You know very well, that if you add Google AdSense, it will generate some income (hope you have enough natural traffic in your blog or website). But does it mean the maximum output? Do you think that what you are earning is enough for your website? Do not forget that you are leasing a lot of space to your advertisement network!

If you are developing a website to earn money, it is important to look into these areas. You must have a basic idea about the best ways to monetize your blog or website. By the way, I am not talking about some products like Twitter (they are yet to finalize a revenue model). But, do you really think that Twitter will survive even if it cannot find a worthy revenue generation model?

One thing is pretty clear - the pros know how to monetize their blog or website. And to add to this, they are really good at ad space distribution. What about you? Are you really planning on maximum monetization?

Team NBB (A) update:

We have created an Idea box (shared with the team members only) to evaluate different ideas for website development. (Most people start a website at this very moment and thus a lot of them fail.)

We will evaluate different ideas there from different perspectives and would start working with the best one. We thought this is the most crucial step for team development too. NBB will not force any idea - every member of each team will have the full right to select the best idea and put forward their best effort. We hope that within a few weeks, we will be able to finalize the idea.

(If you are not sure of what we are talking about, please read this post)

The selection process was very tough. We had around 19 applications (not bad for a start!!) and some of them are really good. We had to work really hard to come up with a team. However I must say that, Razvan and Shrihari do not end the list. They make up a team with two people from NBB because their expertise and zeal to learn completes a circle - a team. And we are only waiting to find a better match for 5 other applicants. (Are you the one?)

Why we are looking for teams? And why we are always talking about teams?

If you look at the trend, almost everyone starts as a solo blogger. He or she writes posts, comments on other blogs, invests time in social networking, collects links and does all other things. And in most of the situations, they are not full time bloggers. Thus it is very tough for one to become successful and earn enough by blogging. This is one of the big reasons why most of the bloggers who wanted to earn money from the goldmine called internet, flee to other places. Thousands of blogs are created everyday and thousands of them fade out too.

Now just think about this situation, where these four people will have their own share of tasks and at the same time they would participate in developing the website from scratch (even idea generation). Do you think that they will have to work harder than they normally do to earn more? We are sure to achieve better results for the same or less effort.

Anyways, we will keep you updated about the latest developments in this project. If you are still undecided, time is running out.

We would like to develop 4 websites to sell within 8 to 12 months. And we would like to have 2 people to work with us in each of the projects (2×4=8). Each team would consist of 4 people (2 from your side and 2 from our side).

By the way, you do not need to fly to our office to join the team. You can work at your own pace and from your own place. It is a perfect opportunity to learn and earn as much as we do. Interested?

How much you need to invest?

You need to invest absolutely nothing but your time, energy and ideas and that too when you want and as much as you want. We will do all the required investments. However, we would like you to get involved in every aspect of website’s development process. And you must stand up to your commitment.

How much you can earn?

As soon as the websites are ready, we will put them up in a website selling marketplace. You get 25% of the sales price - straight (a team = 4 members = 25% X 4 = 100%). Thus, if your website is sold for $10,000, you will earn $2500 - straight. Interested?

Who can join?

You can join a team if you believe that you have the ability to think and act. You can be good at designing, content writing, link building, social media marketing, online marketing, SEO - whatever. We are looking for people who are ready to take challenges. You can hide your identity or you can speak out loud that you are working on a project - as you wish.

How to join?

Simply write a comment under this post or send us a mail at JoinNBB@gmail.com and tell us why we should take you in our team? Tell us something about you, your experiences and your expertise - that’s it. It is just great if you have a blog.

How things would actually work:

We would create a small mailing list for each team and continue working together until the website is sold (8 to 12 months).

So, are you ready?? If you have some questions, write to us at JoinNBB@gmail.com and we will be happy to answer.

Everybody preaches about how to earn money - we would like you to earn money with us - cash.

You can easily develop such a website in just an hour and put it up for sale in a website marketplace. But, what is the use? How much profit can one expect from such a website if it is at all sold!

If you ask my personal opinion, I will never develop such a website. And trust me, if you can develop 3 or 4 really good website every year with proper evaluation and promotion, you would easily make much more than all those one hour jobs combined. In addition, you would also get a brand value to help you in future projects. Do you doubt it?

This blog itself is a big example of how much you can earn by properly developing and selling a blog.

How to start?

Identify a topic - any topic is good if you have the zeal to research, learn and apply.

Identify the target market (go deep down and select the niche topic - for example, go for Wordpress SEO plug-ins rather than going for wordpress).  Do some keyword research and identify around 20 niche keywords (do not select more than 5 highly competitive keywords - on the contrary, target the keyword long tail)

Identify the potential competitors (Google search is good enough) and what they are offering. Find out how you can add some value to the existing setup or how you can be different from those competitors! Don’t start a blog or a social network just because they do not have any. Try to understand, if the target market needs and move accordingly.

To be continued:

Now, the basic question is how to develop an idea that would sell!

As far as my experience and understanding goes, everything sells - if you can show a reason to the prospective customer to buy it. BY the way, you must be good at finding out or locating a prospective buyer too.

If you want to go by a natural planning, you can start a website that is directly associated with financial transactions. For example, you can start a simple and easy to use website on comparison shopping. You can also think about starting an online book store. However, in this case too, the success of your website depends on identifying a niche product. However, if you are not sure about how to promote and market the product, do not go for unorthodox topics. Stick to some common topics with less competition.    

Now, follow all the natural optimization techniques to develop the website like unique content, optimized pages, link building etc. Here, if you have a unique idea and if you can develop and promote it in the right way, things would become much easy for you. Idea sells.

Now, here is a catch. Do you think that in the website selling marketplace, you are actually selling the website?

I don’t think so - you are actually selling a platform to a prospective buyer who can develop it further to earn money or use it for his or her own reasons. And thus it is also important to identify, what the prospective buyer would actually be looking for.

For example, what would you look for when you are thinking about buying a directory? I don’t think you will be much concerned about the volume of visitors it generates everyday! I would be more interested about the page rank of the directory and the number of back links it has gained from authority websites.

What else? Wait for the next post on such a unique internet business opportunity.

A lot of people and smart webmasters and seasoned marketers often develop an idea into a website and than sell it for a bigger amount. This is really a big online business.

Why should people be interested in buying my website?

People would buy the website because it is not easy to develop a website from scratch - it takes a lot of time and you never know if it would be popular or profitable in future. You worked hard to do it and made it popular - whatever it is, the reality is in front of the website buyer. They know the benchmark and perhaps they know how they can turn it into a money machine. And these are reasons enough for a prospective buyer to take an interest on your website. However, if your website or blog deals with your personal life alone like some random thoughts on everything under the sun, forget about getting a buyer.

If I can develop an idea, why should I sell it?

Whenever someone talks about ideas, there is a common tendency that people start thinking “it must be unique”. Things are not necessarily so. A lot of webmasters develop a website on a common topic just to sell it in future. For a seasoned marketer, these websites are marketed to be sold. Just think about a micro site with a niche group of visitors where the webmaster is giving away free eBooks. Perhaps he or she is creating a big database of email ids to sell a product under the same niche in future.

Anyways, a lot of webmasters often do not find enough reasons (time, promotional investment, return on investment etc.) to continue with their websites and just sell it.

Where to find an Idea to develop a website to sell in future?

Ideas come from anywhere :) but not necessarily all ideas are commercially viable. And if you start running after ideas, it would be tough for you to start such a business. Stop running after ideas and get into reality. The best way is to move the other way round.

How?

Wait for the next post.

…”in no uncertain terms, that if affiliate links came from valuable, relevant, trust-worthy sources - bloggers endorsing a product, affiliates of high quality, etc. - they would be counted in link algorithms.” This remark was made by Sean Suchter of Yahoo and the statement was supported by other search engine representatives at SMX East.

Now what does this statement mean to online business owners?

1. Affiliate links normally do not point to any static page - links often redirect to a landing page. Now if the affiliate marketer is getting your PR juice that also means that search engines are fine with redirected links or at least when they come from authority websites.

2. Affiliate links are often no-follow links. The above mentioned statement may also mean that now you can also count on no-follow links to develop the amount of your back links. In fact, do you remember that Yahoo used to show comment links in its search explorer for link command! Unless they followed the no-follow links, how did they place it in my back link list! I never found Google doing the same - did you?

3. From business point of view, we should see some major changes. Earlier, a major section of online promotional budget was spent on link building - especially for small business owners. One of the most important reasons for not investing in affiliate marketing is that a lot of webmasters thought that affiliate links will not improve their search engine ranking or PR. Now, things should change a little bit and branding exercises would gain more importance. However, I must mention here that all business models are not good for affiliate marketing model - know your status before you jump in.

4. Blogs would gain more popularity - any doubt?

Do you have anything to add? Please write a comment or discuss this topic at NBB Forum.

Advertising trends are changing very fast. Advertisers and marketers know very well that you simply flee away to another channel as soon as you see that an advertisement is popping in.

To add to this, I feel, people expect different things from web. For example, you cannot click on an advertisement in Television to get more information and thus you do not expect to do it either. However, in the web, the viewer would simply click on the link to get more information or to buy the product. This example may seem very funny and common but perhaps this is the most important advantage of web. People have already grown apathy towards direct advertisements promoted in televisions but they are yet to get such apathy about online advertisements (I exclude forced pop ups).

Why am I telling all these? A recent U.S. study found that two-thirds of all consumer goods sales are now directly influenced by word-of-mouth. Some big companies like Adidas are trying to capitalize on that. And sometimes they call it buzz marketing - a below the line advertisement plan.

So, what exactly is buzz marketing in real world?

The model is simple - they try to capture some of the opinion builders or leaders from smaller groups like a football team captain and offer them free samples to use.  They love to show it off in different occasions as a proud possession and eventually influence others to get one. And the return on investment as those companies recorded is much higher than the returns from traditional advertisements. There are some big agencies that gather such people and execute the buzz marketing plans.

We also do the same thing in web. Don’t you think social network marketing is just an online version of these sorts of Buzz marketing?

In hard financial times, you need to maximise your income streams while watching every dollar you spend. Would you like to grow your business for little if any outlay? The secret is rediscovering the ‘we’ mentality that underpins the lost art of partnering.

The Me Mentality

The world today is filled with stories that reflect a ‘me’ mentality, and small business is no different. Entrepreneurs are encouraged to critically view every encounter, be it with clients, suppliers or others, with a ‘what’s in this for me’ attitude. One of the earliest nuggets of wisdom I learned when starting the Australian Leadership Development Centre (ALDC) from a humble garage, was that no matter what business you are in, you are either in the business of making money, or you are in the wrong business.

From Me To We

Now don’t get me wrong, I still believe this. But it is an incomplete view of the world that limits your ability to grow your business and make more money. By contrast, a ‘we’ mentality involves looking at how you and others can work together for mutual benefit. You will find many examples in Big Business such as Harvey Norman working with GE Money to offer ‘no interest, no repayment finance for 18 month’s.  In this arrangement both parties win. Harvey Norman captures those prospective customers who want what they sell, but may not have the money at the moment, while GE Money gets people signed up to its product amidst the 300+ credit cards available in the Australian market. Other well known partnership arrangements include QANTAS & Avis, eBay & PayPal, and Woolworths/Safeway & Caltex.

Yet, you don’t have to be a big company to benefit from partnering.  In fact, it is the limited resources of SMEs that make partnering such an attractive option for small business. Without any additional investment in resources, partnering allows you to grow your business profit a number of ways including, reaching more clients, reducing expenses and better meeting prospective customer needs.

Building Your Own Partnerships

The first step in partnering is to strategically build a potential partner list by asking yourself 3 questions:

1. What are your most pressing business needs at the moment?
2. Who could help you achieve those needs?
3. Which of these people could you help in some way, and how could you help them?

In my own story of growing the ALDC, our most pressing business challenge was that we were consistently half filling our management training seminars through our limited bank of email contacts. Half full covered expenses, and took a lot of my time to get there. Yet, once a program was half full, every person who registered was virtually pure profit. So we partnered with a professional association of managers. They had large databases of contacts and great pulling power. In return, we added to their reputation of meeting their members needs and shared our profit with them. Even with a 50-50 shared profit arrangement, we were making 5 x as much money per workshop because they were full. Your situation will be different, but you can work through the above questions to find productive partnerships of your own.

Once found, make contact and be sure to show them how the deal works for them as well. But be careful, not all partnerships work as it requires a ‘we’ mentality on both sides. Start small, with a trial arrangement. Then dump partnerships that don’t work, and enhance the ones that do.

Shaun Killian is a guest columnist for The Australian and a director with the Australian Leadership Development Centre - our countries only educational organisation exclusively devoted to leadership.

In last couple of posts, I have been talking a lot about investing a part of what you have saved to promote your online business even in this economic downturn. You can visit this site (Financial Times) for some interesting findings.

FT’s research finds out something like this:

“In every recession of the past 90 years…the businesses who increase their advertising spend are the ones who survive the tough times and thrive afterwards.”

If you still have any doubt, read this post: Nine Web 2.0 Startups Beating The Odds in a Down Economy (published by CIO).

On affiliate marketing:

Do not forget to read the point number 2 at seomoz post “6 Lessons from the Search Engineers at SMX East” on affiliate links that points out that “in no uncertain terms, that if affiliate links came from valuable, relevant, trust-worthy sources - bloggers endorsing a product, affiliates of high quality, etc. - they would be counted in link algorithms.” This remark was made by Sean Suchter of Yahoo and the statement was supported by other search engine representatives. And it does not matter if you use no-follow or not. Didn’t you know that already! (It is only confirmed now. So get your commission ready and get more bloggers interested in your money!)

And, if you have any doubt about the power of social networking, do not forget to read these two posts at Fast Company: “How Social Media Got Out the Vote” and “Are Employees Twittering Away Productivity?”

The quickest update: did you notice a new link in the top navigation bar at NBB? We already have 17 members (wow - that’s a good start to have) - who is next?