Aug
10

Online Business is more than just blogs

Steve Mills Business, Communication, Entrepreneur 1 comment

Just a quick post today to make sure that everyone knows that I am still around and kicking. I have had a busy last month, consolidating a couple of exciting new opportunities that have presented themselves, and getting my teeth into some challenging new internet marketing campaigns.

I just wanted to put the idea out there today to all of the bloggers out there that are wondering how to make money online with their blogs. The short answer is that you have a very small chance of making a decent income with just your blog alone. A blog that just has posts, a few adsense ads and some affiliate programs (like this one is at the moment) may turn some dollars, but not enough to get the bank manager excited every time you walk in.

You should not be considering yourself just a blogger, but taking the next step, treating this area seriously and start thinking about starting an online BUSINESS. Sure, a blog may be an integral part to it, but at the end of the day you need to know how to attract peoples attention and move some kind of product. The internet is full of bad information about “How To Make Money Online”, in fact there seems to be more of this around today then ever before. But in-between all of this there are some sound strategies of people that have gone before and made Sustainable Online Enterprises.

Like the byline of this site says, I am all about helping people become Sustainable Personal (as in personally branded) Online Connected Entrepreneurs. Its a simple phrase, a small acronym that can be easily remembered and applied to everything you do online. It is a system that outlines how to gain traffic, and then monetize that traffic so that your audience becomes your customers, and yes, even your fans in the year to come.

By utilizing the wide variety of ways to promote your business, develop content and target customers the SPOKE system deals with social media, google adwords, SEO strategy, blog optimization, marketing and advertising theory, personal branding and sound business knowledge to provide a comprehensive system to at the very least give a good online business idea a head start.

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Apr
02

Retune your information stream

Steve Mills Communication, Entrepreneur, Lifestyle, Productivity 6 comments

If you are a blogger or internet marketer, you will be only too aware of the overwhelming amount of information that is released every day. It is an endless torrent in which some days you find something of relevance, or a concept that you can apply easily to your business. Other days it feels like you are drowning in a sea of sales pages, marketing hype, time wasting posts and RSS.

information radio

 

This saturation of media can be thought of as a stream, a constant input of information that your mind has to process, fit into your current model of the world and make sense of.

To simplify things, we can be seen as a computer that takes inputs from our environment and creates outputs in our actions, words and communication with others. Just like you are what you eat, you are what you read, watch and hear to a large extent.

SHAPE THE INFORMATION STREAM 

In order to succeed in business online, you need to be able to make focussed, clear actions in a defined direction. If you set out to write one concise post every three days, or to write 1000 words on a new book or interactive course then you should be shaping your information stream to help you attain that goal. If not, the sea of competing ideas can easily distract you.

I am not saying that you shouldn’t read some things that are off the topic, but perhaps a good rule of thumb is 80% on topic (for the project that you are currently working on) and 20% other information.

TUNE IN AND TURN ON

An apt analogy would be that of listening to a radio (the old, analogue type, not internet radio) when the dial is a bit off the station. The signal is filled with noise, useless junk information that is stopping you from clearly hearing the message that is supposed to be coming through (or at least that nickelback song they keep playing).

If you tune the radio and get rid of the noise and static (useless information) then the signal (useable & actionable information) becomes clearer.

The best way I know to re-align my information stream with my goals is to go through my automatic information collections (rss feeds, email lists, bookmarks, blogrolls) and optimize them for the market or niche that I am working in.

Sort your RSS so that you are constantly seeing information from the top experts, and not being inundated with useless information or empty hype.

I am currently going through this exercise myself, trimming down my RSS subscriptions to a manageable level, only keeping the ones that have consistently provided me with valuable or interesting content.

Removing those that have failed to deliver gives you space to add new interesting feeds when you see them and not have them get lost in the noise. I have been unsubscribing from mailing lists that never have anything of interest, and only keeping the ones that fill my inbox with useable, relevant information.

Oct
23

The revolYOUtion part 4: Evolve a Niche

Steve Mills Communication, Ideas, Uncategorized 5 comments

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.