Steve Mills - Online Entrepreuership with the SPOKE system

Lets All Talk About The Same Thing

I am having a little bit of a change of direction for this site going forward, with more of a concentrated effort to showcase my work as a writer of fiction, non fiction and free thought. As I have said here over the past few weeks, there are enough blogs out there about people making money online, internet marketing and blogging in general. All are fine topics, and there are some pearls of wisdom to be found in the other 100000000 sites out there that talk about there subjects.
BUT, 95% of internet marketing is marketing in the pure sense. What they are marketing to you is products that allow you to market the concept of marketing to others. If that sentence doesn’t make a lot sense, the reason lies purely in the reality of the situation, and not my grammar. It is a pure caste made of air, a house of cards, the emperors’ new clothes. People telling others how to basically sell nothing. MLM pyramid schemes, get rich quick sales pages, too good too be true offers. Not for me thanks…

With latest Google page rank fiasco, I don’t really see the point of building a business who can have its profits halved, quartered or decimated completely by a giant corporation. That is not building an asset or a legacy. It’s a ticking time bomb, being fuelled by the time you put into it.

Sure if you love it, then do it. But do what you love, express the ideas that are in your head, the ideas that are yours alone because you thought of them. Create, don’t chorus with every other opinion or business plan or genre that you feel everyone wants to hear.

What I will share with you are ideas of how people can make money from their creative works, from their songs, novels, short stories, designs, graphics, games and un-categorisable projects. I will also detail my journey from unknown writer to hopefully known writer. I know that inside every blogger out there flogging some useless affiliate program (Hey that’s a new word… flogger : someone who writes purely for the commercial aspect online to sell ads) is a novel, or a screenplay, or a killer new bit of software just bursting to get out.

That is the revolYOUtion, letting that creative bit of you out, and making the systems of the internet and the commercial world work for you, not mindlessly selling your talented self after 10 cents of adsense dollars every day trying to make it rich, writing content that every other person is hashing out pursuing the same goals.

I think that I have made my point.

The Best Way To Make Money With Facebook

I was thinking this morning about John Chows post about people not being able to monetize Facebook applications effectively. It seems as if the developers are great at making these things, but so far suck at turning the know how into dollars… until now that is.

Here is my fantastic idea of how you, or anyone else you know that can develop a Facebook app. Or, if you are a company, I would be going out right now and hiring two gun Facebook application developers to start work TODAY. Facebook developers do charge a bit for spec work (the best way for them currently to monetise their skills), but if I was a company, a large corporation like Coke, or Nike etc I would be paying a team of developers to build the next killer Facebook app.

It would have to be something amazing, that users just could not do without. A revolution.

Facebook is fairly new territory, so I am sure that there is at least one fantastic idea that no one has thought about. What i would then do is embed my branding in the app every way that I could. Not enough to distract people from using it, but enough so that there would be no mistake who made it. If people familiarise themselves with your brand via repeated viewing, AND also associate it with the great time that they are having on Facebook then it is exposure that is worth major money. People are addicted to Facebook, the use it to plan their lives, keep in touch with friends and have fun. A captive audience if I ever saw one.

The beauty of the idea is that you don’t have to be a big player to get this reach and exposure. A small business, or even SEO consultant or pro blogger could gain a huge volume of traffic to their site and and the way that it could build your profile would be phenomenal. Why not team up with someone that has come up with a fantastic Facebook app, get joint naming or branding on it and then promote it as hard as you can online

If you already have a great Facebook app, go out and try to directly sell advertising for it to a major corporation. Show them the reach figures that your application gets. How many pages it is installed on, how many views those pages get per month. I am sure that they will be staggered at the numbers and pay you something. An up front fee, a licensing fee per month. It has to be better then earning the pocket change that Facebook developers are getting at the moment.

I think I have given away enough money making advice for today, just remember me when you are driving that Porche.

The revolYOUtion part 4: Evolve a Niche

The internet is full of advice. Some of it is fantastic, it makes you leap of your chair and start making plans to change the world. Some of it makes you sit back and think, to re-evaluate your current strategies and consider a different outlook. Some of it is just not very good.

There is a lot of talk on blogs, and especially those that are concerned with internet marketing about finding a niche and attracting traffic. The theory goes that you find a topic, or just a set of keywords that people are searching for, put up a long sales page site or 10 article blog, then slap adsense on the page to monetise it. I am sure that everyone reading this blog has seen the advice before. I am sure that this strategy would have worked great for the first 10,000 people that tried it. That is, until all of the good keywords were used up, and competition for them became tighter and tighter. This of course leads to an escalation in the amount of resources that people spend (Pay per click dollars, advertising, time) in order to get traffic to their “niche” site. Before you know it the profitable little niche that you found has been done to death by all of the “me too’s” and want to be’s. The model isn’t sustainable. It’s no way to build a business that has any long term future, or turn into a saleable asset.

To really get a niche and have a sustainable blog or online business you need to find a niche that no-one can copy easily, one that has a barrier of entry a bit higher then all the rest.

Here is another perspective : Do you think Darren at problogger, or Yaro at Entreprenuers Journey had a plan when they started? I don’t think so. Go back and read the archives for those sites, as recently as 18 months ago and see how different they are from the entities that you see today. In terms of presentation, topics, site direction, comments, overall theme they are quite different from now. The only consistency I can see is the strong personality of the great guys that run those sites. They both are confident enough in themselves to let the blog evolve to meet the different selection pressures of the internet at the time, what people are after, what other bloggers are doing.

What you need to do is write about things from your perspective, different things, new things. Start something fresh. You need to EVOLVE a niche, start of writing about what you love, and see what people react to, what they want more of, what they can’t stand. Listen to your comments, link to those that are like you, and also those which stimulate opinion, counter-opinion and genuine new thought about the areas that you are talking about.

By doing this you will create a whole new genre of blog, one that with time and effort people will be attracted too because of it’s differences, not it’s similarities to other blogs.

I have made this article part of my revolYOUtion series because the same principles can be applied to your life. Evolve the life you want, one gradual step a time. Look at your long term goals, and inch towards them day by day. Some days you may make a drastic leap forward, other days all you might do is write one email that has something to do with you end goal. But just keep progressing forward, changing your strategy to suit the time, place and situation that you find yourself in at the moment. Look for the niche in life, the place where you get value and reward for being you.

Don’t turn readers away

I really get turned away from posting comments on other blogs that have “you must log in to comment” at the bottom of the post. Why put up a barrier for people interacting to you and your work? If you are getting a lot of spam or trolling, just install a plug-in to deal with it, like akismet. But with millions of other blogs out there, the last thing you want to do is make it just that bit harder for people to connect and communicate with you.

Some of these “must log in to comment” people are probably doing it for another, more tactical reason. They don’t want people to be able to put a link back to their own blog inside the blog comment. To get around this they make everyone that wants to comment a “user” of the site. An interesting tactic, but one that really goes against the ideas of Web 2.0
The other thing is, that if you have a blogger based blog, please allow comments from users, rather then just blogger registered users.

Turning readers away is also about trying to engage them at all times. So I put this out to my (quite modest it is to be said) readership.

Is there anything, based on what I have written, that you want me to research / write about?

Is there a problem that you are currently having that I can help with?

Campaign Study : Atomic Blogging and Paid Reviews

The best thing about online marketing is the amount of freely available statistics and reporting about a campaign if you know where to look. It’s always good to study what others are doing in a constructive way, looking at data from a number of different sources before you adopt a strategy.

I think that bloggers can add value to this information , while avoiding the practice of just reciting the facts in another form. By analysis of the data and looking for common trends, we can start to develop some real intelligence about these campaigns, and develop more effective sales tools and monetization strategies in the future.

Getting paid reviews for your e-product can be a great way to get traffic to your sales page. If you feel like you have a product that is revolutionary and makes a big difference to the way that people will conduct business online, then getting the message out fast,hard and with as much reach as possible will work to your advantage. I think that Alvin Phang had a bit of a different experience in getting his Atomic Blogging program reviewed recently on John Chow.com. He paid the standard $400 for a John Chow review, for which he hoped to get traffic to the sales page for atomic blogging (which shows all of the standard sales page hype, coloured font and testimonials by the truckload) and convert them in sales.

The PDF report of the Atomic Blogging program on John Chow is here http://www.gathersuccess.com/downloads/GatherSuccesscom-JohnChowReview.pdf

And here is my analysis of the data.

What did his $400 get him :

Qualitatively : A not very favorable review which points out the weaknesses of the system.
Total number of clicks : 349
Total number of sales : zero! = (
Return of Investment: -$400
Cost per click: US$1.14

Lesson to be learned : If your product is mostly for newbies, and does not offers something new, why give it to an expert to publicly pick holes in it, at your expense! Don’t have an inflated view of what their product is worth, and truthfully measure the value it provides to the consumer.

Recommendation : I would think that it would be wiser to spend $400 to buy up some banner space on forums where people are looking to get into blogging. The whole tone of John Chow is wrong for this type of product I would think. He is a No BS type of guy, so demonstrate some real value and you might do OK.