Do you have your own www?

Do you have your own world wide web with your brand stamped on it or do you have lots of internet property floating adrift in hyperspace? Some people have many accounts around the internet, some in their own name and others with their brand or company name. They jump from one site to another as fashion dictates, leaving behind all their followers and work to stagnate.

The internet is both a blessing and a curse because what you put on the internet will stay there for many years for people to find, it could be a great article about you or if could be a forum post where you lost the plot. Both will become harder to find over time but they will still to on the net for people to find. The trick is that when you move on to your new passion is not to forget all about your old one. Therefore, if you are starting a new blog let your old blog readers know about your new blog, if they liked your old one they may like your new one! If you are thinking of moving to the latest social networking site, let your followers know as many of them might also be moving too the new social networking site also.

Search engines like Google or yahoo can take up to six months to look at and index a new websites, when the search engine indexes a website they look at every page and follow every link on the site. Therefore, if you have a website already you can link to your new one to bring it to the attention of the search engines. Search engines rate the links so that a link from your car review site to your cake-decorating site is not going to be very good for your stats, unless you link to a page on decorating cakes like cars!

There are many tools around that you can use to automate thing so that you can keep your sites active. You can time delay your posts on your blog and have your blog post to your social network sites and many social network site will post to each other. As long as you are talking about similar things this linking will help strengthen your web on the internet and draw in people beyond your direct contact.

Once you have your own sites linked and supporting each other, it is time to start collaborating with other in the same or similar subject that you are working in. people can be found and relationships on dedicated forums. Some forums have sections or groups for members looking to collaborate or to promote each other but as in life you will get people that just take and not give.

So rather than let your old sites fade away on the internet, link them to your active sites and keep them feeding you with visits and followers.

Before you Die

Nobody likes to dwell on the idea but the fact is that we are all going to die at some point. Another fact that you may not be aware of is that many people die each year without making provision via a will for their estate after they have gone (intestate), which means that the government, after some time gets to keep it all! If you have made a will then good for you but did it, include your internet property and copyrights?

Stieg Larsson the author of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the Millennium Trilogy died before it was published and that has so far sold in excess of 40 million copies. Being intestate and the fact that Swedish law does not recognise the rights of common law spouses in this matter meant that his spouse of 30 years did not receive anything and the copyright and money went to his father and brother.

The internet is relatively young and the number of people that have died leaving internet property just floating on the web might be quite small compared to the millions upon millions of sites, blog’s, social accounts and stores that are on the web. If you are going to be making money on the internet, maybe even a living or even a very good living from the internet then what is going to happen to that income once you die?

Besides the obvious sites like your POD stores and online banks that you money in, your other sites also have a monetary value even if it is harder to put a figure on them. Your blog that gets thousands of visits each month or your twitter account with tens of thousands of followers, how about your facebook or myspace account with close to a million fans, they may not be able to be turned into cash but are you going to let them fade away on the web after you have gone.

Many companies on the internet at the moment do not have any provisions for account holders that die. The best way to ensure that your internet property goes to whom you want it to go too is to leave instructions in your will. Do not forget to leave a master copy of all your internet accounts along with passwords to make things easier for the beneficiaries of your will, this should be kept in a secure location like a bank deposit box so that is does not fall into the wrong hands.

In many countries there is a limit on how long a copyright remains after the death of the artist / writer, 50 years in Canada while 70 years in the United States and the UK. Some times the copyright will last longer if an active company owns it so it might be worth your while to set up a company that will own all your copyright material and internet property and then you could leave shares in your company to different people. In the UK you can give ‘gifts’ to people each year and the longer you live after giving the gift the less inheritance tax (on a sliding scale) the beneficiaries will have to pay. This can be a good way to pass on your assets to the next generation while reducing both you and your beneficiaries tax liability.

This may not be on top of your ‘to do list’ but once it is done you will have peace of mind in knowing that your loved ones will benefit from all your hard work for years to come, so I will leave you with the words of Voltaire, “people that leave things to others in their will are only giving away things that no longer belong to them”.

Keeping at it till you succeed

Persistence is one of the worst keep secrets of people making money on the internet and business in general. Some people just do not like the idea of all that hard work and who could blame them when the media is always telling us about “over night success” even if it was 10 or 20 years in the making. It is also seen in the popularity of programs that should have been called “we have not got any talent” where the contestants believe that they are super stars and the viewers watch to see them make fools of them self’s.

The vast majority of you know that you have to put the work in but sometimes you feel that you may not be putting in the right type of work especially when you are not seeing any results for your efforts. It can be both encouraging and discouraging when a “guru” on a forum or in an ebook tells you how they sold X amount of their newest product within the first month of going on sale. What they very rarely tell you are how large their active list is or how many followers they have on facebook or twitter, or even how many views their website / blog gets each month. I am not saying that they do this deliberately but sometimes they forget how much anxiety this can give to people just starting out.

Setting goals can be a very good way to achieve the things to want but you will find that the goals that work the best are the ones that are stepping-stones to bigger goals. So if you want to run a marathon, you do not go from couch potato to marathon runner in one week, you do it in smaller steps or goals like running around the block once a week, then twice a week then two blocks and so on. If you really want to run a marathon, then keeping this in mind will help you keep the smaller goals.

I find one of the best ways to keep motivated is by reaching and surpassing goals that I have set myself. Some are stand-alone goals but most are stepping-stones to a really big goal. Some of the smaller goals are repeated with bigger numbers, like build my facebook following up to 100, 200, 500, 1,000 and so on always with your big goal in mind to keep you going and do not forget to set a time limit to reach your goal.

Setting your goals is the hard bit, too easy, you do not get the thrill of achieving them, too hard, and you will give up on them. If you have set a goal, too low keep going for the period you gave it, so that next time you can give your self a more realistic goal. You want to set your goals to suite you so that they become habit forming but not boring, fast enough to make you feel alive but not so fast that you burnout. It is ok to take a break, step back and revaluate even change your goals, after all, they are your goals and keep it fun.

Socialise for Profit

Social network sites have become an ever-increasing part of the marketing mix as the number of social network sites grow. Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and now Google +1 are just a few of the broader social network sites each one having its own style, format and group of people that prefer that platform.

One thing that they all have in common is that they can be very addictive, so before you go and open a few accounts and spend the next five years tweeting or playing games on facebook you need to work out what your strategy will be and what you want from the site.
• Just to socialize with like minded people
• Keep in touch with your fans, followers and allow your customers to give feed back
• Drive traffic to your web site

With this in mind it is time to go and look at the sites, you should look for other people in your field to see if there are a lot of them, (is the site known for writers, bands or photographers) and how do they interact on the site. The different sites organize things in different ways, so Facebook and LinkedIn have groups where as Twitter makes use of the hash tag (#), this affects how you find things and ultimately how you will broadcast your content.

One of the most important skills needed on social network sites is time management, it is all to easy to spend hours a day checking out peoples profiles and links. Set your self a time limit and keep to it, I like to go on social network sites when I am at the library so that when my time is up I am done for the day.

Google has now opened its Google +1 site so will everyone leave Facebook and go to Google? The short answer is no, sure some will leave Facebook and some will have both Facebook and Google+1 accounts but the vast majority will stay. After all not everyone left when Twitter and LinkedIn came along and there are still tens of millions of active users still on Myspace.

A lot of sites have tools that help you leverage your efforts. So that when you post on your blog it sends out a tweet which then post in your Myspace stream and then to your Facebook Fan Page and when people go to your blog there are buttons that make it easy to tweet or post to their Facebook or Myspace.

There are also specialist sites that can be considered social network sites to some degree. Video sharing sites like MyTube or photo sharing sites like Flicker and book marking sites like Stumbleupon or Digg that can all be linked into your other networking sites to create your own little web to find followers, fans and even buyers. If you write romantic fiction books then why not join a few dating sites that will let you post links to your books, after all most of the people on there are looking for love and romance.

You should be making money on the web 2

In my last post, I talked a little about making money on the internet. I believe that everyone should be making at lest some of their income from the internet. Sure, I could tell you how much money is spent on the internet or how many more people are now buying on the internet compared with last year but I would rather ask you to think about your own situation.

• Has your salary gone up or down in real terms, can you afford the little treats that you did last year?
• Is your job as secure as it was a year or two ago, is yours a job for life!
• Is your job just that little bit more stressful because you can not leave and walk into another one?
• And what about the future, your retirement and your children?

The list could go on and on but you get the point, the reason for this is that most of us are tied in to income stream our job! A lot of us have savings and investments but we have all seen the income from them drop over the last couple of years as well. The internet is not immune to the effects of the economy and just like investments some part have done better than others.

Most of us know not to invest all our savings in one place but to diversify for greater safety, yet most of us invest all our working skill, time and labour in just one place, our job! The internet is a great way to diversify your income as you can work on it as and when you please and for as long as you want.

I am a photographer and so many of the ways that I make money on the internet involve images but not every way. Over the coming articles I will tell you what has worked for me and what has not, the mistakes that I have made and how I got around them, I will also tell you what I do week by week and what I am planning for the future.

The internet is growing and there is money to be had if only you are willing to have a go, you may not become a millionaire over night but this time next year you may be on vacation paid for by the internet.

Why You should be Making Money on the Internet

There are many ways to make money on the internet legally but unfortunately, the frauds and spam campaigns have given the internet a bad reputation. So much so that many people are embarrassed to tell others that they make their living from the internet and many more will not even consider the idea of making money on the internet.

The opportunity for people to make a bit of money on the side, increase their standard of living, or even throw off the title of employee are very real on the internet. Not everyone will be able to do it and it will not happen with out a lot of work, time and a bit of luck. If you were to ask any finances advisor (that is worth their fee), they would tell not to put all your savings or investments in one place, they would tell you to diversify so that the impact of any investment going belly up would be lessened. By working for just one employer, you have put all your work time / investment in one place, so if the company starts laying people off you may be in trouble.

This is where the flexibility of the internet gives back the advantage to the average person in the street. You can put as much or as little time into it as you please; you can learn what you need at your own pace and little or no start up capital needed. There are many business models that work on the internet and the hard part in the beginning is not being overwhelmed by all the information on the internet. The next bit to stay clear of is the get rich quick books, there is no secret formula, well no one formula that will work the same for everyone and it is not a secret but many people believe it is too simple to work.

Information is the big thing on the internet. If you love to do something then you have information that other people will want and you do not even have to be good at what you love doing, you could tell people about your mistakes so that others do not have to make them. The thing is that no matter what you love doing there will be an opportunity for you to make money from it on the internet.

So why should you be making money on the internet and why am I telling you? If everyone was less dependent on employers and had a few income streams then the wealth would be spread around and people would be a little bit happier and that includes me.

Forgotten Bloggs still live on the internet

As you can see from this blog, it has been about two years since I last posted here and yet it is still up, getting visitors and pointing search engines towards my POD stores. The number of visitors I get each month has dropped through the floor but I still get some and this blog still shows up in search engine results for some key words.

For the last two years I have been focusing my efforts elsewhere on the internet, trying out different platforms including social internet and what I have come to understand is that no one platform is perfect. They all have their strengths and weaknesses and it is down to personal preference as to why one person will make one platform work for them and another will not.

Why have I come back to this blog? Well it is my blog and I have put time and effort into it in the past and rather than throw all that work away I will now try and build upon it. I hope that what I have learned from other platforms around the internet will brush off on this blog in some small way but only time will tell.

So welcome back and I hope that it will not be another two years till my next post.

Where to leave your link

Before I go into where you can leave your link a few things to keep in mind:
1) Make sure that where you put your link that the people that will see it will be interested in what you have for sale. If you sell T-shirts with dogs on, then do not post in cat owners forums or blog’s.
2) If you are posting on someone else’s site then play by their rules and do try to be helpful in forums before you try to sell.
3) Do not SPAM
Right now that we have got that out of the way. Your first port of call should be your own property, by this I mean your own websites and blog’s, if they have the right subject matter. Next, you should move onto your social media accounts that you have like twitter, facebook, myspace and so on. Many social sites let you link them together so sites like tumbler will auto post on twitter for you with a link back to tumbler. If you put a description to a photo you have posted on tumbler remember that twitter only allows 140 characters including the web address. Also do not for get about the # for twitter, so instead of “photo xxx by xxx” you should put “#photo xxx by xxx” it might look a little weird on tumbler but it will help you a lot when it gets to twitter.

The next step is blog’s and forums that let you have a link in your signature. The first thing is that the blog or forum has to be relevant to your product and second DO NOT SELL TO THEM in your posts, be useful, helpful and take part in the community. If you are part of the community and are known as a nice person then people will come and see what you have for sale.

Can you write a 500 word article, no, give it a go anyway. Now this is not a sales pitch, you are trying to help people, like finding a unique gift for someone or the perfect card for that special occasion. You then add your link suggesting that they might try here; you could put in more that one of your POD sites but not to many. Once you have a few articles you can send them off too an article resource site like goarticles.com, some sites let you have links in the body of the text while others will only let you have them at the end in the resource box. People can then use your article for free on their blog or website as long as they keep the links in. If it is a good article it could end up on 1,000s of blog’s and websites around the internet, if you would like more control over your article then you could use it on a Squidoo lens. A Squidoo lens is like a one page website where other members can vote and comment on your page, the more popular the page becomes the more traffic you will get.

Next time I will be talking about advertising off line.

Advertise, advertise and then advertise again.

So now, you have chosen your POD sites and you have your images up for sale on various products but no one is buying your stuff. Well that is because no one knows that it on the POD site, like I said in my last post to sell in the market place you need to get visible and to get visible you need to have sold a lot, it is catch 22. Do not get me wrong, some people do make it from the start in the market place but they are usually very good at SEO for their store and very good at tagging their work.
Therefore, as the title of this post suggests you need to advertise your store and work. The three big points of the type of advertising you do is,
A) You have to find it easy to do.
B) You have to like doing it.
C) You have to test your advertising.

Every thing in life has a learning curve and I believe in spending the time and not the money to get things done (at first anyway), if you are doing business on the internet then it helps to be a bit internet savvy. If you can still not get your head around the problem then by all means outsource the work but by then you will have gained some knowledge that will help you know if they are trying to rip you off for the work.
Advertising needs to be done day in day out. Think of how many adverts you see every day from world famous brands, from fizzy drinks to cars. They spend billions to stay in people’s consciousness, so if you look forward to doing it the you are more likely to do it every day rather than if you thought of it as a chore that you had to do.
You may be getting results with what you are doing now but you have to ask your self how long will that last and can you do better? This is in every area from the style of your copy to how often you post. This also means keeping an eye out for the next big thing, just on the social side of things think about myspace, your tube, facebook and twitter, each of them appeal to different types of people but which one has your target buyer? Some of the people that got in early on in these sites managed to gain market dominance when everyone else joined.
So what do you need to do? Well I like to think of it as “link love” but the links have different value in them self’s, if you have a link to your funny dog T-shirt site from a Viagra blog it will have less value than a link from a Scotty Dog owners blog. In addition, if the owner of that blog only post once every six months rather than every day then your link is not as good. Now you have to keep in mind that the better your contribution too the blog or forum the more likely that people will click your link to see what you have on offer.
The more links you have on the internet the more chance you will have of people coming too your store to buy. In my next post I will go through some of the places that you can post your links and if you want to leave a comment with a link to your store, I have no problem with that as long as you are not a porn site or a spammer, if I am a member of your POD site then I will send you a PM to let you know that I have approved your comment.

Before you sign up with a POD site

Before you join a print on demand (POD) site, you would be advised to do your research, as with all other things in life everything has its pros and cons. Some of the things to look out for are; size of market place, ease of use for uploading products and setting up your store / shop, payment times and methods and so on. The first places to look is the forums and keep any eye out for threads about different POD sites, a POD site might be quick to pull a thread that is complaining about them, they may not be so quick to pull a thread that is bad mouthing another POD site.

Size of market place.
This is the number of people that visit the main page of the POD site to look for things to buy. Most POD sites let you into their market place for free but not all of them, some of them feel that they have built up their brand and that the storekeepers should pay to have access to all that traffic. Other believe that the storekeepers will drive traffic to their own stores some of which will spill over into the market place. Ether way your exposure in the market place will depend on how well you sell, the more you sell the better your exposure, the better your exposure the more you sell, bit of a catch 22 that will mean that you will have to promote your own store to get started.

Payment times and methods.
Most pay you monthly but some pay you quarterly and all of them have a minimum balance before they pay you out. Everyone likes to hold on to money for as long as possible and POD sites are no different, so you made $100 in the month of June, it has cleared the banks so you will get paid in July, no way, you will get paid in August maybe even September depending on the date they cut their cheques.

Cheques are another problem; if the POD site is not based in the same country as you then you will have to pay big bank charges to deposit it and then wait 6-8 weeks for it to clear. If they have other methods of payment like paypal.com then all the better.

Some of the other things I have highlighted like store setup are down to personal likes and dislikes, you will have a learning curve for all of the POD sites that you join and this will be ongoing as the sites grow and develop.

I hope that you find a POD site that you like and start to get the extra income you deserve.