Worried About the Competition Online?

Posted on May 4, 2008
Filed Under Blogging advice | 9 Comments

I recently chatted with a friend through Gmail, and she was slightly worried.

She was building a site in a certain niche and found out that other people were building their sites on the same concept. She used SBI and actually found a couple of SBI-ers building their site in the exact same niche.

Should I continue? Do I stand a chance now that even someone using an SBI system is going for this niche?

A Must Read For Every Blogger

Posted on April 24, 2008
Filed Under Blogging advice | 12 Comments

If you have a blog and your goal is to make money with it, then read on…

Ken Evoy, the CEO of Sitesell.com has recently posted a new page which explains, in detail, why blogging is not the best way to build a successful online business.

I suggest that you head over to the Blog or Build page, prepare yourself a drink and read the full page. It’s long page so take your time…

(And if you are using Wordpress as your blogging platform, don’t skip the »Nitty Gritty Wordpress vs. SBI! Comparison«!)

Back already?

Let me share my experience with content sites and blogs (especially this one) and explain when you should use each one.

Two Google Adsense Tips To Boost Your Earnings

Posted on April 15, 2008
Filed Under Earn money online | 12 Comments

I’ve used these two Google Adsense tips and tricks to improve my eCPM and my earnings in the past few weeks.

First I did a lot of research on Adsense smart pricing and figured out something that worked for me.

Second, I was in a unique position to see how my Adsense earnings fluctuate since I moved my account from a personal to a business one. This showed me how much my account was affected by smart pricing and arbitrage advertisers.

But let’s get to the point… Read more

Seizing the Opportunities of the Future

Posted on April 13, 2008
Filed Under Earn money online | Leave a Comment

Are you planning a website or a blog for something that will happen in the future? If not, then you might want to consider a few options.

I recently came across a post from Everton about relaunching his Windows7 News website.

Windows 7 release is of course still far away, but as you can see, there are some internet marketers already getting keyword rich domain names and building content about that topic.

I’ve ventured into one such experiment not long ago too and started a blog about the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 cell phone.

Starting A Journey Towards Financial Freedom - Q&A

Posted on April 2, 2008
Filed Under Earn money online | 5 Comments

This is an email conversation with one of the readers of this blog and I thought it would be interested to include here as a post. I am happy to answer questions as it also helps me get some quality content for this blog…

Hi Tomaz,

Just a hello from me again.

How ya doing, your blog is not active nowadays and I missed reading your insightful posts.

To be honest, I did not do anytime much for the past few months after emailing to you. Just register a few domains and left it at that while I change a new job and got settling in.

But now I am ready to put a blueprint and really achieve financial freedom…can you give me a helping hand? hhahah,….well i was just writing as i think so if possible maybe you can give me some comments on my thoughts and hopefully, I will stay the course and see the RESULTS real soon!

First, can I know how is your sites doing now? Are you still hitting the 10k mark per month as you indicated before? Or are you doing better than before with your tennis site and vacuum cleaner site? Can share some details for motivation sake?

Read more

The Longest Useful Comment I Ever Got

Posted on March 21, 2008
Filed Under Blogging advice | Leave a Comment

Today I received the longest unique, useful comment ever on my tennis blog.

Scroll down on this page:

Pete Sampras Vs Roger Federer - Who Wins?

And you’ll find a comment from Jeffrey which is 1494 words long!

That’s not a comment, those are 2 or even 3 articles! And Jeffrey’s English is excellent too.

There are a couple of long comments on this blog too and I want to thank all those that contribute!

So what was the longest comment you got on one of your blogs? (Feel free to post a link to your post with the longest comment!)

Interview With Ken Evoy - Part IV - The Future Of Internet

Posted on March 14, 2008
Filed Under Site Build It | Leave a Comment

This is part 4 of the interview with Ken Evoy. Here are the links to part I, part II and part III.

Tomaz: What do you see as the future of the Internet? What’s the future of SiteSell?

Ken: Some years ago, I wrote that search engines were essential to the Internet and they were like the best bargain in the world. And search engine optimizers got it. But I don’t think the average small business person really got it.

And now, eight or nine years later, people still say that one should not get used to them because they can’t last forever.

There was this ridiculous interview of a Forester researcher were they asked her if Facebook will replace Google. And she actually thought it could. Her reasoning being, “Well, you know if you want to go to Hawaii now, you can just ask a friend on Facebook instead of doing the search in Google.”

Now, how stupid is that? Because thirty years ago you could ask a friend if you’re going to have a vacation in Hawaii without using the Internet.

You know, Facebook is an activity. It’s fun, it’s valuable, it connects people and all that stuff, but its not a gateway to the Internet. The search engines, as far as I can see for the next five, ten years, are still the main highway to the Internet.

And that sounds obvious, but it’s a bold statement to say because to predict anything beyond six months in the Internet is very dangerous. Things change. Gigantic killers come out of nowhere. Major new technologies happen.

But people use the Internet to search for information.

Interview With Ken Evoy - Part III - Can You Become Financially Free With SBI?

Posted on March 10, 2008
Filed Under Site Build It | 1 Comment

To read part I and part II of my interview with Ken Evoy just follow the links…

Tomaz: Since my blog is about financial freedom, I want to ask you this question:

What do you think is a typical journey of someone who has achieved financial freedom with SBI? And how much do you think they usually earn per month?

Ken: It varies so much, Tomaz. And some people start part-time because they have a full-time job where they work sixty hours a week.

Some people start full-time like a stay-at-home mom whose children have just gone off school so she has six hours a day to really work. She picks a good niche, starts to see traffic, and starts to make income three to six months, which becomes the main family income in a year or in eighteen months.

Why SEO Will Soon Become A Waste Of Time And Money

Posted on March 8, 2008
Filed Under SEO | 2 Comments

Google has recently written a post Why Data Matters where they explain how their algorithm has changed over the years.

Here’s the first main point of that story:

On the academic side, the National Science Foundation started a “Digital Library Project” which made grants to several universities. Two Stanford grad students in computer science named Larry Page and Sergey Brin worked on this project. Their insight was to recognize that existing search algorithms could be dramatically improved by using the special linking structure of web documents. Thus PageRank was born.

Where we are now with SEO

a) ON-page SEO: Pagerank + keyword in title

From my own experiments and experience, I know that pagerank is still a very healthy factor in rankings.

Actually pagerank + keyword in title are the most effective things you can do on-page (of course if you have some pagerank regardless of the anchor text of the incoming links) to rank for a certain keyword.

Here’s an experiment I did on my tennis blog www.tennisthoughts.com:

Interview With Ken Evoy - Part II - The Biggest Obstacles Of Online Success

Posted on March 6, 2008
Filed Under Site Build It | 4 Comments

This is part II of the interview with Ken Evoy…

Tomaz: What do you think is the biggest obstacle of success for the technical part? And of course what stops people from succeeding (personality traits)?

Ken: The biggest obstacle is lack of knowledge. For a small business person who wants to start his own site, there are just too many barriers in terms of themselves learning HTML and FTP is just a scary concept.

People don’t even understand the concept of a server, how a website works on the Internet. Something as basic as that. So what FTP does and where those pages go sounds so simple to you and me, but it’s fundamental as that. People hear about search engine optimization and their eyes are really getting scared.

So the whole thing starts to look like it’s impenetrable. So what do they do? They hire a webmaster who they think knows these things but most of them really don’t.