Come for the Ride…

Many web startups and blogs are born each day with the dream that banner advertising will be the answer to solve all of our problems. Unfortunately for this startup, I too was guilty of this when we first hatched the free classifieds idea.

While advertising in itself is not a bad move, one must be watchful of the market conditions, recognize changes and be wary of placing all your eggs in one basket. While there are certainly sites out there that make it big and pull in thousands of dollars a month, there are at least 10,000 failed webmasters working for spare change every month for every success story out there.

What can you do to better the odds? Diversify your portfolio. Test different affiliate and marketing solutions and try and add other services and revenue models to your website.

Before you implement your next big idea, here are some other places to check out in supplement your AdSense income.

Chitika - This is a search results based ad network that you can put on your website in conjunction with Google AdSense. As long as you are not doing contextual search, the two services do play pretty nicely. One benefit I’ve found showing Chitika ads instead of AdSense ads for search referral traffic - it actually help boosts the CTR of your AdSense ads by showing less impressions.

Amazon Affiliates - If your website can help promote consumer products, this is a good program to join. Amazon spends a lot of money on research making sure people convert on Amazon.com. If you place affiliate links on relevant review or blog sites, chances are you’ll be making more per sale than you would referring clicks to other sites that sell the same products.

Commission Junction - CJ has been around for a long while now. They have all sorts of affiliate programs promoting all kinds of products and services. I can’t say I’ve been thrilled with the results from CJ but if you play around with the referral links, banners and test different placements, you may be able to get money that is incremental to your AdSense earnings.

eBay Partner Network - If referring people to relevant websites makes you money, referring them to eBay’s marketplace should be a no brainer. I’m sure the tweaked services out there can squeeze a lot of money out of eBay. I’ve seen moderate successes with this myself program myself but nothing spectacular.

Text-Link-Ads - If you blog and write interesting content, then chances are you can make money selling links. Even though selling links is frowned upon by the search engines, if you’re a casual blogger who’s just looking to make some extra bucks for your time, I don’t see why you should/would care about the ethics of paid vs. unpaid linking.

In the end, Google AdSense is still our best performer due to sheer volume. But if you aren’t happy with your results and want to see incremental income from other sources, then I would definitely go check some of these other services out. Are there any affiliate programs you guys use that’s not listed here that have just blown you away?

I stumbled across this gem while browsing one of the auto industry blogs I frequent. Times are tough now and whether you’re a car dealer or an entrepreneur, your ability to visualize success and execute those actions does make a difference in the result. Most of the differences are very small but make incredible differences.

You can change where you are in life by (1) being honest where you are and (2) getting the knowledge to get you in a position to take the actions of successful people. Each one of the categories below are impacted ONLY by KNOWLEDGE! So are you mostly column one or column two?

Successful	Unsuccessful
Can Do Attitude	Can’t Do Attitude
I Will Figure it Out	See’s Solutions as Impossible
Opportunity Focused	Problem Focused
Loves Challenges	Hates Challenges
Seeks to Solve Problems	Wants to Avoid Problems
Persist until Successful	Quits When Challenged
Willing to Take Risk	Actions are Conservative
Unreasonable	Reasonable
Willing to be Dangerous	Must Be Careful
Interested in the Creation of Money	Interested in Conserving Money
Takes Action	Talks about Action
Says Yes	Says No
Commits	Never Fully Commits
Goes All the Way	Half Attempts at Everything
Now (immediate)	Later – (procrastinates)
Courage	Fear
Change	Stay the Same
Right Approach	Hard Work
Interested in Change	Not Willing to Change
Breaks Traditional Ideas	Adopts Traditional Ideas
Goal Oriented	Work Oriented
On a Mission	On a Job
High Motivation	Low Motivation
Career Focused	Job Focused
Interested in Results	Interested in Work
Big Goals and Dreams	Realistic Goals
Creates Reality	Deals with Reality
Commit First - Figure Later	Figure First - Commit Never
Highly Ethical	Unethical
Interested in the Group	Interested in Self
Dedicates Time to Learning	Dedicates No Time to Learning
Seeks and Values Knowledge	Denies the Value of Knowledge
Willing to be Uncomfortable	Must Stay Comfortable
Reaches Up	Reaches Sideways and Down

“THE BEST INVESTMENT YOU CAN MAKE DURING TIMES LIKE THESE ARE IN YOURSELF.” - Warren Buffett, April 2009

This excerpt was borrowed from Grant Cardone who has studied successful people for over 30 years. Grant Cardone is a speaker, author, sales trainer and CEO of Cardone Training Technologies. Author of Sell To Survive and other Audio, Video, and training programs.

For more information on Mr. Cardone visit grantcardone.com

Technology entrepreneurs build things because they can and because they want to solve problems. However, as cool as many of these startups are, many of them do fail because the CEO/CTO create them under the assumption “if you build it, they will come.”

The web is a big BIG place. Simply building something and expecting traffic these days is like setting up a deluxe lemonade stand in the middle of the Sahara desert and expecting people to just stroll in. Sure, it’s the desert and people LOVE lemonade. It’s the PERFECT marriage of problem and solution - so why is it failing?

The missing ingredient is promotion and sales.

Even if you make the best lemonade in the world, if you cannot wrap your head around how to promote and sell your product, chances are you will fail. On the other hand, if you know how to sell, you can get away with cheap-o lemonade and still make a killing. This is why in startups you want a rockstar hacker, but you NEED predator sales guys.

Case in point: Recently a new automotive startup has popped into the scene and onto our radar. Their niche targets a certain demographic and provides car listings for under $1,000. After careful analysis, it’s pretty apparent that the technology behind this solution is pretty basic and the number of listings they carry is nowhere near an AutoTrader or Craigslist. In fact, I would even go as far as saying this is now one of the biggest and best advertised “BANS” type store ever. (If you’re familiar with how BANS works.)

So how are they getting 100k visitors a month only after 3 months?

Instead of putting all their energy into building a complex solution, they decided to put their focus in marketing and PR. The owners bought a car for under $1,000 and drove it across the country. As they are doing this, local press from various areas picked up their story and ran it on local TV stations and newspapers.

The takeaway? Your life as an entrepreneur doesn’t end when you finish building your product. To be rewarded, you need to gloat, show it off to the world, and talk about it constantly like you just had a baby. You can sell pretty much ANYTHING and get people to talk about you as long as you actually make some effort to do marketing. Even if you’re driving without a map or a destination, it would be better than not driving at all.

Imagine if you had Superman’s ability to hear everything that goes on on planet Earth. No, not just the headlines that gets printed on today’s newspaper nor the more frequently updated news and blog websites - but actual chatter, from everyone; about every important and mundane thing in real time. Pretty awesome huh?

One would think with these new-found powers, we’d be SUPER! But the truth is, we don’t have Superman’s ability to fly, to travel at the speed of light or his ability to multitask. As much as we’d like to be kept up with on-demand gossip, we can’t tackle the entire beast. Even Superman needs sleep sometimes.

So how should someone or some company handle Twitter? How can we use it to our advantage?

Twitter for some time has been a more evolved and efficient way of communicating for tech geeks. After all, the world is getting smaller and it is getting harder to keep a full schedule of work, play, family and to maintain relationships with friends that are around the world.

At the base of this craze lies a communications tool. For the life of me, I still can not figure out why most people don’t get that. In the world of newspapers, magazines and blogs, you subscribe to them cause you find them interesting. Including them in your life made you better in one way or another. The same is true for Twitter - you follow interesting people or friends because you want to engage them and you have interest in what they have to say.

For the people who are touting their ability to garner 5,000 or 10,000 followers in 30 days… why? Your one time achievement doesn’t make you a social media expert and working that hard to clutter up your life with meaningless chatter is just a pathetic cry for attention in an otherwise apathetic Twitter world where everyone has their own agendas. #FAIL tag all around.

Seeing companies trying to make Twitter work for them has also been interesting in the last few months as various companies try out different techniques to tackle the collective. While some companies get it and engage customers at their time of need, others are again, too involved in the race for numbers without a good reason for building that base.

If you sell vacuum cleaners and you have a website. Shouldn’t your purpose be helping those who have an immediate vacuuming needs to learn more about your products vs. trying to get anyone and everyone to make your website their browsers’ homepage? For the companies who are building a large following on Twitter w/o a real clear motive, that’s exactly what their doing - climbing the wrong ladder.

So how should you or companies use Twitter to enhance your lives?

1. Recognize it’s a communications tool. Similar to the phone, text messaging, emails, etc. People use it to vent, to inform/broadcast and to get help from the platform. If your contributions can fulfill those needs, by all means lend a hand and jump in the conversation.

2. Recognize that tweets are from real people with evolving lives. People need different things for a short period of time in their daily lives. If you can help by sending a short tweet, great! But if your goal is to help, there’s no need to expect a BFF status after the short exchange.

3. Use Twitter as your personal resource, not as a popularity contest. When you ask for help, it’s much more useful to ask your friends rather than to shout your question in the middle of Times Square where no one hears you. The same is true for Twitter. The platform is MUCH more useful when you garner people of similar interests.

4. Utilize the tools. Twitter.com sucks! However, their open API has allowed an insane amount of useful tools to be created around the platform. Just like you wouldn’t be caught dead using a rotary phone, check out some of the available Twitter apps that are more suited to your mobile or working life.

5. For companies, research the chatter on the platform about you and then define a Twitter strategy to match. You can’t jump into other peoples’ conversations and then tell them what to talk about. If you listen though… there could be more gold there than any of the old school product registration cards.

6. Finally, take a break once in awhile. You’re not God or Superman or Skynet. Monitoring chatter can be fun but it really does help your productivity to turn it all off once in awhile.

As an entrepreneur, being a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none may be a good attribute to have when wearing many hats are necessary; but as a start-up, spreading your company too thin trying to cover too many basis just won’t cut it.

In the same way that Ludacris didn’t come onto the scene trying to be the best rapper, best hip-hop artist, best heavy metal rock star and best entrepreneur at the same time; the successful start-ups pick something they can excel at and focus on that attribute like a laser until it punches through the noise and becomes a brand.

So whether your new venture is a copy-cat business of another idea or a brand new idea of its own, does it offer something unique that people won’t find elsewhere? More importantly, can you excel at improving and selling that feature to the point of making it a barrier to entry for other new or existing competitors to follow suit?

This is something we’re working on refining and defining now… a free or freemium service is great and all but if it lacks an edge or unique offering, it will be hard to get the general public interested in it.