Category Archives: business

I’m a B-B-B-B-B-BAD Blogger

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A couple days ago I had the privilege of being featured on Liz Strauss’ Successful-Blog BAD Bloggers series.

Liz had tracked me down via MyBlogLog [which, in a brilliant right turn of a business model, has re-invented itself into a pretty decent networking and social tagging site] and emailed me to tell me why, if I was serious about my Internet business, I needed her Perfect Virtual Manager service.

Now I’m usually highly suspicious when someone tries to tell me what I need, but a day later I was on Skype with Liz. In a few short sentences she comprehended what I was trying to do, analyzed my immediate needs and suggested a couple resources to fill in the gaps for my business.

The next day I received emails from both of the people she had referred me to saying that Liz had suggested to them to get in touch. In other words, she make it really easy for me [a shy procrastinator] to take an important step and get some much needed help with my business.

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This post was written by Jon Symons, see . Or use the contact page to get in touch.

Lessons From the Dragon’s Den

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One of the things that I can see is happening to me as I attempt to create wealth by building a business is the constant need to do things that are outside of my comfort zone.

My biggest fear in life is and has always been public speaking. I get terrified. No different now than in seventh grade.

Tonight I went to see a talk by Sean Wise [a thank you to Terry Ross of iCore.ca for orgainizing the event]. Sean is the guy behind the popular Canadian show [it's a big hit] the Dragon’s Den. The show is a “reality” show where budding entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to real VCs in an effort to make real deals for real dollars…my kind of reality TV. I watched it every week, of course.

When I heard that Sean [the guy behind the recent $2m deal that the b5 guys landed] was coming to Edmonton, I just had to go and hear his talk Lessons from the Dragon’s Den.

It was -23 Celsius in Edmonton tonight and when leaving for the talk, my always reliable vehicle wouldn’t start. Walking 30 minutes into a 10 mile an hour wind chill I was able to arrive just as the evening was getting started.

The talk was excellent [check the link above to watch a video of the presentation] but at the end of the talk Sean decided to have a live “battle of the pitches” and asked for two volunteers to come up in front of 150 or so other entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, educators and industry insiders and give an elevator pitch for their company.

A clear voice in my head said something like, “This is the kind of opportunity that a real CEO doesn’t miss!” Up went my hand and a minute later I was trembling my way through why my new blog network would be a slam dunk investment for any VC.

Did anyone cut me a check? No.

Did I make a complete fool of myself? Maybe. I was extremely nervous and completely unprepared.

Do some of the players in Canadian business now know who I am and know about my blog network? Yup.

Was it worth it? Absolutely.

I feel like I grew a mile tonight at that meeting. There is a price to pay for success and it is to be able to do things that ARE good but still may FEEL bad or may scare the crap out of you.

Commit to throwing up your hand when you get the tug from inside and you’re instantly a success.

Jon Symons
Stay tuned for more adventures beyond the comfort zone.

This post was written by Jon Symons, see . Or use the contact page to get in touch.

Carnival of Personal Finance and My New Home

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I sent my article Micro Lending and the Decline of Poverty in to this week’s Carnival of Personal Finance. The carnival is being hosted at Everybody Loves Your Money and I love the metaphor of the used car salesman presenting this week’s carnival.

In Other News

Can you hear that joyous sound? That’s my relief, since I spent the weekend moving Art of Money to a new hosting company, and upgrading to the latest version of WordPress. My apologies if you dropped by in the middle and received a bunch of errors as your reward.

The site loads noticeably faster and I have an insane amount of bandwidth so I can go wild with the videos. Dreamhost has another little feature that I like…you can force everyone to use the same version of your url. If you type in artofmoney.org, it will automatically slam your browser over to www.artofmoney.org.

This post was written by Jon Symons, see . Or use the contact page to get in touch.

Essential Grown-Up Skills

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Are you a grown-up? No seriously, I see constant evidence that there are very few real grown-ups in the world.

Why are there so few grown ups online?

First a slight diversion courtesy of my wife. She says if you want to see reality, then watch people driving. At your dinner party people will laugh and make jokes and be very cordial with each other; when driving to work, the same people will cut you off, flip you the bird, honk and curse your whole family.

What’s the difference?

At your dinner party, they know they are being watched; in their car, people can believe that there is no consequence to the occasional tantrum…therefore, as my wife says, they let the real person show a lot more easily.

Same Goes Online

People fight, flame and are way more rude and childish than in the the off line world, and…I hate to be the bearer of red pills, but the online version is closer to the truth. We are mostly a world of children, and this fact makes things a lot harder on ourselves and everyone around us.

Four Grown-Up Skills

The four grown-up skills that I are the most useful for success are:

  • Not needing to be right
  • Letting go of actions based on your feelings
  • Relaxing when making decisions
  • Honesty

Let’s take a closer look at these one by one.

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This post was written by Jon Symons, see . Or use the contact page to get in touch.

How to Delegate and Why You Don’t Do It

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This post is a follow up to my recent One Essential Ingredient for Big Bucks Online article in which I drew the conclusion that in order to make any decent money, and to have a real business, an online entrepreneur needed to figure out how to leverage other people’s time and have their business grow beyond the magical number of ONE.

I was hinting at outsourcing and my struggles with the concept, but really outsourcing is just a specific form of a bigger concept: delegation.

In the comments a person with the very unusual name of “Seeking Revenue” left an excellent and honest comment in response to my questions:

Skills Required?
Yes and I don’t know how to break it down into no-brainer parts so that I can outsource or automate.

Trust Required?
Yes, I can’t let go.

There was more, but those bits are the meat of it. We’ll cover off the “break it down into no-brainer parts” in a future post…that’s the easy part. The tough part is the “I can’t let go.” Turns out that Seeking Revenue is not alone [my hand is extremely raised at this one].

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This post was written by Jon Symons, see . Or use the contact page to get in touch.

One Essential Ingredient for Big Bucks Online

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control valve 1 tbn One Essential Ingredient for Big Bucks Online
Are You A Control Freak Too?

I was just checking out Rich Schefren’s latest pitch, which will set you back ~$1000 a month and I have to confess the I get tugged every time I see one of these coaching type offers. Fortunately, being in negative cash flow brings a level of sobriety that must be embraced and excludes these type of luxuries.

Thinking about what Rich is really selling, I remembered how incredible that his “Internet Business Manifesto” was. It had a profound affect on me. I was literally in tears when I read it. The diagram with the gazillion tasks and everyone of them assigned to “YOU” [me] was particularly poignant.

Amazing to this Internet business guy, is that I’m still very much struggling with the same issue. I can’t scale. I continue to create assets, income is increasing, but it is slow. I have way more tasks than I could ever possibly complete myself, and when I start a new project, it becomes a burden on my time, rather than an opening of possibilities.

If you can relate to what I’m saying…stand up and repeat after me:

“Hi, my name is [your name] and I’m a control freak.”

There doesn’t that feel better?

Probably not, but it is true, in my case at least.

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This post was written by Jon Symons, see . Or use the contact page to get in touch.

A Unique Twist on Article Marketing

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A couple weeks ago I received an email from a woman named Mary representing a web site called 1st 4 Articles. She had found one of my niche affiliate sites and was offering to write an article for my site.

My first thought was, “what’s the catch?”

Of course there was a catch, three links must stay in the article. These days I don’t put a ton of effort into that niche site, so I thought that an article in exchange for a couple links would be well worth it.

To my surprise, the article I received was very professionally written about a tough subject to write about [if it wasn't well written I wouldn't be writing about her service here on Art of Money icon smile A Unique Twist on Article Marketing ].

I’m embarrassed to admit it but I have purchased my fair share of private label rights [PLR] articles and I was expecting this article to be along that line. You know, someone rambling on trying to fill up space about a subject and stuff it with just the right number of keywords.

But no, this article was highly readable, lively and informative, better than most of the rest of the content on my site that I had written myself. Since the links went to a high quality site that was directly related to the content of the article, they were value added as well.

Since then Mary has written 4 more articles for me, for sites that I am much more picky about and I’ve been equally impressed, so I wanted to give her service a plug on here and I thought it is a great chance for my readers to get a high quality article written for their sites…did I mention that Mary provides the articles for free?

Also, I was able to set the topic for the articles and they are exclusively for use on my site, she doesn’t re-use them. Unique, one-off content for free.

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This post was written by Jon Symons, see . Or use the contact page to get in touch.

How to Promote your Web Site

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As my newsletter readers will know, I recently began to offer an online version. All I did was put a very basic plain page up and linked to it as an alternative to reading the text email [it also allowed me to do better links].

Of course being the savvy Internet guy that I am, I also went and grabbed a stats project and stuck it on the template for the newsletter, so I could see if anyone was visiting the online version.

newslettervisitors tbn How to Promote your Web Site

Traffic Spike to my online Newsletter [Passive income Tips #14]

On average about 1 or 2 people a day read the online versions but, a few days ago I had 123 visitors to this one.

What happened?

Someone bookmarked it on StumbleUpon.

Here’s the link where the traffic came from. A guy named Mike Levin bookmarked my newsletter…thanks Mike!

Let’s find out a little bit more about Mike…click on his profile in Stumble Upon. Notice the URL beside his photo…connors.com. It rang a bell to me:

“Hit Tail is brought to you by Connors Communication.” from here. Did you make the connection?

I mentioned Hit Tail in the newsletter [at the very bottom]. Mike looked for links to his cool new Hit Tail service [and it really is worth a look, I'll do a full review in an upcoming post] and then sent traffic from his bookmarks in StumbleUpon and Squido to sites that were linking to his company’s site.

I’m impressed, a very Web 2.0 way to say thanks for the link and it shows that his company is on the ball and really gets how the web works [this is even clearer when you actually start to use Hit Tail].

Takeaways:

  • Always track your visitors.
  • You can promote your site or service or product by promoting other people’s sites…even indirectly.

Another thing that I was thinking about is that there is something cool about the way my newsletter is online in its very plain form, I wonder if that leads to a sense that one has found something that is not commercial and not really meant for human consumption, like it has a “hidden gem” feeling.

It would be worth testing out that theory with a plain text website icon smile How to Promote your Web Site

Jon Symons
Obsessing on my web site stats…so you don’t have to.

This post was written by Jon Symons, see . Or use the contact page to get in touch.

Multiple Domains or Sub-Domains?

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I received a question by email today and since it’s a relatively common question, I thought it would make a good blog discussion.

Should I purchase multiple domain names like:

widgets.com
greenwidgets.com
brownwidgets.com

Or is it good to have one web site and or blog that has one domain and many pages of subdomains, as in:

widgets.com
green.widgets.com
brown.widgets.com

The best way to tackle the question is to understand the difference in terms of relationship.

Separation

In the first group the sites are completely independent. One of the three could be sold, for example, and the others would remain unaffected. With a sub-domain this wouldn’t be possible.

Strength Transfer

In my experience, search engines reward sub-domains with a bit of love from the primary domain. So in the above example if widgets.com was an established site and you created green.widgets.com it would have more search engine weight, and acquire it more quickly, than a separate site: greenwidgets.com.

Of course, the most famous usage of this strength transfer of sub-domains is employed by search engine spammers. By using blogspot.com or other popular sites that allow a user to create a sub-domain, they can milk the strength of the main domain.

Peril

Live by the sword, die by the sword. If you are doing anything even remotely considered uncool by Google [and their list of uncool includes made for AdSense or affiliate sites, even if they have original content] or even if some algorithm writer has a bad hair day and bans your site, you could lose 3 sites rather than one.

All it takes is one Google search site:widgets.com and they have every page on all of your sub-domains.

Cost

Of course if you want many domains it will cost more to host and to purchase and maintain the domain names. Hopefully these are minor costs, but worth considering if you want 100 sites.

Summary of Using Sub-Domains

Pros:

  • Cheaper
  • Transfer of benefits from primary domain
  • One large site builds a longer tail

Cons:

  • Vulnerable to collateral damage if the primary site is banned
  • Cannot be sold separately from primary site

Other questions to clarify:

Is there any reason that I can see, either now or in the future that this project may need to be broken apart and split into separate pieces?

How closely related are the topics?

If I was doing a site about widgets and I knew I was going to tackle every possible topic related to widgets then I would consider sub-domains to create an uber-site about widgets.

But, if I was doing a general site about widgets and then I was going to drill down on a couple of the types of widgets, green and blue, but not provide detailed information about red or black or gold plated widgets, then I would go with three different domains, since they really are three separate approaches to related topics.

How about:

widgets.com
widgets.com/green
widgets.com/brown

One other tip related to this topic. If you are going to interlink a lot between the 3 sites, then don’t use sub-domains or separate domains; use folders as they are seen as being on the same site.

Interlinking your own websites is a similar linking scheme to getting links from the same C class IP block, but in this case the WHOIS website registration information may be also used by the search engines to link the owner to all the websites involved in the link network. (Danger Score:8)

Source. [btw...this links to a very good article about link building and SEO]

Sorry, for the “it depends” type of answer, but this issue is not clear cut. There are advantages to all three approaches. Hopefully I’ve given you enough information to help you make the right choice for your situation.

If not leave a comment and I’ll dig a little deeper.

Jon Symons
Getting my sites and sub-domains banned…so you don’t have to.

This post was written by Jon Symons, see . Or use the contact page to get in touch.

Blog Tag Line: Help! Art of Money Needs One

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The first order of business for my site re-design is to come up with a tag line that gives a new reader a taste of what the site is about; since “Art of Money” doesn’t really say much about what to expect.

The other purpose of a tag line is to help me, your author focus on what is important to write about and what you’d like to see more of on this site.

I’d prefer it to be short and sweet like some of these examples.

Profit

Your Guide to Business Success

ProBlogger

Helping Bloggers Earn Money

CopyBlogger

Copywriting tips for online marketing success

Boing Boing

A Directory of Wonderful Things

LifeHacker

The Productivity and Software Guide

Canadian Business Online

Your Success is Our Business

Art of Money

Then with one of the following below it:

Please help me decide. You’re allowed one vote per IP address [I think] so if you want to sway the vote you’ll have to go to lots of Internet cafes, use a proxy or mobilize all your friends [recommended icon wink Blog Tag Line: Help! Art of Money Needs One ].

If you think of one on your own that you think is superior, leave it in the comments…there will be a prize if yours gets picked over all the ones in the pole!

This post was written by Jon Symons, see . Or use the contact page to get in touch.