I’m not sure what the prize is – or if there is a prize… but if you want I would appreciate it if you could cast a vote my way :) Just click here and select the radio button where it says “My Most Valuable Site” below my site (www.hannesjohnson.com), scroll down and click the button that says “Jetzt abstimmen”. You have until April 24th to vote – but please vote right now while it’s fresh on your mind.

OK, I was checking the site again a little better and it looks like this is a site for a conference in Germany and according to this page the first prize in the business category is 5.000 € and an advertisement in “brand eins” (which I believe is a magazine). 5,000 Euros is about 7,700 USD so that’s quite a lot of money – what are you waiting for: go vote for me! ;)

If I win I will most definitely have a very impressive contest with lots of prizes here on this blog :)

By the way, do you want more contests on this blog? Because a couple of days ago I got a proposition from a guy that wanted to sponsor a contest on this blog. What do you say? More contests? – Let me know in the comments, also let me know if there are any specific contests you are interested in (like, subscribe to the RSS feed to get an entry, solve a puzzle, etc…) and if there are any prizes you prefer (gift certificates, PayPal payment, magazine subscriptions, iPod or something physical, etc…) – also let me know if you voted for me in this contest and I’ll give you featured link here in the sidebar for a month – but only the first 10 (maybe more) to comment [just let me know in the comment what anchor text and URL you want me to use].

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..heavy clickers are:

• More representative of lower income households than the average user.
• Less educated than the average user (or from less-educated environments in the case of minors).
• More likely to live outside of the major metro regions.
• More likely to be using SNSs to meet new people than the average user (who is more likely to be using SNSs to maintain connections).

This is also interesting:

Wealthier users are more likely to spend money online, but they are less likely to click on ads. Poorer users are more likely to click on ads, but not likely to spend money online except in a few verticals. Wouldn’t this then mean that Google is more likely to get the eyeballs of those likely to spend money, but statistically less likely to make money off of their clicks?

That means that businesses can actually benefit greatly from using e.g. Google AdWords to advertise their business by using it for branding and not trying to get more direct clicks to their website. If the data the article is referring to is correct then the people that can afford the products might glance over the AdSense banner and while they might not click they might notice the URL or the brand name (product name or company name) and visit the website later on (or Google the brand name) without it costing the advertiser anything. Something to think about for your AdWords strategy…

This is also something affiliate marketers that are you using AdWords have to think about – I’ve seen a lot of affiliates using the product’s URL as the display URL. This is probably not the best strategy if people see the URL but don’t click your ad (with your affiliate link) but just visit the URL directly later on. That’s why you should get a custom domain name for all the most important products you’re promoting as an affiliate.

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Goodie Bag TV – Americans Love Lists

It’s true – lists are very popular online and I suspect people often write all kind of lists primarily as link bait – and it often works (to some degree). People like short, to-the-point bullet points that give them some interesting/entertaining information, right? But it’s not just online is it? Magazines often have articles that are based on lists – these two headlines were on the cover of October’s issue of FastCompany: “25 Widgets We Love” and “14 Designers To Watch”. And since it looks like it’s working – why stop? Like he says in the video: “We need more lists, we need lists of lists within a list” ;)

Another video I ran into today:

Here Comes Another Bubble – The Richter Scales

[Update: OK, it looks like the video has been taken down because of a copyright claim (of a photo used in the video). But apparently you can still watch the video here (at least for now)]

Pretty funny lyrics – and a catchy song too ;) Yeah, some people think there is another bubble going on. Perhaps – I mean, is Facebook really worth $15 billion?

This video is actually a pretty good link bait – and they even admit that it’s a link bait video: “won’t you blog about this song?” :)

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When you want to grow in your business there is only so much you can do on your own. That’s why you might want to reach out to others and see if they can help you – or better yet, if you can help each other. You could consider outsourcing, hiring staff or doing joint ventures with other people. If you want to do JVs you could try co-registration (if you have a mailing list), mailing list “swap” (where you send your mailing list a promo for their product and they do the same for you), or join forces with one or more partners on a project (big or small) – even a simple link exchange can be considered a JV.

You might not even have to reach out to other people – sometimes you just have to keep your eyes open. I was checking out Douglas Karr’s blog a couple of weeks ago and noticed that he was looking for contributors to a contest he was holding. Doug was looking for 10 partners where each partner contributed $100. That’s why you can now…

Win $1,000 Cash!

..plus, other cool prizes. Contests are always fun so I decided to contribute to the contest. I also thought this was a great opportunity to get some extra exposure. Doug has over 1000 RSS subscribers – which is a pretty big audience. I have 100+ RSS subscribers and in the first contest on this blog I gave away $25 (or a featured link) and a website review (which took a lot of time). So, spending $100 to reach a 10 times bigger audience looks like a pretty smart move ;) Not to mention, I don’t have to worry about managing the contest and all the extra things that take time.

Just for fun I decided to on top of the $100 to throw in some extra prizes:

• A copy of the A Pound A Day Diet eBook
• A copy of the eBook Confidential Internet Intelligence Manuscript Volume II: Your Business Battle Plan and Your Life on Fire
• 3 Month Membership to Affiliate Booby Traps

Those extra prizes are valued at $103,85 on their own.

How to enter

Oh, you want to know how you can win the $1,000? Well, all the details are over at Doug’s blog but basically you have to write a blog post with a reference to each sponsor and a couple sentences about their site, product or service. You can combine all sponsors in one post – or do a post for each sponsor, giving you 10 entries into the contest (10 times better chance of winning!). The deadline is November 25th, 2007 – so you have about 6 days. You better hurry… just head on to the contest post for the details, write your post(s) and submit your entry through the form. On last count there were 32 entries in the contest – which means that if you write a post for each sponsor you’ll have about 1/4 chance of winning $1,000 cash!

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Just as you should keep track of your affiliate commissions you should also check all your websites regularly – To make sure they’re up and running, everything looks like it should, no problems in the order process, etc. If you have several different websites you might forget one or two – especially if many parts of your online business are running on auto-pilot. You might have some sites that are more popular than others and you keep a closer eye on them – but don’t forget the little ones ;)

I’m writing about this because I just discovered that one of my websites got hacked. Some unscrupulous people exploited a security flaw in my website and inserted an iframe (that loaded some dubious websites) in the header of the templates. I’m using a popular system to run that particular website so I checked the forum and saw that I wasn’t the only one hit with this. So, fortunately I was able to fix it and get my site (sort of) back on track.

It’s always a good practice to regularly take backups of your important documents (that includes your websites and databases) ;) If you don’t have a backup you might be able to use the “cache:” command on Google – for example for this blog I would type “cache:http://www.hannesjohnson.com” into Google. The Wayback Machine could also help you – but they might only have a copy that’s a few months old (even older). The WP-DB-Backup plugin should come in handy if you want to backup your WordPress blog.

How about you? Have any of your websites been hacked?
Do you regularly take backups?

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• Create a niche “interesting videos” site – Sort of a TV Guide for YouTube. Like Seth says:
  

  What we need are tiny, specialized sites that obsess about specific industries. Is there a good video every day about how to do better real estate sales? If there isn’t, there soon will be. Or for heart surgeons?

  I actually found that pretty interesting and might do something like that soon – If you’re interested in joining forces with me let me know.

• Solve a common problem – “Everyone is lonely”. The first thing that came to mind was the “dating” niche because that’s a very lucrative market. But another idea could be to organize a seminar for some niche market to help people network and create joint ventures. Or create a social site like MySpace or Facebook. Either way, if you have a product (or a service) that solves a common problem you have a solid business. You can make some nice money selling a solution.
• Start a blog – Even if it’s just one post. You can then just update it as you learn more. Not a bad idea – you might even be inspired to write a second post, and a third… You definitely don’t have to post multiple times per day in order to have a successful blog.

What do you think? Do these business opportunities sound interesting to you? Or do you maybe already have a solid business that you’re working on? (it’s never good to get distracted by “shiny” opportunities that take your focus off the thing you have set your mind to).

Keywords: seth godin, Online Business Opportunities, Business Opportunities, niche, niche marketing, youtube, video, blog, problem, solution, dating, seminar, social, MySpace, Facebook

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ShanKri-la (aka K-IntheHouse) writes about Remember The Milk going offline using the new Google Gears tool. I remember checking out the to-do list service Remember The Milk some time ago but never really tried it (I usually use the Simpleology system to create “daily tasks” lists). But this sounds pretty cool – it’ll also be interesting to see how Google Gears will develop. It’s going to open up a lot of new possibilities.

Kassper posts about the launch of the AGLOCO viewbar. That’s good news – it looks like they delayed the launch quite a bit. Well, better to launch something that works rather than having to patch it constantly. I joined AGLOCO a few months back but didn’t promote it much. There is too much uncertainty around it for me to spend a lot of time on it. But it might work… Right now I can’t access their site to check my downline so I can’t give stats on that.

Jacob talks about how you should do more than you learn. That’s a great tip because that’s what I think a lot of people do – they buy eBook after eBook (or regular book, audio course or some other information package) thinking that this one will fix all their problems. I used to do this to some degree and I guess I still do a little – I sometimes get caught up in reading blog after blog because they’re all so good and educational. Looks like I have to be more strict and set aside specific periods where I’m going to only work on building my business – and also set aside time to reeducate myself. Because even though nothing happens if you don’t take action you have to be aware of the latest discoveries – especially when you have an online business where everything changes so fast. So, don’t be an information junkie – be an action junkie!

Ryan gives a great tip on how to increase your website performance if you’re running AuctionAds on your sites. I might need to try that one…

Natron provides some good tips on how to properly network. Creating the right kind of relationships is very important when building your business – you might just be one joint venture away from huge success.

Scot posted a couple of videos on public speaking. These are more like “how NOT to” videos – they are so embarrassing, but still funny :)

Techified checks out the new Nokia E65. My current cellphone is over 3 years old so it’s time to upgrade – I might consider the E65 because I want my new phone to be all tricked out :)

Gary talks about the importance of message-to-market match – or that’s what I think his point was ;)

Jeff thinks women are dangerous. Yes, definitely – if your focus isn’t at the right place bad things can happen ;)

Chee posts about trying to live without the major search engines for a day. I don’t think I could do it – I use Google all day, every day. It’s just become a part of my life – both personal and business.

Also, as a bonus, here is a post from a loyal reader, Emad. I kept seeing his image (the green lantern or something) on the MyBlogLog “Recent readers” widget in the sidebar — New feature in Google Images lets you get only results for faces. Interesting… I tested it a little and it seems to work. I wonder how Google does that – if they developed (or acquired) an algorithm that detects faces or if they’re having people go through the results and pick out faces? The algorithm is more likely…

If you’re interested in being included in the next “reader appreciation” post it’s pretty simple – just comment on my posts and/or join my MyBlogLog community.

Actually, right now you only need to place one comment to get into the top commentators list – hint, hint ;)

Keywords: to do,simpleology,google, google gears, remember the milk, top commentators, agloco, AuctionAds, video, funny, tech, link love, women, face search

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That’s a hard one… I subscribe to a few dozen blogs and I check them every now and then (if I have the time). But because school is pretty much taking up 100% of my time right now I don’t have time to read all the blogs I’m subscribed to. So it doesn’t mean that I read these 5 blogs every day – but I think they’re really good and I try to read them as much as I can.

Well, here are my top 5 “must read” blogs (in no particular order):

Seth Godin – he’s probably one of the most famous marketers in the world and he has an awesome blog that he posts to regularly. It’s one of the most popular blogs, has PageRank 7 and he doesn’t even have any ads – well, besides all the plugs for his own stuff (which is often the reason people start blogging). He always gives great tips and case studies – I especially like his short but powerful posts.

Matt Cutts – If you’re interested in SEO and recent Google changes why not hear it from a guy who works at Google? ;)

ShoeMoney – Jeremy Schoemaker has a pretty cool blog. He shares various tips regarding affiliate marketing, SEO, etc. But he also mixes it up with more personal posts like pictures of him with celebrities or posts about his favorite TV shows.

The Income.com Blog – This is a brand new blog, but anything from John Reese is bound to be good. I think this blog will become quite popular once Income.com kicks off. John is probably going to talk about internet marketing, SEO, affiliate marketing and anything about running an online business.

John Chow – although I don’t read all of his posts he often gives some great tips on how to make money with a blog or just how to make money online in general.

I tag Gary Lee, Jeff Kee and Nate Whitehill. I think tagging 3 people is enough although the Paper Bull tagged 5 in the original post – so if any of my readers want to be tagged I have 2 spots open ;) Just let me know and I’ll update the post.

Update: ShanKri-la also wants to play so I tag him too. One spot left if somebody is interested…
Update 2: Jacob grabbed the last spot. He can consider himself tagged :) Now get cranking on those lists.

To keep the viral aspect of this meme intact I think that participants should link to the post where they were tagged and maybe also the paper bull to give him credit for starting this.

Keywords: meme, viral, tag, Seth Godin, Matt Cutts, ShoeMoney, Jeremy Schoemaker, John Reese, Income.com, John Chow

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So, time is of the essence and if you want to check it out you can click here for “Same List More Profit”. I just bought it and look forward to receiving it – it’s actually a physical DVD, not “just” a digital product – although they’re nice too ;) A few months ago they also had this kind of a “nickel sale” and I bought that package too – the video was pretty cool and I learned a few things so I’m sure I won’t be disappointed.

You might be wondering what the DVD is all about… Well, like the name suggests they will take you through how you can make profit with the same mailing list – or, if you don’t have a mailing list – how you can build a new and profitable mailing list the right way. Gary and Keith both have huge mailing lists and know how to make the most of their lists – they’ve been around for quite some time and tested a lot of different things. I know from my own experience that having a responsive mailing list can bring you some nice extra money by just sending out an e-mail with your affiliate link in it. However, I must admit that I’ve been neglecting my lists a little bit over the past few months because of lack of time. But that will all soon change when I get my hands on that DVD ;)

Right now the price is $4.40 so you can get a physical DVD sent to your door that can help you grow your business for just a few bucks (+ shipping). Click here to lock into that price before it goes any higher.

Just to let you know – there is an upsell, but you might want to check it out if you’re interested in starting a serious business that can bring you a serious income.

By the way, Paul Kleinmeulman is using the same trick with his Profit Funnel Secrets package. I also have that – excellent product that teaches you one of the vital parts of having a profitable business. It’s a digital product (video + eBooks) so you’ll get access immediately.

Keywords: Gary Ambrose, Keith Wellman, Nickel Mania, DVD, urgency, fear of loss, upsell, Paul Kleinmeulman, profit funnel

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I believe an about page can help bloggers get more loyal readers – people that know a little about you might feel a “connection” and are more likely to come back again to read your blog. A picture of the author should also help give it a more personal touch – people often want to put a face to the name.

It also helps build trust when people know a few things about you. Since I’m selling and recommending products online people might be wondering “is Hannes Johnson a scam artist?” – I’ve actually gotten hits on my sites from people using this search engine query. I was a little shocked when I saw it in my stats – but I actually thought it was funny. This is just one of the things that come with success and being more prominent on the interwebs ;)

Is there something that you look for in a typical “about” page? Something that you want to know about the author(s) of blogs that you read? If you have any questions or want to get some more details let me know – in the comments or through the contact form.

Keywords: blog tips, trust, about, personal, scam, hannes johnson

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