NetBusinessBlogWork from Home, Business Opportunities, Websites for Sale - Run an Online Business

We have a winner of the John Chow look-a-like competition. Erik from Station360 had plenty to choose from and although Brian Aldrich actually had more in terms of numbers, I was looking for copy-cats, look, style, content, writing, advertising, even his Buy me a Beer thing…

Erik had found blogs that fit this criteria.

I think these guys need to try and find a different avenue as they will find it hard to emulate his success by copying his business model exactly. Sure you can start a blog about making money online but you need that edge, that something that will set you apart. John used clever marketing to get his blog seen by thousands (he came up with a unique idea) then with his humurous writing style and solid content he built a profitable business. The worst way to start a business is to copy someone and expect the same success, it just won’t WORK!. You can take ideas and make them work for you but you should never ever copy the look, feel and overall aspect of a competitor’s business.

Three of the best Copy Cats:

JakelDaily
BobBusKirk
ShaunCarter

I still don’t understand the sports car thing? It has nothing to do with making money and is lost space which could be made up with targeted advertising. At least, add something that would help the visitor in some way?

Anyway…congrats to Erik, well done on finding some great John Chow look-a-like blogs.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Popularity: 4% [?]

Just came across this Article courtesy of CNNMoney an Interview with Kevin Ham, a very discreet businessman who deals in the Domain Industry. I’ve had a keen interest in domain building but have never really got into this market enough to make a living from it.

This has to be one of the best passive income oportunities out there. I think things are much different now and competing in the domain industry must be fairly hard. I would imagine though, you could still pick up the odd great domain when a company or sole individual forgets to re-register it. This could net you big profits depending on the domain in question, research is key here and with the right plan like most Internet businesses, you could easily compete and make a healthy living doing what Kevin Ham does.

Domain parking is one of the techniques Kevin Ham uses which is I think is still hugely mis-understood.

Read the full article here

Domain Blogs.

The Domain King
Frank Schilling

Popularity: 5% [?]

Popularity: 5% [?]

If you’re running an online business (store) you should be fimiliar with the fast and smooth checkout procedure? the customer should be able to click and buy a product/service within three clicks (ideally).

Do you know what this does…it creates word-of-mouth marketing like you wouldn’t believe!

This has massive benefits, you could even be more expensive than your competitor for your product or service, but by having a faster loading site than them and a super fast checkout procedure you will end up with very happy customers! I remember using certain sites that got this process right (Play.com, Amazon.com) I immediately learnt a big lesson, get this right as one of the first things you do when building your online store and you have one foundation set.

I love it that consumers are impatient online (although I’m not sure why as all the stress is taken out when compared with offline shopping?) make it so simple (a two year old could order from your site) and you’ll have people talking about your service for years!

People may forget the actual product but they sure will remember how fast it took to order from your site. Do you understand why???

Because they’re impatient! they want in and out quickly to go about their day. Be fast, make it as simple as you can and you’ll have the basis of a good online store.

The next important part of this process is choosing the right merchant. Get one that suits your budget and solution. They must be able to grow as your business grows, there is no use having a merchant who can only handle 50 orders per day when you’re looking at acheiving at least 100. If their server falls over who’s to blame for the lost sales? I’ve been in this situation and we lost aprroximately $20k on one weekend because of a system fault. This is slighty different, but you must know your merchant and what they can provide you with, quality and service matched with great pricing.

I’m going to outline some pro’s and con’s of the Merchants I have used over the past 7 years.

eButtonz

We used a whole solution at first with eButtonz offering very small online businesses a shopping cart and payment processor through WorldPay. We grew out of this option within five months, but none-the-less they were perfect for what we needed at the time. Their customer service and support was always fast and reliable. Shame we had to move on really because I liked them. They just couldn’t offer the support for the amount of transactions we were dealing with at the time. Things may have changed now? also we had problems with WorldPay…

Application Costs: eButtonz Costs

Worldpay

Ahh…wonderful Worldpay. No, not at all wonderful in my eyes, I think this can happen when a company like this has the huge amount of success they had in such a short space of time. Growing to the size they did obviously didn’t help them, lacking in customer service, quality and ease of use of their admin back end and their famous holding of your funds for months at a time, this is not a good business model to me. I really don’t like these guys if you couldn’t already tell…mainly there attitude towards small businesses at the time pissed me off! They almost took us out of business!

Again, my be good to customers stands true. They ended up losing out on a very large, potentially long-term customer with transactions exceeding 2000+ per day.

Application Costs:

* Additional Currencies: Domestic currency provided as standard part of Internet Merchant Account. $100 per additional currency.
* Chargebacks: due to the costs involved in reversing transactions, WorldPay will charge you $20 for every chargeback.
* Settlement: Settlement in GBP for a UK bank account is £0.35. Settlement to a bank account outside the UK and in local currency is £2.50.
The minimum amount that can be settled is £10.00 in GBP, and the equivalent of £100.00 for all other currencies.

Protx

What they say about themselves: We have grown to become the largest independent Payment Service Provider in the country because our solutions offer our customers exceptional value for money without compromising on the level of service and functionality we provide.

We have been satisfied overall with what they have provided us with over the years, although their servers have been hacked and we have experienced down time this is nothing when compared with others providers we have heard about. They have rebuilt their main front-end sales website, but I still believe they have a very amatuerish back-end administration, don’t let that put you off though.

They are fairly easy to set-up and integrate and so simple to manage, ie: refunds, transaction look-ups, fraud protection. Unfortunately they only service the UK. We did our research and found at $40 per month with no other charges allowing 1000 transactions per quarter (at the time (2003) being perfect for us) and they still are. I highly recommend them.

Application Costs:

Our rates are subject to negotiation for websites that process many thousands of transactions. For more information about our pricing structure please contact us.

(pricing details have been taken from the merchant websites mentioned in this article and are subject to change at any time)

Popularity: 6% [?]

Popularity: 6% [?]

This is something I fell for in my once desperation for Internet Wealth. At times It was just curiosity (could it be done) I was interested in seeing if any of these so called techniques worked in making easy money. While some do work in the short term you will end up chasing the latest techniques, never really getting anywhere in your dream to make a living online. I have spent money on eBooks that promise the earth but deliver very little. What this has enabled to do is learn how to ignore this false world and stop listening to these guys. I know more than them, I don’t need to buy their stuff!

If I could give you one bit of solid advice it would be to stay away from Internet Marketing (ClickBank Products) no matter how much you start to enjoy it! - you’ll end in the forums, following the sheep, being lied too, buying stupidly over-hyped products which ultimately lead to nothing. You have been warned!

Internet Marketers have built this false world up where money comes easy (over-night). Once you’re in their world it can be hard to get out, but you must. They seduce you with NLP words and emotionally targeted words, this is how they build a solid following of naive money makers who buy the products they pump out every month! These guys will keep buying their Shit and making them more and more rich. It’s like a drug to the GOO-RUU the more the sheep buy the more they pump out.

In the real world, you follow a simple formula, a process that has no secret tricks, no special piece of software to make you rich. You get an idea and make it happen with hard work and determination, the rest you’ll learn along the way. I will try and give out as much knowledge as I know on the Industry as a whole but the rest is up to you.

A real world, solid business whether off or online takes work, hard work to get started and run, but once you’ve done this the rewards can be Astounding!

The new POLL has begun - Real World Business or Make Money Products?

The last poll was an astounding overall victory for “Consumers are People Too” (funnily enough) 67% of you have the right qualities when it comes to making a living online in my opinion. Customers/Consumers are me and you, treat them no differently in business. The other 24% of you - you should be ashamed of yourself!

Get voting!

Popularity: 6% [?]

Popularity: 6% [?]

I have only just started to track data for this blog, what I am interested in is the bounce rate of the home page and how long the visitors/readers stay here. That’s what I will be looking to improve over the next few months.

I’ve just read about the OnClick feature over at BlogStorm is the ability to track how many people are signing up to your RSS feeds and this is done by using the ‘OnClick’ feature code. Another fantastic feature is the Site Overlay, I used this feature all the time in my last business and it enabled me to organise the website to suit our targeted consumer. One thing I love studying is “Customer Buying Habits” this feature alone will keep me busy for an hour a day.

Some of you may already be using this feature? I will be adding the ‘OnClick’ code to the adverts on this blog and will even track 404 errors. It’s always a good idea to overdo “Statistical Analysis” if you’re going to improve the quality of your website and visitor experience. If you’re too succeed you must know your audience Not only that but the happier the visitor the more time they will spend at your site which in turn will ultimately make you more revenue.

I’m lead to believe not many online business owners make it their business to understand this very important part of running a successful online company. Make it yours!

Popularity: 65% [?]

Popularity: 65% [?]

I love this TITLE and will hopefully have this down some day soon…

This blog is going to take it out of me I’m sure. I want to get to a stage were I can sit back and have a nice passive income rolling in every day, week, month. That’s my long term goal which I’m sure I will achieve. My last business (eCommerce) didn’t have the same strategy and couldn’t because it will always need management, maintenance, staff, etc..etc..and because our initial plan was to exit after 5 years it seems this strategy changed over time. Largely due to shareholders and Director decisions out of my control. This is why I’m here blogging and no longer involved with the day to day running of that company.

Anyway the guy who seems to know more about running this lifestyle (I’ve heard it has a lot to do with outsourcing if you read the comments left on Amazon for the book by Tim Ferris)

Taken from one of the Amazon comments - Ferriss gives some great ideas about starting your own business even if you don’t have or desire an MBA (like me). He provides lists of free and paid resources to help you along the way.

I haven’t read the book yet but I’m sure I will enjoy it, should keep me busy this weekend…

If you are interested in how to get a book deal with a large publisher Tim Ferris writes how he did this over at Noah Kagan’s blog.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Popularity: 5% [?]

In this article (post) I’m going to refer to the last business I was involved in (MyMemory.com) this will help me to list and identify the key areas we did well in and at the same time pass on some handy knowledge to you.

eCommerce has come such a long way since Jeff Bezos and his Amazon Jungle flew out the starting gates back in 1994! Since then there has been a flood of online start-ups, some successful others hitting that big [DOT COM BUBBLE] back in the late 1990’s. I’m going to outline some simple but often over looked rules that I came across and stand by when running and/or starting an eCommerce store.

When in social gatherings, most of the time you’ll get the what do you do question…hmmm…always hate that one. Then all of a sudden I’ll get the oh, you do that, I’m looking to get into that as well. I’ll say (sarcastically at first) really…9 times out of 10 these people are already successful in their own right but have been seduced by the media painting a rosy picture of wealth at your fingertips for little work.

Maybe they’ve read articles in newspapers stating how many millions can be earnt for only working a few hours a day! I’m not sure, but somehow the majority think an online store equals untold riches and is obviously far simpler to start than an offline brick and mortor business.

This brings me onto The First Golden Rule: Love Your Customers. I love my customers, often far too much and will go out of my way at times to make sure there are so happy they’ll talk about my business for years to come telling friends and family. This is what you should do. Be NICE, be AMAZING, be the BEST in your marketplace and tell yourself everyday your going to succeed and you will succeed! I’m 100% positive about this.

At first our (MyMemory’s) marketing strategy was simple, offer the same high quality sort-after products elsewhere but at the lowest prices using a workable mark-up. Making sure to back it up by outstanding quality and service. This general rule served us well and brought us success at first. You’ve got to remember in this market pricing is key (digital memory is very volatile, buy wrong and you could lose big time!) and because we started off using price comparison sites for instant traffic (back in 2003) you would show up at the top if you could offer the lowest price. I never really liked the way companies such as Pricerunner and Shopping.com operated but the ROI was fantastic at first and worked a treat.

It wasn’t long before we had a large mailing list and would be able to leverage this to boost our turnover on weekends when we would always do a newsletter offering massively discounted deals. It never failed to bring in $20k up to $70k on our best weekends. Our mailing list alone was worth more than the business in my opinion due to size of it, the loyalty and brand awareness it brought us.

The best way we found to run this business model was to go for high volume selling, low margins, mark-up would be at best 23% gross before and costs I would say we were hitting 10% margins after staff, advertising/marketing, rent, postage, etc..etc…costs. It would be a long time before we saw huge profits and at times this did get me and the other Director down. (we where very hungry for success quickly) We did have an exit strategy and 18 other shareholders to keep happy. Our turnover was looking healthy and our lifestyles where great so I shouldn’t have complained really.

The Second Golden Rule: is to buy your product at exactly the right price and turn it around as fast as you can. This worked very well for us as we would buy a very sought after product at the best price possible and add it to our spotlight product. In most cases it needs to be your best seller, get it out fast spreading the word which in turn would bring the numbers in and then a customer would hopefully go on to purchase other similar products at better margins.

The Third Golden Rule: is to use Magazine or offline marketing with care. It can spiral out of control and their pricing is ridiculous when compared with online advertising. The ROI for us was pathetic with offline marketing and I quickly started to cull lots of the magazines we were in. The best way to deal with Magazines when they approach you is to wait it out. Sales reps for magazines are on deadlines and under severe pressure to sell, use this to your advantage. When they call, say you’re not interested unless they can do it for X amount.

This being in our case at least 80% less then their rate card. I promise they’ll always call you back with an ad space. It does depend on your margins but I know knew I could work on gaining a reasonable ROI while keeping the product at a great price without having to compromise on the price the consumer would get it for. Win, Win we’re all happy. You don’t want to have to raise prices because of your marketing spend, you just need to use an abundance of common sense and get clever to work it to suit your business model.

The Fourth Golden Rule: Know your marketing - Brand marketing or ROI marketing which is it? Brand marketing is very, very expensive and in my mind obscenely wasteful. Measured, 99% guaranteed DROI (Definite Return On Investment) marketing is effective and it should be what most small businesses use when on a budget. A very expensive mistake we made (I still don’t know to this day whether it worked or not) was advertising with Viacom using the Tube (Underground Railway Service in London) the bill boards were on the inside of the main trains on certain busy lines.

The cost…hmmm…$40k and I still feel sick we went ahead and did it. This is what You could call a right cock-up but Brand marketing at its best. Not very measurable at all, apart from asking the customer at the checkout how they found us and on the phones. Most cannot be bothered or forget where they found our website URL. We never made any ROI worth talking about but it may have produced word-of-mouth marketing, enough to push our brand name and further establish us as market leaders in the digital memory arena.

Having an exit strategy in mind is only good if you follow it through. Have a definite goal and also have a great plan - what do you want from this business. How much do you want from it. Where do you see it in three years?? These questions should be answered if you’re to succeed in any business. Some people have a great idea for a business but do not understand the why, where and what if’s…also I would hazard a guess they think more about the money before anything else. People also need to understand what type of business they have…many just don’t know. Is it a lifestyle business where you just make a living (not necessarily profits) you run the business on your own and will never need or want staff to make it a hugely profitable scalable company. Investors love scalable businesses.

Once you have a loyal customer following you can then start to dictate your prices putting them up a percent of two. Keep up the same quality and service and they’ll stand by you. The great thing for us was that everyone else in our market were already stupidly expensive so it was easy to undercut. You may be thinking at this stage (it’s all a bit easy to just undercut and expect to do well in business) yes, this is partially true, anyone with half a brain can undercut a competitor. It’s a no-brainer as they say and well…many do this without backing it up with the quality and service the consumer deserves.

These are the parts they decide to miss out on. When all a business owner can think of to beat his or her competition is to go in lower it’s just not going to work on its own. You still need to be clever offering something they’re not offering. In our case the best quality and service came through. I wanted not only to be the best digital memory provider online but also offer the customer a seamless experience when purchasing, this is when we hired a web design agency to design our store with the buyer needs completely in mind at all times. I started to get engrossed by our customers often to a addicted state of mind. Wanting to know exactly when, why and how they arrived at the store and what they where interested in purchasing.

This all happened when I purchased Who’s On I love this software! - I loved the real time keyword referer results knowing what a consumer was seaching for (what keyword they had used) when they hit our website. This was very powerful stuff, If we didn’t have the product they were looking for, I would tell our purchaser to get it and of course this would end up in more sales for us. Simple but very effective!

I felt that once I knew all there was to know about our customers I could start improving the website so they would stay longer and obviously spend more but at the same time enjoy being on what I would still call today a very boring website. Not because of design but really the subject matter (digital memory). Not exactly stimulating, buying memory is boring for most.

Luckily I didn’t get too involved in the purchasing as this would have bored me silly not to mention this was not my strong point. Another stat worth mentioning was that 44% of all visitors left the homepage after 30secs, just goes to show you how fast you must act and use your homepage to sell or deliver to the visitor exactly it was they were searching for. These stats are approximate because who can trust the accuracy of AwStats and Google Analytics.

Still, non-the-less, this was valuable information we needed to know.

Using these simple strategies we built up a great name quickly and I started to feel the brand awareness building fast. Forum marketing happened on its own. People started to talk about how excellent our phone staff were and then how great the prices and service was. Even freebies we’d give away and the competitions we’d run, little things like this are very powerful marketing tool for any business.

The Fifth Golden Rule: become amazing at statistics and customer buying habits. Once you start understanding your consumer you can really start to provide the best products and experience for them so much so that you will have them wanting more and more even emailing asking when products are in. That’s when you know you’re you’re doing very well. It gave me huge pleasure and achievement knowing this and I wanted to make sure our customers were always very, very important to the success of our business. Don’t let your buyer think, don’t let them have the opportunity to call you to complain. Give them the best shopping experience you can with your store and they’ll come back for more time and time again, it’s that simple.

I’m haven’t mentioned PPC yet and I will go into it in detail in another separate article. What I will say is that It didn’t work for us at first and took a great deal of testing to find the correct keywords, but once you have done this it should pay off. In our market it was not very profitable and ROI was very little but we didn’t care because we wanted the customer not the profit. As long as we broke even we were happy. The value is in your customer you must remember this at all times.

In the next instalment, I will outline how I decided to concentrate heavily on SEO (Organic Traffic) instead of PPC. This was to be one of the best things we did at the time, saving the company over $500k per year. This was all accomplished by signing us up to the three best Affiliate Networks at the time. This leveraged lots of my time allowing our Affiliates to go out and promote for us.

Until then, remember - The Consumer Drives Brand Awareness be good to them. If you have time please also read Affiliate to eCommerce Mogul - The Real Secrets To eCommerce

Popularity: 7% [?]

Popularity: 7% [?]

I was browsing some website for whatever reason when I came across a banner ad for Match.com that really impressed me. I have seen ads like this before but they have been few and far between.

The ad was obviously animated, so use your imagination a bit.

So what is it? It’s a girl supposedly using Match.com to either find a mate or to talk to someone she has just met. You can tell by her occassional grin and the cancerlicious glow coming from what is probably a computer screen. So why is this good?

Match Knows its Audience

The first thing you notice is pretty obvious - the person in the ad is a girl. But what kind of girl? Is it a supermodel? She might be. But does she look like a supermodel? Is she wearing pounds of makeup with a thousand dollar hair do and a designer dress? No. She is attractive, but she looks like a regular person. Someone who might actually use the dating system (or at least the guy registering at Match.com after seeing this ad hopes).

The online dating world has been suspicious since the beginning. Promises of beautiful women at the other side of the intertubes just waiting on you have long been considered fake. Dating sites such as PlentyofFish.com excel at displaying *actual people* in their dating pool and others such as Match and eHarmony are following. Now as I said the girl up there in that ad is almost certainly a model, but she’s not portrayed as one.

eHarmony has been doing the same thing with their aggressive TV ads showing ordinary people who may or may not have actually met through the website.

What is the moral of the story? Know your audience. If you are serving people who want to meet real lifemates then don’t throw them a bunch of A-list supermodels and try to convince them that they may actually wind up with someone like that.

I am personally very impressed with the online dating industry. They seem to have their heads on right. They’re incorporating old media very well. They are adhering to their audience very well. They are even branching out into other new media (mobile technology) extremely well.

Take a lesson from Match.com and others. Know your audience.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Popularity: 6% [?]

Hello, my name is Adrian Cooke and I am the proud new owner of NetBusinessBlog.com. Thought you might be interested in hearing why I purchased this blog and what my plans are for it. First of all my background (I’ll be quick I promise) I have been online since 2002…seems light years away. Ever since then, I’ve loved how quick you can build a business online and make it a success for a relatively low budget, if you have the right desire and determination.

In that time I have started a tangible goods store MyMemory.co.uk selling digital memory products with a friend and opened an offline store. MyMemory went on to be a fast success hitting 300k turnover in its first year climbing to 3.5Mil in just two years! - I’m very proud to say I was a part of that, but now I am just a shareholder.

I purchased NetBusinessBlog.com because I decided to buy into an already successful brand/business than start one from scratch myself. I’m not sure why…but I can hit a brick wall sometimes when I start with an idea for a business this is when I came across Yaro Starak and reading one of his posts made me think…why not buy a website. If it fits your lifestyle and your interests do it!

I came across it with 4 hours to go at SitePoint and made a decision to bid, not really thinking twice about it. Later… me and Matt decided on a fair price and that was that.

So there we go, a tiny bit about me, hats off to Matt Coddington for starting a blog I always wanted to start and making it a success in such a short space of time. He really screwed me over at $50k though but I think it’s worth it? - I also think I’m going to find it hard to keep up the reader level, but that’s because it has such a great following (you guys reading this…you still are right?).

P.S. I look forward to making this blog more popular and I hope to hear some nice comments from you all. If any of you have purchased a business online before please give me your view point.

Thanks.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Popularity: 3% [?]

The first email I noticed this morning when doing my daily inbox cleaning was one from AGLOCO stating (allegedly) that the viewbar has FINALLY been released!

Dear Matt,

We are pleased to report that your AGLOCO Viewbar has been released and is ready for you to download now. Since you signed up with AGLOCO, our community has continued to grow even larger, stronger, and more active. With the Viewbar software, we are excited for each Member of the AGLOCO community to begin earning their share of the wealth generated on the Internet.

Here is how to download and launch your Viewbar:

1. Go to the AGLOCO website at https://www.agloco.com/c/portal/login and login to get to your Member Account page. There is now a “Download the Viewbar” button on that page.
2. Simply click the Viewbar download button and follow the download directions. Please click “Run” when offered to Run, Save or Cancel.
3. You will need to enter your Account ID# (or email address) and your AGLOCO account password to activate your Viewbar.
4. After you download the Viewbar, you can launch it for first time by going to your Windows Start Menu and clicking on the AGLOCO Viewbar Icon.

There was some other stuff but it was boring. The important point here is that after months and months of waiting the AGLOCO toolbar has finally been released and we can actually start to see whether all the hype is worth it. I had almost given up on AGLOCO due to the constant setbacks but the ease of installation brought me back. I intended just to go see what it was about but then after 30 seconds I had the viewbar running on my site.

The viewbar is exactly as it was portrayed in the prelaunch “propaganda”. It is not intrusive. It flows well with the main Windows bar. There are no hidden tricks. No spyware or adware (as far as I can tell).

I did find a couple of things odd, however, which you can see in this screenshot (click to enlarge):

Can you spot the teeny tiny out of place detail?

There are No Ads

Where are the ads? The viewbar was postponed for months mainly on the basis that the ads weren’t displaying properly. So where are the ads? Well here is a bit of an answer from the AGLOCO blog:

(6/4) Update: I am happy to announce that the Viewbar has been released. The software is functioning fine, but it appears to have overloaded the ad servers in the initial surge. I was told it needs to be reset by the ad network people which may take a few hours (not in our control). I will update you on this. You will still accumulate AGLOCO Hours normally for your Viewbar use during this period.

Wow. One of the most hyped company launches since the first bubble and they don’t even have the server power to handle the userbase. Great sign. Not an omen at all.

Now this shouldn’t be a huge problem and will hopefully be fixed soon. I just find it amazing that they didn’t prepare for it. They had the numbers beforehand. They knew how many people were registered and hopefully had a good idea of how many were active and would immediately install the toolbar.

What confuses me even further is that the ad server crashed and not the server HOSTING THE TOOLBAR. Now I’m not a programmer by any means, but I would assume a server whose sole purpose is to display ads has a much lighter load than one that is distributing an executable to thousands of people at once, no?

Oh well, at least the toolbar is out. Now I just have to remind all of the people I referred (5 damn months ago) what AGLOCO is and tell them to actually use it. Should be a blast.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Popularity: 4% [?]