me that perhaps it is early days now but the domain market will mature at some point.

Good domains should rise in value, I think most people would agree with that, I also think there should be a lease market that will develop at some point. Think about the high street in any major city that you know of, how many for sale signs do you see up in the main shops? Very rare. People/businesses that own shops know that rather than sell a shop in a prime location for a quick buck they can lease their shops to generate an income, all the time owning an asset that can continue to rise in value.

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