Free Video Tutorial – W2 Buying Domain Names

How can you get this free “Buying Domain Names” video tutorial?

Sign up over there on the right side –>

or, click here.

This second free video tutorial covers the essentials in buying domain names and has just under 20 minutes of help for you.

I walk you through the process of buying a domain name and saving money while you do so. I touch on the legalities that you’ll need to know to stay out of trouble.

Buying domain names is not a difficult task – it’s an essential one, and there are some basic things to learn before you go ahead and buy one for your online company – and then have it taken away because you infringed on someone’s trademark.

Take a few minutes and watch this video and see if you don’t pick up some valuable tips – and save some money on your next domain purchase.

I show you the same process I’ve used to choose each of hundreds of my own domain names.

How can you get this free “Buying Domain Names” video tutorial?

Sign up over there on the right side —->

or, click here.

You’ll get links to the videos as they are completed. There will be at least 30 free video tutorials to help you with your basic online skills. There may be skills you are not 100% on, things you’ve forgotten, or things you never knew contained in these tutorials. I highly recommend reviewing them all before continuing on to the EBusiness PRIMER or PRO courses.

If you have any suggestions for how to make the videos more interesting – they’re welcome.

If you want to see the notes I created as an outline for this video tutorial on buying domain names, you can see that in PDF format here:

W2 – Buying Domain Names ->

As you can see if you look at this PDF file – there isn’t 19 minutes of information here. This is a skeleton outline of the free video. There is always more info in the video tutorials than the PDF outlines – but, I give them to you anyway – just in case you want to get a glimpse of the course material.

Here’s a complete list of the video tutorials we’ll be offering:

Free Online Training Video Tutorial List

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

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