my tips

Ok here is another good tip.

I like to call it the coke theory.... that is how I explain it to people anyway. Basically coke can make cherry coke, new coke, diet lime coke or whatever they want and it costs them next to nothing to do it.

If you wanted to maye a pop could you? No cause it would cost you ASSLOADS for the staff/manufacturing/processing.


So basically if you have a website that works just recreate it will small degrees of seperation.

(this sucks cause I cant come up with a good example that I am not doing so I guess I will just talk about something I have done.)

Ok lets use the Mobile phone vector for a example. Lets say you have a website for tmobile wallpapers (you know the background on your phone) and it takes off. People come and download thousands of wallpapers for there phones through your website.

Some people look at this and settle. I look at it as a oppourtunity. Yes, you have made a successful website and people are coming. Now you have 2 choices. You can either sit back and soak up from affiliate websites or take the bull by the horns and make your own.

For instance someone comes to you and says "hey sell me advertising space so I can sell my tmobile data cables on your website". Now you can take 10% or a monthly fee to sell this guys data cables OR you can start your own site and sell data cables for these phones. You already know that people HAVE to have data cables in order to load the wallpapers for phones so why not profit from that also.

Ok so now you have 2 sites that are pulling in traffic. AND 2 NEW AREAS TO MARKET. Now make a site for tmobile ringtones. why? well you already have 1) people who are savy enough to put there own content on there phones (wallpapers)

and 2) people who have the required data cable to load the ringtones on to there phone (or you can sell them one!)

boom now you have 3 sites and your empire is growing

Now sell phone accessories!

Now douplicate it for Verizon, Nextel, Cingular, Us Cellular and the other 39 cell phone providers world wide (believe me I know how many there are =).


ok so now you have 80 or so websites and have the cellphone media market covered.... Hopefully you have planted seeds with other vectors and now your ready to start doing it for cards, or portable games or WHATEVER


Small degrees of speration =)


PS- just for record vector refers to different industries. When I refer to the computer website vector I mean the computer website market. I also did not make up this term it comes from seoguy.

I dont have time to spell check or grammar check this so hopefully it makes some sense (no pun intended)

 

Thanks to those that have given me good rep for posting. Its very encouraging =)

 

shoemoney,

thanks again for loads of great info. just curious: out of many of your sites, are there any non-.com tlds that you've made successful?

 

I have only had success for .com but that is all I register. I am pretty uneducated about tlds honestly.

I have a theory that in the future .com's will have huge weight over other tlds for commercial business (the way it was intended). That may or may not happen.

 

Amazing...indeed you speak words of wisdow shoemoney. My sites have never employed this technique. I am not sure how you measure success but I employ people and run a profitable business that is 100% internet dependant.

I have been in business since 1989 and have been working the net for the last 5 years. Each year for the last 5 has shown 20-40% growth in gross sales. 100% internet based, and really passionate (love) what we do every day. The secret to my motivation has been steady growth. Today you have shown me, through your knowledge base, a new level of growth.

You see so many scams out there 'MAKE $43,500/ month with ADSENSE' RETIRE IN 1 YEAR with ADSENSE', etc. Personally when I see them I am one on the few that actually reads everything these 'scammers' have to say. My earnings are 5 digits each month and growing...so when I see these scams I already know that this is possible. It is a pleasure to hear from folks like you that are authentically achieving thier own levels of success that surpass most, and willing to share it.

So content generation (auto) is a must for success, huh? I have no technical knowledge on how this is done as all my mainstream sites are uniquely created accept the one on my sig...syndicated copy. The person who gave me the original thought was the 'scammer' (??) link above, he talks about 8 different content generating engines??? Although I question the integrity of the purpose of these engines, I can also see honest merits to having LOTS of unique content. You mention black, white and grey. Yes I agree grey is my fav. .

Thanks again and PLEASE remain a DPer your input is always appreciated.


Live long and be prosperious

 

Those are some god tips shoemoney.

 

Getting traffic seems to be one of the hardest parts of all this. Do you care to share any traffic building tips?

Thanks again for the great info in this thread!

 

I'm impressed. The hardest concept I have getting my mind around is that of building a site, say, ringtones, when there are a bazillion of them out there already. I guess it's like porn, there are always enough visitors to go around. I just don't understand why that is. I would think that once the market is 'saturuated' that any new sites would be lost in the noise.

 

Haii
Thank you very much for your information.I cleared some doubts,thanks again

 

This is great stuff SM - thank you for sharing. Any insight on how long one might reasonable take to build up traffic?

 

In regards to the whole "Don't take on any partners", I can vouch for that! I have started three separate companies and had three different business partners over the years and it never works out.

If you insist on doing something with a partner... one person has to have more control than the other. There is no equality in business. One person should always have the final say on any decision (even firing the other person). That should be in a contract you have with the other person.

Or better yet, just don't take on a partner. Hire your friends to work FOR you as employees. Give them a set amount of money. But never do a 50% split.

And best case scenario, never work with friends or family PERIOD!

 

In my opinion traffic is the easy part. Its finding the niche or service that is the hard part. For instance- I think I am going to get into the sony psp market because there is really no good website that explains how to hax your sony psp. I am passionate about it (I love playing the psp) and its something I would love to build a nice community about.

If you have something that people want just put out a press release (prweb) or submit news to slashdot.org (if its tech related).

****WARNING******

Make sure your website can handle the traffic it recieves from this. One of my mobile sites was featured on slashdot a few months back and even though it was on a huge web cluster it was just demolished by the amount of traffic. I was not prepared for that ....

I guess they dont call it the "slash dot effect" for nothing.

 

mopacfan:
When you talk about market saturation think of this: How many people do you know who don't own a TV yet, around the world how many people bought a TV in the last 12 months.
You have to remember, when working on the internet you've got a global business. With literally 100's of millions of customers (and still growing at a very high rate). If you think you can saturate the internet market, then you're going to be taken out for dinner by an aweful lot of bankers
In the UK alone, there is something like 40 million mobile phones - take that global and that's a heck of a lot of potential ringtone sales
I'm pretty sure I've seen a couple of shoe's websites (can't remember atm how I found them) and they are impressive and I'm damn sure they do a lot of buiness.

 

So, Shoe, you actually DO sell stuff on your pages, you don't have them just for information, content, etc?
So, if it's like this, what gets you most money? Selling stuff (like ringtones...) or adsense?

Thanks again for the great tips you give! =)

 

I try to have all of the above on my sites where I can. I try to dropship everything I can and not have inventory to manage but sometimes if the profit is there that is unavoidable.

This is hard to judge. I sell subscriptions, have donations, sell physical stuff and also have adsense. Also again I am all over the board. I mentioned ringtones and stuff just because that is 1 area I do business. Currently I am delving in about 8 different vectors.


Keeping with the Mobile websites. I generally offer a annual subscription for 29.99 a year which auto renews at paypal.

Subscriptions : 33345 members paying 29.99 subscriptions that renew anually = minimum of 1,000,000 dollars a year. Take this compounding over 5 years and it will build into a huge ball. This is what I feel is my stable income and so I try to keep focused on providing a service people want and need.

Donations : I put up a button on all sites for people to donate money. I dont know why they do but people like to donate. How do you value money that is so free like this =)

Physical Goods : There is a HUGE markup on these. Most data cables can be bought for under 1$ and if you buy bulk you can literally get them for pennies (quantities of 1,000 or more). I usually make a 75% profit on physical goods including shipping, handling, and packaging.

Adsense : This is the cowboy market. Its fun and profitable but TONS of volitility. Sure you can make 5480$/day and be on the road to 2 million a year for the month of January but then what happens in feb when you dip down to 1200$ a day. It makes you want to change your entire website... but then is it your website that needs changing or did the market flux... or was it that change you made 2 weeks ago in the global header that is drawing less paying ads. THIS WILL DRIVE YOU INSANE!

Is adsense here to stay? What happens when yahoo launches there competitior or msn?

So whats the best thing to do? I think reoccouring subscriptions is key to building a strong stable income that will stand the test of time.

I will let you know when I figure it out! For now I am trying to stay as diversified as possible with my revenue streams.

 

Yeah, of course, AS is a very unstable, unsettled and vague income - for sure not a good thing to rely on, I never wanted to say something different . Anyways, it's interesting to know what makes you most profit for now .

Yeah, this would be the next question I'd ask: How do you handle your shops/selling stuff? Do you sell your stuff via some affiliate/reseller system, so you somehow pass the purchases to some other backend seller?
Do you buy like thousands of pieces at once and sell them bit by bit?
Or do you order the purchased items just when a user purchases them.

Then I think you'd have very long waiting times for your customer, which is not very good. Referring customers to some other "real" seller is neither good, since you'd lose money this way (just getting x% of the sales).
So actually, the most profitable way to handle selling stuff is buying a few hundred/thousand ones and then selling those. On the other hand, this brings the risk of not getting rid of them and, of course, the need to spend a pretty big amount of money, before getting it back (even more to get profit)....

 

exactly... I have even put items for sale that I didnt even stock yet then if they sell I stock them. Yes the first lump of people whos package doesnt arrive for 2 weeks may get pissy. I have found this not to be the case though. If people inquire I let them know there is a delay and offer them the option for a refund. I feel its MUCH better to test the waters then to dive in and be buried in inventory.

I actually see ZERO of the stuff that I "stock". I have 1 retired person that I have inventory shipped to. All they have to do is log onto paypal once a day and click ship for items that need to be shipped, print the label and take them to the post office 1-2 times a day depending on volume. This person is 60 years old and never used a computer before I hired them to do this. She thinks Im getting ripped off paying her to do this for me.

 

loooooool, that's great! ;D

Okay, thanks for your tips! Great!



//edit: Another thing I'd like to know: If you start selling new items by buying them directly yourself, too, you won't get discount for that masses. So, in the beginning, do you sell your items with (almost) 0% profit? Or do you sell them for some higher price, and lower it later, when you are sure that the items get sold and you order a bulk of it?

//edit2 (hehe): What kind of software do you use, to manage your orders? Just some basic "Pay via PayPal" buttons? Some online ecommerce systems like "kagi" and so on? Or the really professional version, using a real shopping cart system (like the one i sold place for in my signature, or like oscommerce, etc?)

 

Can you clarify this a little bit? Thanks.

 

Perhaps because the PR on the domain is going to disappear just as quickly - and if you sell it - saying PR7 ...