Is Online Business Sustainable In The Long Term?

Q: Dear Tomaz,

Your website is really inspiring. I am going to buy Site Build It pretty soon (off your link) and get started.

This might be a stupid question, but do you think that making a living online is sustainable? In other words, do you see yourself making a living online 15 years from now doing the same thing?

A: You’re welcome and thanks for a very interesting question. I’ve considered and contemplated on this before – whether online business will work in 15 years or more.

Here are some of my conclusions: Read more

How to Build Your Own Successful Website By Reverse Engineering Successful Sites

Building your own successful website is not as difficult as you may think.

The factors that enabled a successful website to get lots of free search engine traffic and earn lots of money are almost completely transparent – you can see exactly what it takes to build your own website that works.

This article will show you how to analyze successful websites, learn from them and apply this knowledge to your online business.

Step 1: Find successful websites

How do you know which websites get a lot of traffic and earn good money?

a) Sitesell.com lists their most successful websites, and you can study the top 5 from each category on this page. These sites definitely get a lot of traffic.

b) Find sites with an Alexa ranking below 100,000. While Alexa doesn’t tell you exactly how many visitors a particular site receives, in my experience all sites with a ranking below 100,000 have very good traffic. Install Search Status if you use Firefox for a quick glance at the Alexa ranking.

c) Look for success stories. Google has their Adsense success stories page, and if these sites earn a lot of money, they definitely get a lot of traffic. You can also learn where to position Adsense ads since these sites all get very good CTR and eCPM. Read more

Seven Reasons Why You Need A Website AND a Blog

In creating a successful online business, your goal should be a site with a great deal of content that will draw fresh, targeted daily visitors through free search engine traffic.

This is the basis of Ken Evoy’s ‘Site Build It’ program, and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of high traffic websites based on this model.

On the other hand, you have the bloggers. They stick to their model of running a blog, which is actually a website from the perspective of both search engines and most visitors. Blogs are typically updated more often than websites and are more time-oriented – meaning they write about something that is happening right now in their industry or field of interest.

I have found that using both, a large content website and a blog, is a great combination and others have also recommended this approach.

Consider Amazon Context Links Affiliate Program For Product Based Sites

I’ve been positively surprised by the Amazon affiliate program last month. When Chitika average CPC dropped a few months ago (now it’s back up!) I was looking for Chitika alternatives.

While I kept the main Chitika ads on my site, I saw that the Chitika Linx was not earning well.

So I tested the Amazon Context Links affiliate program. Since I use SBI Includes on my site I can change the javascript code for all pages of my site with only one upload so I simply replaced the Linx code with the Amazon Context Links javascript code.

Chitika Alternatives

If you are a Chitika publisher, then you’ve surely noticed a big change in your average CPC and earnings in May. Unfortunately, for most publishers this resulted in much lower earnings than before.

You can see some of the comments in this post:

What the f is going on with Chitika?

There was also quite a bit of discussions in the Chitika forums and other IM forums like Digital Point.

I use to get around 0.35 per click 6 months ago in my vacuum cleaners niche. Later, the CPC dropped to around 0.21 to 0.25 and was quite stable there.

Two Google Adsense Tips To Boost Your Earnings

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

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

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

How To Manage Your Money In 2008

Last days of December are great to start planning on how to manage your money in the next year.

You’ve made some mistakes this year from which you can learn and you’ve made some right decisions which you can do again. And of course, you can also find great money and finance related blogs out there on the web.

I can’t really say that I am an expert on managing my money (yet) so I tried to find online resources from which I can learn.

Here are some of the best posts on how to manage your money and achieve financial freedom perhaps already in 2008: Read more