photo credit: cbanck

If you followed my post on semiproblogging.com, you’ll see that my advice is to focus on a few blogs to turn the internet buck. Apparently, I’m focused or unfocused on too many blogs.

Avoid the other extreme as well. Don’t post a bunch of posts on one day to make up for your lack of diligence. If you do have a hankerin’ to write a bunch, save all but one for other days as draft posts. Release those draft posts on a daily basis thereafter. Slow and steady wins the race.

What have I been focused on. Well, taxes got in the way. I’ve also been posting quite a bit on ohiogolfblog.com as golf is in full swing in central Ohio these days.

What more can you expect shortly:

1 – update on the incredible free ebook moneymaking experiment;
2 – update on adwords investment on my sites;
3 – more Wordpress 2.5 goodies – Wordpress finally got WYSIWYG right; and more.

The idea was simple – save $3 a day and do it everyday. Actually, the idea was a bit more complicated then that but I’ve stripped it down to its bare essence. Save three lousy bucks a day. Even I can do that!

I guess with the advent of credit cards, savings has become almost nonexistent for many of us. With more bills to pay than you can shake a stick at, who has the extra money to sock away for a rainy day? Even when I had extra money, I couldn’t save it. I needed some reward for paying all my bills, so I would buy something. I deserved it, right?

And then it hit me. I’ve always been pretty good at paying bills so why don’t I treat savings like it was just another bill. It would be a form of forced savings. Of course, I would also have to institute rules on when I could use the savings. So far I’ve come up with no rules, so I haven’t used any of my savings.

So how did I institute my forced savings plan? I signed up for an account with ING Direct. ING Direct is the internet version of ING Bank in Wilmington, Delaware. Your deposits are FDIC insured with ING Direct so it’s just like working with your corner bank. I set up an account with ING Direct and linked it to my bank here in town. When I started, I set up an automatic transfer of funds from my local bank to ING Direct on the first of each month for $90. You can control the date and amount of each deposit/transfer. My savings plan was just like paying a bill each month. The transfer occurred automatically. I didn’t have to do anything. It just all happened in the background.

Saving money became so easy that I doubled the frequency of my automatic transfers to twice a month. That was easy so I increased the amount of each transfer. Now, I’m saving $8.33 a day or $250 a month. I may up the amount again to the equivalent of $10 a day. Plus I’m also getting interest on my savings.

Do you want to make money with the internet? This may be the best way that I know how. Check out ingdirect.com. I’ll have a link here soon.

Damn the commas! You can figure out that headline. I just wanted to give a quick update on the incredible free money making ebook experiment. I’ve added three more chapters online in the past day and have only four more to go! This is a lot harder than cut and paste. And it sure takes a lot of time. But in doing this, I’ve discovered another benefit to the entire project. I can track what interests people the most through my site statistics.

So far chapter 5 has been the most popular. By knowing what people want to read about I can give them more content along those lines.

Also, my co-author and I can annotate the book right online in either the post itself or in the comment area. Not only that but we can also edit the book right online. Readers can share their experiences in the comment section as well. This may turn into a really great use of the blog format. I can’t wait to see what happens in the coming months.

Check out the incredible free money making ebook experiment at this link.

photo credit: HVX Silverstar

Unfortunately, these ideas suffered from the Field of Dreams’ “Build it and they will come” mentality. 10 years ago, there may have been some truth behind that mentality. As far as today goes – FOGET ABOUTIT! It’s more like – build it, market the hell out of it while building it, continue marketing the hell out of your site afterwards, researching new ways to market your site, and – oh yeah – part of your marketing plan needs to include spending real money to get your site going (I wonder has anyone used the term “internetworking” for marketing web based businesses?).

With the success of sites like Facebook, Youtube, and more, many people are still coming up with great ideas for internet businesses. And god bless ‘em. And those people still come to people like me and my friend (who have some html knowledge) with great ideas for web-based businesses; however, with web-based businesses beginning to resemble brick and mortar businesses more and more (especially in terms of initial capitalization), I have to ask the idea-men and women, “Are you willing to back that idea with a few grand or more in cold hard cash?” If not, then “are you willing to wait 5-10 years while you constantly promote the site through free methods of internetworking to get the site off the ground?”

My advice is – instead of constantly pumping out new sites, why not focus on those websites that have already taken off the ground? I’m guilty of the insatiable urge to develop a website every time I come up with a new idea as well. I keep coming back to the idea that if I just converted another 0.5 – 1.0% of the visitors that come to my best site, I could make another grand a month. Perhaps I should be focusing on my cash cow and trying to milk that a little bit more?

photo credit: woodleywonderworks

Sales of the book that spawned dozens of other legal ebooks have waned, and I figured that now was as good a time as any to offer the entire book online for free. To that end, I started ohiorentersrights.com and have been adding bits and pieces of the book as I am able. It’s going to take a few more weeks to complete the project. I don’t mind posting an unfinished website as I subscribe to the Microsoft theory of product development/sales – It doesn’t matter if it’s finished or not just put it up for sale and update it later. Of course, my product is “free” so if you can’t read the whole thing now – too bad.

So how am I going to make money off of the free ebook? I guess I’m making a few bets by doing this.

1 – I’m betting that people will like what they read and decide that they would rather buy their own copy than read through 100’s of pages on the web. I will offer the reader the ability to buy the ebook as well.

2 – I’m betting that I will cut through a lot of the credibility concerns that buyers often have about buying e-books and the like over the internet. Afterall, I have nothing to hide – the entire book is online.

3 – I’m betting that I can make money off of related affiliate programs from the viewers on the website.

4 – I’m betting that my 160 pages of content will generate some nice traffic over time.

And, of course, I’m always open to other suggestions. Stay tuned as I will be reporting on the Incredible, Free E-Book, Money Making Experiment’s progress from time to time.

Almost all of these subscribers are past purchasers of one of my products. What do they say? If you want to drum up more business start with your former clients/customers.

What else am I doing with Constant Contact? I’m providing all my past customers with a little reminder that my website is still out there. I’m basically keeping my product in their minds so they can buy more or refer my site to others. Why does any large company advertise so profusely? To keep their product in the forefront of our minds. I’m doing the same thing with my product.

Here’s another example. Let’s say I come out with a new product. I can put that product in front of 4000 pairs of eyes in an instant. I can also entice them by rewarding them with a nice discount for being a past customer. Everybody likes products that are on sale. Let’s say I offer them the product for $20. If I convert 0.5% of those 4000, I make $400. If I convert 1%, I make $800. If my subscriber list is 8000 strong, then just double those numbers. Not a bad little bankroll for just popping off an email, huh?

Want to make real money on the internet? It’s really simple. Build an email list and market your product to the people on that list.

That statement really deserves at lease one repetition.

Is there any other business besides the internet where people think that they can make money for nothing?

photo credit: motorpsykhos

I don’t think that there is any other business where you are not forced to invest in your business – especially to get it off the ground. Let me tell you something – the internet is no different. If you want to be successful, you have to invest in your internet business. Posting everyday on your blog, obtaining reciprocal links, writing good content, blah, blah, blah, etcetera, etcetera, will rarely be enough. You could have better content than John Chow or Shoemoney or Problogger.net or insert your favorite blog here. It just doesn’t matter if your site languishes in the obscurity of the ever-expanding internet.

How many new websites are started everyday? How many are in your niche? How many have already been established? You have more competition than you can even imagine.

So do yourself a favor and dump the mindset that anything can be had for free on the internet. I know, I know – so you downloaded a bunch of mp3s for free; so you found your girlfriend on some dating site for free; so you found some nude pictures of Giada for free; so you got some stuff from Value America for nearly free – YOU WILL BE EXTREMELY LUCKY TO CREATE A HIGHLY PROFITABLE WEBSITE WITHOUT INVESTING COLD HARD CASH.

Make a choice now because you can continue panning for gold dust in the river or you can invest in the heavy mining equipment. If you want to pan for gold in the river than just be honest with yourself and admit that that is what you are doing.

photo credit: teadrinker

If you want to find the mother lode than put your money where your mouth is and invest in your site. I’m going to take my own challenge and invest in this site and in another (finerepast.com). For the month of March, I’m going to invest $150 in each site. Yeah, I know, $150 isn’t much but it’s $150 more than 99% of you are investing in your websites. I guarantee it. Throughout the month, I’ll put up progress reports comparing my traffic between this month and last month as well as making other comparisons. We’ll see if putting my money where my mouth is actually pays off.

Want to use the internet to make money? I recommend selling e-books. Learn how to create, market, sell and distribute your ebook on the internet today.

Stay tuned for the power of Constant Contact.

So I went on over to siteflip to see what it is all about. By the way, I wondered why they didn’t register a real domain instead of getting a free one through blogger.com. Then I thought that perhaps they owned the real domain and had just started a blogger.com blog for more publicity. Upon further investigation, it appears that siteflip.com is a website for a cheap web hosting provider and doesn’t appear, at first glance, to be related to the blog. I immediately question the veracity of a site if a free domain name is involved. If you have something worthwhile to say then fork over the ten bucks for a real domain as well as the additional costs for real hosting especially if you are going to talk about buying, improving and then selling websites for profit. By the way, do you really own anything with a blogger.com blog? What if you wanted to sell your blogger blog? You probably couldn’t sell it.

In siteflip’s recent posts they also have posts related to house flipping. Is this just a way to try to tap into the house flipping viewers? Flipping houses and websites don’t seem to be related so adding a section on house flipping detracts from his website flipping message and makes me further question this website.

It appears that part of the site flipping scheme is to buy a website and then further monetize it thereby increasing its value and then sell it with these new revenue streams. Interestingly enough, Site Flip doesn’t seem to have much in the way of monetization going on. Shouldn’t we practice what we preach.

I can’t seem to find any information on where you would sell your website once you’ve refurbished it. I immediately think of ebay but there must be other places. I’m waiting on his website marketplaces directory to load – another problem with blogger.com. It finally came up – several places to flip your site our listed. Ok, now this is finally getting interesting. I’ll dig into it more and report later.