Now-a-days there are several online options that will allow you to make money over the internet without spending any money at all. These include options such as Squidoo Lenses complete with sponsor advertisements, blogger.com blogs with AdSense ads, as well as HubPages.

The great thing about all of the above mentioned options is that they allow you test the waters of online business and get your feet wet without spending any money. With so many “free” monetization methods you may wonder why you should ever fork over your hard earned cash to pay for a domain name and web hosting.

These are great questions and the answer to these questions is… leverage. Having your own webpage allows you greatly increased control over your sites and this increased control increases your potential for online money making.

For example, let’s start by comparing a Squidoo lens with a domain name of your own choosing where you pay for your own hosting. First lets consider the Squidoo lens. A lens might make money from Google AdSense ads, Amazon’s affiliate program, eBay’s affiliate program, as well as other potential sponsors.

One of the downsides of Squidoo is that all revenue from your lenses are split 50/50 between you the “lensmaster”, and Squidoo.com. Squidoo lenses also contain links from your lens to other parts of the Squidoo.com website. This means that you are not in full control of the outbound links on your lens. If however, you own your own webpage you are in full control of any an all outbound links from your site.

Website traffic is extremely valuable, and as we like to say here at Feedback Secrets, “the lifeblood of any online business is TRAFFIC.” For this reason some website owners are very particular about where they send their outgoing traffic. Some site owners will only send their traffic to other sites in their own network, while others choose to charge for their outbound links.

Let’s say that you maintain a Blogger.com blog which eventually becomes popular. You may well decide that you wish to switch from the Blogger.com platform to your own domain and hosting. At this point you will face the challenge of trying to transfer as many readers as possible from your old blog to your new blog.

We should also consider email newsletters, which are often one of the most profitable attributes of small online businesses. As far as I am aware it is not possible to place an email opt-in form on either a Squidoo lens or a blogger.com blog. An visitor who opts in for your email list may well become a lifelong customer, therefore not having the ability to collect opt-ins can greatly hinder to money making potential of your online business.

There are many more reasons that having your own webpage increases your ability to leverage your online business. The purpose of this post was just to scratch the surface of the advantages of springing for your own hosting and domain.

If you liked this post you may enjoy our post on the monetization of web traffic.

Tags: Advantages of Habing Your Own Webpage

Let me start by saying that there are many ways to make a dollar online; this post will outline one such method. I am not sure who this quote belongs to, but I have heard it said that if you drop a entrepreneur off in New York City with nothing but the clothes on his back and a 100 dollar bill, you could find him a year latter running his own fleet of hot dog stands. I believe that one of the skills of a good entrepreneur is that, if necessary, they can make money without spending it.

Robert Kiyosaki, in his book Rich Dad, Poor Dad advises his readers never to take a job for the money, but rather, for the experience. Every now and again, I will suggest an experiment for the readers of this blog to conduct. If you decide to try any of these experiments, PLEASE don’t do it for the money… it won’t be worth it. What you will learn from these experiments on the other hand, that’s another story.

But I digress, back to the subject of how to make a dollar online without spending any money. For this experiment you will need at least the following, a PayPal.com Account and a Squidoo.com Account. Your mission, if you choose to accept it is to create a “lens” on Squidoo and bring the “lensmaster” revenue on your account from $0.00 to $1.00. One of the cool things about Squidoo is that they allow you to set your own payment threshold, so for purposes of this experiment you may well want to set the threshold to $1.00.

Squidoo hosts what I would call mini-webpages, what they call “lenses” for free. Lenses on Squidoo are made up of “modules”. You could have a module for text, one for pictures, one for recommended books, and so on. A lens can generate revenue by Google AdSense ads plus other possible revenue streams such as revenue from sponsors like Amazon and eBay. Squidoo shares 50% of all revenue from a lens with that lens’s lensmaster.

So the question becomes how to generate enough traffic, to filter through your conversion piece… I mean lens, to make it to the $1.00 threshold in a reasonable amount of time. Let’s consider some options.

You could make an awesome lens that ranked in the top 100 lenses on Squidoo. This should garner you a good amount of traffic from those searching the top 100 list as well as those conducting searches on Squidoo.com. You could sign up for a forum related to your lens topic and write posts that include a link to your lens in the signature file. You might use the “FREE keyword suggestion tool” at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ to find some good keywords and attempt to use article marketing and SEO to gain some traffic for your site.

If that last suggestion threw you for a loop, don’t worry, a post on that topic will be coming out very soon.

Since I would like you to complete this experiment well before you qualify for social security, let me give you a big hint. You are probably best off sticking to one of the following topics: insurance, mortgages, or pharmaceuticals.

If you complete this experiment, let us know by posting a comment on this post. You can even include a link to your lens as the URL. That link alone should be good for some more traffic, and who knows we may even feature your lens in a future post.

If you enjoyed this post you might like our post on monetizing web traffic.

When the scandals of Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom were first exposed the world was in shock. The stories of these three companies are not the only tales of woe from the business world that make us wonder if the average CEO of a publicly traded company has the best interests of his shareholders in mind.

The above mentioned scandals have caused some to loose faith in the stock market. Of course there are those talking heads on TV who would tell us that there is no reason to loose faith in the market and that the scandals which have been exposed are isolated incidents. Here is the issue, with hundreds of millions of dollars on the line; do you think that the temptation to steal will ever disappear?

Of course government regulatory agencies like the SEC that monitor publicly traded companies in this country have adapted since these scandals in an effort to make sure such antics are tougher to pull off for the future would be crooks. This sort of evolution is natural but the question is how much more comfortable should it make us feel? More…

The term “above the fold” originated in reference to the portion of the front page of a newspaper that was above the crease. An up and coming journalist might dream of the day that one of his headlines appears above the fold. The front page of any newspaper is prime time real estate, and the top half of that page is the “crème de la crème.”

In this case, what is true in newspapers is also true in web pages. It’s great when your stat-counting software tells you that a new visitor stayed on your site for 2 minutes and 38 seconds after first landing on your page. But far too often webmasters encounter the dreaded notice that the time on site was “0:01”.

The problem is that the web is just too big; there is too much information out there to ever hope to be able to digest it all. With so much information and so little time we are forced to make snap judgments about every web page that we land on. And if we happen to land on a new web page, what information are we going to make our split second judgment based on…?

Most likely, based on whatever is above the fold. The portion of a web page that is said to be above the fold is the portion that you see when you land on a page before you do any scrolling. If you look at the top of our webpage you will notice a header image, as well as opt-in form for our email newsletter. Nowhere above the fold on our site will you notice any Google AdSense ads.

This fact should act as a big hint that we are more interested in email opt-ins that we are in having people click on advertisements. Regardless of what you wish to emphasize on your site, pay special attention to the most valuable visual real estate you have, the area above the fold.

The nature of your relationship with your outsourcing company has the potential to change drastically from the beginning of the project life cycle towards the end. This Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde routine is best modeled by what I like to call the Landlord Effect.

When you first meet with a prospective landlord they are usually as sweet as pumpkin pie. If they like you as a tenant (a.k.a. they think you have money, and are not likely to total the place) then they will do everything in their power to charm you, and to assure you they are reasonable and easygoing people.

By the time that the brutal, no-holds-barred battle for the security deposit takes place however, there is a decent chance that the image that your landlord initially painted of himself is now burned in effigy.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that an overseas project manager with a Masters in Computer Science, or a Doctorate in Electrical Engineering, is pleased as punch to be working for you, for 35 cents on the dollar. More…

I must begin with a warning! The subject of Broadcasts vs. Messages as it relates to email marketing, is not nearly as interesting as the subject of Godzilla vs. Mothra, as it relates to the fate of humanity. With this in mind let us continue… emails sent to an email list or newsletter come in two flavors, broadcasts and messages. Broadcasts are single emails that are sent at the same time either to your entire list, or to a portion of your list. Messages on the other hand usually form part of a series of emails which are sent out at preset intervals. These intervals usually start from the date of opt-in.

Broadcasts lend themselves more towards recently breaking news. For example something major has just happened in your industry or a related industry, and you would like add your own point of view to the events taking place and there relevance to your industry.

Messages lend themselves better toward those pieces of information in your email campaign that will not become outdated as quickly. A group of such emails might easily be formed into a Mini-Course. Such a course can act as the “freebie” offered to entice new subscribers to sign up for your list. Another give away item, which you may consider including in your list of initial messages is a free ebook. While an ebook probably won’t fit in a single email, a link to your ebook in one of your first few messages will work just as well.

As time goes on and you have written more and more broadcasts you may decide that some of your broadcasts would fit nicely inside your messages. So as your number of broadcasts grows your number of initial messages might grow as well, effectively “killing two birds with one stone”.

The CNN Money article, “eBay backlash: 5 sellers who ditched it” by Stacy Cowley, tells the story of 5 online business owners, whose businesses seem to have stopped selling their merchandise on eBay. Some of these sellers seem to basing there current business model on marketing there own webpages while others appear to have transitioned to eBay alternatives such as Amazon.com, eCrater.com, and others.

The recent changes that eBay has announced regarding its fee structure and feedback system for the U.S. version of their site seem to be creating quite a stir among eBay sellers; it should be interesting to see how these changes play out. One of the positive themes that seems to be consistent in most of the companies profiled in the above mentioned article, is that they appear to be taking an active role in marketing their online business.

Whether these business owners were taking an active role in their marketing while they were still selling on eBay is difficult to determine from the article. Whatever the case may be, having such a hands on approach to marketing should only help their online success.

Let’s say that you are absolutely nuts about golf, and you have decided to follow your passion and build an email list around the subject. Imagine that at this point you have built your email list up to 100,000 leads and that you have several products in your pipeline, which you plan on release in the near future. This could include a product on weight-lifting for golf, a product for improved driving, and a product for achieving putting perfection.

A simple way to market these 3 products would be to create an email campaign for each product and send the entire campaign to every one of your subscribers. Of course even with such a simple strategy you would want to make sure to spread out each campaign. No list will respond well to being constantly bombarded with sales pitch after sales pitch, and padding the space in between pitches with informative, and preferably unique information, on golf can only help your credibility in the eyes of your list.

A more complicated marketing strategy would be to divide up your list into a main list with several sub-lists. So you might send an email to your main list telling them that you have special information for anyone interested in efficient weight lifting for golf, which will add yards to their drives and fairway shots, even without a touch of improvement to their technique! This email would contain a link for anyone interested to follow.

Anyone who clicks on this link will be brought to a second opt-in page where they will have the option to become a member of the sub-list for “weight-lifting for golf.” Of course I would not advise you to use the term “sub-list” anywhere on this web-page, just some brief information to pique there curiosity, and get them to sign up.

Once your “weight-lifting for golf” email marketing campaign is completed you can send it to your sub-list. Please not that by campaign I mean a series of 5 to 7 emails designed not to inform but specifically to sell. At the same time you send your campaign to your sub-list you can send a brief series of sales letters, between 1 and 3 to your main list to try to encourage some extra sales.

Breaking up your email list in this way tends to cause better results in terms of conversion rate as opposed to treating all members of your lists as equals. You are always going to get a higher conversion rate emailing to your list of pre-qualified golf leads then you would to a list of 100,000 members of the general public. The reason is that your list represents leads that are pre-qualified based on the specific interest of golfing. It is the specific interest of the lead that gives it its value, and in a market as wide as golfing related products, there are bound to be even more specific interests which can be unearthed.

When it comes to outsourcing web development and programming , there are advantages and disadvantages to using one company for an entire project. As we mentioned in our last article on the subject, Dangers of Outsourcing Part 2, in order to limit potential losses we would advise your first several projects to be small in scale. There are two main reasons for this… first, it is often the case that work gets paid for that does not get completed and second, projects frequently wind up costing more to complete than the original agreement price.

Let me describe to you one of the really strange phenomena that occurs in the field of outsourcing. To describe this effect it is best if I use an example, our example will have three characters. 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.