I recently heard the term “Social Media Equity” for the first time in a recent post entitled ”The Benefits of Social Media Aggregators and Lifestreaming: A Look at Friendfeed” written by Maki of DoshDosh.com. I have to say that I like this term a lot. The virtual world has become a fascinating place and its financial impact is beginning to rival that of the physical world.

Take the term “digital real estate”, which some use to refer to virtual properties in online games like Second Life. According to the article “Is there real money in online real estate?” by MSN Real Estate correspondent Christopher Solomon, Ailin Graef may be making around $150,000 per year from her digital real estate empire.

When speaking of digital real estate, it is important of course not to confuse it with “virtual real estate”, which is a term that some use to refer to web domains. Domain names have potential cash value or equity based on several factors which might include how clever the domain name is, the amount of incoming traffic, any pre-existing name recognition, or similarity to a popular pre-existing domain.

For about $10 a year you can sit on a domain name without the need for any hosting in the hopes that someone will come along someday and buy it. Starting at about $5 a month you can ad hosting to your domain and change your online prospects dramatically.

With virtual real estate, as with physical, it’s not just the address that is important in determining value, you also have to look at the size of the property. With hosting you can add as many pages to your site as you want, with each and every page that you add your SEO presence grows, and as it grows so does your site’s value.

All of this suggests that the equity of the virtual world has very real value in terms of real dollars and cents. What is great about this is the nature of the barriers to entry in the online world.

At Feedback Secrets, we believe that if an opportunity has no barriers to entry then it is not a very good one. There are definitely barriers to building your online equity; however they are barriers of desire as opposed to barriers of circumstance.

For example, if you wanted to get started with investment properties or flipping houses but you had $100 in the bank and no job, you would most likely be out of luck. The barriers to entry, when it comes to virtual equity are the willingness to work hard, be creative, and potentially risk your time.

Tags: social networking, social media, virtual real estate

The big name celebs of the online business world have at least one really powerful advantage in common, it’s called leverage.

When you have 300,000 people on your email list, that’s leverage. When you are one of the biggest names in internet marketing, and people will “ohhh” and “ahhh” at your every word, then you have leverage. When you have a strong network of associates that will promote your products for you in the form of “conversations” on online forums, you have, you guessed it… leverage.

The list goes on and on, but no matter how you slice it, the big names all have leverage working on their side.

This of course is all well and good if you are top dog, but what if you are currently a small name, or even worse what if you are relatively unknown in your field? What do you have working for you in the early stages of your online business?

If you are just starting out online please realize that you do have something very powerful, that will potentially work in your favor, and it is yours for the taking if you choose to use it.

The powerful “ace up your sleeve” that I am referring to is frequency. Consider those two or three functions that are the most important part of your business, it could be writing posts to your blog, writing articles for article marketing, creating content for your static site, or building your presence on some social networking site.

Consider for example article marketing. Each and every article that you write will have a monetary value, so the more articles you write, the more money you will make. When it comes to the static site that you market with your articles, every new page of content you create brings with it increased SEO dominance. The greater your SEO presence on the web, the more you will be able to see which SEO strategies are working and which should be dropped.

Put simply, with increased frequency, comes increased efficiency! Therefore, the frequency with which you produce in these core areas of your online business may well be the difference between stupendous success and lackluster results.

Tags: online business, internet marketing, make money online

Online entrepreneur Shea Gunther recently raised $20K in four days using Twitter and other media. Feedback Secrets caught up with Shea to ask him some questions regarding his unorthodox fundraising technique, and to get the scoop on his latest venture.

Could you tell us a little bit about your new start up venture?

I’m starting up a screen printing and t-shirt company. We’ll start with a handful of shirt designs and build out more lines focusing on green themes, social media and news, online celebrities, and pop culture. 

How much money did you raise, how much equity was sold, and how long did it take you?

In four days I raised $20k and I have another person considering going in for another $5k. All told so far I’ve sliced off 30% of our equity to my investors/partners.

Can you tell us about your business background before you started using Twitter?

I’ve been starting businesses since I was 20 and founded a $16M VC funded online video dot com. I’m 30 now so I guess that means I have a decade of being an entrepreneur under my belt (that makes me feel old). My day job time spent is working on a new green web startup. I’m working with some amazing guys in Chicago on a news site targeting the college set. This is my fifth startup with $100k+ in funding and I’ve started a handful of smaller businesses in between and on the side.

How much did your business background, prior to establishing a presence on Twitter, contribute to your ability to raise capital so fast?

I think my investors and partners know that I’ve been around the entrepreneurial block. We’ve built a tight little business model and I think we’ll do good in the niches we’re going after. I’ve been friends with my lead investor for a few years now- it’s all about who you know and who knows you.

How has Twitter increased your leverage as an entrepreneur, both in terms of this fundraising effort and in general?

I’ve been able to build a network of acquaintances on Twitter that’s proven invaluable. I’ve made some very real friends out of people who started off as followers and it’s provided me a platform to promote myself, my work, and my friends work. Twitter has so far seemed to attract a high proportion of smart, high achieving people and it’s been great to be able to tap into that.

What are the different methods by which prospective investors contacted you with questions regarding potential investment?

I didn’t write a business plan for this one. I didn’t have time and frankly hate having to write them. I do a LOT of business planning, I just despise writing out the formal business plan. If I was raising $200k or $2M it’d be harder to justify not writing a plan, but because I was targeting people for $5k and $10k investments I was able to get away with it. I wrote a lot of emails outlining everything I had planned and followed it up with Q&As on the phone. It was actually a very easy process, everyone came in excited to get involved.

Someone left a reply on your Twitter profile suggesting that the SEC might not be happy about you raising funds on Twitter. What are your thoughts on this subject?

I said something to the effect of “I’m raising $20k in all, I’d welcome the links I’d get from an SEC investigation”. I’m not blasting spam out to a hundred million people asking for investments in the next hot new stock, I’m asking my big circle of friends if anyone else wants to help start a t-shirt company with me. Boing Boing would be all over any federal heat coming my way. That would almost be worth it alone. ;D

When can we expect T-Shirts to be available for purchase?

We’ll be up and running at the end of June, beginning of July. We’re in no huge rush to get up and want to make sure we have production and the whole sales and shipping cycle down before we sell shirt one.

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.

If you have been involved in internet marketing for any length of time, you have probably experienced some form of content theft. While an exact definition of what constitutes “content theft” may be tricky to pin down, most people sense that something is not right when they feel that something has been stolen from them.

The term “symbiotic marketing” refers to a situation involving two parties where an marketing action taken by at least one party benefits both parties. This can be seen in a blog comment, where the commenter contributes to the discussion and in return receives a link back to his site, in Twitter profiles where marketers promote the content of others as well as their own, or in a host of other forms whether on social networking sites, forums, or elsewhere.

If the above mentioned examples constitute examples of symbiotic marketing what then should we call the unauthorized copying of content for the intention of profit? Perhaps we should call it Parasitic Marketing, since by design it intends to leach value from its host.

Presented in this way the battle between symbiotic marketing and parasitic marketing seems very clear cut, very black and white. This is the way that I have viewed the unauthorized use of content for quite some time. Recently however I have begun to consider that this issue might have more shades of gray then I initially considered.

Is it possible that someone could use your content in an unauthorized manner yet cause you to receive some unintended benefit?

I think that I may have come across at least one such example. Consider blogs that are made up almost exclusively of headlines and excerpts taken from other blogs in a particular niche. The owners of these blogs do little in terms of generating there own content, but instead use the content of others and reap the rewards in terms of SEO traffic.

One unintentional benefit that may occur in such a case is that the content producing blog receives and increase in its Technorati authority due to the link from the content copying blog.

I am not saying that this is a fantastic gain for the content producing blog, or that the unauthorized use of content is a good thing, and I am in no way advocating the unauthorized use of content. Obviously, in studying any possible benefits it is important to remember that there are downsides to the unauthorized use of content.

The motivation behind this post comes from my interest in studying causes, effects, and even side effects in business. Closer examination of these causes and effects give me ideas, and ideas I have learned have value.

I don’t know of many examples of this effect but if you have come across an example where the unauthorized use of content has benefited you, and you would like to share, feel free to let us know by means of email or blog comment.

Tags: Content Theft, Technorati, Internet Marketing, Symbiotic Marketing 

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

A lot of site owners that have Google AdSense ads on their site debate with themselves whether or not they should put AdSense ads above the fold on their sites. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, “above the fold”, it refers to the portion of your webpage that a user first sees after landing on your site, before scrolling.

This portion of your website is extremely valuable since many first time visitors to your site will take one look at this portion of your site and take one of three actions. Either they will scroll down further, click on a link, or leave the site.

Because of the chance that a new site visitor will never see any of the content below the fold many site owners decide to place AdSense ads in this portion of their site. Taking such action will often have the effect of increasing your site’s click-through rate (the percentage of viewers that click on an ad).

When deciding for yourself where to place your AdSense ads, it is helpful to ask yourself a couple of questions. First, is your site content driven? When I say “content driven” I don’t mean do you have content on your site? If the primary reason that you have content on your site, is so that you can host AdSense ads, then your site is not content driven.

If your site is not content driven, then I would definitely advise placing some of your AdSense ads above the fold.

If your site is content driven then I would suggest asking yourself three more, related questions. Is building an opt-in email list important to you? Are you interested in creating brand recognition for your website? Do you want your website to be viewed as an expert source of knowledge on a particular topic?

If you answered yes to any of these three questions then you may want to think twice before placing any AdSense ads above the fold on your site. One of the best places to place an email list opt-in form on your site is… you guessed it, above the fold. Putting advertisements of any kind in this space causes competition between the ads and your opt-in form.

Visitors who opt-in for your email list have the potential of becoming life long customers. If a new visitor lands on your website and clicks off your website by following an ad, you may have permanently lost a long term customer in exchange for a little money today.

If you are trying to build your website into a brand or to have your website viewed as an expert source of knowledge you should seriously consider not putting AdSense ads at the top of your site. Sites with AdSense above the fold can be perceived as “spamy”, therefore run the risk of visitors taking your site less seriously as either a respectable brand or a valuable source of knowledge.

If you are interested in this subject you may enjoy our post on how web traffic can be monetized.

Tags: AdSense, Email Opt-In, Above the Fold, Internet Marketing, Email Marketing

A lot of people seem to be asking the question, what is a reasonable amount of money to make from an internet marketing campaign? The answer is that it all depends on your leverage. Let’s consider some examples inspired by recent marketing campaigns in the internet marketing community.

Say for instance, that you decide to run a two-day webinar complete with video-conferencing, non-video call in lines, and bonus online resources. If your webinar has a sticker price of $1,999 and you sell 500 seats then your gross revenue is a touch shy of the 1 million dollar amount. Keep in mind with all these gross revenue figures that the profit margins on information products tend to be pretty high.

If you are more of a products-only kind of guy, you might decide to spend a few months producing a take-home study course. You could outsource the development of a book, workbook, and DVD. Pay someone to write a winning sales letter, pay someone else to create a course related website, and pocket the difference. If you had an email list of size 50,000 you might expect 3% or 1,500 sales. If your take home materials cost $299 on average, then you could be looking at around $450,000 gross.

If you prefer you could run a five week online course with weekly teleconferences, online course related materials, and ways to network with other course participants. If you charged $199 for such a course and 200 students signed up by paying tuition, then you would collect near $40,000.  Such a take would obviously not bring anywhere near the amount cash as the two above mentioned examples, however with opportunities to up-sell your students as well as increased exposure for you and your brand, such a venture would definitely be worthwhile.

The examples above tell the story of the kind of money that established players in the internet marketing community are making. When you are just starting out in the field of internet marketing you should expect to make no where near this amount of money.

Factors that can help contribute to the kind of massive leverage that would be required to pull of the kind of numbers mentioned above include a huge opt-in email list, a massive black book of networking connections that can light up online forums with to-the-top threads that never seem to die, or serious connections with dozens of bloggers who can post you offering on a score of blogs and let the viral power of the net take over.

Obviously it is never easy to generate a million dollars in revenue in a two week period, however the important thing to remember is that it can be done, and that the people who are doing it right now are ordinary human beings just like you and me.

Email lists can be built up even if it takes a couple of years of hard work and determination, as can extraordinary networking connections whether they be comprised of social networkers, bloggers, forum members, or a combination of the above.

Tags: internet marketing, marketing, marketing camapigns, make money online, webinar, teleconference 

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