Over the past few years, the practice of uploading and sharing of videos on the Web has become extremely popular. Advances in technology, increases in storage space and computing power, coupled with faster access speeds through broadband have all contributed to the rise of video marketing. The viral nature of sharing popular videos by email or social bookmarking sites has further fueled this growth.

So is there any way that any business with a website can take advantage of this to grow their customer base, increase frequency of purchase, grow loyalty and basically add to the bottom line? You bet!

There are some very big benefits of using video as part of the marketing, communication and advertising strategy of your business. Some of the benefits are obvious, but there are a few benefits that can deliver the biggest impact for your business, but are not known or understood by many.

Let’s press on and explain the benefits of video promotion.

First, the obvious benefits. Video commands attention, as it affects both our visual and aural senses. Have you ever walked into a room where a TV is playing? If you are like most people your attention is immediately drawn to what is playing on the screen. Video will attract the attention of your customers, particularly if you can showcase your product or service and communicate your value proposition in a clear and simple manner.

Video also provides a quick and effective communication channel. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth a million words. Rather than reading through reams of documentation or a 30 page sales letter, one can communicate the essence of the offering succinctly and clearly. Your customers who are just as time poor, with limited attention span, will thank you for it.

Video promotion marketing can also provide a personal touch. Think about it. Unless your customers know you personally, you are just a name behind a web site. It requires a lot of trust for people to buy from an unknown person. This can hurt conversions. On the other hand, with video if you are the owner or employee in the business and are on the screen, your customers can begin to relate to you.

Think about it. As the saying goes “people don’t buy from businesses or website; they buy from people”. Internet video is a great way to have a one to one, person to person connection.

This can also lead to better conversion rates for you. Because after they have watched the video, if they click on a link to visit your web site, they are a more qualified, hot prospect.

Videos can also help you stand out against your competitors online. It provides you with differentiation. You do not need your video to be slick and professional. In fact, with the popularity of “reality television”, it is probably better if your video looks more natural and real.

Instead of looking like every other web site out there, you can stand out by employing video to brand your business and communicate what you stand for, more effectively.

Now for that hidden benefit, that provides the biggest impact.

If you have a web site, you probably realize how hard it is to rank well in the search engines for the competitive key word terms in your industry. On the Internet, key words are very important, as most users type in keywords into the search engines to find the product, service, brands or businesses they are looking for.

One of the big benefits of using video currently is that if you use Internet video and then use the correct keywords, describe your video using keywords and then upload them to multiple free video hosting services, this could in many instances help boost your rankings in the search engines.

I’ve created several videos using Camtasia for our own projects as well as for our clients and I was able to get first page rankings on Goolge in less than 48 hours. My friend, video marketing dude, Mike Koenigs, showed me how to do achieve these top rankings. Here’s his secret recipe for dominating markets online.

Visit Traffic Geyser.

Mike shows you how to create an online campaign that dominates search engines and generates massive traffic and leads fast, easy and cheap. You’ll be able to turn any prospect into a buyer without coming across like a salesperson. It’s so brilliant simple you will get it immediately.

In fact, when Mike revealed it at a recent marketing conference, he got THREE standing ovations. Did I mention I got it for you for FREE?

Take a look at Traffic Geyser.

Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: video marketing, how to use videos, promotional videos, get traffic, video marketing secrets

How’s that Pink Floyd song go… “And then one day you find, ten years have got behind you… no one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.” It’s been over 7 months since my last post. (Sounds like I’m making a confession) So, what happened? I guess we were trying to do too many things at once. Sound familiar?

But there’s more to it than just being too busy. It’s about commitment. If you’re not committed to to do something, it probably won’t get done. Simple as that. So I say “make your pledge” to accomplish whatever it is you want to do and stick to it. I know it’s easier said than done but without it you don’t have a chance.

So what triggered the inspiration to start up again? First, I’ve been reading the Sedona Method and it’s helped me get in a more positive frame of mind. Second, I came across a post on MyBlogLog, which by the way is a great blog community, from someone wondering what happened to this blog. It just reminded me of this project and the importance of sharing information and helping others.

That said, I’d like to share a very cool Wordpress plugin called the Ninja Affiliate by MaxBlogPress which automatically converts keywords on your blog into money making affiliate links. You can also manage, track, cloak and shorten an unlimited number of affiliate links from one central location.

Go ahead and mouseover and click on the above links and you’ll see it action. I highly recommend this tool for all your blog marketing and promoting affiliate programs within your blog. This plugin is easy to install and implement.

I will leave it up to Dane to write more about what we’ve been doing for the last several months (besides not keeping up with this project!). He’s a much better storyteller. I just like to get to the point.

Technorati Tags: affiliate marketing, affiliate links, blog community, online business

My friend Gary Chandler from Earth News Media wrote up some questions we should all address in our business ventures. Also, on the topic of surveys I found this open source survey tool we’re going to implement for one of our clients. You should also check out SurveyMonkey as well. I look forward to reading your comments. OK, here are the questions to ask yourself…

1. Do you have a business plan or a marketing plan? If you have a marketing plan, how would you augment it and refine it with a variety of public relations strategies and tactics; including media relations, customer relations, vendor relations, strategic alliances, and others? If you don’t have a marketing plan, get one.

2. Have you conducted any formal market research to help identify your place in the market, customer insights/preferences/awareness/actions, opportunities, threats, etc…?

3. Who is your target market? How else can you segment that audience? Single, married, by country, by city, by lifestyle preferences, etc…

4. What charities do your prospective customers support?

5. Who is your top competitor and why? What is their appeal and market niche? Why is your product line or service superior/preferable?

6. What publications/mediums are your competitors using the most to market their products or services?

7. If you were to model your business and product strategy after another company (same or another industry), who would it be and why?

8. Sales so far have come from who and where? Have you had repeat buyers? Are you surveying past and future buyers?

9. Of your customers to date, what do they have in common? (geographic, demographic, psychograhics, etc…)

10. What products or services do you expect to be your top sellers?

11. Define your potential revenue streams – wholesale, retail, Internet, affiliates, etc… What percentage of total sales do you expect to come from each revenue stream?

12. In your business are there any human interest stories about the people who are involved with the products and services? Personal experiences, the jobs created, environmental benefits, etc…

13. Is there a seasonality to your product or service? Is there a time of year that it slows drastically?

14. What are the industry trends that you should understand?

15. Do you have any business plans/activities that are newsworthy?

16. Where is your hometown? Where did you go to college? Are you a member of social or professional organizations?

17. Define success? Where do you want to be in one year?

18. You just opened the New York Times or some business magazine and you see a story in there about your company and products. What is the headline?

Technorati Tags: business strategy, strategic business survey, marketing survey, online business survey, business plan, survey tool

I have to admit that I’ve dropped the ball on my site flipping project. Creating Joomla membership sites is not as easy as it seems. Setting up the Joomla templates is not the issue but rather getting the content, plugging it into the site, adding the Joomla extensions, finding my way around the admin area, etc…

Everything takes so much time! OK, I’m not giving up. It’s just going to take a little longer than I expected. And I haven’t been motivated to learn Joomla inside and out. I may have to outsource some of this stuff.

In the meantime, I’ve compiled a list of marketplaces for buying and selling web sites…

http://www.Sitepoint.com
http://www.forums.digitalpoint.com
http://www.Sedo.com
http://www.DealaSite.com
http://www.WebsiteBroker.com
http://www.VotanWeb.com
http://www.SitesIndeed.com
http://www.WebsiteLot.com
http://www.BuySellWebsites.com
http://www.DaniWeb.com/forums
http://www.YoungEntrepreneur.com/forum
http://www.MidasCode.co.uk
http://www.IBuyWebsite.com

I personally like Sitepoint and I’ve heard good things about Digitalpoint and SitesIndeed. How’s your site flipping going?

Technorati Tags: site flipping, site flip, buy websites, sell websites, site marketplaces, buying and selling web sites, Joomla

So I dove into building the MentorNet website (See MentorNet - Finally!). I wanted a really crisp, clean look and feel, so I borrowed a few ideas (ok, and some code from around the web and came up with our new design. I’m really please with it. I built a handy-dandy back-end that Rich and I can use to add resources. Rich has been busily populating that. Then I went ahead and installed WordPress for our blog and went to start making the UI match the main website. That’s where I hit a wall.

I don’t know what it is about stylesheets. I know they are eminently logical. I suppose if I just knew all the ins and outs I would find them to be child’s play. But as it is (and I’ve been working with stylesheets for years) I just find trying to bend CSS to my will to be excruciatingly frustrating! Now with PHP, I feel like there’s nothing I can’t do–at least nothing that I can think of. I build all kinds of cool applications in PHP. But the minute I try to do stylesheets, I slow to a crawl.

I know what I need to do. I just need to outsource this kind of stuff. I did it just the other day for a little Flash animation I needed. Cost me $15 and it was as painless as could be. So why don’t I just do it?

1. I get caught up in the challenge. Doing web development is kind of like doing puzzles. Your brain gets a little endorphin hit whenever you get the website to do what you want. I start in on it because I enjoy the creative activity. But then, with stylesheets, I start hitting the wall. It’s like going into withdrawal. It isn’t as much fun, but by that point, I’m just determined to make it do what I want.
2. I’ve had bad experiences with contracting out work before too–people who don’t speak english well, don’t respond to their emails, do half-assed work. Sometimes it’s quicker just to do it yourself.
3. I don’t have money to burn. I have this gnawing anxiety whenever I think about spending money. I can’t be certain MentorNet will produce income. Can I risk forking over cash just to save myself some time and frustration?

Well, I know the answer. It is worth it to outsource these kinds of jobs. We can find developers who do quality work. And my time is better spent working on the business rather than frittering my time away doing webdev puzzles.

I’ll let you know how that turns out.

Technorati Tags: MentorNet, online business, web development, php, css, stylesheets, UI, user interface, website

Rich recently sent me some videos put out by Frank Kern as he was getting ready to launch his big Mass Control product. (In case you aren’t aware, Frank Kern is an online marketing guru who’s famous for being behind the Stomper.Net launch that generated $17 million or something like that). thats I must say that I like his style. I thoroughly enjoyed watching the videos and was very motivated to give them a try. But Rich and I talked about it and just couldn’t rationalize forking out the $2K at this time. So we let the date come and go and we’ll just have to rely on our own wits for a while longer (God help us

Anyway, it was so impressive to see how compelling a case he made through the videos and other material. He used his own techniques to sell the product, which was his techniques. And since you found yourself wanting to buy it, you realized that the techniques must work, which makes you want to buy it even more. So it creates this kind of virtuous spiral of desire and reinforcement. Brilliant!!

Watching his countdown to Feb 1, 2008 and seeing that x number of people were already pre-registered to snap up the limited number of openings, you could practically feel the excitement of people counting down the minutes. The whole time I was witnessing this I’m thinking “Wow. This guy is going to make a million bucks in the space of an hour!” I never did actually find out if he did make a million buck, but I can’t imagine how he didn’t. Now that sound like a lot of fun!

I’m looking forward to checking out Frank’s blog going forward, and I’m hoping that we’ll be able to do an interview with him on MentorNet once we get it ready for prime time.

Technorati Tags: frank kern, mass control, mentornet, online marketing, video advertising, online business, internet business, online success, online opportunities, business plan

Rich and I have been kicking around a lot of ideas about what kind of online business we ought to start. Sure, we’d actually like to see this blog become an income generator itself, but the whole idea is for us to figure out just how to make an online business work so others can learn from our experience. Having this website be the business that we build, well, it’s a self-referencing loop and it’s just kinda weird. So like I said, we needed to decide on a business.

As I’ve probably mentioned already, and probably will again, Rich and my problem is not coming up with enough ideas–it’s narrowing them down to one that we can really concentrate on. Well, I think we’ve finally got it here. Drumroll, please!……………

MentorNet

No, not that MentorNet, the NEW and IMPROVED MentorNet! I’ve actually owned the mentornet.com domain since 1995, when I first jumped into the Internet business. (I know, I know, pathetic that I’m still trying to strike it rich after 13 years). For most of those years the website as been a stale, neglected piece of brochureware., ignored by us and the world alike. It only saw action when we pitched a website project–we’d go in and spiff up the portfolio and as soon as we got the project we’d forget about mentornet.com again.

Yet, I’ve always loved the name and thought it had great branding potential. I’ve often thought about turning it into a kind of hub for mentors or a portal for people trying to achieve success in online business.

Well, the time has come. Go check out MentorNet if your interested in seeing what we’re up to. And please, let us know what you think! Interested in participating? That would be cool!

I’ll be posting more about the project in the days to come.

Technorati Tags: mentornet, mentors, online marketing gurus, internet business experts, internet business, online success, online opportunities, web business resources

I did it! My site flipping experiment worked! I sold 5 web sites for around $1500 in 2 weeks. And these sites weren’t even memberships sites! I’m really excited now!

Even though I did buy a site on one marketplace and took the template and tweaked it, optimized the code for the search engines and promoted it to all the top social bookmarking sites and then flipped it on another marketplace, I think I will develop from scratch the majority of the sites that I will sell online.

So now Dane and I have to make the process of creating and selling sites as automated and as efficient as possible. It might be time to revive a project of ours that’s been sitting on the sidelines for years… I need to talk to Dane about it before I give away the details.

So, what am I doing right now? I’m learning how to use Joomla, a content management system. Supposedly it is much better than Wordpress, which is more of a blog management system. Even though Wordpress is the best blogging tool that I’ve used, I’m always spending way too much time with plugins that don’t work and templates that have too many bugs. The key is to know which plugins and templates to use. I’ll write more about Wordpress some other time.

I think Joomla will be the platform to use to create high-quality, membership sites and get some traffic and revenue and then sell them online. If you’re interested in learning more about Joomla I highly recommend this site… How to Build a Free Sophisticated Website with Joomla. Also, here are some Joomla videos and here are the extensions to use recommended by the SiteFlip Academy to use: Fireboard, Group Jive, Community Builder, Marketplace, AEC, Sigsiu Business Directory, Ion Files and All Videos Plug-in. I don’t know much about these extensions but will try them all out and let you know.

Technorati Tags: site flipping, selling websites, Joomla, Joomla videos, Joomla extensions, Wordpress, Wordpress plugins

I just finished listening to an audio cd of an interview between Keith Baxter and Jack Humphry and I knew I would listen to it until the end when Keith introduced Jack as the first marketer of “authority sites”. Just so you know, you can get this same audio CD for free at Nothing Held Back - Software Lead Generation. So, his mentioning authority sites caught my interest and brought back memories of the “Absolute Authority” project Dane and I started way back when in 1998.

Absolute Authority was basically a directory of vertical portals made up of authority guides building their sites by adding related links, articles, affiliate programs and more through an easy-to-use online control panel.

Authorities could even view their traffic stats, tap into a resource section packed with traffic generation and marketing tips, advertising information, a contact manager to manage their own subscribers and so on.

By the way, we didn’t have the ability to add Adsense ads because this was happening before even Google was around! We did include Commission Junction ads because they were one of the first to offer affiliate program links.

Anyway, to make a long story short, the Internet bubble burst and we couldn’t close on our second round of funding from angel investors and we had to let go of all our programmers and eventually sell the site. That was a bummer. We did learn to never again use Cold Fusion for developing web sites! It’s all PHP these days. I’m sure we’ll have more posts on Absolute Authority - I don’t want to get too depressed right now. I want to get back to writing about Jack Humphry because he wrote a very informative and comprehensive resource on creating authority sites and using Web 2.0 social media sites to bring in traffic. You should download the free resource at Authority Blackbook. BTW, he’s launched a new site called Bending The Web, which I haven’t even had a chance to check out yet.

I’m a big believer in promoting through social bookmarking, social networking, video sites and other web 2.0 sites. I think there’s a lot of potential here to tap into some great traffic, if done right. There’s a new coaching course called SMARTS that looks like they’ve got social media marketing all covered. Check out this Social Marketing video by StomperNet.

Technorati Tags: social bookmarking, absolute authority, web 2.0, authority blackbook, Jack Humphry, Keith Baxter

I was having another typical discussion with my buddy, Rich, where we were bemoaning all the obstacles preventing us from making progress with our online business quest. But probably the biggest one is that we have just too many ideas. And it doesn’t make it any easier that whenever you get on the web and start doing anything you are immediately presented with a million other new things that look pretty darn interesting too.

Rich has so many projects going on and so much knowledge about online marketing tools that whenever I talk to him my head starts to spin. So we started talking about about the need to have a way of getting organized that:

1. Would allow us to keep all our information stored in a central location
2. That we could each update on our own time
3. That was easy to customize for our specific purposes

I could develop a system like this from scratch using PHP, but I’ve done that and I know how much time that takes. So we went looking for something that already exists. We looked at basecamp which is a really decent project management/collaboration tool. But we needed a structured list of all the logins (for example) and this just didn’t cut it. In other words, we needed a database program. I thought about Intuit’s QuickBase which does allow you to create your own database driven applications online, but they are now charging for it, and Rich and I are loath to spend money since we’re not making much money right now.

So as we were talking, Rich did a search on something I said and BLAMMO! He found just what we were looking for!

It’s called ZoHo. It’s a beautiful suite of Web2.0 applications, including word, spreadsheets, presentation, collaboration, project management, etc. The one we started using was Creator, which allows you to create an online we application with incredible ease. So we built an application within about an hour and started inputing our data right away. Getting all our data in there is going to take longer. But it’s a beautiful application and it’s completely free (at least for the moment). Maybe by the time they start charging for it we’ll be making a bunch of money and it won’t matter!

Technorati Tags: zoho, spreadsheets, project management, basecamp, project tools, management tools, collaboration tools online

I was poking around some of the marketplaces on web sites for sale and noticed that directory sites are popular and are selling quite well. Especially ones that are generating some traffic and revenue. The most popular directory script I’ve seen out there is the PHP MyDirectory script. I might have to invest in it.

And on the topic of niche directories, I found a great video on niche directory profits. Check it out. I like the fact there is good, detailed and useful information here provided by Keith Baxter. I will definitely give this a try.

Too much to do and too little time. But I think I’m close to putting some sites for sale and see if there are any buyers out there. I sure hope this site flipping stuff works.

Technorati Tags: site flipping, niche directory, directory scripts, niche directories

I’ve recently come across the first school for site flippers at the Site Flip Academy and found it interesting enough to join. Justin Brooke provides very good advice and a nice collection of resources to get started in the growing field of site flipping.

I think I’m going to try to flip some sites in the next two weeks and see how it goes. I think the key will be to create good-looking membership sites. But I’m still experimenting with some membership scripts. And so I might take a short cut. What are some of your thoughts on membership sites and software?

I have so many domain names that I will first try to whip up some sites and see if I can sell them real quick for some fast cash. But as I mentioned, my main goal is to create higher quality sites that have more value, more traffic and more potential. I guess that’s not really site flipping if I’m going to create a site from scratch and sell it. But close enough. I might poke around some of the marketplaces like Digitalpoint and Sitepoint to see if there are any worthwhile sites to buy, fix up and flip. I’ll keep you posted. Wish me luck!

Technorati Tags: site flipping, sitepoint, buying and selling web sites, site flipper, membership sites, membership software

Rich and I were just having a typical conversation for us–wondering how certain people seem to make it so easily on the Internet and others (like us, so far) just can’t seem to get off the ground. This particular conversation lead into a discussion about what the various Internet business models are. I thought that a clear breakdown of the main types of business models would make a pretty useful planning resource, for us as well as for you. So here goes:

First, I should qualify this list as being for individuals or small companies that don’t have a lot of resources to develop real proprietary technology. This list should be applicable for anyone of reasonable intelligence with some time and a little money to spend.

Thinking this through, I think there are really two key components of any given business model:

1. What are you offering of value to the visitor?
2. How are you making money?

As we will see, these are not necessarily the same thing. In fact, it is probably more common that they are not. But obviously both of these components are necessary. You need to provide something that visitors want in order for them to come to your site. And if you don’t have a way to turn those visits into money, well, what’s the point?

Business Models

So let’s start with the first component. As I see it, there are seven main business models in terms of the value provided:

Content
Whether the content is serious, humorous, useful, salacious, intriguing, or whatever, you are providing written or visual material that your visitors will want to view. Typical examples would be news websites or blogs.

Resources
A resource site is basically a guide to other useful information on the web. The value to the visitor is that you’ve organized the Web just a little bit for them, saving them time.

Community
A community site brings together visitors with a common interest and facilitates their communication. Forums and social networking sites would be prime examples.

Free service
Free services involve providing some tools or functionality beyond just content or community–something that helps you get a job done. CoolText, a tool that helps you create buttons, is a good example. (I used it to create the button for the search form on this site.)

Product for sale
Products themselves could be the valuable commodity you provide. This is the most basic of business models. Shoppers want a particular type of product. You offer it at a competitive price. Simple.

Web-based service
By a similar token, you may offer a web-based service that is exactly what visitors need, and it is valuable enough to charge them for it. We’re classifying this differently than the free services mentioned above.

Professional services
Here I’m referring to providing services on an hourly or contract basis using the web as your medium for communicating with your clients. This could be doing web development, training, consulting, or any number of things. The key is you find your customers, communicate with them, bill them, etc. primarily through the web.

Hybrid
Of course, any website could employ any combination of these types of value to attract visitors. In fact, it would probably be unusual to find a business model that is using only one of these. Maybe the key is finding the right mix so that visitors see a lot of value without getting overwhelmed, and you optimize your income-generating potential without getting overextended.

Am I missing anything? Let me know if you think so, and I’ll see about adding it to the list or otherwise fitting it into this model.

Revenue Generation

On to the second factor: converting the visitors into money. I see eight main ways of doing this:

Product Sales
Again, straightforward. The visitor pays you money and you send them the product. This category includes hard merchandise as well as information delivered digitally.

Service or membership subscriptions
In this situation the visitors are paying you and a regular basis (monthly, yearly, etc.) in order to maintain access to the service or membership that you offer. If they stop paying, they quit receiving your service. Dating services like Match.com or DVD rental services like NetFlix would be prime examples.

Affiliate fees
With this method, you don’t actually have a product or service to sell, but rather you get a commission whenever you refer customers to some other company that is selling a product or service. Your job is to focus their attention on a particular subject and then direct them to the place where they can spend the money.

Banner advertising
It may be down, but it’s definitely not out. Banner advertising is another way to generate income indirectly by sending visitors on to another website. The upside is you get paid whether they buy anything there or not. The downside is that you don’t earn nearly as much per visitor action.

Text link advertising
Like banner advertising, you’re just sending your visitors on to someone else and taking a small fee for the service. Google’s AdSense is certainly the most common way that this is accomplished, but text links could be sold directly as well.

Selling mailing lists
If you’ve got members who have registered on your site, you could be sitting on a valuable asset. These could be sold as targeted leads to other companies.

Hourly billing
This revenue method basically goes together with the professional services value listed above. Customers take delivery of your services over the web, you bill them for the hours you spent, and they pay you over the web.

Transaction broker
This model involves finding two individuals or companies that need each other and acting as the coordinator of their transaction. Sites like eLance and oDesk are good examples. They get paid a percentage of the transactions they broker.

Hybrid
As with the services offered, it is likely that a website will generate revenue in more than just one way.

Now that I’ve identified these various business models, let me map these to the Online Business Quest project on which we are currently working.

The value that we are offering is primarily content at the moment. We plan to offer information, stories and analysis that will be useful and entertaining. We’ll also be something of a resource–organizing the most valuable tools and resources available for Internet entrepreneurs. We may end up being able to offer some tools through the site, but we’ll have to see about that.

In terms of generating money, we’re looking to start out with the basic AdSense advertising and affiliate links. As our membership base grows, we will hopefully be able to start selling some premium services. Eventually we’ll plan to pull together some products of our own to sell.

When you consider that you can do any combination of above business models, you can see that there is really limitless possibilities. And that is a potential hazard, as I alluded to earlier. I know that has been a real challenge for Rich and I. With so many options, it is really difficult to just zero in on one, or a small number of projects. If we don’t experience instant success, it’s so easy to conclude that we’re missing out on a better business model. So we have moved from project to project over the years never really gaining any real traction with any one of them.

Can you relate? Do you think there is a business model that stands out above all the others? How do you resist the urge to try something else if you aren’t sure you’re on the right track? We would love to get your input!

Oh, one more thing about this post. You may have noticed that I said these business models could apply to small fries like us, and then I proceeded to use major players as my examples. I would be happy to include smaller companies as examples of these, but I was running a little short of time. Let me know if you can think of a better example and I’ll change them out.

Technorati Tags: online business model, work from home, internet entrepreneur, income generation

If you’ve read my first post, you have the basic idea about who we are and what we’re trying to do. Now I’m going to flesh out some of the details of our Plan. First, I suppose I should admit right up front that this isn’t a perfectly formulated plan. We’re going to have to see where this goes. There are so many ways to make money on the Internet, and we’ll consider almost all of them (no porn sites, warez, fraud, or other nasty stuff). Other than that, we’re open to suggestions.

But we’re starting with this blog–a basic content website supported by advertising and affiliate links. We know our target market… people like us who who want to make money on the Internet but just aren’t making it. The plan is to provide content that is both useful (e.g. how-to secrets from experts we’ll highlight as we go) and engaging (e.g. real-life stories of failure and success). We’re going to mix in opportunities and incentives for visitors to participate–try to nurture a thriving community. By posting daily to the blog ourselves and extending that through user-generated content, we plan to begin to generate traffic through organic search engine results. We’ll employ all the social networking techniques we can think of to build our readership and membership bases, start working our mailing lists, etc. If it starts making money, then maybe we’ll give PPC advertising a shot. At some point, hopefully even press will come into play. Who knows?

Heck, this website could be the very online business we are looking for! We’re going to try and make that happen.

But that’s not the whole plan. You see, scattered amidst all that user-generated content are going to be some real golden nuggets of information. What are the best online opportunities? How can you build the most traffic with the least time and money? What “free” tools and resources are actually just a waste of time, and therefore very costly indeed? Which gurus are for real and which ones are posers? We plan to gather all that knowledge together and distill it down to the essence. I envision launching a series of online businesses–an empire that stretches around the globe. I see a vast social network of associates collaboratively building this entity with a life of it’s own, generating millions and millions of dollars! Bwhaaahaaahaaa!!!!!

OK. Calm down, Dane. Actually, I will be happy with simple financial freedom for me and my family (and Rich ;-), but I think there’s power in aiming high, so that is the vision I’ll continue to nurture.

I am *very* interested to know what you think of this plan. Is it shear genius? Pie-in-the-sky daydreams? Or just plain boring? Please post a comment and let me know! Maybe someone will post that comment that brings me back down to earth convinces me it’s a futile effort. Maybe somebody gives me that inspiration to make a breakthrough. Or maybe you’ll just get a little exposure for your own ideas. Either way, the floor is open….

Technorati Tags: online business, internet business, online success, online opportunities, business plan

You are invited to join us on an exciting adventure! Who are we? Well, no one you’ve heard of…yet.

I’m Dane Christensen and my business partner, who you’ll also be hearing from a lot on this site, is Rich Benvin. We are a couple of average guys who have been trying to “strike it rich” on the Internet for years. Rich and I became friends originally because we shared the dream of creating automatic income streams on the Internet…financial freedom, etc. Perhaps you also share that dream? As for me, from the first time I logged onto the Internet back in 1994 I saw the unlimited potential to create value and generate wealth. I dove into the industry head first and have never looked back. But after more than thirteen years of extensive effort, I sit here today still working for someone else, living hand-to-mouth, frustrated and disappointed in the countless hours I’ve seemingly wasted chasing this elusive dream.

But somehow I just can’t bring myself to give up. Because I know that it is possible. In my job as a web analytics specialist for ClickTracks Analytics, I talk to people every day who are involved in successful online ventures. And of course I’ve read so many testimonials like this one that it makes my head spin. What makes this especially frustrating is the fact that Rich and I really know our stuff! It kills me when I read stories of people who just stumble into fortunes online, as if it were just the simplest thing in the world. Sometimes I wonder if there really is a secret–some mystical, beautifully simple formula that if you just find it everything falls into place. Or is it just blind, dumb luck? No doubt there’s some combination. But what is the combination? And how do you make your own luck?

Well, I am determined to find out, once and for all. That’s what this website is all about. Rich and I are about to launch our final quest to build an online empire. Over the months to come, we are going to document our journey from the backwaters of the Internet to (hopefully) fame and fortune. My vision is that before the end of 2008, we’ll be appearing on Oprah as an inspirational rags-to-rags-to-rags-to-riches story. Our lives will completely change.

And you will have a front row seat to the entire show. You are either going to witness–in real time, as it happens–two guys actually making their dreams come true, (and showing you exactly how we do it), or going down in flames for the whole world to see! Either way, it should make for a great human drama!

But our plan is to make this site about much more than just voyeuristic entertainment. As I mentioned above, we are going to thoroughly document our quest as we explore all the possible paths to online wealth. We’re going to enlist the aid of people who have made it on the Internet as well as invite the feedback and questions of fellow seekers. We’re going to examine stories of success and failure in order to uncover the hidden keys. We’ll review many technologies, techniques and systems to find the essential pieces of the puzzle. Over time, we plan to distill our findings down into step-by-step plans that you can follow so you too can make the dream come true for yourself.

So please take a few seconds now to bookmark this site, tell any friends that you think might be interested, and sign on yourself so you can participate in this amazing adventure with us. It’s going to be a lot of fun!

Technorati Tags: business quest, online business, dane christensen, rich benvin