IncZen.com, IncAnswers.com, IncorporationAnswers.com for Sale

We decided, after quite a lot of thought that we should sell all the websites that are taking my time away from what I want to do – write books.

IncAnswers.com is a great domain name, and we were in discussions with an intermediary that had a client willing to pay $20,000 for it in January, 2010. Whether that company is still interested or not – we’ll see, because we’re only asking $6900 for the domain name and all content associated with it.

Sale Includes:

• IncAnswers.com domain
• IncorporationAnswers.com domain
• IncZen.com domain
• All domain content at IncAnswers.com (none at incorporationanswers.com)
• YouTube account (IncAnswers)
• Gmail Account (IncAnswers@gmail.com)
• Twitter Account (IncAnswers)

The content on IncAnswers.com is pretty specifically focused on the internet marketing niche – though it need not be. There is little traffic to speak of – perhaps 20-30 unique visitors per day. This website was created with the idea that I’d have more time to focus on the internet marketing niche, but I’ve come to the conclusion that I just don’t have time.

The price is only $6,900 and the value is predominantly in the domain name itself. The name, IncAnswers.com lends itself to a number of possibilities, as does IncZen.com.

If you would like to buy this domain, bring an offer through Escrow.com. The owner is a Thai girl here in Thailand that owns all of our projects. Once you’ve deposited the funds in escrow.com we will transfer the domain and give you the logins for the other accounts.

We are also selling a couple of other sites you may have an interest in:

AimforAwesome.com – Hawaii focused site

ThaiPulse.com and /blog/ – Thailand expat focused site

Online Business Advice for a Friend

I just finished with an email to a friend with some advice about creating an online business and I thought I’d include it here – edited slightly. My hope is that you see how important it is to me about what business you decide to create online. You could go any of 1000’s of ways, but there are lots of dead ends.

One thing I’ve stuck to over the last couple years for online business projects I’m involved in is producing content.

My friend Shawn had told me he will start a site that offers a new website to get indexed in Google and 100 backlinks for a price…

Email below:

***********

Honestly Shawn, and I’ll tell you what I think because I don’t want to see you flounder.

Offering site indexing and backlinks is what half the online businesses are about today. You couldn’t pick a more saturated niche. To say it’s impossibly competitive is understating the situation. Is it worth it to get into it? Not for the last few years – no.

Then you have to look at – are you adding value to anyone’s site by giving them backlinks from the same sites over and over – different clients getting links from same sites? Links coming in are only of value if they are related to the same subject as the site. How many different sites will you have that are ranked PageRank 3 and above to link to these new sites?

I see it as a dead end. Worse than a dead end because you’re climbing a very steep and LONG road. When you get the top there’s no view, no reward, just a dead end… then you have to retrace steps backward to go find something that works.

The reality is that there are not many things entrepreneurs new to web dev and internet marketing can really do. The gurus that sell stuff will tell you 16 ways to get on top in 30 days  but the reality is – it only works for them because they have 1. Traffic. 2. Connections to other sites with traffic.

The best possible thing you could do in my opinion?

There’s a WHOLE lotta stuff – but, you must produce CONTENT that is unique and needed.

That’s it.

Everything else will come after that.

You can shoot video. You can do podcasts. You can write a content site. You can make ebooks. You can podcast ebooks. You can write music. Create graphics. Make a cartoon. Play music. Sing. Do interviews. Create a product. Create a martial art. Write a book. Make art.

You’ve got to make content that is yours that you can resell over and over and over.

Over the last couple years I focused on a lot of different online business projects for producing content.

1. I started filming myself – to get comfortable in front of the camera. Now I love it. I could definitely do an internet show of some sort. I know now, for me – video is the content I will produce in abundance… it’s fun, easy, and it’s where the internet is going and will be for the next 10+ years – easy.

2. I wrote a book – 130,000 words – about a topic that was personally significant to me, but will never get published – It was great accomplishment to actually finish it.

3. I wrote another book – a bio – over 100,000 words. I talk about a lot of stuff I can’t say here in Thailand yet, so I’ll not offer it for publication until I’m solidly back in the states.

4.  I wrote 2-4 ebooks. Just did another one and a site: www. (editedout) .com – not sure I told you.

5. I created www.JoysThaiFood.com where my wife did her videos and recipes.

6. I created Thaipulse.com where I have 400+ posts, over 100 articles, over 3000 images.

7. I joined Dreamstime.com to sell my stock photographs and I put 400 images there that have sold over the past 2 yrs.

8. I joined fotolia and some other stock agencies that sucked – sold some and pulled the photos from there. I trust dreamstime more and went exclusive with them.

9. I tried to create a funny video series on youtube – the Gross Grub Series – me eating bugs – sustainable living style – here in TH.

10. Doing Thai wildlife series videos – snakes and other stuff – also mostly at YouTube.

Notice anything ?

Content man – content!

I worked with a brilliant guy in Hawaii – he was number one at Dean Witter within 3 years of starting work. His name is, Ken Young (name changed). I found him in the state of HI jobs database. I worked for his online greeting card co. which was a front for a MASSIVE spam operation. Legal spam – he always did it by the book – but, we were sending 3 billion spams per month.

Anyway – the guy had already made his millions, retired at 27, and got into online greeting cards with his wife. They made (editedout).com. The site, quite frankly – sucks. The cards? Suck. They are the worst, corniest – most ridiculous drivel I’ve ever had to look at every day of my life. I never told anyone I worked for that company while I did.

I’d suggested updating the site a number of times to make it more contemporary and to compete with the looks of other ecard sites. Ken always rejected the idea because it was working. If it works – don’t mess with it. Sounded ridiculous to me at the time – but, that’s why Ken was on top of the game and I wasn’t yet. Today – his site is still EXACTLY the same! Looking back I realize – yeah, no reason to compete with BlueMountain.com because Ken was targeting a different audience. One that liked big text, corny colors and graphics, and ridiculously simple ecards.

Guess what? Ken’s tiny little company was making bank.

The cards were free to send – 90% of them.

10% were premium cards – extra special JUNK.

If you joined for $2.95 a month – recurring billing on your credit card, you got access to all the extra corny cards.

He had 30,000 subscribers when I joined. That was a drop from what it was previously but I can’t remember how many he was up to at the most.

And, the $100,000 per month on 30,000 subscribers to the premium cards wasn’t where he made his real cash. He made it with spam. As a 4 person company – with Ken and his bro in law doing the admin stuff – and me and another girl doing the hard work – “we” were making 5 million a year minus about 1.5 for expenses.

Not bad. He was paying me 50,000 and the other girl about 30,000. His brother in law? No idea. The almost talentless girl that did the online greeting cards was making in excess of $100,000 per year.

I realized about a month into working with him that he had phenomenal insight into the internet already. I’d been in seo and internet marketing for a number of years already. I knew my stuff.

Ken knew my stuff, his stuff, and everyone else’s stuff.

He was super bright and played with scenarios and testing everything – all kinds of new projects to see what worked. Our routine test was 2-3,000 dollars. We’d try it – if it worked – we’d put some effort into it – see if it really worked. If it really worked we’d be pumping hours into it until it got big.

I wrote down a number of things that lead to business success from my hundreds of hours talking on the phone with Ken…

1. Produce content that is hard or impossible to replicate.
2. Focus on the big stuff that makes money, not the little stuff which can suck away your time.
3. Keep a very small group that can change focus fast. 1-3 people is ideal.
4. Test, test, test. Test in small ways – today we can use adwords to bring instant, focused traffic and see if there’s a result. If not – it really doesn’t make sense to build a whole website about it and try to get Google ranking!
5. Best products to sell online are under $30.
6. Know your target market – in his case he knew that his target was nerds and old people that loved the corny cards and were die-hard loyalists!

Having a monopoly was high on Ken’s list. Creating content that is unique gives you a monopoly at least until someone copies it. Create content that fills a need. Brand that content and that’s all you need for the rest of your life.

Content Shawn – please, produce content and I think you’re going to have a much better time of this… don’t chase what others have already done and then overdone and ground into the dirt.

You’re talented as hell – with people, with writing, with what you pick up – like a sponge.

Create something – and get it going. If it’s Thailand focused I can give you links from my sites. If it’s something you need a link from AimforAwesome for – let me know.

If you need help with video anything – let me know.

Please don’t create a site that indexes a web site and promises links to it… unless you know someone doing it now that is very successful and will share everything with you – Thailand is a new market – but, really limited. There are VERY few farangs (foreigners) here that know what they’re doing, or know what is needed.

Choose something to start producing. Start producing content of whatever sort gets you going – that you’ll continue to do.

Best,

Vern

Starting a Small Business Selling Buddhist Charms

My wife and I stumbled into this almost by accident. Her family had some old Buddhist charms (amulets) they wanted to sell but when I saw them I told them I could sell them for them. I gave it a try on Ebay and sold some for $200-$490 each.

That was a small success – we didn’t have any more of the old amulets so it was a limited opportunity. It piqued my interest in the niche.

I found some charms locally and started selling them on EBay. That was no fun -the market is saturated with junk Buddhist charms and everyone was selling replicas of each other’s amulets.

I found some local charms at a temple and they were unique and sold some on EBay. I don’t have the patience for ebay and dealing with bidders that don’t pay and what not, but I use eBay as a testing ground to see what might work if I built a dedicated site.

I built a blog at blogger in 10 minutes and posted some articles about Thai amulets there. I got some traffic after a few months (50+ unique visitors per day) and some were emailing me asking if they could buy the amulets I pictured on the blog.

I then created a little Thai Buddhist pendant site for my wife – ThaiAmuletSales.com and we put up some basic amulets we found. Some good luck amulets, personal protection amulets, gold cased amulets and Buddha and Buddhist monk charms.

We sold a couple per month for a while and made about $150 per month net. I thought there might be some potential to this so, I thought I’d put some SEO time into the site and try to crank it up a bit. After that effort we were doing pretty well. I’d not expected this little project to turn into anything at all – and now it was netting her $500+ per month. We had hardly tried to be successful with it but already she was making twice what her fellow college graduate friends were making in Bangkok.

So, the time has come to crank it up again. I redesigned the header a bit – kind of a sad state of things that site because I just kept building on a poor design. I should turn it into a WordPress blog but I can’t justify the effort yet. As a result I’ll just add another 50 pages or so with some new Buddhist charms she bought the other day and we’ll see if we can hit $1,000 per month net. That would justify another effort of changing it over to WordPress and making it nice. As it is it sells ok – but, sure it could really be overhauled!

Such is the way successful projects go sometimes. I never knew this niche was going to do anything for us at all. Much like some other things I have going right now – little projects that I give a try and see what happens. Over time they either pan out or not. This panned out. So did my crazy YouTube videos where I now have 1.3 million views per month for doing stupid stuff in Thailand. I’ve kept adding videos and now I’m at 140 videos about Thailand’s wildlife and eating crazy things like a scorpion.

So, what does it all mean?

Start lots of little projects and feed them enough to see – do they start taking off, or no? If not – move on to new projects.

Start projects with a micro-effort. Start a blog. Post there a couple times a week. See if you gain readers. Anyone want to buy anything?

Don’t start out big – big projects fail really big. I’ve found over the years that it’s much better to start little projects and keep cranking them up as they do better. Soon you have something bringing $500/month. Then $1,000. Then $2,000. That’s nice extra income… maybe you can crank it up enough that you don’t work for anyone else anymore. That’d be nice…

That’s my goal for everyone reading this – crank SOMETHING up and turn it into your life’s work… Get away from the 9-5.

Good luck!

The “Free” Business Model

You might have heard about people giving away products or services for free online and wondered how you make money from that business model.

It might go a couple of ways:

1. You could give away loads of information on your site – in the articles you write, for free. This is information you could charge money for – but, you don’t – you give it away for free.

2. You could offer some specific product or service for free that you could charge people for access to. (PDF, book, forum, video, training program, report)

Why would you want to give away something for free? Shouldn’t you always charge money for it? Not necessarily.

There are websites making a whole lot of money by giving away free information. Here’s why that is.

1. Free information is instantly available to whomever lands at your site. They don’t have to wait for it – or pay for it, it’s there and ready to consume.

2. You might be instantly cutting out your competitors that are all charging for the product/service. You may quickly become THE source everyone uses because everyone wants free instead of paying for it.

3. Free = Viral if the information is desired. People will pass free links to their online friends much more often and quicker than they would for something that will cost their friends money. Surfers love to help their friends and passing them links to a place they can get info for free – is a big help.

That’s the WHY of the Free Business Model. Now, what’s the “How”? As in, “How do I make money from it?”

Basically traffic comes first. Money comes later. If a website is able to amass traffic – a couple thousand people per day or more, then the website can make money from advertisements on the website. Their own or other companies advertisements work well when large amounts of visitors are arriving at their site.

The amount of money you can make from ads on your site depends on:

1. Numbers of people coming to your site.

2. The focus of your site. If your niche is tightly defined and there are advertisers that pay a lot per click you can do quite well off low level traffic.

Most businesses giving it all away for free are usually also selling something.

So, you can advertise on your site some products that you’ll charge money for. Or you can put Google Adsense, Textlink Ads, or charge other businesses to put their ads on your site because you have some decent traffic coming in every day – giving you a high pageview count.

One of the best things you can do when you have a free site is start an email list. You can start a list with Aweber.com – which is definitely one of the top two companies doing email lists online today.

Short and simply… You join Aweber. You create a form on their site – that you can add to your site – as a pop-up or as a small blurb that goes on your website somewhere people will see. Look at the checkbox on IncAnswsers – that’s my Aweber form section. I also have a popup that comes up sometimes – once per customer. If your IP address changes you’ll see it again.

You collect names and email addresses to go with the names. You create a newsletter or some other emails that you send out to those that join your list. If you focus on providing more free information and occasionally ask for friends on your list to buy something – some do. Over time your email list will become very important to your business.

Recently one guy I follow pretty closely, Jeremy Schoemaker, decided that instead of write a book and sell it he was going to create a 12 week course and just give all the information away for free instead. The way he’s monetizing this is that he gives away his affiliate link so I can link to his course… if you buy any of his products or services I’ll make a small commission off whatever it is. It’s a win-win-win. You win because you find his 12 week free course. I win because I get a commission. Jeremy wins because you’ve found his site and become an email list member if you decide to opt-in to the free 12 week course.

That’s what to do with a Free Business Model site to make money with it. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. Of course I can’t cover everything in one article – so, ask questions to clarify if this is something you’re considering.

- Vern

Photo credit: Flickr.com member, The Consumerist

Is Google or FaceBook More Important to Your Business?

There is a war happening online that is invisible to you unless you go looking for it.

The war is over your eyeballs, your time online, your wallet.

The two primary competitors in this war I’m speaking about are: Google and FaceBook. Each is focused on different things, but ultimately want the same prize – your cash in their pockets.

Google is the search engine Big Dog. No doubt about that. Especially when you add YouTube to the mix – a Google owned property, that is the 2nd most used search engine – beating Yahoo and MSN Live.

FaceBook has more than 200 million members and is growing all the time as people across the world join in.

It shouldn’t surprise you that the membership model FaceBook has – even if free to join, is very powerful. It’s powerful because it’s a group. It’s a group that facilitates sharing information within the group and controlling how much the group can interact outside the group.

Would you rather search FaceBook and find what real people that you know are saying about some new electronic device you might buy or try Google and see information posted from anyone (sometimes anonymously) with an opinion? FaceBook is betting that you’re going to want to get information from friends first, strangers later.

I have to think they’re right. Search your friend’s name in Google and you’ll get a lot of outdated info – some current. Search your friend on FaceBook (and have them approve you as a friend and share their info with you) – and you’ll see a lot more relevant information about that friend including jobs they’ve had, have, hobbies, things they enjoy doing – recent photos and videos and more.

Google is good for finding information about anything. FaceBook is good for finding in-depth information from friends, family, and friends of friends.

When you purchase something – do you want to hear friends’ advice or strangers? Myself – I’d rather hear what friends have to say if they’re knowledgeable about the subject. Most times they aren’t. That’s the problem for me. I use Google a lot to try to get as many different perspectives on something I’m considering buying as I can.

I think most people don’t put the kind of research into buying something that I do. I don’t buy on impulse. I don’t buy based on emotion. Though I might like the idea of an iPhone I haven’t bought one because I already have a solution that fits what I need in a phone, but even better.

I think most people DO buy at least partly, based on emotion. Hearing a friend recommend something is all most people need as justification.

For “things” – products, something tangible that someone is considering buying I think most people might search using Google and then ask friends what products they use or recommend. Then they’d buy at a local store if they know of one that sells the product, or as a second choice – online.

What about for services? If you need someone to build you a website for instance. Would you go to your friends that have websites and ask them who created it and how much it cost? Sure you would. If a friend, or two friends recommended the same solution to you – would you be inclined to use it?

Definitely you would.

Now, if you search on Google for services you’ll find tens of millions of web developers. How do you choose? Go with whatever company Google ranks on the first page or two?

Most people do that. What does Google know of these people? Nothing. They trust the websites that make it to top 10 or 20 in the search engine results pages. That’s all. No recommendation. No past experience. Maybe not even real information at all. There are sites that are totally bogus that pop up in the top 10 results constantly. Can you trust Google to find you a place to spend your money for web development?

I think not. I would hope not.

Problem is, you might not know anyone that provides the service you need. Your friends might not know either – what then?

You could search Google to find some blogs that connect you more personally with a person that does web development. You could read some articles they have about it. You could see if there are any negative posts about them – also by searching Google. Eventually you’d come to a point where you trust what someone is saying about the service you need – and purchase from them.

So, which is more important – Google or FaceBook?

In my ideal world I’d know someone that was expert or high level at everything I need. I’d know people that could find me the best health insurance for the best price. I’d know someone that could fix my car or motorcycle for a fair price. I’d know someone that could bring me 100,000 new people to my website which I try to turn into customers. I’d know someone that could find me 40 coconuts a week and drop them off at my house.

Where would I most easily find these people? FaceBook. Google is great for finding some information about any subject you can think up. But ultimately I think the sales – the power of the group of friends, acquaintances… experts on so many things is found in FaceBook… (and Twitter!) but, more about Twitter in other posts…

So, which is more important to your business? Do you think people prefer to go with Google or would prefer to use friends they trust giving referrals and recommendations on products and services?

For myself – I have a decent Google presence for this IncAnswers blog and for my other personal development site: AimforAwesome.com. Eventually people start to realize I’m not out to sell them something they don’t need. I don’t hype anything. I don’t twist words or sell dreams without the reality.

For me – Google is working… but, I’m an expert at developing my sites for Google. If you aren’t – you’ll need to find someone that can do it. That’s expensive to do it right.

FaceBook is free (so far). It doesn’t cost anything to post a message, a link, or a product you’re selling on your feed.

I’m not currently using FaceBook as a business. I haven’t accepted mass numbers of friends – right now only real friends and a couple friends of friends are in my group. How much more powerful would it be to me for my business… for my income, for web development if I decided to open up the doors? Not sure… still thinking about that one.

Have you opened the doors yet? Are you using FaceBook as a business? Can it be used that way without making your friends feel like you’re trying to sell them something too often?

Interesting questions… and the future is wide open as to which of the two, Google or FaceBook will become the most important site to businesses in the future.

Any thoughts?

Best of Life!

Vern

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