So as we touched on in our last post, all things that relate to monetization in the online business world start with Traffic. It is the river flowing towards your online business. Feel free to let me know if I am getting too metaphysical sounding.

Anywho, once we have this traffic flowing towards us, it is our job to funnel it through some sort of conversion piece. The purpose of this conversion piece is to catch a certain percentage of the traffic flowing towards us and to convert them into some actionable event, such as a sale.

If you are sending traffic from an email list to a specific landing page on one of your e-commerce sites that sells a single product, or a single product with multiple variations, then in theory your conversion rate could get as high as 5%

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My favorite movie so far this summer has been Kung Fu Panda, and my favorite character from the movie is Master Oogue. I’m an Oogue fan for two reasons, first he is super wise and second, despite the fact that he is obviously a high-mileage turtle, he is fast when he needs to be.

So how does this relate to online business? One thing in particular which Oogue says to Shifu, “let go of the illusion of control”, I think resonates especially well in the world of online business.

Human beings, as creatures of habit, naturally want to feel in control. The problem is that in the crazy world of growing your own business, rarely are things ever under control.

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If a cow is purple in the middle of the woods with no one around to see it, does it really matter what color the cow is?

A lot of us have read Seth Godin’s book Purple Cow, which advocates making products remarkable so that the most powerful form of advertising, word of mouth, will naturally work in our favor. The term for such a revolutionary idea that spreads like wildfire is an “ideavirus”, as in the book Unleashing the Ideavirus by Godin and Malcolm Gladwell.

Here is the question though, are there limitations or even possibly dangers to being remarkable without a platform. When I say a platform, I mean anything which gives you a significant amount of leverage in initially promoting your company’s new offering. For instance in the world of online business your leverage could come from an email list of 100,000 members or a Facebook profile with 2000 friends.

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In a post on his blog, GoDaddy.com founder and CEO, Bob Parsons explains that “Everything that is watched improves.” If this statement is true it means that just the act of starting to pay attention to the VPV metric should cause your Value Per-Visit to improve. And of course, if your average VPV grows and your traffic stays the same, your site’s revenue increases.

Once you start to measure VPV you can decide on how fancy you want to get refining your measurements. For example if your site usually gets many more visits than unique visits, you may choose to track Value Per-Unique-Visitor (VPUV) instead of VPV.

Even if you choose to refine your measurement from tracking the Value Per-Visitor to tracking the Value Per-Unique-Visitor this metric you can still refine things a step further. This is due to the fact that a site’s average VPV could be calculated from traffic from several sites, and the VPV from each of these sites can sway wildly.

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In keeping with the theme of our last post let’s take a look at the process of moving closer to your online business goals. In order to help us in our discussion there is a book I’d like to mention, it’s “The Trick to Money Is Having Some” by Stuart Wilde. I am not a fan of the book because I do not agree with a lot of the ideas presented in it.

That having been said, I think that the idea behind the title is extremely useful. In order for me to demonstrate the practical application for this idea, let me suggest some alternative, spin-off titles for the above mentioned book. “The Trick to [AdSense Income] Is Having Some”, “The Trick to [Affiliate Income] Is Having Some”, and “The Trick to [Email Leads] Is Having Some”.

Let’s say that you have the goal of making $50 per day in AdSense income. If you are starting at zero dollars a day, focus first on making 25 cents a day from AdSense. In working towards your goal you are going to learn things and in addition, your online business is going to grow more efficient in terms of making income from AdSense.

For this reason, every incremental step you take towards your goal should be easier then the previous goal. Going from 25 cents a day to 50 cents a day should be easier than going from 0 to 25 cents. Think of a snowball rolling down a hill gaining momentum and mass the longer it goes.

Of course this is not a new idea, it’s actually quite ancient. We find this concept presented in the Bible. In the 25th chapter of Matthew the first half of the 25th verse reads, “For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance;”.

Tags: Online Business, Goals, Goal Setting, Internet Marketing

The inspiration for this post came from a conversation on goal setting that I had with fellow internet marketer, Fei Yie Adricula.

So let me ask you, what goals do you have for your online business? Are you interested in generating $2,500 in AdSense revenue a month or $3,000 in affiliate income? Are you trying to build the number of RSS subscribers following your blog to 500 or would you like 5,000 readers of your email newsletter?

Let’s say you put in 6 months hard work in building up your RSS subscriptions for example. That act of building up to 500 in-and-of-itself may not make you a penny in terms of income but having 500 RSS subscribers’ means that your readership has grown. This increase of readers will almost certainly increase your leverage for making money online.

Imagine a worst case scenario where 6 months from now where nobody cares about RSS, everyone just stops using it. Even if this were the case, you would still be in good shape because whenever you work towards a goal there are always side effect benefits.

For example while building your up your RSS subscriptions your post frequency on you blog increased, this increase led to a an improved Technorati authority. Because of your increase in authority, your blog starts seeing a significant jump in traffic which caused your AdSense earnings to increase.

The point is that it doesn’t really matter what your goals are, what is much more important is that you have goals. The process of setting and striving for goals will have a profound effect on your business, and greatly increase your ability to make money online.

Obviously professional poker players are not the only group in danger of going on tilt while at work. Like a dope dealer without discipline, Internet Marketers are often guilty of using too much of their own product. The resulting condition is known as “information overload”.

As your brain is being drowned in a glut of its own neurotransmitters the victim often feels a host of uncomfortable symptoms. These can include feelings of tension and duress, a cold sweat, as well as light nausea.

The occupational hazard in this industry comes from the fact that the nature of the web makes it extremely hard to stay “on topic”. The temptation to abandon whatever goal you are working on to click one of the random links on your screen is extremely seductive.

Switching gears from one train of thought to another is such a haphazard manner causes a good deal of stress not to mention an inefficient use of time.

The cure for this condition is a technique known as “batch processing”. I first got the idea of using “batch processing” to make my work schedule more efficient while reading Timothy Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Work Week. Ferriss definitely had the right idea when he suggested building a schedule based on clumping together as many similar activities as possible.

There is a clear advantage that comes from grouping activities such as writing blog post, producing email newsletter broadcasts, doing online research, or reading books. Not only does batch processing make you more efficient but it saves a lot of wear-and-tear on your system.

Tags: internet marketing, information overload, online business, make money online

Right around the time that I was finishing my undergraduate degree I had a friend who was finishing his MBA, as part of a joint degree program. The program allowed him to opt for an extra year of school in exchange for an extra degree.

I was curious to know what is taught in an MBA program, I burning desire to know if it was really the kind of life altering experience that people claimed it could be. So I asked my friend, degree fresh in hand, what he had learned.
He told me that he had learned a lot of small lessons that he was thankful for, but that he only learned two things of great importance. More…

I always took this saying to mean that whatever you undertake, you should give it your all. However recently I have started to think about the phrase in a new way. That is that you have to be actively involved “IN IT” to have any chance, what-so-ever, to “win it.” As someone who has suffered from over-analysis in the past, I can attest to the fact that theorizing, without action, gets you nowhere.

Everyone has heard the overused saying that “starting is half the battle” but there really is something magical that happens when you take action. There are several reasons for this, however I think one of the biggest reasons is timing.
Take a guy like Wayne Huizenga, the ultra-successful entrepreneur that has been involved in the founding of such notable companies as Blockbuster Video and AutoNation. Huizenga seems to have an amazing instinct for knowing exactly when to sell a company, in some cases right before the company starts to tank. I am sure you can chalk at least part of having great timing instincts to “being born with it” but that is only part of the story. Great instincts can be developed, however when it comes to business I think this is where excessive theorizing fails.

Just as in nature and in life, business too has its own rhythm; whether it’s the rise and fall of a fad, the rise and fall of interest rates, or the rise and fall of the dot-com bubble. I think that it is only by acting on your ideas that you get connected with this rhythm and without such a connection your timing instincts will have little chance to develop. No matter how good or bad, you think your business plan might be, attempting to implement it will give you a lesson in timing that no amount of meditation or speculation ever will.

If you were to build a table, would you consider building one with only one leg? How about if you were building a business model, would you build a business model with only one leg? I think that the table analogy is a good one for business models. At some point the number of supports may become too many, but one is almost certainly too few.

People ask me,” can you make good money with an eBay business?” That question makes my cringe, just a little, every time I hear it. You see anyone who has an eBay business has an online business, since eBay transactions after all take place (at least in part) online.

So a much better question, in my opinion, would be…”can you make good money with an online business?” The problem with the first question is that it can cause a kind of tunnel vision that I find limiting. If you are thinking only in terms of eBay there is a potential danger of missing the bigger picture. More…