How To Write A Book

This is something I have been thinking about for a little while.

Should I write a book that goes into greater detail then what I post on my blogs?

Now this book will not be about making money online or anything like that. It will be on one very specific topic. As with all books a great deal of research and effort will need to be put forth as well.

I'm probably not going to get picked up by a major publisher, but with POD I can self publish and manage my own ISBN if needed.

Best of luck on all your money making efforts. Take some time to take a break, you know what they say about all work and no play.

Michael

My 2 Cents on The Economy & Tax Rebate

I got my Tax Rebate notice the other day. Most of it will be spent in a few weeks when we go on vacation.

I will spend the whole thing and watch to see if the Economy gets stimulated. That is said tongue in cheek as it could take years for the economy to improve.

What else can be done to stimulate the economy? Keep in mind credit card debt and gas prices continue to rise. Add in Health care and the cost of groceries and there is barely anything left to stimulate the economy with.

Fortunately in addition to my day job I make some money on the internet too. A little money for entertainment, nice dinners out and a car payments.

There are many benefits to making money online compared to my real job, but there are downsides as well.

Time to get back to work on my online business to see if I can make more money to spend.

A little disclaimer here. I am not saying that you should spend all your money. In my real job I have a great retirement plan, so that is where I save my money. That way I can spend all the money I make online (after taxes). Your results may vary and if you don't have some savings built up, please do that first.

Michael

Stand Out In A Crowd

Where I work we are raising money for "Make A Wish". The goal is to raise enough money to fulfill a wish for very sick children.

Each of the departments came up with a different idea.

So now when you get on the elevator you are inundated with small posters promoting a departments fund raising idea.

I love the ideas, they are great.

But the problem is that none of them stand out. When you walk in the elevator there are so many it is hard to focus on just one.

There is one poster that has some standout stuff, but no memory factor.

So, the idea isn't just to stand infront of your customers. But to stand where they can see you and clearly recognize you.

Michael

Interesting Testing Results

I had a nice surprise yesterday. I checked my stats on shareasale.com and noticed that I had a sale. But not just any sale, since I often have sales promoting their merchants.

The surprise part was that I had a sale for a merchant that I was planning on testing. I was working on a landing page and was going to promote using AdWords. But I didn't start advertising yet.

So the page was found with a natural search. After checking the page stats it doesn't get much traffic.

I may have found another winner. Now I will have to use the tools over at Wealthy Affiliate to figure out the best keywords to use on AdWords.

I could just load a campaign with 100's of keywords, but I found that using the tools at Wealthy Affiliate save me time and money. Now I only need to have 15-25 keyword phrases in my AdWords campaigns.

Have a good weekend.

Michael

Buy One Get One Free

Why run a special to Buy One and Get One Free instead of offering 50% off?

I don't know the answer to this question and would imagine that it is complex and varies by business and purpose.

Could it be to reduce stock on hand. If the product is consumable will the customer have to also buy more of another companion product. For example shampoo and conditioner.

There isn't an easy way to buy one and get one free with ebooks. That is unless you have 2 ebooks and are selling them together as a set where one is free.

Could this be a new way to joint venture. Buy my product and get Mr.x's product free? Well I guess that wouldn't be too new, but not common.

What are your thoughts on this as it relates to selling digital products online?

Michael

Tax Rebate & Why I Love EntreCard

First an update on the Tax Rebate for those of us in the USA that qualify. Always be thankful, it isn't much but it is better then nothing. In the end all we have are memories anyway.

Now on to Entrecard. I am starting to like EntreCard more. At first I thought the work to results ratio was not worth my effort.

But then I made a slight change and now I don't have to work as hard. I was dropping over 100 cards a day. But now I drop about 20 and because I like to see who the new blog are that visit me and I drop another 10-20 on blogs that I like to read. So I am down to about 40 from over 100 (close to 150).

Want to know what the big change was that I am so happy about ... keep reading.

When I first started I was dropping and visiting blogs. But I wasn't spending my credits.

The true power of Entrecard didn't kick in until I started spending my credits.

Now I earn more EntreCard credits per day when I did over 100 drops with much less effort.

More bloggers see my ad on other blogs, visit my blog and purchase an ad worth their EntreCard credits. It is a win-win for all involved.

There you have it. To take full advantage of EntreCard you have to regularly spend your credits.

Michael

Use Tools To Help You Make More Money

The best way to make a hard job easier is with tools.

It will hake hours to cut your lawn with scissors, but a lawn mower will make the work easier and produce better results.

The same holds true for making money online. That is why I use the tools at Wealthy Affiliate.

Big things are happening at Wealthy Affiliate and in addition to the tools already offered, more are on the way.

I use the competition spy tool to help me spy on markets before I start promoting within a niche. Works great and saves me a ton of time.

If you are serious about making money online now is the time to join Wealthy Affiliate. The price goes up on Tuesday, but you can lock in the current low price if you join now. Thats right, join now and pay the same price for as long as you are a member.

I don't know what the new price will be, but the tools alone are worth 3 times the price of membership. They also offer free website hosting for 3 sites and have free tools to help you build sites quickly.

Join today before the price increase and start using tools to help improve your online income.

Michael

One Blog or Many Blogs?

One of the comments I got yesterday asked why so many blogs.

Do you think it is better to have one blog or multiple blogs? There is no one right answer, but below is my answer.

I prefer to have multiple blogs based on topics. Would you keep coming back to my blog if I posted about solar power one day and mountain bike tires the next?

I create a new blog for each topic that I am interested in. Some of the blogs only get one post per month, others once per week and others once per day.

By keeping the topic content together I get better search engine results. So this benefits me in the SERPs and benefits my readers as they don't have to weed through content that they are not interested in.

Michael

Project Planning

I was considering promoting some clickbank products next week. But instead I am going to promote some shareasale.com programs.

There is normally less competition in PPC advertising when promoting niches from networks other then Clickbank.

I found one that only has 3 advertisers promoting it. Good chance I can write a better ad and conversion copy.

Rewards are something I have noticed the offline world picking up more and more. It isn't as easy to do online, but something I am going to look into.

Michael

Past the 600 Post Mark

This is post number 601. Hard to believe that I made it this far.

Now if I could only break the $200 a day barrier.

Traffic picked up on one of my blog. I love when that happens. Guess I will have to increase the posting frequency.

Most of my blogs I only post once a month or once a week at most. This is my only blog where I post almost daily.

Time to do some research and start planning next week.

Michael

Tools For Blogging Success

I see that FaceBook added a chat application today. I know that most of the email providers also have a chat option. But I like the ability to chat with contacts no mater what email provider they use.

Over at Wealthy Affiliate they keep adding new tools to help me make money online. I love the research tools, saves me a good bit of time and money. They provide much at a very low price.

I haven't invested my $170 yet. I will probably use it to test 2 products with AdWords, but haven't decided yet.

My MyBlogLog community is growing nicely. Almost at 800 and it should hit 1,000 this summer.

Michael

What Can We Learn From Events

As you may know I was in Denver last week at a conference.

While there I attended a bunch of educational sessions and talked to a couple hundred vendors. It was neat to see how each of the vendors did their marketing.

Some were offering a chance to win a big prize like a Mac notebook or iPod touch, while others were handing out small trinkets. Some even gave pins to put on our conference badge.

At first I thought the big prize vendors were missing something by not having a handout at the conference. But then today I got an email from one of the vendors with an announcement of the iPod Touch prize winner.

And what did I do. Well I opened it and read the whole thing. In addition to announcing the winner (wasn't me) they told me about a free webinar that I can register for next week.

How smart is that.

There is just one more thing this vendor could have done to get me closer to being a customer. And that is to present on one of the session topics.

I give credit to the vendors to freely give of their time to come to a conference and offer free training.

More on offline and online marketing over the next few days.

Michael

March Madness Internet Marketing

Do you play the brackets for March Madness? You know the office pool where you pick NCAA college basketball teams, narrowing your selection down to the champion.

I like basketball and enjoy playing the March Madness basketball pick games.

How does March Madness connect to Internet Marketing.

If you think about it, the teams are all seeded or ranked within their devision. In internet marketing we have a seeding in that Google ranks websites and blogs.

With March Madness there is competition. Again we compete in Google for top position. If Google doesn't give it to us through a "Seed" we have to buy it with AdWords.

And finally the champion. Well I guess that would be every internet marketer that makes more then they spend.

Best of luck on your basketball picks and your internet marketing.

Michael

One Month To Live

Yesterday I mentioned about the book "one Month To Live" by Kerry & Chris Shook.

Since you are only supposed to read one chapter a day I will have to add a second book to my current reading list.

So far I love the book.

I may not have agreed to roller skate on Saturday had I not been reading this book.

What does that have to do with internet marketing?

For me when I think about only having one month to live and the work I do online. It helps me to focus on what is important and cut back what is not.

The 4 Hour Work Week did a great job of guiding my thinking at eliminating things that were not important. But 30 Days To Live does so with a thread of purpose throughout.

What good is working only 4 hours a week if you are not going to use the free time for something important.

Before you spend 3 or 4 more hours surfing the net today/tonight. Cut back by 50% and head to the bookstore to purchase "One Month To Live". No, this isn't the book that was given to me for free to review. I think it will change your life, that is why I suggest it.

Michael

Bright Sunny Day - Great Day For Outdoors

Today is a bright sunny day. Still a little on the chilly side, but overall a bright sunny day.

Instead of spending too much time behind the computer I am going to take a break and spend some time outside.

My bike needs some adjusting so that it is ready to ride in a couple weeks. The car needs washed and the list goes on.

One quick topic I want to hit today.

Live life as if you are going to die in 30 days. Don't go out and max all your credit cards. I'm not talking about that. Hopefully you don't plan on leaving your kids with a ton of credit card debt.

What I am talking about is not putting off for tomorrow what you know you should do today.

Tomorrow I will have an update on some of the changes and projects I am working on.

Michael

Blog Moved to OnePennyProject.com

I am pleased to announce that I finally purchased a domain name for this blog. I will let Google supply the free hosting to save space and bandwidth on my virtual server.

Today I purchased OnePennyProject.com to replace the one-penny-project.blogspot.com URL that was pointing to this blog.

Same great content, much nicer looking URL.

There is nothing wrong with using a blogspot domain name. Heck most of my blogs still use a blogspot URL. But I figured this blog has grown to a point where it desirved to have a custom URL.

Wish I would have done this before I purchased my latest advertising. But at least I finally did it.

The next step is a professional header graphic. I currently have a project open for a graphic designer.

I like the design of this blog so I probably won't re-design the layout. I may re-arrange some of the widgets, but nothing major.

You may notice that Google is confused about what ads to display. This should be fixed in a day or two when they realize that OnePennyProject.com replaced one-penny-project.blogspot.com

Michael

Short Posts or Long Posts

Do you prefer short blog posts or longer blog posts?

I read a ton of blogs every day in addition to about 3 books a month. The problem I have is finding a place to stop.

I prefer short blog posts and short chapters in books. It makes it easy for me to find a stopping point and mark where to continue the next day.

Pictures are a nice feature as well. I will have to start adding more photos to my blog posts.

What are your thoughts on blog post size?

Michael

Back From New Orleans

I am back from New Orleans. The trip was a safe one. It is good to be home with my family, yet there is much rebuilding to be done.

Now on to internet marketing.

Looks like MyBlogLog is having a problem with adding contacts again. I will test this on my laptop as well, but I think it is a process problem, not a PC problem.

Today is catch-up day then back to work tomorrow. Even though I tried to check in this past week, there is plenty I need to get done.

Looking forward to starting a new site and testing some new advertising.

Take Care,

Michael

Don't Get Stuck In A TrafficJam

John Reese just released one of hs new websites to the public. I have yet to join BlogRush for various reasons. Income may be done some day, still waiting for that one.

I see no reason to jump on the TrafficJam bandwagon. I know the ins and outs of Technorati, so why bother with another blog tracking site.

John is a great marketer and no doubt there is some value with TrafficJam. But for me I will stick with Technorati.

I have a new product that I will be promoting when I get back. I didn't get a chance to review the product or sales letter yet. The membership I belong to gives me master resell on a product they create every month. Works gret for me as it would cost 5 times as much to have the product written.

Things are going well in New Orleans. Today it is rainy, but all of our work will be inside. This might slow down the drying time of the drywall compound though. Hopefully we can get all the walls ready for paint if not completly painted by Friday evening.

So much to do, so little time.

Michael

Do What You Can - Don't Sweat The Details

Hello All,

Our group arrived safely in New Orleans yesterday after a bumpy, but uneventful flight. We took a tour of one of the houses we will be rebuilding and should be set to start work on Monday.

Today is Church then we may spend some time in the French Quarter. Love the music and atmosphere of the French Quarter. But as always many places are better enjoyed every once in a while rather then every day.

Many of the people who read this blog are bloggers. One thing I often struggle with is the details.

There are 2 types of posts for me. Results and Information.

For "Results" posts I write about things I have tried and how they worked for me. Take for example my thoghs on the tools I use at Wealthy Affiliate. I also try verious advertising methods and ways to make money online.

What I do and what I learn from it are written as "Resluts" posts. Many of my readers prefer those posts over the information posts.

I do information posts because not everyone is at the same level. So I try to write about some things that may be known to many, but not to someone who is new at blogging. These posts take much more time to write then the Results posts.

What I am starting to learn is that I don't need to write all the details, just a high level post with links to others that have more detail.

This will benefit my regualr readers who already know the topics I am writing about as well as the visitor who is new.

Take Care,

Michael