Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

It seems like everyone these days considers themselves an entrepreneur. Take me for example, am I an entrepreneur? I’d like to think I have the entrepreneur mindset. But most “businesses” I’ve built over the years I would consider small businesses, not entrepreneurial endeavors.

If I wasn’t there, they would cease to make money. That’s more a definition for a small business owner. Also, nothing I’ve done has been really innovative. Sure, I was the first in my elementary to buy a tub of candy from Sam’s Club and sell it on the bus. But that’s nothing more innovative than the local dime store. And if I wasn’t there, I sure wasn’t making money!

I’m not writing this to call anyone out. I merely trying to get people to see that they may not be entrepreneur’s in the traditional sense but rather small business owners trying to make a living working for themselves.

To become an entrepreneur, it’s my opinion that you have to utilize a business system or change the way a current system works, or create a completely new system, or, do all of the above.

In my opinion a true entrepreneur is creating money from other peoples work as well as thinking of something that is new an original. If you have a network of sites, that if you left for a year, would cease to run and make you no money, you might not be an entrepreneur.

Just some food for thought to keep you going towards financial freedom.

The last few months have seen steady and increasing income from my blog network. This month, I can already say, I’ve surpassed last months earnings and we’re not even half way through the month.

Adsense: $202.94
Namedrive: $96.51
TLA: $44.10
Direct Link Sales: $130.03

Total: $473.58

Hoping to keep this ball rolling and improve it even more moving it to new methods to expand and focus (do those go together) the blog network.

Here are a few more earnings from around the way…
$474.51 for the Internet Cashflow Guy
$185.75 for a new one on my list Nomar.

and once again that’s it for the blogosphere of earnings that I follow. Not too many reporting what their earnings are these days. (Or maybe I just don’t follow them much anymore.)

About two months ago I wrote about feeling the digg effect where I talked about the great feeling of getting your article to the front page of digg and then quickly seeing your shared server plan crash to ground.

The residual effect of getting to the top of digg is immense. Although if you feel the effect and your server crashes that is a bummer in the short term, but all the links you get will help your page rank, your site promotion, and boost your readership (so long as you keep up the writing.)
Based on what the surrounding hours were receiving, the time I was down cost me about 30K visitors for the 3 articles I had dugg to the front page. Ouch!!!

It even prompted me to switch servers and plans.

I recently came across a interesting niche hosting idea started by this guy and another called SurviveDigg.com. A great idea, especially if they can keep up with staying true to their name and get to the top of Google’s search results for hosting plan that can survive digg (that should help ).

I don’t know how many times I searched for that on Google as well as all the forums I could find. It’s a tough subject because it seems like everyone has different answers about the same hosts and the same hosting plans. (ie it’s a crapshoot)

But the idea is definitely a great niche to go after and a product that I would have thought about trying had it been launched back when I was mulling over the decision to switch hosting plans because of the digg effect.

March was a decent month once again in terms of earnings. Although I’m still closer to a break even stage in my Blogtown Press blog network, due to paying bloggers and hosting fees, I feel as though it was a good month for me. I’m progressing towards a more realistic goal of a money earning business.

I’m making progress towards a more organized business plan approach and learning as I go along. I’ve been much more active in seeking out buyers of both text links, ad space, and posts for the blog network which has helped in the short term. I’d like to build a presence on (gasp) Text-Link-Ads so I don’t have to spend time tracking down potential advertisers right now.

Earnings for the month of March were:

Adsense: $182.88
TLA: $ 35.28
Posts Sold at Forums: $ 57.66
Links Sold at Forums: $ 80.67

NameDrive Domains: $102.38

Total Earnings: $458.87

Some of you may notice that my namedrive totals have increased since my last earnings report. That’s because I’m working on determining the scale-ability of my domain name investing method. So far so good although I would have liked to see a little higher earnings due to the investment. Still on track to make 100%(ish) return in a year.

Some others who divulge their earnings so you can be inspired…

Yaro Starak recently discussed earning money online and gave us a detailed analysis of his earnings, $6000+. He’s not a regular at doing this but these are the ones that really get you going! Thanks Yaro.

The Internet Cashflow Guy keeps moving up, great to see the progress. $485.40 last month

And that’s it!!! Looking through my blogroll showed me that I have to update it and get rid of some links from people who either don’t have blogs anymore, or don’t update them at all. I think 3 months is a good time period to go by.

First off I want to say that I didn’t spend more than a minute at the site. Just long enough to sign-up and notice that during sign-up and right afterwards the site doesn’t tell you what it’s about.

The site I’m talking about is Geni.com and was recently talked about over at Tech Crunch. I guess when you have the likes of Tech Crunch and Jason Calacanis talking about your site you are going to get a lot of people to sign up and that could bring you some money.

But a valuation of $100 million with $10 mil in second round VC funding is a bit high for a site that currently makes no money. Seems a little bubblish if you ask me.

I guess there are a few roads that the company could take to monetize and it’s an interesting idea. Getting your family members involved and showing where they are in the world. Sounds something right up Googles alley and a drop in their bucket in terms of buying it. Google did buy dodgeball.com.

Social networks are great for kids; Myspace, Friendster, FaceBook, etc, and even good for entrepreneurs LinkedIN (ish). But trying to get the baby boomers of the world to come around to a social network based on their family tree? I have a hard time getting some of my relatives to use email correctly.

I think it’s gonna be a hard road is my opinion. I’d really like to see where they take it. I guess with $10 million you might be able to send out a few fliers with the monthly AARP membership papers.

I just have to give a little shout-out to Yaro Starak who writes great content over at Entrepreneurs Journey. He was on his way back to Australia after being in Canada for six months and had a stop over in Hawaii for a few days. He happened to be staying in Waikiki, where I live, and we were able to meet up for dinner and some great discussion.

It was really nice to have a networking meetup like this and discuss blogging, entrepreneurship and many other things with someone who has had a fair bit of success in those areas. Yaro offered many tips to help me on my way building my blog network. I imagine I made him laugh or his head spin with my randomness and subject jumping that I often get myself into when I begun talking about all the crazy things I claim to be doing.

I did manage a picture via my cell phone that I hope to have up sooner or later but can’t figure out how to get it onto my computer without sending it and god knows what else I have to do.

Anyway, thanks again for meeting up Yaro, it was great. And all you readers make sure to stay up to date with his Blog Traffic School as I’m sure it’s going to be well worth it.

Becoming an entrepreneur is tough! But it’s a fun journey. I just wanted to give a shout out to all those people who help others cause they want to see others succeed, and cause helping others allows you to learn more. Which rocks.

I recently wrote about why I’m hiring bloggers and how it’s helped me build my blog network traffic 4 fold in three months. Sometimes when you’re trying to reach for big goals you gotta look for some help along the way.

Bringing on some extra help with the writing has made a huge difference in my ability focus on building my blog network as a business both from a financial standpoint as well as a promotional standpoint. As I’ve mentioned previously I don’t want to start a business where I’m the business.

With that said I’ve also realized that my coding talents only go so far and that there are really only so many hours in the day. I still work a 9-5 job (sometimes way later) at a biotech company as a biomedical engineer, I’m working on planning a wedding (mine), and I also love to help other people realize their entrepreneurial dreams. Currently I’m helping, in as much as I can which probably isn’t enough, my brother and another friend with various aspects of their companies.

Some may say I’m spreading myself way too thin, which I admit I am. (Especially my finance, who I know would love me to get my nose out of my computer.) But the reason I can’t say no to people is one, cause I can’t say no; and two, cause I love helping people that have energy towards doing cool stuff. If someone came to you and said I wanna start my own company, you wanna help me create a website, market my stuff, sell my stuff, would you say no?

I look at it from some other angles as well. If you help them work on their projects, you’ll learn more about all the aspects of business you might not have otherwise learned on your own. And also, they may be able to help you with your stuff. Which has happened numerous times with the current people I’m working with. I’ve gone in gung ho to just help and ended up having them help me just as much as I’ve helped them.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking of a way to write all this down, but just wanted to let everyone know that if everyone helped those around them out just a little more each day, everyone could get a lot more done

So thanks to all those who’ve helped me thus far and to those who will help me later, an early thanks.

Well, it’s that time again. It’s time to report on earnings and see what others made over the last month. Mine were decent last month. I increased earnings in all categories. I’ve also decided to start a blog network which has taken a lot of time off my hands from building my internet groupings monetarily. I hope to use this month to reorganize and start building earnings in the new year, at a much faster pace.

AdSense              $36.75
Affiliates/Reviews  $30
Text-Links           $8.55
Namedrive           $129.55

Total                   $204.85

Also around the earnings world:

$806.48 over at one-dollar-a-day.com
$206.19 for buildingmyempire.com
$56.94 at Nothing-ventured.org
$504 for 45n5.com
$430.23 over at theinternetcashflowguy.com

It’s that time again, earnings earnings earnings reports.

October was an OK month, again not horrible, but no amazing increase in earnings was seen from previous months. Last month I earned $89.64 from internet endeavours. This month:

Adsense = $24.74

Namedrive = $64.24

Affiliates = $0

Total = $88.98

Elsewhere:

One Dollar a Day saw $838.65

The Internet Cashflow Guy saw $369.85

Building my Empire had $100.36

Well that’s it for earnings reports, if you want to share yours with everyone, please feel free to post a comment with your earnings or or a link to your earnings post.

technorati tags:Blog, Earnings, Adsense, Affiliates, Money, Entrepreneur

I was recently directed to a great tool for doing keyword research. It uses the overture database and then estimates the monthly searches in Google and MSN (probably from released search percentages).

The best part of it is that it offers keywords that are similar and related and shows you numbers for those as well. This save you a lot of time digging through overture, and estimating all the numbers yourself in a spreadsheet (or am I the only one that does that).

They also supply quicklinks for every single option you could think of:

Overture Bid Price
Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search results
Yahoo! Suggest
Digital Point Wordtracker
Nichebot
Google Trends
AdWords Google Traffic Estimator
Google Suggest
Google Synonym
AdWords Keyword Tool

This puts some of the best market research tools all on the same page! You can use all of the tools, or none of the tools.

This can be found at SEO2020.com’s Keyword Suggestion Tool

technorati tags:Keyword, Tool, SEO, Market, Research, Traffic, Estimator