Make Money Online: Quality of Service
In addition to the size of your market and existing competition, the quality of service you provide is a very important factor in making money online. High quality will provide credibility for your content or service, and result in repeat visits and referrals. If your site is low quality, you may have a difficult time in earning the trust of those that visit your site.
Making Money Online: Existing Competition
This is the third part of a multi-part series about making money online. So far I’ve discussed deciding whether to provide content or service as well as evaluating the size of your market. The next logical step to making money online is to analyze the existing competition in the market you are considering.
Make Money Online: Size of Market
This is the second post in a multi-part series I’m writing about making money online. The first step is to decide whether you want to create a blog or develop an online service. Next, you need to decide on a topic for your blog or determine the type of service you would like to provide.
Perhaps the three most important factors to consider in deciding what to put on your website are the size of your market, the competition you will face, and the quality of your content or service. In this article, I share some of my observations on size of market, including examples on how I’ve failed and succeeded in properly assessing it.
Make Money Online: Content or Service?
For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a burning desire to earn a living working with technology. I’ve sought out many different methods for making money online.
Much like Edison inventing the light bulb, I’ve found more ways how not to achieve the desired outcome. However, I’m glad to say that I’m starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I recently decided to share my experience in my quest with a multi-part post on how to make money online.
My Three Goals for 2009
What do you think of new year’s resolutions? I for one am not a big fan, but Chris Brogan had a good idea for setting goals in the new year. Since 2006, he has been using a few simple words to guide him towards achieving his goals.
The simplicity of such a strategy makes it easier to keep focused on the tasks at hand. It also makes it easier to know whether or not you have even reached your goals, because the measuring stick is very easy to read. I’ve decided to implore his strategy with these three goals in mind: listen, engage, and develop.
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Two Ways to Reclaim Your Feeds from FeedBurner
Do you use FeedBurner for your blog feed(s)? Are you annoyed that the article links are feeds.feedburner.com URLs rather than the URLs of the original articles? This bothered me for some time until I was finally able to figure out what was causing it and how to prevent it from happening.
The Brilliance of the Izea Kmart Campaign
Izea recently ran a promotion for Kmart that would offer influential bloggers a $500 Kmart gift card, if they blogged about their experience at the store. In addition to offering the bloggers gift cards, they also gave them an additional $500 gift card to offer as a prize to one of their readers. Whether or not you agree with the ethics of the campaign, you have to admit that it was quite brilliant.
Some other Bloggers You May Enjoy
It’s not a big secret that promoting others is a great way to make friends online, as well as promote yourself. In doing so, you site sources of great information and demonstrate to others that you can be a trusted source as well. In accordance with that thought, I’d like to introduce you to a few other blogs I really enjoy reading and that you may enjoy reading as well.
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4 Simple Ways to Make Friends Online
In creating a new blog, I’ve found myself in need of new friends. No there’s nothing wrong with my old friends, but most of them aren’t geeks like me. I’m not talking about getting as many people on Twitter following me as possible, just for the sake of doing so. I want to befriend the folks that write the stuff I’m interested in reading and learning about. So how does one go about making new friends, when they have few or none to begin with?
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Open Invitation for Guest Posts
Today, Ann Smarty posted the first guest post on my blog. She wrote up a great article on how to find people that share your interests. I solicited her and other MakeUseOf.com authors to guest post for me on my blog. I’d like to open the invitation to anyone else who is interested in making a guest post.
Chris Brogan’s Advice to Me
As far as all of my blogs have gone, GeekLad really has started with a bang. I never really had this kind of blogular momentum (I think I just made that up). My other two blogs (jsierra.net and WealthBoy) have been plagued with inactivity. Although in WealthBoy’s defense, it has fallen back mostly due to my efforts on GeekLad. I really have no excuse for having neglected jsierra.net other than my own laziness and lack of direction with that blog.
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Fast and Simple SEO to Increase from PageRank 0
I was very surprised when I learned that I had quickly increased to a PageRank of 3 within less than 30 days of having created this blog. A few weeks later, I reflected upon some of the things that may have contributed to improving my PageRank. More recently, I came across some additional information that may actually provide the real reason I rose so quickly.
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A Perspective on Micro-blogging from a Microblogging N00b
In 2007, a micro-blogging service called Twitter took the ‘Net by storm. I will often jump onto public (and sometimes private) betas to check out new products, but for some reason Twitter never grabbed me. In real life I am somewhat social, but online I never really developed the kind of presence I would have liked. On the other hand, my college buddy Bwana did a much better job of developing an online presence over the course of many years.
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Writing for Make Use Of
Last month, I read Jimmy Roger’s tips & sites for finding freelance blogging work. At the end of the article he mentions that Make Use Of is always seeking writers. I decided to offer my services and I contacted them.
A few days later, Mark O’Neil (managing editor for Make Use Of) contacted me and allowed me to join the team! I think it will be a good opportunity for me to promote GeekLad. It will also give me another place to share some of the great software tools and sites I come across from time to time.
My first article was published just a few days ago. I wrote about a tool to turn Windows Live Writer into a portable app. Initially I was going to blog about it here, but later I decided it would make a great article for Make Use Of. I’ve already submitted my second article as well. Hopefully it gets approved and will get posted soon.
Increasing Your PageRank
A few weeks ago I was pleasantly surprised to learn that my blog had reached a PageRank of 0 in less than 30 days since having created it. I blogged about some of the things I believed that helped contribute to my rapid rise of a PageRank of 3. I’d like to share a few more strategies that I believe also helped to increase my PageRank.
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PageRank 0 to 3 in Under 30 Days
Less than a month ago, I set out to create this blog. GeekLad was “born” on September 3, 2008. Although I had learned quite a bit about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) when I created my personal finance blog back in January, I’ve learned quite a bit more with my launch of GeekLad. I’ve been keeping a close eye on my PageRank and tonight I was pleasantly shocked to learn it has already hit three! I think it was many months before WealthBoy ever hit PR3. I’d like to share with you some of the things I’ve learned over the course of the past month, and perhaps touch on some of the things that I believe that have helped me to reach a PageRank of 3 in less than 30 days.
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Alternate Recent Posts Widget
I’ve been fooling around with WordPress a lot lately, trying to get GeekLad.com configured just how I like it. Most recently I added a Recent Posts widget. The default Recent Posts widget displays links to all of your most recent posts. If you are already displaying your most recent posts on the front page, the default Recent Posts widget can be rather repetitively redundant. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find something out there that could quickly resolve the issue, so I resorted to writing a hack myself.
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Two WordPress Plugins That Will Make Your Life Easier
Whether you’re a seasoned WordPress blogger or you’re starting up a new blog from scratch (as I am here), then these plugins will make installing new plugins, themes, and WordPress updates a snap:
Effortless Plugin Installation
Installing new WordPress plugins and themes can be somewhat of a hassle. You have to download the file, upload it to your web host, and extract the contents. The Single Click Plugin Updater will alleviate much of the pain by allowing you to install plugins and themes all from within WordPress. You just provide the URL of the new plugin or theme, and the single click plugin does the rest. You don’t even have to download it to your computer first!
WordPress Automatic Upgrade
Much like installing plugins and themes, upgrading to a new version of WordPress can be a tedious and time-consuming process. The WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin makes it much easier, although I would call it more of a semi-automatic upgrade. It’s not a single-click process, as you have to manually click through each step of the process. It does still make it a lot easier to just perform each of the steps at the click of a button rather than performing each one manually.
ScribeFire Firefox Plugin
In an effort to simplify my life with keeping this blog up-to-date, I wanted to find a quick and easy way to write new blog posts. I figured surely there must be a nice Firefox plugin to help me, and I was right. Look no further than ScribeFire. ScribeFire allows you to quickly write up posts to your blog all within the convenience of a browser pane in the lower half of the screen. If you’re blogging about a particular web page, you can do it without even having to leave the page or having to go through the hassle of navigating multiple screens. Just pop open the ScribeFire pane, write up your post, and publish it. It took me all of about 30 seconds to realize I had found exactly what I was looking for. Read more…
