Tim Aten

C.R.E.A.M. – How To Make Money On The Internet

October 8, 2012 By Tim Aten 3 Comments

I peep at the shape of the streets
And stay awake to the ways of the world cause shit is deep
A man with a dream with plans to make C.R.E.A.M.
-C.R.E.A.M Wu Tang Clan (Inspector Deck)

Often friends run Internet business ideas by me and every so often I get the blatant question, “How can I make money on the Internet, how can I get residual income so I can free up my time and do what I want?” They believe they can dedicate a weekend, a week, a few months, and set something up which outputs tens of thousands of dollars into their checking account. Yes, those people are out there but they are few and far between. I may point you to some of these individuals in this post but realize they have a mix of sophisticated programming knowledge and the will to power.

Be Authentic – Do Something You’re Passionate About

The Algorithms are on the perpetual quest for validating authenticity. Is this website authentic? Are you authentic?

The signal for authenticity is the social web. This is where the story begins and will end. But first… where did we come from?

The Black Hat. The Sheisters. The Shady.

If your website ranks high in a natural or a paid search result- think ranking 1,2,or 3, you’ll get traffic to your website. If a keyword or keyword phrase gets 100s of thousands of monthly searches and you are in spots 1,2, or 3 you’ll get traffic and if you’re selling something with a smart design and concept you’ll make money on the internet. This is the game and the hustle.

So back in the day, think 7+ years in Internet time, people would research and identify lucrative keywords, build websites focusing on these words and by using wise and researched URLs, title tags, descriptions and keywords one could easily rank high. The game wasn’t that competitive. Eventually people stuffed keywords in their meta descriptions and we’ve evolved to a point where meta keywords aren’t a signal at all and some believe with Bing it could even be a negative ranking factor. (Note – title tags and URLs are STILL VERY IMPORTANT)

With the ease it became competitive. And the algorithms got smarter. The internet evolved and linking, particularly backlinks, became important. With linking also came content. It always comes back to content. Content is king. Content will always be king.

So here’s what the black hats did- They built a pretty legitimate-appearing website which may have a decent user experience focusing on keywords they wanted to target. This is still a viable option and plan. However, what they would do is set up “dummy sites” all over the globe most notably Eastern Europe, China, and India and massively crowd source content, garbage content, stuffed with these keywords and then LINK BACK to the legitimate website.

You can’t really play this game anymore.

Use White Hat Techniques – Google Always Sees Black & White

You may have heard about Google Panda (content) and Penguin (linking) updates. These Google Algorithm updates were ways to identify and weed out sites that were using content farms and link farms.

I was at a Wordcamp Detroit over 3 years ago and one of the presenters, Brad Gosse, a passionate and avid Internet Marketer, gave me insight into this world. Brad wasn’t shy about his Internet Marketing roots in Pornography and commented there’s no money in porn anymore. He pointed out porn pioneered a lot of the technology on the Internet – namely streaming video and content management. Back to the point about content and link here – at one time when he was managing porn sites he was managing over 800 sites. Think about that! It was a revelation to me for the mentality you must have to hustle on the web.

A word advice – beating the search engines is never a long-term strategy. If you do try to “game it” you will get penalized and you will likely lose your rankings and whole business model. If you are aware of this then maybe you can go in it for the short-term.

Two Must Use Links for Keywords and Websites –

Search Engine Land Keyword List – Search Engine Land is THE place to go for Search Marketing. This link is to an old post with valuable research tools.
WordPress – If you are new in this space – learn it and host it yourself. I may post on WordPress but there are a bazillion places on the web to learn.

Some Ways to Make Money On The Internet

Affiliate Marketing – You have a product to sell, preferably an e-book, and use a site like Clickbank to find others who will set up their own websites and sell that product for you on your behalf… for a percentage. From what I gather the people who do this have a half-dozen websites they manage and the aggregate has them accumulate significant income. You can work both sides, both offering products to sell and being someone who gets the percentage. The website OfferVault has a whole catalog of these arrangements to discover. There are a lot of individuals who you can pay $100/month and they”ll share all their secrets. Be careful, the internet can be a dark and shady place. One person I have a lot of respect for who does a fair amount of free webinars is Matt Carter and he freely explains and is well adept in this field. Part of his success is the fact he offers a ton of free content.

The easiest way to think of Affiliate Marketing is Amazon’s Affiliate Network. Put simply, what you can do is take a product on Amazon, virtually anything, and then target that product and set up a site around it. Off the top of my head I just picked “charcoal grills” because there was an image on the Amazon home page. If you Google Charcoal Grills you will see a page on About.com comes up first with Top 10 Charcoal Grills.

Now if you click on this page you will see a comparison of these top 10 grills. Each one of those price comparisons and links will eventually take you to this individual’s Amazon affiliate id and he gets paid if a person actually purchases a grill. Amazon will write him a check. In the screenshot below see all the links back to Amazon’s price comparator. They are also receiving additional revenue from the AdSense ads at the top (another hustle – get enough traffic and start earning revenue from AdSense or other ad network).

Another variation of this method is to create an authoritative website on Charcoal Grills, ie CharcoalGrills.com that would rank very high and your online catalog links back to the Amazon affiliate store. Measuring your ROI, you can feasibly point AdWords ads to your site and create more customers that way.

Warrior Forums – Best of luck here. Put on your flak jacket and put on your rubber gloves. This is the seedy nightclub of people touting their wares. Think “pay me $25 and I’ll show you this amazing business model”. There is something to learn here, just be careful.

Engines Try To Mimic People. People Want Authoritative Social Content.

With the site I manage, DevelopYourEnergy.net, I work with my Qigong instructors to offer pdf courses and videos online. We are all extremely passionate about the benefits of Qigong for personal health and happiness and the betterment of the Earth. We participate on Facebook, Twitter, and Google +, though not as much as we should. The point is we practice what we sell and back everything up with support and a money back guarantee on our intro Qigong 101 course. We have taken the conservative approach and it’s paid off, our rankings have increased steadily through the years. There are others in this space who have gone the way of affiliate and other “black hat” techniques and they are no longer around in the search engines. The Panda and Penguin updates destroyed their presence.

It is important to do frequent copy updating. I have found the website Copyblogger to be an excellent source of information and education to produce valuable engaging content including successful email marketing. Make sure to sign up for their free online marketing course. The emails you get from them are invaluable to understand what it takes to create successful copy that is shared.

Figure Out Your Currency

What if your currency and success isn’t cash? Maybe it’s followers, engagement, even consciousness? Maybe it all goes hand in hand. I’ll end with a website which has intrigued me the past year. I have seen this website grow from a few hundred followers to 44,500 Facebook followers and 44,400 subscribers on YouTube. One could make the inference people are subscribing to both, which implies a very devoted and passionate following. The website began with Jordan Duchnyz and is called The Spirit Science. A person could spend a lifetime trying to understand the information shared here and that’s basically what Jordan set out to do. Using his talents as a web animator (like all the web savvy kids out there trying to land a design gig), he set out to uncover and discuss the mystical world of esoteric and sacred geometry. His Spirit Science Playlist on YouTube has the potential to tickle your consciousness, at least make you think. Followers in his community anticipate his next video and literally follow him around the world as he tries to uncover the light within and around him. Jordan is a bodhisattva and doesn’t seem to be in it for the money, but you will see on his website there is a donate button and I suspect he funds a lot of his travel and technology expenses for this. Why not?! It’s similar to a musician or band crowd sourcing funding on KickStarter to keep them playing and putting out records.

The point to conclude with here is I discovered Spirit Science in a Google+ feed I was following relating to chakras in my qigong research for DevelopYourEnergy. Someone had shared the Spirit Science video on Chakras. I watched and pretty quickly got swept up in the FREE and VALUABLE content on the Spirit Science website. On the site I found an abundance of resources and links to other sites, Jordan refrences everything he discusses. He shares knowledge freely. There is also quite an active community in the forums section. In a way he’s earned my conscience currency. Masters of acquiring and engaging with people like Spirit Science have a lot to teach us as we try to escalate up the awareness and ranking ladder.

Be authentic. Share. Be in it for the long haul. Contribute. Make it easy. Understand the technology.

Finally I leave you with the Wu Tang video which kicked off the spirit of this post. Wu Tang to Spirit Science. There’s a 360 degree cypher for ya.

The Delicious Trick – Business Research

September 24, 2012 By Tim Aten 2 Comments

You’re lost at a fork in the road. You need to make a decision and don’t know where to start with abundant options. No worries, use The Delicious Trick.

The Delicious Trick uses the crowd sourcing of Delicious.com to your advantage. Delicious.com, or del.icio.us as it was formerly known, is a “social bookmarking site” purchased by Yahoo in 2005 and then sold to AVOS Systems in 2011. Simply put from Wikipedia-

Delicious uses a non-hierarchical classification system in which users can tag each of their bookmarks with freely chosen index terms (generating a kind of folksonomy). A combined view of everyone’s bookmarks with a given tag is available; for instance, the URL http://delicious.com/tag/wiki displays all of the most recent links tagged “wiki”. Its collective nature makes it possible to view bookmarks added by other users.

I first used Delicious back in the day to easily archive my bookmarks in the cloud regardless of what computer or browser I was using. Most browsers have a host of plugins you can use to save and tag bookmarks.

Company, Business, Plugin, and App Research

What is the trick I speak? Say you are stepping your toes into the data mining space and you need to set something up for a client or simply need to know who the players are. You know you want something that is Linux based.

Do a “top 10” or “best of” or “top” Google search of what you need to learn more of. In this case the query will be “Top data mining software“. It could be “top 10 e-commerce WordPress plugins” or “Best Social Media Monitoring Programs.” You get the picture.
My query resulted in a great page – 9 of the Best Free Linux Data Mining Software. Here you will find the 9 links and normally you would go to all 9 sites, read up on them, read reviews, maybe even download, install, and play around. That could take days, even weeks depending on how complicated you get with trial and error.
The Delicious Trick is to bookmark all of them and see who has the most bookmarked links. I’ve figured out a quick way but here’s a nugget for a would-be-developer- Delicious’ API seems relatively open and there’s probably a slick way to make an application. Simply open up each of the links in a new browser and tag, in this case I”ll tag them “datamining”. What I end up can be found here – http://delicious.com/hogpath/datamining. I had previously used the tag datamining, had even bookmarked The R Project way back, so again I have a clue that may be something to pay attention to.
Here is what I get with the number of people who saved or bookmarked these Linux Data Mining Websites.

RapidMiner	561 saves
ELKI	9 saves
R	6792 saves
KNIME	417 saves
Weka	1570 saves
Orange	369 saves
jHepWork	93 saves
Rattle	273 saves
ROOT	176 saves

Based off this I just saved myself a lot of work, especially if all I need to know is where to start. I probably wouldn’t bother with Elki, but Weka and R have my serious attention. In a case like this where R blows all sites out of the water this is where I would start to focus my attention. Also coming from a web design background R has a pretty crude website and I may have devoted more time to site with a more pleasing web interface. This Delicious trick helps me make an informed decision.

Not to discredit ELKI, but 9 saves are 9 people talking about it, compared to R which has almost 7,000 people taking the time to bookmark it in their delicious account. I’ve used this technique extensively when I need to quickly get a pulse of a landscape and even in choosing platforms to use and build on.

; – )

Check me out on delicious.

Paid Search To Get The Gutter Cleaned

September 16, 2012 By Tim Aten 4 Comments

I needed my gutters cleaned and there was no way I was doing it with a ridiculous fear of heights, at least on ladders. (Disclaimer – I didn’t have plants growing like the photo.) A few years ago I had my garage roof done with a respectable local company so I called them up and they referred me to a company a few towns over that did siding and gutter cleaning. It was probably a company that employed 6-7 people with 2 or 3 secretaries in the office. The woman on the phone kind of sighed and said “Yeah, we do gutter cleaning but only when it’s convenient for us when we’re in the area. Same goes for the estimate, we’ll do an estimate when we’re in the area”. I think that was like two months ago, they’ve never come out or returned my phone call.

After a week of them not calling I took to the Google and searched “Ferndale Gutter Cleaning”. Screenshot below and this is where the story begins.

You see, going back even 10 years ago Google AdWords was in my opinion left to the aggressive and shady marketer selling V*agara (deliberately misspelled), people finders, car insurance, or large advertisers with large budgets with money to burn. Sure, there were clever and smart ways to use it, but to me it was largely noise and I consciously and ultimately unconsciously tuned it out. When searching for something I would immediately go to the top organic results. I remember when I was treading into the web design world one of the first questions we received after a site launch was “How come we’re not #1 on Google?” This seemingly innocent question we would laugh at as pretentious web designers set me on the path of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I had to explain to our clients why they weren’t there and what they would need to do in order to get to #1. We also began to look at Search Engine Marketing (SEM) to compensate and appease them as they could now see their company on a Search Engine Results Page (SERPs).

After being in this business for some time now, people do click on these ads and with Google and Bing’s constantly evolving dashboards to run these campaigns they can be laser focused, efficient, and targeted. The industry is currently paying a lot of attention to Google+ and whether it can take on Facebook, if it’s even worthwhile, if people are using it, or if it’s necessary to have a page if you are a business. Bottom line is this – if you are a small business it’s imperative you use Google+ merely for the integration with Google Local. Obviously you need to be on Facebook and maybe Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, and other Social networks.

In my search for “Ferndale Gutter Cleaning” this company came up for gutter cleaning and window cleaning, Prestissimo. Being “IN” the business of Search Engine Marketing I took note of their #1 position in the Paid Results (#2 in screenshot) and then their address listing in the ad with an address very close to my house. I kind of smiled to myself and thought “this guy knows what he is doing”, sure I’ll give him a call.

A Shift in Paid Search Thought

Right then and there I noticed in the ten-year span my reaction to paid search campaigns had monumentally shifted. Before it was a signal for shady and sloppy dark sides of the internet and now it had become a signifier of a smart small business optimizing their ad dollars and who knew how to play the game. In a way it almost established a subtle form of trust in his business because I knew if he was #1 for such a long tail search he was serious about his business. How I went on to do business with Carl Scott of Prestissimo continued to impress me.

Pay attention business owners – what went on was textbook.

I went onto his website, he had a contact form, I filled it out explaining my problem. He called me in 15 minutes. Obviously his online contact form was feeding an email or text to his mobile device. He called me from the field.

Carl was professional and kind and we discussed how he had grown up in my neighborhood. He could come out and look at the gutters that day and nobody needed to be home. After he looked he called me back and gave me a fair price and gave some good advice/concerns about the status of my roof. I could tell he had done this a lot and was very careful to make sure I understood all the ramifications.

I think he came out two days later to clean the gutters. When he got there he was surprised to find that the gutter guards were drilled on and had to be taken off, he didn’t charge me extra, and he wrapped up all the gutter trash in garbage bags to the side of my house.

An Adwords click and two days later my gutters were cleaned and I have yet to meet Carl in person.

Also, when he left the invoice he left three business cards and on the back was a QR code. Carl is well on his way.

SEO Sidenote

The point of this post is to show and recognize how small business can effectively use digital marketing but it’s also my way of giving thanks and promoting Prestissimo Window Cleaning Company. I’ll share this article in my social circles but by linking to him here I give what they call “Link Love”. What Carl will get really excited about from an SEO standpoint is the following sentence-

In my search for “Ferndale Gutter Cleaning” this company came up for gutter cleaning and window cleaning, Prestissimo.

Some SEO Points about this sentence –

He won’t get “double SEO weight” because I gave him three links, two text and one for the image. Google will only index the first text link in this case.
I debated linking out to Prestissimo with the actual hyperlink under “Window Cleaning” because window cleaning seems to be the core of his business and currently ranks #5 in my results. The logic here is window cleaning would be affiliated with the name Prestissimo and could boost his ranking for this keyword phrase. Obviously he’s going to do fine for just the word “Prestissimo”. However, due to the Google Penguin Updates which is a link spam filter I erred on the side of caution. I could have linked out this way but with all things Google I always recommend to be as white hat and transparent as possible. Technology will always catch up to you.
Having not hyperlinked window cleaning, Google’s spider is smart enough to pick up the context of this sentence and see that Prestissimo is affiliated with window cleaning, gutter cleaning, and even Ferndale gutter cleaning which is in apostrophes. The proximity of words to the link plays a part.
Links, title file names, and alt tags are key signals for the search engine crawlers.
Also all links have the alt text “Window Cleaning and Gutter Cleaning” which helps further explain what the business is.
I also named the image for Prestissimo “Gutter-Cleaning.png” and also used the Alt Text “Prestissimo Gutter Cleaning”.

Many thanks for Prestissimo for the fine job on the gutter cleaning.

Lone Wolf, Family Owned Business, or Corporate Jock

September 7, 2012 By Tim Aten 2 Comments

I’m amazed and awed how fast the business world has evolved in the past five years. Some find frightening, others exhilarating. It’s a great time to be in business, especially if you understand digital, how networks work, and are disciplined to tenaciously learn and study, and seek out new technologies and ideas. As the kids are just getting back to school and others find themselves embarking to get the JAY O BEE here are some learnings I’ve picked up along as one looks to go into business.

The Entrepreneur

I learned more in one week in business on my own than I did in four years while getting my MBA. There is nothing more humbling and more eye-opening than coming home to your wife and telling her a large corporate client was lost due to a restructure and that this coming Friday there would be no paycheck, no income coming in. Stark reality is the best way to learn the bottom line, to learn a balance sheet, to learn cash flow, to learn about credit, to learn about the stomach and courage it takes to go out on one’s own. Having your own business has two sides, one fuels the ego with power and control and the other side does the same where it may humble you and force you to look at your priorities and goals. If you have the itch, do it, even if it doesn’t work you’ll be better off and the insights you gain, even in failure, will help you. In the end it makes you a better businessman or businesswoman.

A word of caution – be prepared, have a backup plan and make sure your spouse/family is behind you and supportive. It’s going to take a lot. And also be cautious going into business with family and friends. One of the best pieces of advice I received from a law professor is when choosing to go into business with family and friends immediately view the partnership in legal terms, ie have the paper trail necessary BEFORE going into business. If you are setting up a LLC, a S Corp, or have an informal agreement how profits will be shared, make sure you hire a neutral third-party (a lawyer) and have a written contract. If things get strange later on in the business relationship and the odds are it will, having a written agreement set up when everyone was feeling all optimistic and cheerful will be invaluable. Make sure it’s black and white and no gray area. Doing this will help ensure you keep your friendship or family relationships in tact. Be warned going into business with family and friends has the potential to make things go sour. If your partner feels otherwise about signing an agreement, or it feels awkward to discuss, I would highly recommend to second guess the maturity and acumen of that party and move on.

People will inspire you and people are going to let you down, even those that are close. I know one colleague who was in business for over ten years with his best friend and that friend was siphoning funds from the business all along. When protecting your name, or your assets, it’s best to be overtly cautious and defensive.

The Small Family Owned Business

Maybe the risk and insecurity of being on your own is not for you. You search and find a job with a small business. By small business I would venture to say somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 – 150 employees and $20 – $100 million in annual sales. In this situation stay extremely focused and shrewd. In a small business it’s very easy to drink the kool-aid without knowing it.

The first thing to figure out is if it’s the means or the end. Is the job an end, are you doing exactly what you want or what you went to school for? If that’s the case consider yourself extremely lucky. Or is the job a means where you can pick up skills and experience? The means can even be that it’s a low stress job with not many hours that enables you to live the lifestyle you want or gives you time to pursue other hobbies and interests. Figure this out early on, you’ll be much happier. Whatever path you’re in always be aware it’s the companies’ bottom line that matters. It really is like The Godfather at the end of the day “It’s nothing personal, it’s business.” If the profits aren’t there you could be cut.

It’s crucial in the small business you become invaluable. This will help you when cuts are necessary. Each business has its own culture and vibe but be warned, unless you have an equity stake you will never be allowed “in” and likely won’t be making important decisions. Time can race by in a small business. I was with one for eight years. Later, after I had moved on, I was in a job interview with a fairly prestigious executive recruiting firm for a fairly high level position. I received the best and most brutally honest comment I’ve ever received – “You obviously know what you’re talking about and are very passionate but at Company A you did the same thing for 8 years, I need to see more.” The comment rang and it was so true. Towards the end of my tenure at that company I confided with a friend about my frustration and he bluntly said, “Move on.” If you are not advancing in the small business it’s unlikely you ever will. Keep advancing.

The Big Corporation

This one has surprised me and where I’m currently at. My past two jobs have been with big companies. “Back in the day” I was your typical post modern college hipster looking to study and change the various ISMs. You get it. When I ride the corporate elevators I laugh to myself because I never imagined I’d be doing that. Initially the corporate realm invited me with its stability and intrigue to try something different and see what life was like on the other side. I’ve come to appreciate it. There’s not a lot of dead weight. I found in the Small Business world you find many extremely comfortable people who’ve been there for over 15 years and just collect the paycheck. Ironically, people tend to stay and businesses keep them, maybe it’s because of the legal and personal sensitivities of letting people go.

I’ve found the corporate realm can be perceived to be intense and cold. You’ll stick out if you under-perform, people will talk, and it’s almost like a self-censuring thing of the team. You’ll get weeded out. The corporation will look to get rid of the dead weight. Some can view this as heartless, others can view it as striving for innovation and new ideas. As long as you are thinking, trying, and not afraid to think for yourself you’re fine. To me it’s been like being a freshman at a big university. You’re thrown into a situation with no oversight, nobody to really hold your hand, and you have to navigate it on your own. If you can handle the responsibility it’s quite liberating. You can focus on the work. In the small business, in retrospect, be wary of all the hand holding and coddling, it can be a way of control.

Each company is totally different and what I say about the small business may apply to the large company and vice versa. This has been my experience. What are your thoughts?