Weblogs, commonly known as “blogs”, began as personal journals posted on the Internet. They were mainly posted by teenagers, but soon adults began to post them as well, and thus a new wave of self expression took over the world. Blogs are no longer just personal journals, they are also used by business people as a means to boost business and gain profits. Instead of buying expensive ad space in multiple magazines and trade publications, business owners can now post in blogs that can potentially be read by literally millions of people.
One of the best sites to use for this purpose is MySpace. There are many business people who specialize in providing a certain service, such as massage, auto repair or even babysitting, but don’t have a website dedicated to their business. MySpace is the perfect place to gain customers. You can create a blog and list it in their classifieds section. The great thing about their classified ads is that they provide local listings. That allows service providers who rely on local trade, to focus on areas that are close to their location.
If you are an existing business owner, you may already have an established website, custom designed to get the attention of the millions of viewers that visit the Internet everyday. The problem is, so does your competition. By posting a personal blog on MySpace, you can lead other members and viewers to your business site. A personal blog lends a personal touch to your business and allows people to get to know you as a person. People are more likely to do business with someone they feel they know as opposed to a stranger.
Post a blog everyday about your category of interest, to attract people who share that interest. For example, let’s say that you sell fishing supplies. Post interesting and humorous stories about fishing expeditions you’ve been on. The best way to win readers is by making them laugh and if you win enough of them, soon you’ll be chuckling all the way to the bank.
10/31/2006
Blogging is money… what are you waiting for?
Why not to become a professional blogger and earn a full time income by just posting and writing article online? is it such difficult and you can’t do it or maybe it is so easy and you are just neglecting the idea?
Well, sure you have something interesting to post online and who doesn’t, your blog could be about any subject like computers, cars, sports, politics recipes and so on it could be just any subject you like and you feel happy and confortable to write about so the answer for the first question can I start my own blog with my own content the answer is of course yes, just think for a moment about something you are expert in and sure an idea will come quickly.
Good news, isn’t it? so ok how to start up technically? three steps are required to have your blog online:
Register a domain name
set up a hosting acount
set up wordpress
if you you know how do that so great, you are ready to start however if you are not I am going to post soon about each one of those steps to help you with so keep checking this blog for more information.
All that is good, but how to start generating money from my blog? in fact, recently it became so easy for bloggers to start making money from their blogs and there are a lot of options for you to advertise on your blog and get paid by click, some of those options are AdSense, BlogAds, MSN AdCenter, YPN, Chitika’s eMiniMalls and many many more however we’ll come later to posts about each of those options and which are the best for you.
So, blogging is easy, fun and above all a new income for you so why not starting your own?
Well, sure you have something interesting to post online and who doesn’t, your blog could be about any subject like computers, cars, sports, politics recipes and so on it could be just any subject you like and you feel happy and confortable to write about so the answer for the first question can I start my own blog with my own content the answer is of course yes, just think for a moment about something you are expert in and sure an idea will come quickly.
Good news, isn’t it? so ok how to start up technically? three steps are required to have your blog online:
Register a domain name
set up a hosting acount
set up wordpress
if you you know how do that so great, you are ready to start however if you are not I am going to post soon about each one of those steps to help you with so keep checking this blog for more information.
All that is good, but how to start generating money from my blog? in fact, recently it became so easy for bloggers to start making money from their blogs and there are a lot of options for you to advertise on your blog and get paid by click, some of those options are AdSense, BlogAds, MSN AdCenter, YPN, Chitika’s eMiniMalls and many many more however we’ll come later to posts about each of those options and which are the best for you.
So, blogging is easy, fun and above all a new income for you so why not starting your own?
10/28/2006
How to make money from your blog: 5 tips
By Jeff Wuorio
Many of the people who write blogs today simply want to share their opinion on something. But then there are the business-minded folks, who have found a way to use blogs, or Web logs, to bring in a little extra cash too.
recently wrote a column detailing how to get a blog up and running to boost your small business.
If you're interested in taking it further — blogging for bucks, if you will — here are five strategies that could turn your blog into a moneymaker.
1.Sell advertising. This is likely the most common means of leveraging a blog to generate income. If yours happens to become a well-known blog, or one that is well-received in a particular niche, it's always possible to sell ad space on your own. For lesser-known blogs, services such as Google's AdSense or BlogAds enable bloggers to establish ad programs.
AdSense's — which lets you select several ads that are consistent with the content of your blog — pays you based on how many readers click on the ads for further information. Even better, it's free. BlogAds, on the other hand, hooks bloggers up with would-be advertisers and levies a commission in return for any ad placements that result. "The nice thing, too, is that the ads are relatively unobtrusive," says Scott Allen, co-author of "The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online."
2.Help sell others' products. Here is another click-through opportunity. Affiliate programs enable your blog to serve as a conduit between readers and online sites offering various goods and services. One popular choice is Amazon.com. If, for instance, you offer book reviews or even just mention a book in passing in your blog, an affiliate program provides a means for your readers to click directly from your blog to Amazon to obtain further information about the book. If they break out the checkbook or charge card, you get paid as well.
3.Solicit contributions. Not every blog-related income opportunity involves hawking goods or services. As Blanche DuBois did in "A Streetcar Named Desire," consider relying on the kindness of strangers. Ask for contributions. If, for instance, your small-business blog supports a cause or issue in some fashion — say you repeatedly mention tax reform, health care or some other topic — you can always ask for reader support.Even if you've attracted a group of regular followers who simply enjoy reading what you have to say, they may be willing to underwrite their loyalty with a little financial help. Programs such as PayPal make it easy to establish a simple on-site contribution collection button. "There are lots of worthy 'cause' blogs that would qualify for donations from grateful members of the blog community," says Las Vegas communications consultant Ned Barnett.
4.Market your services in your blog. Many people associate blogs exclusively with a cyberspace-based soapbox — a place to shout your opinions and little more than that. Granted, blogs are an ideal venue to share your thoughts with others, but don't overlook their capacity to generate new business as well. When appropriate, work in references to what you do and, in turn, what you may be able to offer any would-be client or customer who may be reading your blog. That can spread your opinion and your business moxie at the same time.
"Instead of short commentaries that begin a dialogue with readers, as many blogs do, I write the equivalent of journal articles that demonstrate my abilities, strategies and perspectives on specific issues," Barnett says. "When it resonates, it means money. Since starting this approach, I have generated three new paying clients and brought in about $10,000 on revenue — directly attributable to specific blogs."
5.Use a blog to deepen your existing customer relationships. Nor does any marketing material inserted in blog content have to be limited to bringing in completely new business. By using a blog to regularly communicate with existing clients as well as other readers, you can take advantage of the opportunity to fully inform them about everything your business does. That may expand your readers' understanding of the full scope of your products or services.
"My blog has helped existing clients determine the range of my skills and services," says Ted Demopoulos of Demopoulos Associates, a Durham, N.H. consulting and training concern. "One client who had only used me for training in the past was surprised at my range of expertise and is now using me for a consulting project. Another who only used me on technical projects is now considering me for a more business-oriented project."
Many of the people who write blogs today simply want to share their opinion on something. But then there are the business-minded folks, who have found a way to use blogs, or Web logs, to bring in a little extra cash too.
recently wrote a column detailing how to get a blog up and running to boost your small business.
If you're interested in taking it further — blogging for bucks, if you will — here are five strategies that could turn your blog into a moneymaker.
1.Sell advertising. This is likely the most common means of leveraging a blog to generate income. If yours happens to become a well-known blog, or one that is well-received in a particular niche, it's always possible to sell ad space on your own. For lesser-known blogs, services such as Google's AdSense or BlogAds enable bloggers to establish ad programs.
AdSense's — which lets you select several ads that are consistent with the content of your blog — pays you based on how many readers click on the ads for further information. Even better, it's free. BlogAds, on the other hand, hooks bloggers up with would-be advertisers and levies a commission in return for any ad placements that result. "The nice thing, too, is that the ads are relatively unobtrusive," says Scott Allen, co-author of "The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online."
2.Help sell others' products. Here is another click-through opportunity. Affiliate programs enable your blog to serve as a conduit between readers and online sites offering various goods and services. One popular choice is Amazon.com. If, for instance, you offer book reviews or even just mention a book in passing in your blog, an affiliate program provides a means for your readers to click directly from your blog to Amazon to obtain further information about the book. If they break out the checkbook or charge card, you get paid as well.
3.Solicit contributions. Not every blog-related income opportunity involves hawking goods or services. As Blanche DuBois did in "A Streetcar Named Desire," consider relying on the kindness of strangers. Ask for contributions. If, for instance, your small-business blog supports a cause or issue in some fashion — say you repeatedly mention tax reform, health care or some other topic — you can always ask for reader support.Even if you've attracted a group of regular followers who simply enjoy reading what you have to say, they may be willing to underwrite their loyalty with a little financial help. Programs such as PayPal make it easy to establish a simple on-site contribution collection button. "There are lots of worthy 'cause' blogs that would qualify for donations from grateful members of the blog community," says Las Vegas communications consultant Ned Barnett.
4.Market your services in your blog. Many people associate blogs exclusively with a cyberspace-based soapbox — a place to shout your opinions and little more than that. Granted, blogs are an ideal venue to share your thoughts with others, but don't overlook their capacity to generate new business as well. When appropriate, work in references to what you do and, in turn, what you may be able to offer any would-be client or customer who may be reading your blog. That can spread your opinion and your business moxie at the same time.
"Instead of short commentaries that begin a dialogue with readers, as many blogs do, I write the equivalent of journal articles that demonstrate my abilities, strategies and perspectives on specific issues," Barnett says. "When it resonates, it means money. Since starting this approach, I have generated three new paying clients and brought in about $10,000 on revenue — directly attributable to specific blogs."
5.Use a blog to deepen your existing customer relationships. Nor does any marketing material inserted in blog content have to be limited to bringing in completely new business. By using a blog to regularly communicate with existing clients as well as other readers, you can take advantage of the opportunity to fully inform them about everything your business does. That may expand your readers' understanding of the full scope of your products or services.
"My blog has helped existing clients determine the range of my skills and services," says Ted Demopoulos of Demopoulos Associates, a Durham, N.H. consulting and training concern. "One client who had only used me for training in the past was surprised at my range of expertise and is now using me for a consulting project. Another who only used me on technical projects is now considering me for a more business-oriented project."
10/25/2006
Turn Your Computer Into a Cash Machine
Turn Your Computer Into a Cash Machine
Your hobby + a computer = extra money.
by Marc Myers
There are hundreds of stories about ambitious people who quit their jobs to start businesses in their garages, worked 80-hour weeks, sold their companies and wound up rich. This isn't one of them.
Instead, this is about the growing number of average people who are spending their leisure hours selling hobbies and services on home computers and the Internet. With full-time salaries stretched thin and the cost of necessities rising, more people are looking for low-risk ways to earn extra income.
"The Web is a great place to shop and spend money, but it's pretty great for making money too," says Joanne Pratt, a Dallas-based adviser to the Small Business Administration on at-home commerce.
More than half of all small businesses are based at home, according to the SBA. "Computers, Internet access, cell-phone technology and simplified web-page design software have all become cheaper and faster in recent years, making it easier to launch some type of at-home enterprise without sinking a lot of money into it," says Simon Yates, senior analyst at Forrester Research.
Most people who run an at-home business use a desktop computer, connect to the Internet and live in a household where the average annual income is $65,000, reports Forrester. To manage the extra cash, many entrepreneurs are using accounting software programs for small businesses, such as Intuit's QuickBooks line, which generated revenue of $654 million last year -- a jump of nearly 100 percent since 2000.
"If you're the slightest bit entrepreneurial, you can reach large numbers of consumers instantly over the Internet, while key-word searches at Google let consumers reach you just as quickly," says Pratt. "The Web is an amazing marketplace." How can you turn your PC into a cash machine? It's easier than you think:
Auction Stuff on eBay
In New York, where trend-conscious executives and socialites routinely clear out cramped apartment closets to make room for newer looks, Bonnie Levine is considered something of a personal seller. Think Carrie Bradshaw in reverse. When the Manolo Blahniks and Pradas have to go, Levine gets a call to pick them up.
At home, Levine, 41, and her partner, Mindy Calo, 34, auction off the shoes, designer clothes and accessories on eBay, taking 50 percent of all sales. "We're both moms and our husbands work full-time," says Levine. "We do this to earn extra money between family chores, not to get rich quick."
Levine and Calo devote about 20 hours a week to their e-enterprise, and each pockets about $3,000 a month. The idea for the business came to Calo in 2003 when she auctioned off some of her own clothes. Soon Calo and Levine were doing the same for families and friends nationwide, using the eBay seller name Mindycara. In fact, there are now more than 50,000 "trading assistants" registered with eBay to help people auction off their goods.
"Both of us knew high-powered women with great taste, and they told other women, who told their circle of friends," says Levine. Now the pair has 20 regular clients.
In addition to sorting through clothes, Levine and Calo snap digital images, write up descriptions, determine market values using andale.com, post the information on eBay, and ship merchandise to winning bidders.
To avoid paper clutter, they use channeladvisor.com, a virtual office that stores images, e-mails and documents they don't want to print out or can't afford to lose in a computer crash.
Levine and Calo's advice: Focus on satisfying your customers. "If you have a '500' positive feedback rating," says Calo, "you're much more likely to be viewed as reliable and trustworthy, which counts for everything on eBay."
Blog for $$$
When he's not teaching Internet and constitutional law full-time at the University of Tennessee, Glenn Reynolds, 44, can be found "blogging" on his computer.
Reynolds, creator of the conservative instapundit.com, is one of a growing number of bloggers (blog is short for web log) who post commentary, reviews, photos and more on a wide range of topics on websites throughout the day. Imagine a cyberspace soapbox, and you get the idea.
Blogging is something of a Seinfeld experience -- enabling anyone with a website to write about nothing and everything on a regular basis and receive feedback from readers. What did you do today? That's a blog. What do you think about today's headlines? That's a blog too. How's your pet chinchilla doing? Another blog. "It's like your own printing press, without having to worry about paper, ink or postage," says Reynolds.
Technorati.com, a San Francisco-based real-time search engine that tracks web logs, estimates that 12,000 new blogs are created each day. They range from engadget.com, which features consumer electronics news and reviews, to boingboing.net, with posts on everything from spring-loaded women's shoes to novelty records.
To attract and hold a large, well-defined audience that advertisers will want to reach, a blogger needs a strong point of view, an engaging writing style and a gift for smart analysis. Reynolds says his site receives up to 500,000 visits daily and earns income -- $3,000 a month -- through contributions and posted ads.
"I put a tip jar on my site in 2002 after a friend suggested it," he says. "I thought it was a dumb idea, but I earned $1,300 in the first few days."
Last year, instapundit.com generated so much daily traffic that blogads.com, an Internet ad-sales company, convinced Reynolds to accept ads on his site. Blogads.com takes 20 percent of the fee paid by advertisers.
Reynolds devotes two to three hours a day -- between classes and at night -- writing entries and reviewing upward of 200 e-mails. "When your site generates enough buzz, you start getting great links and opinions from others that you can post," says Reynolds. "At this point, my site is almost a group blog with a strong editor."
Does Reynolds dream about giving up teaching and blogging full-time? "This is just a hobby, not my life's work," he says. "The only difference between this and my other hobbies, like scuba diving, is that blogging makes a little money." Reynolds's advice: Keep it fresh "so your audience will keep coming back."
Forecast the Future
Emily Galash's friends are so jealous. The 16-year-old Portland, Oregon, high school sophomore is paid $125 a month to take digital photos of teen culture and send them to Look-Look, a youth-culture marketing and trend-forecasting firm in Hollywood.
Galash is one of Look-Look's 35,000 teen trendspotters worldwide who feed their network inside information about the ever-shifting tastes of the lucrative youth market. The demand for hip, sharp-eyed trendspotters is growing as companies and consultancies attempt to learn more about what makes teens buy.
Some of Look-Look's corporate clients, such as Virgin Mobile, a cell-phone service provider, use the images on their websites to give pages an authentic teen feel. Which is why Galash's subjects must first agree to be photographed and then sign a release before she can upload their images to look-look.com.
Galash was offered a shot as a trendspotter last August, when her cousin gave up the job. Known at Look-Look as a "photojournalist," Galash finds her best subjects at school, in the park, at local malls and near the city's many music clubs. "It's getting more difficult to capture original styles because so many young people work hard to stand out," says Galash. "You have to be able to spot the difference between someone who's copying trends and someone who's truly inventing a new look."
Galash's advice: Develop your communication skills and intuitive feel for that next cool thing. But remember that "schoolwork comes first."
Sell Your Hobby
Stephanie Sorbel is one of only a handful of Kyle, South Dakota, residents who own a computer. She's also one of only a few members of the Oglala Lakota tribe on the Pine Ridge Reservation who sell traditional clothes and crafts on the Internet.
Word-of-mouth sales from Sorbel's site (lakotamall.com/lakotadreams) bring in an extra $1,500 a month, which along with her and her husband's full-time salaries goes to support their four children.
Sorbel taught herself to use the computer and navigate the Internet after her Marine husband bought her a PC in 1997 to e-mail him while he was stationed in California. When her mother suggested she sell her crafts on the Internet, Sorbel applied for a low-interest loan from the Lakota Fund, which helps businesses develop on the reservation. Then Sorbel was able to hire a website designer and pay a hosting service. "People don't realize how many funds there are that can help you start a website," says Sorbel, who now works as an office manager for the fund.
Sorbel made her first online dollar in 1999 when a craft shop commissioned a traditional cradleboard for $800. "They sold it right away and immediately asked me to make a doll and other items," she says.
Using traditional 18th-century techniques passed down to her by tribal members, Sorbel decorates clothes by pressing porcupine quills flat and hand-sewing them, using deer or buffalo tendon.
Time management is key. "After we eat dinner each night, I work on my projects in the same room where my children are doing their homework," she says. "When they're done, my 12-year-old daughter helps with the beadwork, while the others put hair on the beaded dolls."
Sorbel works on several projects simultaneously. The men's powwow dance leggings ($1,500) she's completing will take a couple of months, while the $700 doll of Standing Bear, one of her husband's ancestors, will require weeks. Sorbel's advice: Be sure visitors to your site don't have to hunt to find a phone number or e-mail address for you. Feature up-close images of your products. Most important, she says, "Never over-promise customers, and always be honest about what you can and can't do within their time frame."
Troubleshoot PCs
After years spent fixing their kids' computers, Donna Gaynor and Maria Luskin decided they could earn extra income doing just that for people in their San Diego neighborhood. So they took classes to become certified through the Computing Technology Industry Association (comptia.com), an international IT trade organization.
In 2002, Gaynor and Luskin formed PC Divas, a mini-business that brings in about $3,000 a month. They try to work no more than 20 hours a week -- usually from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. while their teenage children are in high school.
"We called ourselves PC Divas so we'd always remember that this is a side venture and that we have families and lives," says Gaynor, laughing. They have about 250 clients, charge $75 an hour, and limit repairs to computers within a 10-minute radius of their homes.
A growing part of their business is diagnosing problems remotely -- provided the client has Windows XP. With the client's permission, Gaynor and Luskin use software that lets them see the customer's desktop from their home computer and even control the client's mouse to resolve problems.
"We have a client in his 70s who regularly calls to say he can't find a file or that his computer is acting strange," says Luskin. "I connect to his PC while he's sitting in front of it, and I use his cursor to show him what's wrong or where a file is located. It freaks him out a little -- it's like watching a piano play by itself -- but we're on the phone together and he trusts me."
Gaynor and Luskin's advice: Review a service contract from a major computer-repair company and use it as a model. Then have a lawyer draw up a tailor-made contract that advises the customer of the risk to his data and limits your responsibility to the agreed-upon repair. It should also specify a time limit to any guarantee of your work. "We make our own schedules; we work only a few hours a day and provide good service," says Gaynor. "We're computer divas."
Your hobby + a computer = extra money.
by Marc Myers
There are hundreds of stories about ambitious people who quit their jobs to start businesses in their garages, worked 80-hour weeks, sold their companies and wound up rich. This isn't one of them.
Instead, this is about the growing number of average people who are spending their leisure hours selling hobbies and services on home computers and the Internet. With full-time salaries stretched thin and the cost of necessities rising, more people are looking for low-risk ways to earn extra income.
"The Web is a great place to shop and spend money, but it's pretty great for making money too," says Joanne Pratt, a Dallas-based adviser to the Small Business Administration on at-home commerce.
More than half of all small businesses are based at home, according to the SBA. "Computers, Internet access, cell-phone technology and simplified web-page design software have all become cheaper and faster in recent years, making it easier to launch some type of at-home enterprise without sinking a lot of money into it," says Simon Yates, senior analyst at Forrester Research.
Most people who run an at-home business use a desktop computer, connect to the Internet and live in a household where the average annual income is $65,000, reports Forrester. To manage the extra cash, many entrepreneurs are using accounting software programs for small businesses, such as Intuit's QuickBooks line, which generated revenue of $654 million last year -- a jump of nearly 100 percent since 2000.
"If you're the slightest bit entrepreneurial, you can reach large numbers of consumers instantly over the Internet, while key-word searches at Google let consumers reach you just as quickly," says Pratt. "The Web is an amazing marketplace." How can you turn your PC into a cash machine? It's easier than you think:
Auction Stuff on eBay
In New York, where trend-conscious executives and socialites routinely clear out cramped apartment closets to make room for newer looks, Bonnie Levine is considered something of a personal seller. Think Carrie Bradshaw in reverse. When the Manolo Blahniks and Pradas have to go, Levine gets a call to pick them up.
At home, Levine, 41, and her partner, Mindy Calo, 34, auction off the shoes, designer clothes and accessories on eBay, taking 50 percent of all sales. "We're both moms and our husbands work full-time," says Levine. "We do this to earn extra money between family chores, not to get rich quick."
Levine and Calo devote about 20 hours a week to their e-enterprise, and each pockets about $3,000 a month. The idea for the business came to Calo in 2003 when she auctioned off some of her own clothes. Soon Calo and Levine were doing the same for families and friends nationwide, using the eBay seller name Mindycara. In fact, there are now more than 50,000 "trading assistants" registered with eBay to help people auction off their goods.
"Both of us knew high-powered women with great taste, and they told other women, who told their circle of friends," says Levine. Now the pair has 20 regular clients.
In addition to sorting through clothes, Levine and Calo snap digital images, write up descriptions, determine market values using andale.com, post the information on eBay, and ship merchandise to winning bidders.
To avoid paper clutter, they use channeladvisor.com, a virtual office that stores images, e-mails and documents they don't want to print out or can't afford to lose in a computer crash.
Levine and Calo's advice: Focus on satisfying your customers. "If you have a '500' positive feedback rating," says Calo, "you're much more likely to be viewed as reliable and trustworthy, which counts for everything on eBay."
Blog for $$$
When he's not teaching Internet and constitutional law full-time at the University of Tennessee, Glenn Reynolds, 44, can be found "blogging" on his computer.
Reynolds, creator of the conservative instapundit.com, is one of a growing number of bloggers (blog is short for web log) who post commentary, reviews, photos and more on a wide range of topics on websites throughout the day. Imagine a cyberspace soapbox, and you get the idea.
Blogging is something of a Seinfeld experience -- enabling anyone with a website to write about nothing and everything on a regular basis and receive feedback from readers. What did you do today? That's a blog. What do you think about today's headlines? That's a blog too. How's your pet chinchilla doing? Another blog. "It's like your own printing press, without having to worry about paper, ink or postage," says Reynolds.
Technorati.com, a San Francisco-based real-time search engine that tracks web logs, estimates that 12,000 new blogs are created each day. They range from engadget.com, which features consumer electronics news and reviews, to boingboing.net, with posts on everything from spring-loaded women's shoes to novelty records.
To attract and hold a large, well-defined audience that advertisers will want to reach, a blogger needs a strong point of view, an engaging writing style and a gift for smart analysis. Reynolds says his site receives up to 500,000 visits daily and earns income -- $3,000 a month -- through contributions and posted ads.
"I put a tip jar on my site in 2002 after a friend suggested it," he says. "I thought it was a dumb idea, but I earned $1,300 in the first few days."
Last year, instapundit.com generated so much daily traffic that blogads.com, an Internet ad-sales company, convinced Reynolds to accept ads on his site. Blogads.com takes 20 percent of the fee paid by advertisers.
Reynolds devotes two to three hours a day -- between classes and at night -- writing entries and reviewing upward of 200 e-mails. "When your site generates enough buzz, you start getting great links and opinions from others that you can post," says Reynolds. "At this point, my site is almost a group blog with a strong editor."
Does Reynolds dream about giving up teaching and blogging full-time? "This is just a hobby, not my life's work," he says. "The only difference between this and my other hobbies, like scuba diving, is that blogging makes a little money." Reynolds's advice: Keep it fresh "so your audience will keep coming back."
Forecast the Future
Emily Galash's friends are so jealous. The 16-year-old Portland, Oregon, high school sophomore is paid $125 a month to take digital photos of teen culture and send them to Look-Look, a youth-culture marketing and trend-forecasting firm in Hollywood.
Galash is one of Look-Look's 35,000 teen trendspotters worldwide who feed their network inside information about the ever-shifting tastes of the lucrative youth market. The demand for hip, sharp-eyed trendspotters is growing as companies and consultancies attempt to learn more about what makes teens buy.
Some of Look-Look's corporate clients, such as Virgin Mobile, a cell-phone service provider, use the images on their websites to give pages an authentic teen feel. Which is why Galash's subjects must first agree to be photographed and then sign a release before she can upload their images to look-look.com.
Galash was offered a shot as a trendspotter last August, when her cousin gave up the job. Known at Look-Look as a "photojournalist," Galash finds her best subjects at school, in the park, at local malls and near the city's many music clubs. "It's getting more difficult to capture original styles because so many young people work hard to stand out," says Galash. "You have to be able to spot the difference between someone who's copying trends and someone who's truly inventing a new look."
Galash's advice: Develop your communication skills and intuitive feel for that next cool thing. But remember that "schoolwork comes first."
Sell Your Hobby
Stephanie Sorbel is one of only a handful of Kyle, South Dakota, residents who own a computer. She's also one of only a few members of the Oglala Lakota tribe on the Pine Ridge Reservation who sell traditional clothes and crafts on the Internet.
Word-of-mouth sales from Sorbel's site (lakotamall.com/lakotadreams) bring in an extra $1,500 a month, which along with her and her husband's full-time salaries goes to support their four children.
Sorbel taught herself to use the computer and navigate the Internet after her Marine husband bought her a PC in 1997 to e-mail him while he was stationed in California. When her mother suggested she sell her crafts on the Internet, Sorbel applied for a low-interest loan from the Lakota Fund, which helps businesses develop on the reservation. Then Sorbel was able to hire a website designer and pay a hosting service. "People don't realize how many funds there are that can help you start a website," says Sorbel, who now works as an office manager for the fund.
Sorbel made her first online dollar in 1999 when a craft shop commissioned a traditional cradleboard for $800. "They sold it right away and immediately asked me to make a doll and other items," she says.
Using traditional 18th-century techniques passed down to her by tribal members, Sorbel decorates clothes by pressing porcupine quills flat and hand-sewing them, using deer or buffalo tendon.
Time management is key. "After we eat dinner each night, I work on my projects in the same room where my children are doing their homework," she says. "When they're done, my 12-year-old daughter helps with the beadwork, while the others put hair on the beaded dolls."
Sorbel works on several projects simultaneously. The men's powwow dance leggings ($1,500) she's completing will take a couple of months, while the $700 doll of Standing Bear, one of her husband's ancestors, will require weeks. Sorbel's advice: Be sure visitors to your site don't have to hunt to find a phone number or e-mail address for you. Feature up-close images of your products. Most important, she says, "Never over-promise customers, and always be honest about what you can and can't do within their time frame."
Troubleshoot PCs
After years spent fixing their kids' computers, Donna Gaynor and Maria Luskin decided they could earn extra income doing just that for people in their San Diego neighborhood. So they took classes to become certified through the Computing Technology Industry Association (comptia.com), an international IT trade organization.
In 2002, Gaynor and Luskin formed PC Divas, a mini-business that brings in about $3,000 a month. They try to work no more than 20 hours a week -- usually from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. while their teenage children are in high school.
"We called ourselves PC Divas so we'd always remember that this is a side venture and that we have families and lives," says Gaynor, laughing. They have about 250 clients, charge $75 an hour, and limit repairs to computers within a 10-minute radius of their homes.
A growing part of their business is diagnosing problems remotely -- provided the client has Windows XP. With the client's permission, Gaynor and Luskin use software that lets them see the customer's desktop from their home computer and even control the client's mouse to resolve problems.
"We have a client in his 70s who regularly calls to say he can't find a file or that his computer is acting strange," says Luskin. "I connect to his PC while he's sitting in front of it, and I use his cursor to show him what's wrong or where a file is located. It freaks him out a little -- it's like watching a piano play by itself -- but we're on the phone together and he trusts me."
Gaynor and Luskin's advice: Review a service contract from a major computer-repair company and use it as a model. Then have a lawyer draw up a tailor-made contract that advises the customer of the risk to his data and limits your responsibility to the agreed-upon repair. It should also specify a time limit to any guarantee of your work. "We make our own schedules; we work only a few hours a day and provide good service," says Gaynor. "We're computer divas."
10/18/2006
Watch advertising and make money
-by Emmanuel Obadia
We discussed here several times how advertising could be the revenue stream allowing for free software, free music or free video. In an interesting statement, Microsoft highlights how far larger is the advertising opportunity compared to the software one world-wide.
"Our close partnership with the ad community is extremely important to us as we evolve Microsoft from a software company into the world's largest, most attractive provider of online media through MSN, Windows Live and adCenter," said Ballmer. "Ad-supported software services are an integral part of Microsoft's plans to give consumers access to a broader variety of digital media, whenever they want and on whatever device they prefer."
The debate about software as a service (SaaS) seems to be clearly closed and discussions seem to focus on when rather than if. The question is: what will happen to the $120 billion software revenue? Will it augment the advertising revenue or vanish?
Google realized this a long time ago and provided our industry a clear demonstration on how to succeed in that space. The latest Google acquisition, YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock, grabs more than 50% of the online video market on top of its own 11% i.e. 61% total. With more than 100 million videos played each day, Google now appear to be a solid Web 2.0 broadcaster. The largest national US networks are revisiting their advertising value proposition, bending more to a result oriented proposition than the usual message impression probably responding to the Internet capability.
Another question is whether advertising can be more than just allowing for free stuff. As a matter of fact a good friend of mine, Marc Leprat, started an interesting business recently called imagiin.com, where you can earn money - yes real dollars - if you agree to watch commercials. They've been introducing non intrusive Advertising On Demand, more relevant and more effective. Each minute devoted to watch ads will bring you back about 50 cents i.e. $30 an hour. It is already well regarded in the communication industry as imagiin.com made CB News, a major weekly publication in France about communication, cover page. I encourage you to go on imagiin.com and become a member today.
We discussed here several times how advertising could be the revenue stream allowing for free software, free music or free video. In an interesting statement, Microsoft highlights how far larger is the advertising opportunity compared to the software one world-wide.
"Our close partnership with the ad community is extremely important to us as we evolve Microsoft from a software company into the world's largest, most attractive provider of online media through MSN, Windows Live and adCenter," said Ballmer. "Ad-supported software services are an integral part of Microsoft's plans to give consumers access to a broader variety of digital media, whenever they want and on whatever device they prefer."
The debate about software as a service (SaaS) seems to be clearly closed and discussions seem to focus on when rather than if. The question is: what will happen to the $120 billion software revenue? Will it augment the advertising revenue or vanish?
Google realized this a long time ago and provided our industry a clear demonstration on how to succeed in that space. The latest Google acquisition, YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock, grabs more than 50% of the online video market on top of its own 11% i.e. 61% total. With more than 100 million videos played each day, Google now appear to be a solid Web 2.0 broadcaster. The largest national US networks are revisiting their advertising value proposition, bending more to a result oriented proposition than the usual message impression probably responding to the Internet capability.
Another question is whether advertising can be more than just allowing for free stuff. As a matter of fact a good friend of mine, Marc Leprat, started an interesting business recently called imagiin.com, where you can earn money - yes real dollars - if you agree to watch commercials. They've been introducing non intrusive Advertising On Demand, more relevant and more effective. Each minute devoted to watch ads will bring you back about 50 cents i.e. $30 an hour. It is already well regarded in the communication industry as imagiin.com made CB News, a major weekly publication in France about communication, cover page. I encourage you to go on imagiin.com and become a member today.
10/16/2006
The Art of Bootstrapping-Get Big Money at Home
Someone once told me that the probability of an entrepreneur getting venture capital is the same as getting struck by lightning while standing at the bottom of a swimming pool on a sunny day. This may be too optimistic.
Let's say that you can't raise money for whatever reason: You're not a “proven” team with “proven” technology in a “proven” market. Or, your company may simply not be a “VC deal”--that is, something that will go public or be acquired for a zillion dollars. Finally, your organization may be a not-for-product with a cause like the ministry or the environment. Does this mean you should give up? Not at all.
I could build a case that too much money is worse than too little for most organizations—not that I wouldn't like to run a Super Bowl commercial someday. Until that day comes, the key to success is bootstrapping. The term comes from the German legend of Baron Münchhausen pulling himself out of the sea by pulling on his own bootstraps. Here is the art of bootstrapping.
1. Focus on cash flow, not profitability. The theory is that profits are the key to survival. If you could pay the bills with theories, this would be fine. The reality is that you pay bills with cash, so focus on cash flow. If you know you are going to bootstrap, you should start a business with a small up-front capital requirement, short sales cycles, short payment terms, and recurring revenue. It means passing up the big sale that take twelve months to close, deliver, and collect. Cash is not only king, it's queen and prince too for a bootstrapper.
2. Forecast from the bottom up. Most entrepreneurs do a top-down forecast: “There are 150 million cars in America. It sure seems reasonable that we can get a mere 1% of car owners to install our satellite radio systems. That's 1.5 million systems in the first year.” The bottom-up forecast goes like this: “We can open up ten installation facilities in the first year. On an average day, they can install ten systems. So our first year sales will be 10 facilities x 10 systems x 240 days = 24,000 satellite radio systems. 24,000 is a long way from the conservative 1.5 million systems in the top-down approach. Guess which number is more likely to happen.
3. Ship, then test. I can feel the comments coming in already: How can you recommend shipping stuff that isn't perfect? Blah blah blah. ”Perfect“ is the enemy of ”good enough.“ When your product or service is ”good enough,“ get it out because cash flows when you start shipping. Besides perfection doesn't necessarily come with time--more unwanted features do. By shipping, you'll also learn what your customers truly want you to fix. It's definitely a tradeoff: your reputation versus cash flow, so you can't ship pure crap. But you can't wait for perfection either. (Nota bene: life science companies, please ignore this recommendation.)
4. Forget the ”proven“ team. Proven teams are over-rated--especially when most people define proven teams as people who worked for a billion dollar company for the past ten years. These folks are accustomed to a certain lifestyle, and it's not the bootstrapping lifestyle. Hire young, cheap, and hungry people. People with fast chips, but not necessarily a fully functional instruction set. Once you achieve significant cash flow, you can hire adult supervision. Until then, hire what you can afford and make them into great employees.
5. Start as a service business. Let's say that you ultimately want to be a software company: people download your software or you send them CDs, and they pay you. That's a nice, clean business with a proven business model. However, until you finish the software, you could provide consulting and services based on your work-in-process software. This has two advantages: immediate revenue and true customer testing of your software. Once the software is field-tested and battle-hardened, flip the switch and become a product company.
6. Focus on function, not form. Mea culpa: I love good ”form.“ MacBooks. Audis. Graf skates. Bauer sticks. Breitling watches. You name it. But bootstrappers focus on function, not form, when they are buying things. The function is computing, getting from point A to point B, skating, shooting, and knowing the time of day. These functions do not require the more expensive form that I like. All the chair has to do is hold your butt. It doesn't have to look like it belongs in the Museum of Modern Art. Design great stuff, but buy cheap stuff.
7. Pick your battles. Bootstrappers pick their battles. They don't fight on all fronts because they cannot afford to fight on all fronts. If you were starting a new church, do you really need the $100,000 multimedia audio visual system? Or just a great message from the pulpit? If you're creating a content web site based on the advertising model, do you have to write your own customer ad-serving software? I don't think so.
8. Understaff. Many entrepreneurs staff up for what could happen, best case. ”Our conservative (albeit top-down) forecast for first year satellite radio sales is 1.5 million units. We'd better create a 24 x 7 customer support center to handle this. Guess what? You sell no where near 1.5 million units, but you do have 200 people hired, trained, and sitting in a 50,000 square foot telemarketing center. Bootstrappers understaff knowing that all hell might break loose. But this would be, as we say in Silicon Valley, a “high quality problem.” Trust me, every venture capitalist fantasizes about an entrepreneur calling up and asking for additional capital because sales are exploding. Also trust me when I tell you that fantasies are fantasies because they seldom happen.
9. Go direct. The optimal number of mouths (or hands) between a bootstrapper and her customer is zero. Sure, stores provide great customer reach, and wholesalers provide distribution. But God invented ecommerce so that you could sell direct and reap greater margins. And God was doubly smart because She knew that by going direct, you'd also learn more about your customer's needs. Stores and wholesalers fill demand, they don't create it. If you create enough demand, you can always get other organizations to fill it later. If you don't create demand, all the distribution in the world will get you bupkis.
10. Position against the leader. Don't have the money to explain your story starting from scratch? Then don't try. Instead position against the leader. Toyota introduced Lexus as good as a Mercedes but at half the price--Toyota didn't have to explain what “good as a Mercedes” meant. How much do you think that saved them? “Cheap iPod” and “poor man's Bose noise-cancelling headphones,” would work too.
11. Take the “red pill.”This refers to the choice that Neo made in The Matrix. The red pill led to learning the whole truth. The blue pill meant waking up wondering if you had a bad dream. Bootstrappers don't have the luxury to take the blue pill. They take the red pill--everyday--to find out how deep the rabbit hole really is. And the deepest rabbit hole for a bootstrapper is a simple calculation: Amount of cash divided by cash burn per month because this will tell you how much longer you can live. And as my friend Craig Johnson likes to say, “The leading cause of failure of startups is death, and death happens when you run out of money.” As long as you have money, you're still in the game.
Let's say that you can't raise money for whatever reason: You're not a “proven” team with “proven” technology in a “proven” market. Or, your company may simply not be a “VC deal”--that is, something that will go public or be acquired for a zillion dollars. Finally, your organization may be a not-for-product with a cause like the ministry or the environment. Does this mean you should give up? Not at all.
I could build a case that too much money is worse than too little for most organizations—not that I wouldn't like to run a Super Bowl commercial someday. Until that day comes, the key to success is bootstrapping. The term comes from the German legend of Baron Münchhausen pulling himself out of the sea by pulling on his own bootstraps. Here is the art of bootstrapping.
1. Focus on cash flow, not profitability. The theory is that profits are the key to survival. If you could pay the bills with theories, this would be fine. The reality is that you pay bills with cash, so focus on cash flow. If you know you are going to bootstrap, you should start a business with a small up-front capital requirement, short sales cycles, short payment terms, and recurring revenue. It means passing up the big sale that take twelve months to close, deliver, and collect. Cash is not only king, it's queen and prince too for a bootstrapper.
2. Forecast from the bottom up. Most entrepreneurs do a top-down forecast: “There are 150 million cars in America. It sure seems reasonable that we can get a mere 1% of car owners to install our satellite radio systems. That's 1.5 million systems in the first year.” The bottom-up forecast goes like this: “We can open up ten installation facilities in the first year. On an average day, they can install ten systems. So our first year sales will be 10 facilities x 10 systems x 240 days = 24,000 satellite radio systems. 24,000 is a long way from the conservative 1.5 million systems in the top-down approach. Guess which number is more likely to happen.
3. Ship, then test. I can feel the comments coming in already: How can you recommend shipping stuff that isn't perfect? Blah blah blah. ”Perfect“ is the enemy of ”good enough.“ When your product or service is ”good enough,“ get it out because cash flows when you start shipping. Besides perfection doesn't necessarily come with time--more unwanted features do. By shipping, you'll also learn what your customers truly want you to fix. It's definitely a tradeoff: your reputation versus cash flow, so you can't ship pure crap. But you can't wait for perfection either. (Nota bene: life science companies, please ignore this recommendation.)
4. Forget the ”proven“ team. Proven teams are over-rated--especially when most people define proven teams as people who worked for a billion dollar company for the past ten years. These folks are accustomed to a certain lifestyle, and it's not the bootstrapping lifestyle. Hire young, cheap, and hungry people. People with fast chips, but not necessarily a fully functional instruction set. Once you achieve significant cash flow, you can hire adult supervision. Until then, hire what you can afford and make them into great employees.
5. Start as a service business. Let's say that you ultimately want to be a software company: people download your software or you send them CDs, and they pay you. That's a nice, clean business with a proven business model. However, until you finish the software, you could provide consulting and services based on your work-in-process software. This has two advantages: immediate revenue and true customer testing of your software. Once the software is field-tested and battle-hardened, flip the switch and become a product company.
6. Focus on function, not form. Mea culpa: I love good ”form.“ MacBooks. Audis. Graf skates. Bauer sticks. Breitling watches. You name it. But bootstrappers focus on function, not form, when they are buying things. The function is computing, getting from point A to point B, skating, shooting, and knowing the time of day. These functions do not require the more expensive form that I like. All the chair has to do is hold your butt. It doesn't have to look like it belongs in the Museum of Modern Art. Design great stuff, but buy cheap stuff.
7. Pick your battles. Bootstrappers pick their battles. They don't fight on all fronts because they cannot afford to fight on all fronts. If you were starting a new church, do you really need the $100,000 multimedia audio visual system? Or just a great message from the pulpit? If you're creating a content web site based on the advertising model, do you have to write your own customer ad-serving software? I don't think so.
8. Understaff. Many entrepreneurs staff up for what could happen, best case. ”Our conservative (albeit top-down) forecast for first year satellite radio sales is 1.5 million units. We'd better create a 24 x 7 customer support center to handle this. Guess what? You sell no where near 1.5 million units, but you do have 200 people hired, trained, and sitting in a 50,000 square foot telemarketing center. Bootstrappers understaff knowing that all hell might break loose. But this would be, as we say in Silicon Valley, a “high quality problem.” Trust me, every venture capitalist fantasizes about an entrepreneur calling up and asking for additional capital because sales are exploding. Also trust me when I tell you that fantasies are fantasies because they seldom happen.
9. Go direct. The optimal number of mouths (or hands) between a bootstrapper and her customer is zero. Sure, stores provide great customer reach, and wholesalers provide distribution. But God invented ecommerce so that you could sell direct and reap greater margins. And God was doubly smart because She knew that by going direct, you'd also learn more about your customer's needs. Stores and wholesalers fill demand, they don't create it. If you create enough demand, you can always get other organizations to fill it later. If you don't create demand, all the distribution in the world will get you bupkis.
10. Position against the leader. Don't have the money to explain your story starting from scratch? Then don't try. Instead position against the leader. Toyota introduced Lexus as good as a Mercedes but at half the price--Toyota didn't have to explain what “good as a Mercedes” meant. How much do you think that saved them? “Cheap iPod” and “poor man's Bose noise-cancelling headphones,” would work too.
11. Take the “red pill.”This refers to the choice that Neo made in The Matrix. The red pill led to learning the whole truth. The blue pill meant waking up wondering if you had a bad dream. Bootstrappers don't have the luxury to take the blue pill. They take the red pill--everyday--to find out how deep the rabbit hole really is. And the deepest rabbit hole for a bootstrapper is a simple calculation: Amount of cash divided by cash burn per month because this will tell you how much longer you can live. And as my friend Craig Johnson likes to say, “The leading cause of failure of startups is death, and death happens when you run out of money.” As long as you have money, you're still in the game.
Microsoft CEO talk about Google finalized its $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube
Even the people running the richest tech companies are awestruck by Web 2.0 valuations. Microsoft (MSFT) boss Steven Ballmer, who sat down with BusinessWeek editors and writers hours before Google (GOOG) finalized its $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube, questioned how the online video service could fetch so much. He also talked about Microsoft's video-game and digital music business, as well as the new breed of competition the company faces. Here's an edited transcript of the conversation.
What do you make of the deal between Google and YouTube?
[You've got to ask] could Google do whatever it is they're hoping to buy without paying $1.6 billion? Is YouTube really some permanent, long-term thing, or is it a fashion? I'm not saying it is a fashion. But every time we do valuations, I wonder if we can afford to keep this hot for 10 years. I'm sure somebody at Google has got to do the same analysis, because even $1.6 billion is more than 1% of their market cap.
Is there a business model? Right now, there's no business model for YouTube that would justify $1.6 billion. And what about the rights holders? At the end of the day, a lot of the content that's up there is owned by somebody else.
The truth is what Google is doing now is transferring the wealth out of the hands of rights holders into Google. So media companies around the world are all threatened by Google. Why? Because basically Google is telling you how much of your ad revenue you get to keep.They better get some competition. Us. Yahoo! (YHOO). Somebody better break through or you can short all media stocks right now. As long as there are two, you can hold onto media stocks. Google understands that. And that's one reason why they're willing to lose money up front. Just look at some of these deals. That MySpace deal (where Google provides the ad engine for MySpace). We bid a lot of money on that MySpace deal. And we got outbid. We wanted to win that MySpace (NWS) deal. At some point, we said we can't do this. Now Google can afford to spend more than us and Yahoo because they have more people in their ad system, so they're getting better yield, effectively.
Getting back to the core question, it all depends on how that plays out. I am surprised that Google would pay $1.6 billion for it.
You're clear as a bell on the YouTube valuation…
No. I'm not saying it is overvalued. I'm not trying to say that. It depends on a set of factors. I'm not saying I wouldn't write a check for that amount of money. I might.
Really, even though there's no identifiable business model?
It is one of those things where you have to think. You can't punt either way. If you're asking me if I would offer $1.7 billion if no one else was offering $1.6 billion, no I wouldn't do that. On the other hand, if somebody is really going to offer that amount of money, you cannot reject these things. And I'm not saying that we are.
Take Facebook. Every month and a half, there's a rumor that it's going to get sold. What was the last rumor, a billion bucks? Is it worth a billion bucks? It hasn't proven to be worth a billion bucks. But it also hasn't refuted that it might be worth a billion bucks.
Look, there are only [a few] buyers who can buy anything over a billion dollars in this space. There's us. There's eBay (EBAY). There's Yahoo. And there's Google. I don't think there's anybody else. Even Amazon (AMZN) has a market cap of only $13 billion. I don't think they're going to do too many $1 billion deals. So you've got maybe four guys who will buy in that range. And there's the public market.
Things will be valued that way. And we will not be on the sidelines if we shouldn't be on the sidelines.
What do you think about Web 2.0 valuations?
There are hot companies, and there's everything else. The question is: What's the value of an eyeball? Take Facebook. If you knew for sure that you were going to have the kind of minutes of eyeball time on the percentage of college students that Facebook has today, for the next 15 years, it's an easy billion-dollar check to write, even though it doesn't have a business model that establishes it. If [Facebook founder Mark] Zuckerberg is going to grow older, he's going to lose his hipness. The site is going to be replaced by Facebook Prime, you know, the guy will be old. Pretty soon, he'll be 25. It's not like it's so sticky. College students churn every four years anyway. If it's that, it's not worth anywhere close to a billion.
We're excited about Facebook. We're selling all the [banner] advertising for it. We're more excited now that we're selling ads for it than we were before.
These are hits-based phenomena. Don't you and others have to monetize very rapidly before people shift onto something else?
If they are hits-based, which is the implication I've made here, and you pay a lot of money, you're going to have to move in, milk, and get out. Or, it may turn out that the money is in the infrastructure for these things. What is Google to MySpace? It's the advertising infrastructure. In some of these things, you'll have to decide, if you're the big guys: Do I want to play at the application level or do I merely want to play at the commerce and other platform level in a way that strengthens the rest of my assets and allows me to make money?
Explain how the business for Xbox changes from the first generation of the console to the current generation with Xbox 360.
Generation one was lose money—gross margin loss on the console for the lifetime. You've got to take a lifetime view. We did have a lifetime view that said if you add all the revenue from selling consoles and all the costs of shipping consoles, it was negative. It was a model that made that back on royalties and third-party games and our own first-party games. We actually thought we could pencil it out. We also didn't think we would lose as much money as we did because we thought we could charge a premium for a device that had a hard disk in it. But we could premium price to Sony (SNE) because we had a hard disk.
So this generation, we're not pricing to lose money on the hardware over the life. At the same time, we said we can't have hardware that we can't recover with the consumer. We couldn't recover the hard disk. So the hard disk is not mandatory in the 360. The most popular model has a hard disk. But no games require a hard disk.
Sony, in some senses, is in the exact same position we were in in the last generation. By sticking in the darn Blu-ray [high-definition DVD player] drive—and they are pricing to recover its cost—they are at a price disadvantage. If they move to match our price, they will lose a lot of money over the life of the console. And I'm not sure that Sony's P&L, frankly, would be able to tolerate that.
Microsoft has several high-level new hires. Are they changing the way you view the company?
Absolutely. Classically, we're the Windows company. When it provides $20 billion in profit, it's pretty important. But there's more diversity in everything that we do. I would have been hell-bent and determined six years ago to call Xbox the Windows Game Machine. We didn't. My natural tendency would have been to call [the forthcoming digital music device] Zune something that was related to Xbox since we have some consumer franchise. And yet, we're really building consumer marketing muscle. These guys are really educating us on new ways to do things. These guys are having a fundamental impact on me as well as the company.
Has the announcement of Bill Gates moving to his foundation in 2008 affected the company even though he's still there?
It has. People bring things to Bill for a lot of reasons. Escalation. Because it's nice to get a pat on the back. To get your butt kicked, but at least you can say you got it at the highest level. People see Bill for a lot of diverse reasons. And that doesn't disappear immediately. But we want to make sure that all of those experiences and everything employees need out of that gets picked up by somebody. We're working through that now.
Bill is very active, every day. But I'm telling him, "Now, what you really have to do is consciously think about where you're intervening." I think we've started on that. The fact that Bill was on sabbatical this summer made it a little easier to kick off because it's hard to break old habits.
Who are Microsoft's top competitors?
Guys who can touch us in multiple places probably matter more than guys who can touch us in any one place. And actually we don't really have our big competition from any one company. Any one company, we know how to compete with. It's alternate business models that we will have to embrace or compete well with. You give me any enterprise software company, O.K., and I'll say c'mon. We know how to go do that. We do do that. And we're really pretty good at it. We haven't gotten any worse at it. Boom. Boom. Boom. We know how to keep coming.
[Take open source.] Open source is not a new technology area. It was a new business model. In the last three or four years, we have competed very well by extending our value. Open source never goes away as a business model or competitor. We have learned how to compete with open source, and we will compete with it for the rest of time. But competing with open source will have to be something that's burned bright on the foreheads of our senior people.
The second big competitive force is advertising as a business model. Typically, people just want to reduce that to Google, and if you want to do that, you can. But it's do we embrace advertising fully enough as a business model? Because at the end of the day, anybody who comes at you with a cheaper-to-the-customer proposition, you got to worry about. And advertising looks cheaper to a consumer than something you pay for.
In the case of open source, we couldn't adopt the business model. We adopted a competitive approach that so far has worked very well. In the advertising case, we can embrace that model. We don't have to sit here and say it's that bad.
A third model I could sit here and write down on this list is that there are cases where software gets monetized through hardware. That's what an iPod is. iPod is a software thing. You just happen to collect the money on the hardware. You could say in China and India, it's unclear whether classic software will get paid for as much as advertising, hardware, subscriptions, etc.
So our ability to embrace and benefit from or compete with new business models—and I would say ad-funded and open source, more than this hardware thing—is more the way to categorize the key competitive dynamic for us.
Does Zune fit into the hardware piece of this?
Sure it does. Because the value of Zune, if we're successful, is all in the software. It's in community [the ability to share music and pictures with other Zune users]. I want to squirt you a picture of my kids. You want to squirt me back a video of your vacation. That's a software experience. The truth is, though, if it makes money, it will be built into the gross margin on the hardware. We'll figure out how to make money on the community perhaps later though advertising or other means.
How much money will you lose per Zune?
None. Apple (AAPL) put the hammer down there, dropped the price down to $249. If they had been $299, it would have been nicer. They have the advantage of scale. So we're at $249, too. We don't make a lot of money, not to start out.
Do you foresee any circumstances in which Windows Vista doesn't come out in Europe on schedule?
We're working very constructively with the Commission. At the end of the day, it's completely our choice when we ship Vista in Europe. We're having a discussion with the Commission that puts me, our management team, and the board in a better place to assess risk. If we think the risk is too high, we won't ship in Europe at the same time [as Vista's U.S. launch]. If we think the risk is low and manageable, we will ship at the same time. That dialogue is not done. Sometimes I think we're closer. And sometimes I think we're farther away. But sometime in the next few weeks we'll have to push the button because our partners—hardware makers and retail chains—need time to ramp up supply chains, marketing, and demand generation.
What do you make of the deal between Google and YouTube?
[You've got to ask] could Google do whatever it is they're hoping to buy without paying $1.6 billion? Is YouTube really some permanent, long-term thing, or is it a fashion? I'm not saying it is a fashion. But every time we do valuations, I wonder if we can afford to keep this hot for 10 years. I'm sure somebody at Google has got to do the same analysis, because even $1.6 billion is more than 1% of their market cap.
Is there a business model? Right now, there's no business model for YouTube that would justify $1.6 billion. And what about the rights holders? At the end of the day, a lot of the content that's up there is owned by somebody else.
The truth is what Google is doing now is transferring the wealth out of the hands of rights holders into Google. So media companies around the world are all threatened by Google. Why? Because basically Google is telling you how much of your ad revenue you get to keep.They better get some competition. Us. Yahoo! (YHOO). Somebody better break through or you can short all media stocks right now. As long as there are two, you can hold onto media stocks. Google understands that. And that's one reason why they're willing to lose money up front. Just look at some of these deals. That MySpace deal (where Google provides the ad engine for MySpace). We bid a lot of money on that MySpace deal. And we got outbid. We wanted to win that MySpace (NWS) deal. At some point, we said we can't do this. Now Google can afford to spend more than us and Yahoo because they have more people in their ad system, so they're getting better yield, effectively.
Getting back to the core question, it all depends on how that plays out. I am surprised that Google would pay $1.6 billion for it.
You're clear as a bell on the YouTube valuation…
No. I'm not saying it is overvalued. I'm not trying to say that. It depends on a set of factors. I'm not saying I wouldn't write a check for that amount of money. I might.
Really, even though there's no identifiable business model?
It is one of those things where you have to think. You can't punt either way. If you're asking me if I would offer $1.7 billion if no one else was offering $1.6 billion, no I wouldn't do that. On the other hand, if somebody is really going to offer that amount of money, you cannot reject these things. And I'm not saying that we are.
Take Facebook. Every month and a half, there's a rumor that it's going to get sold. What was the last rumor, a billion bucks? Is it worth a billion bucks? It hasn't proven to be worth a billion bucks. But it also hasn't refuted that it might be worth a billion bucks.
Look, there are only [a few] buyers who can buy anything over a billion dollars in this space. There's us. There's eBay (EBAY). There's Yahoo. And there's Google. I don't think there's anybody else. Even Amazon (AMZN) has a market cap of only $13 billion. I don't think they're going to do too many $1 billion deals. So you've got maybe four guys who will buy in that range. And there's the public market.
Things will be valued that way. And we will not be on the sidelines if we shouldn't be on the sidelines.
What do you think about Web 2.0 valuations?
There are hot companies, and there's everything else. The question is: What's the value of an eyeball? Take Facebook. If you knew for sure that you were going to have the kind of minutes of eyeball time on the percentage of college students that Facebook has today, for the next 15 years, it's an easy billion-dollar check to write, even though it doesn't have a business model that establishes it. If [Facebook founder Mark] Zuckerberg is going to grow older, he's going to lose his hipness. The site is going to be replaced by Facebook Prime, you know, the guy will be old. Pretty soon, he'll be 25. It's not like it's so sticky. College students churn every four years anyway. If it's that, it's not worth anywhere close to a billion.
We're excited about Facebook. We're selling all the [banner] advertising for it. We're more excited now that we're selling ads for it than we were before.
These are hits-based phenomena. Don't you and others have to monetize very rapidly before people shift onto something else?
If they are hits-based, which is the implication I've made here, and you pay a lot of money, you're going to have to move in, milk, and get out. Or, it may turn out that the money is in the infrastructure for these things. What is Google to MySpace? It's the advertising infrastructure. In some of these things, you'll have to decide, if you're the big guys: Do I want to play at the application level or do I merely want to play at the commerce and other platform level in a way that strengthens the rest of my assets and allows me to make money?
Explain how the business for Xbox changes from the first generation of the console to the current generation with Xbox 360.
Generation one was lose money—gross margin loss on the console for the lifetime. You've got to take a lifetime view. We did have a lifetime view that said if you add all the revenue from selling consoles and all the costs of shipping consoles, it was negative. It was a model that made that back on royalties and third-party games and our own first-party games. We actually thought we could pencil it out. We also didn't think we would lose as much money as we did because we thought we could charge a premium for a device that had a hard disk in it. But we could premium price to Sony (SNE) because we had a hard disk.
So this generation, we're not pricing to lose money on the hardware over the life. At the same time, we said we can't have hardware that we can't recover with the consumer. We couldn't recover the hard disk. So the hard disk is not mandatory in the 360. The most popular model has a hard disk. But no games require a hard disk.
Sony, in some senses, is in the exact same position we were in in the last generation. By sticking in the darn Blu-ray [high-definition DVD player] drive—and they are pricing to recover its cost—they are at a price disadvantage. If they move to match our price, they will lose a lot of money over the life of the console. And I'm not sure that Sony's P&L, frankly, would be able to tolerate that.
Microsoft has several high-level new hires. Are they changing the way you view the company?
Absolutely. Classically, we're the Windows company. When it provides $20 billion in profit, it's pretty important. But there's more diversity in everything that we do. I would have been hell-bent and determined six years ago to call Xbox the Windows Game Machine. We didn't. My natural tendency would have been to call [the forthcoming digital music device] Zune something that was related to Xbox since we have some consumer franchise. And yet, we're really building consumer marketing muscle. These guys are really educating us on new ways to do things. These guys are having a fundamental impact on me as well as the company.
Has the announcement of Bill Gates moving to his foundation in 2008 affected the company even though he's still there?
It has. People bring things to Bill for a lot of reasons. Escalation. Because it's nice to get a pat on the back. To get your butt kicked, but at least you can say you got it at the highest level. People see Bill for a lot of diverse reasons. And that doesn't disappear immediately. But we want to make sure that all of those experiences and everything employees need out of that gets picked up by somebody. We're working through that now.
Bill is very active, every day. But I'm telling him, "Now, what you really have to do is consciously think about where you're intervening." I think we've started on that. The fact that Bill was on sabbatical this summer made it a little easier to kick off because it's hard to break old habits.
Who are Microsoft's top competitors?
Guys who can touch us in multiple places probably matter more than guys who can touch us in any one place. And actually we don't really have our big competition from any one company. Any one company, we know how to compete with. It's alternate business models that we will have to embrace or compete well with. You give me any enterprise software company, O.K., and I'll say c'mon. We know how to go do that. We do do that. And we're really pretty good at it. We haven't gotten any worse at it. Boom. Boom. Boom. We know how to keep coming.
[Take open source.] Open source is not a new technology area. It was a new business model. In the last three or four years, we have competed very well by extending our value. Open source never goes away as a business model or competitor. We have learned how to compete with open source, and we will compete with it for the rest of time. But competing with open source will have to be something that's burned bright on the foreheads of our senior people.
The second big competitive force is advertising as a business model. Typically, people just want to reduce that to Google, and if you want to do that, you can. But it's do we embrace advertising fully enough as a business model? Because at the end of the day, anybody who comes at you with a cheaper-to-the-customer proposition, you got to worry about. And advertising looks cheaper to a consumer than something you pay for.
In the case of open source, we couldn't adopt the business model. We adopted a competitive approach that so far has worked very well. In the advertising case, we can embrace that model. We don't have to sit here and say it's that bad.
A third model I could sit here and write down on this list is that there are cases where software gets monetized through hardware. That's what an iPod is. iPod is a software thing. You just happen to collect the money on the hardware. You could say in China and India, it's unclear whether classic software will get paid for as much as advertising, hardware, subscriptions, etc.
So our ability to embrace and benefit from or compete with new business models—and I would say ad-funded and open source, more than this hardware thing—is more the way to categorize the key competitive dynamic for us.
Does Zune fit into the hardware piece of this?
Sure it does. Because the value of Zune, if we're successful, is all in the software. It's in community [the ability to share music and pictures with other Zune users]. I want to squirt you a picture of my kids. You want to squirt me back a video of your vacation. That's a software experience. The truth is, though, if it makes money, it will be built into the gross margin on the hardware. We'll figure out how to make money on the community perhaps later though advertising or other means.
How much money will you lose per Zune?
None. Apple (AAPL) put the hammer down there, dropped the price down to $249. If they had been $299, it would have been nicer. They have the advantage of scale. So we're at $249, too. We don't make a lot of money, not to start out.
Do you foresee any circumstances in which Windows Vista doesn't come out in Europe on schedule?
We're working very constructively with the Commission. At the end of the day, it's completely our choice when we ship Vista in Europe. We're having a discussion with the Commission that puts me, our management team, and the board in a better place to assess risk. If we think the risk is too high, we won't ship in Europe at the same time [as Vista's U.S. launch]. If we think the risk is low and manageable, we will ship at the same time. That dialogue is not done. Sometimes I think we're closer. And sometimes I think we're farther away. But sometime in the next few weeks we'll have to push the button because our partners—hardware makers and retail chains—need time to ramp up supply chains, marketing, and demand generation.
10/14/2006
10 ways to make money at home
If you're looking at ways to supplement your income, here are some options other than working behind a bar or stacking shelves at a supermarket.
1 Police ID parades
Taking part in identity parades is easy money - you just have to stand there - but work is irregular and may depend on your appearance. Many police forces now use video line-ups but you can still get a one-off fee of £10 for being filmed.
Average pay: £10 for the first hour, £5 for every hour after that.
More info: ask at your local police station.
2 TV/film extra
Production companies need people of all shapes and sizes and if you're over 18 but look younger you'll be especially popular, as you can save them the cost of a chaperone for a child actor. Don't expect to meet the stars, though.
Average pay: £80 a day, with bonuses for things like providing your own costume or doing a 'walk-on'. Overtime is paid at around £11 an hour.
More info: there's a list of extras agencies at UK Screen
3 Campus brand manager
All sorts of companies hire students to promote them on campus, from film distributors to sportswear firms. You'll get plenty of opportunities to demonstrate your business acumen, but the work can be time-consuming.
Average pay: £300 a term, though some firms only pay on a commission basis.
More info: look for notices on student job boards.
4 Trading on eBay
'The World's Online Marketplace' has one million registered users in the UK alone so there's bound to be someone who'll pay for anything you have to sell. Start with stuff you don't want (old CDs, clothes, toys) to get a feel for it.
Average pay: the sky's the limit - but unless you're selling something rare or valuable, don't expect to make a fortune.
More info: go to eBay and click on 'eBay explained'.
5 Pose as a life model
You don't have to be beautiful or in particularly great shape but you do have to patient, able to sit still and perhaps not wince at what an artist makes of you. But good models are in demand.
Average pay: from £6 or so an hour clothed, to £7 or so an hour unclothed outside London; a little more in the capital.
More info: contact art colleges and adult education colleges near you. Or contact The Royal British Society of Sculptors at RBS
6 In-store demonstrator
There's lots of work for confident, personable people in supermarkets and department stores. You might be required to show off your ironing skills, hold a food tasting or demonstrate a new kitchen gadget, for example. Hours are often in the evenings or during weekends so can fit around your studies.
Average pay: varies, but can be up to £10 an hour.
More info: search for 'field marketing agencies' on the Internet.
7 Event stewarding
Concerts and sports fixtures employ a small army to help with organisation. The necessary training will be provided on the day but don't view the job as a free ticket. Stewards at football matches, for example, are expected to face the crowd, not watch the game.
Average pay: rates start at £5 an hour; with training you can earn up to £15 an hour.
More info: try Recruit Event Services.
8 Online surveys
To make money completing surveys, all you need is a computer and some opinions. You'll be asked what you think of various products and services, and sometimes be sent things to try out. However, there are scam survey websites so do some research.
Average pay: £3-£50 for each survey, depending on how long it takes. However, you'll have to pay a registration fee (around £20) up front.
More info: UK Paid Surveys rates and reviews the best sites.
9 Mystery shopping
Some men would pay good money not to go shopping, but 'mystery shoppers', on the other hand, get paid instead. It's not just about going to shops but perhaps to restaurants, bars or to stay in a hotel and report on how the customer's being treated. You'll get all the money for your meals, drinks or bills repaid and you may get to keep the shopping, too - unless, of course, it's diamonds.
Average pay: from £6 a visit, but could be as much as £100 a day.
More info: try the Mystery Shopping Agency on 020 8325 8974 or Retail Eyes
10 Internet researcher
You may have grown up taking the Internet for granted but there are plenty of people who aren't familiar with it or are too busy to spend time on it. So if you're skilled at extracting information from a web search, you can hire yourself out as a researcher for people like lawyers and writers.
Average pay: £10 an hourMore info: look for notices on student job boards or contact likely clients in your area.
In addition we would advise you that:
The information given in this article was correct as at March 2006. It does not, however, take account of any changes in regulations, the law or interest rates since that time.
1 Police ID parades
Taking part in identity parades is easy money - you just have to stand there - but work is irregular and may depend on your appearance. Many police forces now use video line-ups but you can still get a one-off fee of £10 for being filmed.
Average pay: £10 for the first hour, £5 for every hour after that.
More info: ask at your local police station.
2 TV/film extra
Production companies need people of all shapes and sizes and if you're over 18 but look younger you'll be especially popular, as you can save them the cost of a chaperone for a child actor. Don't expect to meet the stars, though.
Average pay: £80 a day, with bonuses for things like providing your own costume or doing a 'walk-on'. Overtime is paid at around £11 an hour.
More info: there's a list of extras agencies at UK Screen
3 Campus brand manager
All sorts of companies hire students to promote them on campus, from film distributors to sportswear firms. You'll get plenty of opportunities to demonstrate your business acumen, but the work can be time-consuming.
Average pay: £300 a term, though some firms only pay on a commission basis.
More info: look for notices on student job boards.
4 Trading on eBay
'The World's Online Marketplace' has one million registered users in the UK alone so there's bound to be someone who'll pay for anything you have to sell. Start with stuff you don't want (old CDs, clothes, toys) to get a feel for it.
Average pay: the sky's the limit - but unless you're selling something rare or valuable, don't expect to make a fortune.
More info: go to eBay and click on 'eBay explained'.
5 Pose as a life model
You don't have to be beautiful or in particularly great shape but you do have to patient, able to sit still and perhaps not wince at what an artist makes of you. But good models are in demand.
Average pay: from £6 or so an hour clothed, to £7 or so an hour unclothed outside London; a little more in the capital.
More info: contact art colleges and adult education colleges near you. Or contact The Royal British Society of Sculptors at RBS
6 In-store demonstrator
There's lots of work for confident, personable people in supermarkets and department stores. You might be required to show off your ironing skills, hold a food tasting or demonstrate a new kitchen gadget, for example. Hours are often in the evenings or during weekends so can fit around your studies.
Average pay: varies, but can be up to £10 an hour.
More info: search for 'field marketing agencies' on the Internet.
7 Event stewarding
Concerts and sports fixtures employ a small army to help with organisation. The necessary training will be provided on the day but don't view the job as a free ticket. Stewards at football matches, for example, are expected to face the crowd, not watch the game.
Average pay: rates start at £5 an hour; with training you can earn up to £15 an hour.
More info: try Recruit Event Services.
8 Online surveys
To make money completing surveys, all you need is a computer and some opinions. You'll be asked what you think of various products and services, and sometimes be sent things to try out. However, there are scam survey websites so do some research.
Average pay: £3-£50 for each survey, depending on how long it takes. However, you'll have to pay a registration fee (around £20) up front.
More info: UK Paid Surveys rates and reviews the best sites.
9 Mystery shopping
Some men would pay good money not to go shopping, but 'mystery shoppers', on the other hand, get paid instead. It's not just about going to shops but perhaps to restaurants, bars or to stay in a hotel and report on how the customer's being treated. You'll get all the money for your meals, drinks or bills repaid and you may get to keep the shopping, too - unless, of course, it's diamonds.
Average pay: from £6 a visit, but could be as much as £100 a day.
More info: try the Mystery Shopping Agency on 020 8325 8974 or Retail Eyes
10 Internet researcher
You may have grown up taking the Internet for granted but there are plenty of people who aren't familiar with it or are too busy to spend time on it. So if you're skilled at extracting information from a web search, you can hire yourself out as a researcher for people like lawyers and writers.
Average pay: £10 an hourMore info: look for notices on student job boards or contact likely clients in your area.
In addition we would advise you that:
The information given in this article was correct as at March 2006. It does not, however, take account of any changes in regulations, the law or interest rates since that time.
10/04/2006
Make Extra Money With A Blog Without Spending A Dime
Blog or weblog is simply a website with frequent updates on a particular subject or topic. You can write a comment, review, suggestion or tip on a subject on your blog. You can also provide educational resources and advice if you are an expert at something. For instance, If your blog is about sport cars. You can post the latest annoucements from sport cars manufacturers such as BMW, Ferrari and so on, discuss about the latest models of sport cars and the best components used for producing sport cars.
Blog or weblog is simply a website with frequent updates on a particular subject or topic. You can write a comment, review, suggestion or tip on a subject on your blog. You can also provide educational resources and advice if you are an expert at something. For instance, If your blog is about sport cars. You can post the latest annoucements from sport cars manufacturers such as BMW, Ferrari and so on, discuss about the latest models of sport cars and the best components used for producing sport cars.
Blogger.com allows anyone to create a free blog (free domain name and hosting) without any technical knowledge. Creating a blog with Blogger.com is easy and you can have you blog published within an hours.
There are several ways you can make money with a blog:
Become a Google AdSense publisherYou can join Google AdSense program and start earning advertising revenue from your blog. It is not difficult to set up you AdSense campaign as Blogger.com also provides Adsense tool and guidances to help you start an AdSense campaign. This can be a great source of revenue, though of course the amount of income you can expect from your AdSense ads will depend on the amount of traffic (visitors) to your blog.
Sell Other People's StuffYou can promote your affiliate programs by placing the affiliate links and banners on your blog and earn commission whenever someone clicks through an affiliate link or banner to your merchant's website made a purchase.
Sell Your Own ProductBlog can be used to promote and sell your own products too. You can write about your products' features and benefits on the blog.
Drive Visitors to You BlogTo make money you need to drive visitors or traffic to your blog. The more traffic you're getting the higher your earning will be. There are several free ways of getting traffic to your blog. Here's how ......
1) Introduce your blog to your family and friends.2) Submit your blog to directories. You can find a list of blog directories by going to Google and entering the search term 'submit blog url'.3) Write an article or more with a link to your blog and submit them to article directories. You can find a list of article directories by going to Google and entering the search term 'article directory'.4) Post messages on community forums with a link to your blog on the signature of each message posted.
There are other ways (free and paid) to increase traffic for your blog. You can find a lot of free information and resources about blog promotion from search engines.
Blog or weblog is simply a website with frequent updates on a particular subject or topic. You can write a comment, review, suggestion or tip on a subject on your blog. You can also provide educational resources and advice if you are an expert at something. For instance, If your blog is about sport cars. You can post the latest annoucements from sport cars manufacturers such as BMW, Ferrari and so on, discuss about the latest models of sport cars and the best components used for producing sport cars.
Blogger.com allows anyone to create a free blog (free domain name and hosting) without any technical knowledge. Creating a blog with Blogger.com is easy and you can have you blog published within an hours.
There are several ways you can make money with a blog:
Become a Google AdSense publisherYou can join Google AdSense program and start earning advertising revenue from your blog. It is not difficult to set up you AdSense campaign as Blogger.com also provides Adsense tool and guidances to help you start an AdSense campaign. This can be a great source of revenue, though of course the amount of income you can expect from your AdSense ads will depend on the amount of traffic (visitors) to your blog.
Sell Other People's StuffYou can promote your affiliate programs by placing the affiliate links and banners on your blog and earn commission whenever someone clicks through an affiliate link or banner to your merchant's website made a purchase.
Sell Your Own ProductBlog can be used to promote and sell your own products too. You can write about your products' features and benefits on the blog.
Drive Visitors to You BlogTo make money you need to drive visitors or traffic to your blog. The more traffic you're getting the higher your earning will be. There are several free ways of getting traffic to your blog. Here's how ......
1) Introduce your blog to your family and friends.2) Submit your blog to directories. You can find a list of blog directories by going to Google and entering the search term 'submit blog url'.3) Write an article or more with a link to your blog and submit them to article directories. You can find a list of article directories by going to Google and entering the search term 'article directory'.4) Post messages on community forums with a link to your blog on the signature of each message posted.
There are other ways (free and paid) to increase traffic for your blog. You can find a lot of free information and resources about blog promotion from search engines.
Making money on the Web----Guide
Freelance & Work from Home
AbleStable.com
Directory providing a very broad listing of creative professionals, from artists to web designers, programmers, illustrators and music composers.
Associated Content
Pays individuals to write about the community they live in. Payment is made per submission and one doesn't necessarily need to be a writer. Once you are registered as a "Content Producer" you can immediately start submitting content via their online system. Both non-exclusive (you retain the copyright) and exclusive (copyright bought by Associated Content) submissions are accepted.
EditFast
EditFast provides a free service to skilled proofreaders, editors and writers. If you are selected for a project by a client or by the EditFast administration you will be notified and that project will be directed to you.
Free Business Services
A collection of free and non free business services on the Web, such as: online payment services, cheque / check printing services, import / export companies, Websites and programs related to mortgages and real-estate, day trading companies and online stock brokers, business-to-business portals.
HomeWorking.com
This site is for anyone wanting to work at home and anyone already working at home. You will find lots to get you started, help you find work at home and avoid scams.
Telework Association
TCA is Europe's largest organisation dedicated to the promotion of teleworking. Over 2,000 people and organisations have joined them since they started in 1993. The TCA believes that teleworking can benefit people by increasing the quality of life and improving access to work.
WorldLancerOutsourcing Academy
Job listings and jobs online for a variety of projects. "Buyers" can post job listings for free. Freelancers can find jobs online and get paid for their work.
Job Sites
A BetterJobSearch.com
Free resources for anybody seeking for a Job: employer list, employment resources, resume services, job search tips and more.
Beyond.com
Online recruiting company: search for jobs, add your resume, etc.
Earn Money with your Website
BidVertiser
Place the BidVertiser text ads on your website and make money online by getting paid for every click.
Earn money throughCustom Builds
A 'custom build' of a program is a special edition you can offer for download on your site, and which has your affiliate information built into it. This means that when the user clicks 'register' or 'purchase' in that edition of the program, he/she will go directly to the order page using your unique affiliate ID, making sure you receive the commission for the sale this user generates
Google Adsense
Earn money while displaying advertisements on your Website. When visitors click on these ads, Google pays you. Along with targeted advertising for your content pages, you can add a Google search box to your site and show targeted ads on search results pages.
MIVA WebsiteMonetization
Customised solutions to monetise website traffic, such as: pay-per-click advertising, add a Web search engine to your site and earn revenue from every click, earn revenue from users leaving your site.
RevenuePilot.com
You receive 60% of what advertisers pay RevenuePilot per click. A variety of linking methods is available, including text links, banners, search boxes, javascript feed, dynamic banners, etc.
TargetWords.com
Add text links, search boxes, full-page ad portals or banners to your site and earn $0.01-$0.08 per search through target words.
Earn Money through Affiliate Programs
123inkjets.com
Store selling Inkjet cartridges, photo paper, cables, toner and other printer-related goods. Earn 27% commission on each sale you generate through a banner or text link on your site.
AffiliateSeeking.com
Well organized directory of affiliate programs, organized by category.
AllPosters.com
Sell posters on your Website, earn 25% commission on each poster you sell.
Amazon.com
Amazon.com is an online store specialized in selling books, CDs, DVDs and Videos. When a visitor of your site purchases an item from Amazon.com through a link on your site, you will receive a fee of between 5% and 15% of the purchase price.
Become a TreePadAffiliate and earnmoney!
As a TreePad affiliate you can earn 25% commissions on any sales you make!Grateful to all TreePad users, who have been TreePad's best advertisers, we are now happy to offer you this excellent possibility of earning money. Sign up is free and open to anyone interested.
clixGalore
Build your own affiliate program and boost your sales, leads and website traffic by promoting and building your own large 'pay for performance' sales team.
Commission junction
Over 1000 advertisement programs to choose from. Real-time tracking, reporting and analysis of impressions, get paid monthly by check, etc.
eBay
Online auction house. Earn $5 for each new client who signs up with eBay, earn $0.05 for each bidder at eBay. Also: eBay affiliate University for improving your performance. Limitation: US based affiliates only at this time.
iDonovan.com
Online recruiting company. Pays $ 20-30 USD for each referred sale.
iPowerWeb
Webhosting company. Receive $65 (Tier 1) and $5 (Tier 2) in commission for every new customer
LunarPages Webhosting
Webhosting company. Earn $52.00 for each new customer (Tier 1) and $ 5 (tear 2).
PayDotCom.com
Promote products and earn commissions as a PayDotCom affiliate. PayPal-related.
Read Mails or Surf the Web
MyPoints
Earn Points by reading email, shopping online, touring web sites and more. Free signup. Points you earned can be converted to CDs, clothes, books, movie tickets, airline tickets, dining and more.
Treasurelinks
Get paid to read emails, get paid to click links, get paid to sign-up, get paid to refer others.
Cash a Day
Earn "Cash A Day" from reading emails and for referring friends.
BountyCenter
Get paid to read emails, click on banners and refer friends.
Hits 4 Pay
Get paid to read emails, click on banners and refer friends.
4Daily.com
Get $ 4 just to join; earn money while surfing the Web; get paid to refer your friends.
IncentiveMail
Get paid to read emails, click on banners and refer friends.
E-Mail Paus U
Get paid to read email and for visiting Websites.
Wow Earnings
Get paid to read emails, click on banners and refer friends.
Get Paid to take Online Surveys
American ConsumerOpinion
Get paid for sharing your opinions and ideas in online surveys. Win money in monthly drawings just for being a member. Win money in drawings when you fill out a a short questionnaire. Earn cash each time you complete a survey (a longer questionnaire).
GlobalTestMarket.com
Earn cash by filling out surveys and referring friends.
goZing surveys
In return for participating in online and/or telephone surveys, you receive Amazon.com gift certificates or PayPal cash.
I-SpeakUp.com
$50 for filling out 25-minute surveys, $150 for participating in focus group panels for 30 to 60 minutes, earn free trips, free diners, get freebies given to you with each survey completed.
Opinion Outpost
Opinion Outpost is an online community where people like you can come to share their opinions by participating in survey research. In return for your valued opinion, you can earn opinion points which can be exchanged for cash and prizes.
Opinion PayDay
Earn cash by filling out surveys and referring friends.
Paid-Survey.com
There are numerous marketing companies willing to pay you for your opinion. This site lists a selection of these.Also: make money reading email, make money watching movie trailers.
Pureprofile
Get paid for responding to messges and participating in surveys.
SurveySavvy.com
Earn cash by filling out surveys and referring friends.
YellowSurveys.com
Over 500 survey companies offering paid surveys in cash and prizes.
Money Earning Tutorials & Resources
Affiliate PublisherCo-op
Free information site aimed at the beginner affiliate publisher but also useful for more experienced publishers.
Guide toAffiliate marketing
What's Affiliate Marketing? How do you turn your traffic into profit? Pay-per-Click vs. Pay-for-Performance? Pay-per-Click: the need for huge traffic? Pay-for-Performance Drives Results? How do large affiliate networks function? How / when do you get paid? Why is there a minimum amount policy? What if my revenue is below the minimum amount? How do you get a sponsor? A bit on rights & duties - How free are you? The right sponsor(s) for Your Web Site - a Hot tip!
Enhance your homepageand make money!
How to create a page that is: easy to make, beautiful, interesting, and profitable!E.g. add images and content royalty free to your pages and make money with them!
Introduction toEarning Moneyon the Web
Earn Money Opportunities, Affiliate Marketing - Info + Tips, Search for one or more Sponsors for Your Web Site, Guide to Find the right Sponsors for Your Web Site, Tips for Beginning Webmasters, have a Business or Commercial Web Site? Here's an Excellent Opportunity for You, other Profitable and/or Advantageous Opportunities Available to You on our Web Site.
Affiliate Handbook
Resource for affiliate program managers aspiring to develop a best of breed affiliate program: articles, news, gossip, tutorials, case studies, reviews, interviews, press clippings, consulting services, etc.
Free Marketing Zone
Free marketing resources for Webmasters and online entepreneurs. Free articles, free sales letters, free web-scripts, free promotion tools, etc.
How to make moneyfrom your Website
Resource for affiliate program managers aspiring to develop a best of breed affiliate program: articles, news, gossip, tutorials, case studies, reviews, interviews, press clippings, consulting services, etc.
DOT Solutions
How to advertise. Step by step Website promotions.
Affiliate Cash Money
Tutorial on advertisement and promotion related to making money through affiliate programs; also has a directory of affilate programs,
Virtual Cash Services
PayPal
Online payment system using the 'virtual cash' principle. Transactions are instantaneous and are not delayed by slow bank-to-bank communications. PayPal now also accepts credit card payments.
GreenZap
Online virtual cash system based in Australia.
WebMoney
Online virtual cash system based in Russia.
e-Commerce Services
Kagi
Independent e-Commerce provider. Processes your payments for software, e-Books and other electronic goods.
Northstar
Independent online payment processing and e-commerce company.
Digital River
Probably the biggest e-commerce provider on the Internet. Moreover, during the last few years, Digital River has bought a large collection of independent companies specialized in processing sales online.The list of companies now owned by Digital River is extensive, just a small selection: Digibuy, Element5, eMetrix, Reg.net, RegNow, RegSoft, setSystems, ShareIT, SWREG
eSellerate
Online payment processing and e-commerce company.
BIC Publication Portal
Directory of BIC and SWIFT codes. You can find the bank name using a BIC (or SWIFT) code, or vice versa.
QChex
Free online check/cheque printing system. Qchex.com is a financial service for consumers and businesses. It allows users with internet access and an existing bank account to instantly send bankable checks to anybody's email address, thus by-passing all handling, postage and banking fees associated with pre-printed checks. Upon receipt, Qchex are printed out on the recipient's desktop printer including all characteristics of a regular check.
e-Commerce Tools
osCommerce
Freeware open-source e-commerce solution to create your own online shop. It features a rich set of out-of-the-box online shopping cart functionality that allows store owners to setup, run, and maintain their online stores with minimum effort and with no costs, license fees, or limitations involved.
Related Freebyte pages
Online Business Services &Free Financial Software
E-commerce services, virtual cash systems, payment processing services, check printing, business-to-business portals, online stock trading, currency converters, free accounting software, etc.
Win Prizes
Win prizes through free online sweepstakes without spending any money!
Free Businessand Office Software
Free office suites, word processors, text editors, personal databases, currency converters, accounting software, calculators, document viewers, PDF utilities, etc.
Free Website Promotion
Get more visitors. Free Website submission services and software, free mailing list services, free banner exchange services, web promotion tips and tutorials, search engine tips, online marketing tools, free advertising, free resources for Webmasters.
Free Home pages
Publish your own Web pages for free! Find the best service to host your home page. Create your Web page without any knowledge of HTML. Free services which enable you to run your own CGI scripts (PHP, ASP, Perl, etc.).
Free Email Addresses
A large listing of services that provide free but also non-free email addresses. Web based email, email forwarding, pop email, etc. Also: add email services to your domain.
Free Website Tools
Free Website tools: Web counters, Web statistics, polls to put on your site, guest books to put on your site, URL forwarding services, site search engines, HTML editors, HTML and link validation tools, tutorials, resources, etc.
Free images, icons,clipart, backgrounds,photos
Download images and clipart for free, royalty-free stock photographs, thousands of free fonts, free icons, free GIFs, animated GIFs, free backgrounds, wallpapers, etc.
Free Internet Programs
Free programs to surf the Web, free email software, email virus protection, free newsgroup programs, free Internet chat, telephony and messaging applications, free telnet software, free firewalls, etc.
Free Computers
Free used and recycled computers, mostly for schools, non-profit organisations and disadvantaged individuals.
AbleStable.com
Directory providing a very broad listing of creative professionals, from artists to web designers, programmers, illustrators and music composers.
Associated Content
Pays individuals to write about the community they live in. Payment is made per submission and one doesn't necessarily need to be a writer. Once you are registered as a "Content Producer" you can immediately start submitting content via their online system. Both non-exclusive (you retain the copyright) and exclusive (copyright bought by Associated Content) submissions are accepted.
EditFast
EditFast provides a free service to skilled proofreaders, editors and writers. If you are selected for a project by a client or by the EditFast administration you will be notified and that project will be directed to you.
Free Business Services
A collection of free and non free business services on the Web, such as: online payment services, cheque / check printing services, import / export companies, Websites and programs related to mortgages and real-estate, day trading companies and online stock brokers, business-to-business portals.
HomeWorking.com
This site is for anyone wanting to work at home and anyone already working at home. You will find lots to get you started, help you find work at home and avoid scams.
Telework Association
TCA is Europe's largest organisation dedicated to the promotion of teleworking. Over 2,000 people and organisations have joined them since they started in 1993. The TCA believes that teleworking can benefit people by increasing the quality of life and improving access to work.
WorldLancerOutsourcing Academy
Job listings and jobs online for a variety of projects. "Buyers" can post job listings for free. Freelancers can find jobs online and get paid for their work.
Job Sites
A BetterJobSearch.com
Free resources for anybody seeking for a Job: employer list, employment resources, resume services, job search tips and more.
Beyond.com
Online recruiting company: search for jobs, add your resume, etc.
Earn Money with your Website
BidVertiser
Place the BidVertiser text ads on your website and make money online by getting paid for every click.
Earn money throughCustom Builds
A 'custom build' of a program is a special edition you can offer for download on your site, and which has your affiliate information built into it. This means that when the user clicks 'register' or 'purchase' in that edition of the program, he/she will go directly to the order page using your unique affiliate ID, making sure you receive the commission for the sale this user generates
Google Adsense
Earn money while displaying advertisements on your Website. When visitors click on these ads, Google pays you. Along with targeted advertising for your content pages, you can add a Google search box to your site and show targeted ads on search results pages.
MIVA WebsiteMonetization
Customised solutions to monetise website traffic, such as: pay-per-click advertising, add a Web search engine to your site and earn revenue from every click, earn revenue from users leaving your site.
RevenuePilot.com
You receive 60% of what advertisers pay RevenuePilot per click. A variety of linking methods is available, including text links, banners, search boxes, javascript feed, dynamic banners, etc.
TargetWords.com
Add text links, search boxes, full-page ad portals or banners to your site and earn $0.01-$0.08 per search through target words.
Earn Money through Affiliate Programs
123inkjets.com
Store selling Inkjet cartridges, photo paper, cables, toner and other printer-related goods. Earn 27% commission on each sale you generate through a banner or text link on your site.
AffiliateSeeking.com
Well organized directory of affiliate programs, organized by category.
AllPosters.com
Sell posters on your Website, earn 25% commission on each poster you sell.
Amazon.com
Amazon.com is an online store specialized in selling books, CDs, DVDs and Videos. When a visitor of your site purchases an item from Amazon.com through a link on your site, you will receive a fee of between 5% and 15% of the purchase price.
Become a TreePadAffiliate and earnmoney!
As a TreePad affiliate you can earn 25% commissions on any sales you make!Grateful to all TreePad users, who have been TreePad's best advertisers, we are now happy to offer you this excellent possibility of earning money. Sign up is free and open to anyone interested.
clixGalore
Build your own affiliate program and boost your sales, leads and website traffic by promoting and building your own large 'pay for performance' sales team.
Commission junction
Over 1000 advertisement programs to choose from. Real-time tracking, reporting and analysis of impressions, get paid monthly by check, etc.
eBay
Online auction house. Earn $5 for each new client who signs up with eBay, earn $0.05 for each bidder at eBay. Also: eBay affiliate University for improving your performance. Limitation: US based affiliates only at this time.
iDonovan.com
Online recruiting company. Pays $ 20-30 USD for each referred sale.
iPowerWeb
Webhosting company. Receive $65 (Tier 1) and $5 (Tier 2) in commission for every new customer
LunarPages Webhosting
Webhosting company. Earn $52.00 for each new customer (Tier 1) and $ 5 (tear 2).
PayDotCom.com
Promote products and earn commissions as a PayDotCom affiliate. PayPal-related.
Read Mails or Surf the Web
MyPoints
Earn Points by reading email, shopping online, touring web sites and more. Free signup. Points you earned can be converted to CDs, clothes, books, movie tickets, airline tickets, dining and more.
Treasurelinks
Get paid to read emails, get paid to click links, get paid to sign-up, get paid to refer others.
Cash a Day
Earn "Cash A Day" from reading emails and for referring friends.
BountyCenter
Get paid to read emails, click on banners and refer friends.
Hits 4 Pay
Get paid to read emails, click on banners and refer friends.
4Daily.com
Get $ 4 just to join; earn money while surfing the Web; get paid to refer your friends.
IncentiveMail
Get paid to read emails, click on banners and refer friends.
E-Mail Paus U
Get paid to read email and for visiting Websites.
Wow Earnings
Get paid to read emails, click on banners and refer friends.
Get Paid to take Online Surveys
American ConsumerOpinion
Get paid for sharing your opinions and ideas in online surveys. Win money in monthly drawings just for being a member. Win money in drawings when you fill out a a short questionnaire. Earn cash each time you complete a survey (a longer questionnaire).
GlobalTestMarket.com
Earn cash by filling out surveys and referring friends.
goZing surveys
In return for participating in online and/or telephone surveys, you receive Amazon.com gift certificates or PayPal cash.
I-SpeakUp.com
$50 for filling out 25-minute surveys, $150 for participating in focus group panels for 30 to 60 minutes, earn free trips, free diners, get freebies given to you with each survey completed.
Opinion Outpost
Opinion Outpost is an online community where people like you can come to share their opinions by participating in survey research. In return for your valued opinion, you can earn opinion points which can be exchanged for cash and prizes.
Opinion PayDay
Earn cash by filling out surveys and referring friends.
Paid-Survey.com
There are numerous marketing companies willing to pay you for your opinion. This site lists a selection of these.Also: make money reading email, make money watching movie trailers.
Pureprofile
Get paid for responding to messges and participating in surveys.
SurveySavvy.com
Earn cash by filling out surveys and referring friends.
YellowSurveys.com
Over 500 survey companies offering paid surveys in cash and prizes.
Money Earning Tutorials & Resources
Affiliate PublisherCo-op
Free information site aimed at the beginner affiliate publisher but also useful for more experienced publishers.
Guide toAffiliate marketing
What's Affiliate Marketing? How do you turn your traffic into profit? Pay-per-Click vs. Pay-for-Performance? Pay-per-Click: the need for huge traffic? Pay-for-Performance Drives Results? How do large affiliate networks function? How / when do you get paid? Why is there a minimum amount policy? What if my revenue is below the minimum amount? How do you get a sponsor? A bit on rights & duties - How free are you? The right sponsor(s) for Your Web Site - a Hot tip!
Enhance your homepageand make money!
How to create a page that is: easy to make, beautiful, interesting, and profitable!E.g. add images and content royalty free to your pages and make money with them!
Introduction toEarning Moneyon the Web
Earn Money Opportunities, Affiliate Marketing - Info + Tips, Search for one or more Sponsors for Your Web Site, Guide to Find the right Sponsors for Your Web Site, Tips for Beginning Webmasters, have a Business or Commercial Web Site? Here's an Excellent Opportunity for You, other Profitable and/or Advantageous Opportunities Available to You on our Web Site.
Affiliate Handbook
Resource for affiliate program managers aspiring to develop a best of breed affiliate program: articles, news, gossip, tutorials, case studies, reviews, interviews, press clippings, consulting services, etc.
Free Marketing Zone
Free marketing resources for Webmasters and online entepreneurs. Free articles, free sales letters, free web-scripts, free promotion tools, etc.
How to make moneyfrom your Website
Resource for affiliate program managers aspiring to develop a best of breed affiliate program: articles, news, gossip, tutorials, case studies, reviews, interviews, press clippings, consulting services, etc.
DOT Solutions
How to advertise. Step by step Website promotions.
Affiliate Cash Money
Tutorial on advertisement and promotion related to making money through affiliate programs; also has a directory of affilate programs,
Virtual Cash Services
PayPal
Online payment system using the 'virtual cash' principle. Transactions are instantaneous and are not delayed by slow bank-to-bank communications. PayPal now also accepts credit card payments.
GreenZap
Online virtual cash system based in Australia.
WebMoney
Online virtual cash system based in Russia.
e-Commerce Services
Kagi
Independent e-Commerce provider. Processes your payments for software, e-Books and other electronic goods.
Northstar
Independent online payment processing and e-commerce company.
Digital River
Probably the biggest e-commerce provider on the Internet. Moreover, during the last few years, Digital River has bought a large collection of independent companies specialized in processing sales online.The list of companies now owned by Digital River is extensive, just a small selection: Digibuy, Element5, eMetrix, Reg.net, RegNow, RegSoft, setSystems, ShareIT, SWREG
eSellerate
Online payment processing and e-commerce company.
BIC Publication Portal
Directory of BIC and SWIFT codes. You can find the bank name using a BIC (or SWIFT) code, or vice versa.
QChex
Free online check/cheque printing system. Qchex.com is a financial service for consumers and businesses. It allows users with internet access and an existing bank account to instantly send bankable checks to anybody's email address, thus by-passing all handling, postage and banking fees associated with pre-printed checks. Upon receipt, Qchex are printed out on the recipient's desktop printer including all characteristics of a regular check.
e-Commerce Tools
osCommerce
Freeware open-source e-commerce solution to create your own online shop. It features a rich set of out-of-the-box online shopping cart functionality that allows store owners to setup, run, and maintain their online stores with minimum effort and with no costs, license fees, or limitations involved.
Related Freebyte pages
Online Business Services &Free Financial Software
E-commerce services, virtual cash systems, payment processing services, check printing, business-to-business portals, online stock trading, currency converters, free accounting software, etc.
Win Prizes
Win prizes through free online sweepstakes without spending any money!
Free Businessand Office Software
Free office suites, word processors, text editors, personal databases, currency converters, accounting software, calculators, document viewers, PDF utilities, etc.
Free Website Promotion
Get more visitors. Free Website submission services and software, free mailing list services, free banner exchange services, web promotion tips and tutorials, search engine tips, online marketing tools, free advertising, free resources for Webmasters.
Free Home pages
Publish your own Web pages for free! Find the best service to host your home page. Create your Web page without any knowledge of HTML. Free services which enable you to run your own CGI scripts (PHP, ASP, Perl, etc.).
Free Email Addresses
A large listing of services that provide free but also non-free email addresses. Web based email, email forwarding, pop email, etc. Also: add email services to your domain.
Free Website Tools
Free Website tools: Web counters, Web statistics, polls to put on your site, guest books to put on your site, URL forwarding services, site search engines, HTML editors, HTML and link validation tools, tutorials, resources, etc.
Free images, icons,clipart, backgrounds,photos
Download images and clipart for free, royalty-free stock photographs, thousands of free fonts, free icons, free GIFs, animated GIFs, free backgrounds, wallpapers, etc.
Free Internet Programs
Free programs to surf the Web, free email software, email virus protection, free newsgroup programs, free Internet chat, telephony and messaging applications, free telnet software, free firewalls, etc.
Free Computers
Free used and recycled computers, mostly for schools, non-profit organisations and disadvantaged individuals.
The Top 10 Ways to Earn Money at Home
You do not have to read many success stories before you start wishing you could work for yourself. The opportunity to be your own boss and the potential for high income are enough to entice us to venture on our own. But what can you do? What kind of business would you be suitable to start? We have compiled the top 10 ways to earn money at home, enough to be a full-time self-employed businessperson! (article continued below ...)
1. Antiques
The buying and selling of antiques has been and should continue to be a very productive business, financially, for those that do it. Here, you only need an extra room in the house, or the use of your garage -- and you have an office!
If you have a large home that has some antique furnishings, you might consider turning it into a showroom for your antique acquisitions and sales, providing you satisfy any local zoning regulations. The interest in antiques will survive into the foreseeable future. Many people choose to spend their free time on the weekends "antiquating" from place to place to try and pick up a few odds or ends and maybe a jewel or two. If you know anything about antiques, this may be a great opportunity for you.
2. Baking
Have you ever been told that you have a recipe that people would line up to get if they could? Ever had anyone tell you that you should be selling those cupcakes you make?
There are a number of success stories about people who have launched successful businesses by cooking at home and then marketing to local people first. You may specialize in on just one well-tried and tested food product; or you may innovate on a product that you created yourself and which has never been marketed before. Having perfected the recipe you then turn to packaging and marketing. Word of mouth on a good product may start to get restaurants or bakeries interested in acquiring your culinary masterpieces. Then you progress to selling them statewide and you're on your way to a profitable home-based business.
3. Bed-and-Breakfast
Proprietors Have you ever stayed in a bed and breakfast and thought, "Hey, I can do this!" You probably went on vacation and simply chalked your thought up as one of those pipedreams one gets when they stay in a beautiful spot.
Don't toss that thought away! While it's not easy work as the hours can be long and it's usually a seven days per week business, it's often something that you can work into a daily schedule. After all, it's merely an extension of doing the housework for family, right? More and more Americans are taking after Europeans and opening their homes to travelers.
If you have an extra room or two since the kids moved out, you can start a bed and breakfast in your own place! Bed and breakfast popularity will continue as more and more vacationers and business travelers seek a different accommodation away from the predictability of the average hotel room. If they enjoy their stay, many become "repeat" customers, coming back to the same familiar surroundings time and again.
If you don't need to do any major renovations in the house to accommodate this type of establishment, you can be off and running with very little money invested, other than advertising and some new "guest room supplies". If your dream is to buy a bed and breakfast somewhere in a vacation paradise, there are probably houses for sale that will work for this purpose.
4. Childcare
Due to the financial pressures faced by many families today, parents work outside of the home to bring in enough income to pay daily living expenses. A single parent is obviously working but all too often, both members of a two-parent family are in the workforce. This creates a home-based opportunity. Children must be watched, all day if they're not in school, or, otherwise, for a brief time after school before the parents finish work for the day. Most parents want their children immersed in a more stimulating environment than is usual with the average babysitter. You can begin small at home, offering a more stimulating and educational environment setting for client children.
Caring for one additional child may not be that lucrative, but taking care of several children can certainly be a full-time, financially successful business. Often, taking care of several children is made somewhat easier as the youngsters often will play together. You can do this at home for only a small investment in basic equipment and toys for the kids in addition to the advertising of your business.
5. Computer Specialist
The advent of the computer age has changed the concept of self-employment. Having a computer at home has opened a number of opportunities for running your own business utilizing this equipment. Companies everywhere are "outsourcing" work that can be done by someone else on their computer, out of their own home.
If you are a whiz in computers, you may end up working as a consultant, writing programs for companies. If you are a beginner, you may find yourself able to obtain work as a writer, using your computer to produce copy that is easy to edit. You can also keep accounting and payroll records for companies on your computer's database.
Word processing software can be used not only for writers but for those that can offer secretarial services out of their house. Desktop publishing software can allow you to do newsletters for businesses and other organizations. If you can operate a computer, you can find work in the information age today.
Of course, the advent of the Web has opened a lot of business opportunities for the enterprising individuals. If you have skills in lay-outing and graphic design, you can be a website designer. Website designers earn significant amounts of money nowadays.
6. Gardening
If you like working in your garden each year , it's a definite possibility for home-based employment. Imagine clearing a little more space and growing more items that you can sell directly to the consumer. You can produce vegetables, bedding plants, bonzai tree, exotic plants, flower trees, herb, house plants, landscaping plants, orchids and many more.
Most produce stands will buy from you if your product is one of high quality. If you enjoy gardening, this could be your ticket! If you have some more land to use, do it! Plant what you can, when you can! Contact your local produce stands to ascertain their buying habits.
You can even inquire about your own produce stand if you have enough product. The more space you have on your land, the more likely you will be able to generate enough crops to run the business. People love homegrown vegetables. They just do not have the time or want to be bothered doing it themselves. That is your open door!
You can also engage in selling other gardening products and supplies such as compost, earthworms, herb boxes, beneficial bugs, or drip irrigation systems.
7. Importer and Distributor
There are a substantial number of products manufactured in other countries that can be bought inexpensively and sold in your country at a profitable level. The Government and the formation of international trade organizations have made it easier to bring in other products from other countries.
This is a business easily operated out of the home, depending on the types of stock you're carrying. You may have to rent some storage space, but the capital required to start should essentially be limited to the products you're buying to sell here.
If you know the type of product you want to import and the market most likely to purchase your goods, you have great potential for a successful home-based business.
8. Interior Decorator
Interior decorating is a business that will require you to be mobile, constantly meeting with customers. It offers flexible hours, a good variety of activities, and a very lucrative return. If you have a fascination for decorating a home, this could be your line of work. Many people do not know where to start when they are remodeling or buying a house for the first time.
If you have the knowledge of colors and patterns and what looks good together, plus the expertise of knowing where to get materials and furnishings, this can be a winning home-based business for you. To be able to decorate a room so that it conveys the mood that the homeowner wishes will be your goal. Strive for the skillful, personal touch in all you design.
9. Photographer
The sky is the limit here! Armed with your trusty camera and some good advertising, you can do weddings, models, family portraits, passports, student photos, local newspaper coverage; almost anything that requires a picture!
You can easily start this work, part-time, and work into full-time work based on your success and inclination. Not much equipment is necessary to get going as a camera off the store shelf can often do the trick today. Picking up a tripod and having a room sufficient for developing your pictures, and you're in business -- at home!
10. Sewing and Alterations
Many people love to sew. If you are one of them, consider offering this service out of your home. When someone buys a new outfit, it rarely fits perfectly, meaning some kind of alteration must be done.
People look long and hard to find reliable individuals to do their alterations. If you can sew, you are well on your way to opening the doors of this type of business.
1. Antiques
The buying and selling of antiques has been and should continue to be a very productive business, financially, for those that do it. Here, you only need an extra room in the house, or the use of your garage -- and you have an office!
If you have a large home that has some antique furnishings, you might consider turning it into a showroom for your antique acquisitions and sales, providing you satisfy any local zoning regulations. The interest in antiques will survive into the foreseeable future. Many people choose to spend their free time on the weekends "antiquating" from place to place to try and pick up a few odds or ends and maybe a jewel or two. If you know anything about antiques, this may be a great opportunity for you.
2. Baking
Have you ever been told that you have a recipe that people would line up to get if they could? Ever had anyone tell you that you should be selling those cupcakes you make?
There are a number of success stories about people who have launched successful businesses by cooking at home and then marketing to local people first. You may specialize in on just one well-tried and tested food product; or you may innovate on a product that you created yourself and which has never been marketed before. Having perfected the recipe you then turn to packaging and marketing. Word of mouth on a good product may start to get restaurants or bakeries interested in acquiring your culinary masterpieces. Then you progress to selling them statewide and you're on your way to a profitable home-based business.
3. Bed-and-Breakfast
Proprietors Have you ever stayed in a bed and breakfast and thought, "Hey, I can do this!" You probably went on vacation and simply chalked your thought up as one of those pipedreams one gets when they stay in a beautiful spot.
Don't toss that thought away! While it's not easy work as the hours can be long and it's usually a seven days per week business, it's often something that you can work into a daily schedule. After all, it's merely an extension of doing the housework for family, right? More and more Americans are taking after Europeans and opening their homes to travelers.
If you have an extra room or two since the kids moved out, you can start a bed and breakfast in your own place! Bed and breakfast popularity will continue as more and more vacationers and business travelers seek a different accommodation away from the predictability of the average hotel room. If they enjoy their stay, many become "repeat" customers, coming back to the same familiar surroundings time and again.
If you don't need to do any major renovations in the house to accommodate this type of establishment, you can be off and running with very little money invested, other than advertising and some new "guest room supplies". If your dream is to buy a bed and breakfast somewhere in a vacation paradise, there are probably houses for sale that will work for this purpose.
4. Childcare
Due to the financial pressures faced by many families today, parents work outside of the home to bring in enough income to pay daily living expenses. A single parent is obviously working but all too often, both members of a two-parent family are in the workforce. This creates a home-based opportunity. Children must be watched, all day if they're not in school, or, otherwise, for a brief time after school before the parents finish work for the day. Most parents want their children immersed in a more stimulating environment than is usual with the average babysitter. You can begin small at home, offering a more stimulating and educational environment setting for client children.
Caring for one additional child may not be that lucrative, but taking care of several children can certainly be a full-time, financially successful business. Often, taking care of several children is made somewhat easier as the youngsters often will play together. You can do this at home for only a small investment in basic equipment and toys for the kids in addition to the advertising of your business.
5. Computer Specialist
The advent of the computer age has changed the concept of self-employment. Having a computer at home has opened a number of opportunities for running your own business utilizing this equipment. Companies everywhere are "outsourcing" work that can be done by someone else on their computer, out of their own home.
If you are a whiz in computers, you may end up working as a consultant, writing programs for companies. If you are a beginner, you may find yourself able to obtain work as a writer, using your computer to produce copy that is easy to edit. You can also keep accounting and payroll records for companies on your computer's database.
Word processing software can be used not only for writers but for those that can offer secretarial services out of their house. Desktop publishing software can allow you to do newsletters for businesses and other organizations. If you can operate a computer, you can find work in the information age today.
Of course, the advent of the Web has opened a lot of business opportunities for the enterprising individuals. If you have skills in lay-outing and graphic design, you can be a website designer. Website designers earn significant amounts of money nowadays.
6. Gardening
If you like working in your garden each year , it's a definite possibility for home-based employment. Imagine clearing a little more space and growing more items that you can sell directly to the consumer. You can produce vegetables, bedding plants, bonzai tree, exotic plants, flower trees, herb, house plants, landscaping plants, orchids and many more.
Most produce stands will buy from you if your product is one of high quality. If you enjoy gardening, this could be your ticket! If you have some more land to use, do it! Plant what you can, when you can! Contact your local produce stands to ascertain their buying habits.
You can even inquire about your own produce stand if you have enough product. The more space you have on your land, the more likely you will be able to generate enough crops to run the business. People love homegrown vegetables. They just do not have the time or want to be bothered doing it themselves. That is your open door!
You can also engage in selling other gardening products and supplies such as compost, earthworms, herb boxes, beneficial bugs, or drip irrigation systems.
7. Importer and Distributor
There are a substantial number of products manufactured in other countries that can be bought inexpensively and sold in your country at a profitable level. The Government and the formation of international trade organizations have made it easier to bring in other products from other countries.
This is a business easily operated out of the home, depending on the types of stock you're carrying. You may have to rent some storage space, but the capital required to start should essentially be limited to the products you're buying to sell here.
If you know the type of product you want to import and the market most likely to purchase your goods, you have great potential for a successful home-based business.
8. Interior Decorator
Interior decorating is a business that will require you to be mobile, constantly meeting with customers. It offers flexible hours, a good variety of activities, and a very lucrative return. If you have a fascination for decorating a home, this could be your line of work. Many people do not know where to start when they are remodeling or buying a house for the first time.
If you have the knowledge of colors and patterns and what looks good together, plus the expertise of knowing where to get materials and furnishings, this can be a winning home-based business for you. To be able to decorate a room so that it conveys the mood that the homeowner wishes will be your goal. Strive for the skillful, personal touch in all you design.
9. Photographer
The sky is the limit here! Armed with your trusty camera and some good advertising, you can do weddings, models, family portraits, passports, student photos, local newspaper coverage; almost anything that requires a picture!
You can easily start this work, part-time, and work into full-time work based on your success and inclination. Not much equipment is necessary to get going as a camera off the store shelf can often do the trick today. Picking up a tripod and having a room sufficient for developing your pictures, and you're in business -- at home!
10. Sewing and Alterations
Many people love to sew. If you are one of them, consider offering this service out of your home. When someone buys a new outfit, it rarely fits perfectly, meaning some kind of alteration must be done.
People look long and hard to find reliable individuals to do their alterations. If you can sew, you are well on your way to opening the doors of this type of business.
Asset Allocation:Monthly revenue $12K from my blog
October 2nd, 2006 by Steve Pavlina
My blog get money from $1140 (Sep 2005) to $12K (Sep 2006)
Recently I took a 3-week course on financial planning offered through UNLV. The most important topic covered was asset allocation. Asset allocation refers to how you allocate the money you have available to invest. What percentage of your money goes into your secure, moderate growth, and aggressive growth baskets?
You have many options for where to invest your money, and every option has a different risk/reward ratio. You can put all your money in the high risk/reward basket, such as aggressive growth stocks, and you may enjoy great gains, but you’ll also suffer huge losses when things go badly. On the other hand, you can put all your money in the low risk/reward basket and keep your assets secure, but then your gains will be very modest. If your gains are taxable, you need to make about 7% just to stay even, since you have to cover inflation + taxes (based on typical USA figures).
The point of intelligent asset allocation is to enjoy strong gains without taking on too much risk of losing your entire principal and having to start over from scratch. So you want to have some money in the aggressive growth bucket, so you have the potential to enjoy some big wins when things go well. But you also want to keep some money in your secure bucket, so you have backup funds to get back in the game if your aggressive investments go bust. Asset allocation involves determining how much to put in each bucket.
I’ve made mistakes on both sides. As a young adult, I kept all my money in a regular savings account, earning minimal interest while the market was soaring. Then in my late 20s, I put most of my money in stocks that lost 70-80% of their value during the dotcom bust, and it took me a while to rebuild those cash reserves. Both of these were good lessons for me.
A financial investment example
As an interesting illustration from the course, consider this hypothetical example. Suppose Erin and I are each going to invest $100,000 for 25 years, and we want to maximize our returns.
I decide to play it safe and stick the whole $100K in a fairly secure investment that yields 7% per year.
Erin decides to split her money into $20K chunks and invests in five different vehicles, which perform as follows:
* $20K is lost completely
* $20K returns 0%, so you only get the original $20K back
* $20K is invested at 5%
* $20K is invested at 10%
* $20K is invested at 12%
Who gets the better total return? Let’s see how the numbers add up:
My 7% investment turns that $100K into $572,542 after 25 years.
Erin’s returns are as follows:
* $20K lost = $0
* $20K @ 0% = $20K
* $20K @ 5% = $69,626
* $20K @ 10% = $241,139
* $20K @ 12% = $395,769
So Erin’s grand total is $726,534. That’s $153,992 more than what my 7% investment earned. It’s interesting that 40% of her initial investment returned zero or negative returns, and another 20% underperformed my 7% return. But those higher returns of 10% and 12% really pay off. Even though most of Erin’s picks were poor performers, being right just 40% of the time was all she needed.
By diversifying her investments, Erin was able to participate in the big winners while not being wiped out by the losers. Of course it would have been great if she could have invested the whole amount at 12% or more, but this example assumes she did her best to pick five potential winners.
To optimize your long-term investment gains, you need to optimize your asset allocation. Maybe you start with 1/3 of your money in safe investments like municipal bonds, another 1/3 in growth funds, and the last 1/3 in aggressive growth stocks. Over time these percentages will drift as each bucket grows at a different rate, so you need to rebalance them.
When your riskier investments lose money, rebalancing means transferring money out of your secure bucket to get back in the game and try again. And when your riskier investments pay off big, rebalancing means transferring money back to your secure bucket to lock in your gains. This strategy allows you to continue enjoying some big investment payoffs without taking on too much risk.
Beyond financial planning
After the financial planning course I realized that the strategy of asset allocation can be applied to other areas of life, such as work, relationships, and health.
Consider how you allocate your time. You can think of your time as consisting of several buckets, each having a different risk/reward ratio. If you have a full-time job that pays a flat salary, then most of your time is allocated to the security bucket, so you might want to shift some of that time to the entrepreneurial bucket to participate in the game for much greater gains. Maybe your job pays $20/hour, and you have the option of trying to make $50/hour doing consulting on the side, but your consulting efforts don’t always pay off. Some hours you make $50, but others you make $0. And as you slide the risk/reward ratio further, you may put yourself in the game for some of those delightful $10,000 hours.
You can also use non-monetary criteria for each bucket. With physical exercise you could have different buckets for allocating your time to aerobic conditioning, endurance training, strength training, stretching, sports, and fitness education. Each of these buckets will have a particular impact on your physical health. You would then allocate a certain percentage of your available exercise time to each of these buckets in accordance with your fitness goals. I remember when I started exercising regularly, all I did was running (aerobics). Then I got into distance running (endurance). Today I do about 40% aerobics, 45% strength training, and 15% disc golf (sports). I had the most balanced allocation when I trained in Tae Kwon Do, which was a great blend of everything.
It’s up to you to decide what particular allocation works best for you, whether you’re trying to get better returns on your money, your time, your energy, your goals, or something else. Working like a monomaniac on any one thing for too long will unbalance you, as will neglecting a key area for too long. Intelligent asset allocation can help you consciously determine the right mix that keeps you in the sweet spot of balancing risk vs. reward, work vs. leisure, strength vs. flexibility, solo time vs. social time, and so on.
My blog get money from $1140 (Sep 2005) to $12K (Sep 2006)
Recently I took a 3-week course on financial planning offered through UNLV. The most important topic covered was asset allocation. Asset allocation refers to how you allocate the money you have available to invest. What percentage of your money goes into your secure, moderate growth, and aggressive growth baskets?
You have many options for where to invest your money, and every option has a different risk/reward ratio. You can put all your money in the high risk/reward basket, such as aggressive growth stocks, and you may enjoy great gains, but you’ll also suffer huge losses when things go badly. On the other hand, you can put all your money in the low risk/reward basket and keep your assets secure, but then your gains will be very modest. If your gains are taxable, you need to make about 7% just to stay even, since you have to cover inflation + taxes (based on typical USA figures).
The point of intelligent asset allocation is to enjoy strong gains without taking on too much risk of losing your entire principal and having to start over from scratch. So you want to have some money in the aggressive growth bucket, so you have the potential to enjoy some big wins when things go well. But you also want to keep some money in your secure bucket, so you have backup funds to get back in the game if your aggressive investments go bust. Asset allocation involves determining how much to put in each bucket.
I’ve made mistakes on both sides. As a young adult, I kept all my money in a regular savings account, earning minimal interest while the market was soaring. Then in my late 20s, I put most of my money in stocks that lost 70-80% of their value during the dotcom bust, and it took me a while to rebuild those cash reserves. Both of these were good lessons for me.
A financial investment example
As an interesting illustration from the course, consider this hypothetical example. Suppose Erin and I are each going to invest $100,000 for 25 years, and we want to maximize our returns.
I decide to play it safe and stick the whole $100K in a fairly secure investment that yields 7% per year.
Erin decides to split her money into $20K chunks and invests in five different vehicles, which perform as follows:
* $20K is lost completely
* $20K returns 0%, so you only get the original $20K back
* $20K is invested at 5%
* $20K is invested at 10%
* $20K is invested at 12%
Who gets the better total return? Let’s see how the numbers add up:
My 7% investment turns that $100K into $572,542 after 25 years.
Erin’s returns are as follows:
* $20K lost = $0
* $20K @ 0% = $20K
* $20K @ 5% = $69,626
* $20K @ 10% = $241,139
* $20K @ 12% = $395,769
So Erin’s grand total is $726,534. That’s $153,992 more than what my 7% investment earned. It’s interesting that 40% of her initial investment returned zero or negative returns, and another 20% underperformed my 7% return. But those higher returns of 10% and 12% really pay off. Even though most of Erin’s picks were poor performers, being right just 40% of the time was all she needed.
By diversifying her investments, Erin was able to participate in the big winners while not being wiped out by the losers. Of course it would have been great if she could have invested the whole amount at 12% or more, but this example assumes she did her best to pick five potential winners.
To optimize your long-term investment gains, you need to optimize your asset allocation. Maybe you start with 1/3 of your money in safe investments like municipal bonds, another 1/3 in growth funds, and the last 1/3 in aggressive growth stocks. Over time these percentages will drift as each bucket grows at a different rate, so you need to rebalance them.
When your riskier investments lose money, rebalancing means transferring money out of your secure bucket to get back in the game and try again. And when your riskier investments pay off big, rebalancing means transferring money back to your secure bucket to lock in your gains. This strategy allows you to continue enjoying some big investment payoffs without taking on too much risk.
Beyond financial planning
After the financial planning course I realized that the strategy of asset allocation can be applied to other areas of life, such as work, relationships, and health.
Consider how you allocate your time. You can think of your time as consisting of several buckets, each having a different risk/reward ratio. If you have a full-time job that pays a flat salary, then most of your time is allocated to the security bucket, so you might want to shift some of that time to the entrepreneurial bucket to participate in the game for much greater gains. Maybe your job pays $20/hour, and you have the option of trying to make $50/hour doing consulting on the side, but your consulting efforts don’t always pay off. Some hours you make $50, but others you make $0. And as you slide the risk/reward ratio further, you may put yourself in the game for some of those delightful $10,000 hours.
You can also use non-monetary criteria for each bucket. With physical exercise you could have different buckets for allocating your time to aerobic conditioning, endurance training, strength training, stretching, sports, and fitness education. Each of these buckets will have a particular impact on your physical health. You would then allocate a certain percentage of your available exercise time to each of these buckets in accordance with your fitness goals. I remember when I started exercising regularly, all I did was running (aerobics). Then I got into distance running (endurance). Today I do about 40% aerobics, 45% strength training, and 15% disc golf (sports). I had the most balanced allocation when I trained in Tae Kwon Do, which was a great blend of everything.
It’s up to you to decide what particular allocation works best for you, whether you’re trying to get better returns on your money, your time, your energy, your goals, or something else. Working like a monomaniac on any one thing for too long will unbalance you, as will neglecting a key area for too long. Intelligent asset allocation can help you consciously determine the right mix that keeps you in the sweet spot of balancing risk vs. reward, work vs. leisure, strength vs. flexibility, solo time vs. social time, and so on.
Just Lie?$10,000 a day from Google’s Adsense
The following is Jeremy Shoemaker(Shoemoney.com) opinion-
Well… I can not believe so many people have bought into this whole plentyoffish.com . Actually I can. Social engineering totally amazes me.
Check out the list of people that have bought into this guys bullsh*t
Andrew Johnson
Robert Scoble
I remember when this guy was posting he was making 30$ a day from AdSense on webmasterworld. Then he solicited some people to scrape dating profiles of females from random sites so he could fill his dating website with female profiles.
Then he puts out some fake press releases with bullsh*t statistics like 5th largest dating site.
Now he makes up some crap that he is making 10k/day from AdSense.
He hires people to blog about his bull crap and sends email to every blogger (including me) offering a “exclusive interview”. I called him out when he emailed me and told him I was not buying into his bullocks.
I have to give it up to him. He now has a successful site that people go to. Its possible he makes 1k/ a day NOW from AdSense.
Its kind of funny he makes 10k a day yet is not a premium publisher ?! give me a break dudes…. you look so stupid when you buy into his crap.
Well… I can not believe so many people have bought into this whole plentyoffish.com . Actually I can. Social engineering totally amazes me.
Check out the list of people that have bought into this guys bullsh*t
Andrew Johnson
Robert Scoble
I remember when this guy was posting he was making 30$ a day from AdSense on webmasterworld. Then he solicited some people to scrape dating profiles of females from random sites so he could fill his dating website with female profiles.
Then he puts out some fake press releases with bullsh*t statistics like 5th largest dating site.
Now he makes up some crap that he is making 10k/day from AdSense.
He hires people to blog about his bull crap and sends email to every blogger (including me) offering a “exclusive interview”. I called him out when he emailed me and told him I was not buying into his bullocks.
I have to give it up to him. He now has a successful site that people go to. Its possible he makes 1k/ a day NOW from AdSense.
Its kind of funny he makes 10k a day yet is not a premium publisher ?! give me a break dudes…. you look so stupid when you buy into his crap.
$10,000 a day from Google’s Adsense
Duncan Riley and Richard Giles talk with Markus Frind from Plentyoffish.com, the largest free dating site in the world with over 15 million pageviews a day.
Markus is a one man show, earning $10,000 a day from Google’s Adsense. In fact, he mentioned after the show that that number is now dated. We discuss his business, how he runs it on only several Window’s systems (Microsoft’s perfect advertisement), Adsense, SEO’s getting into web sites development, his web design (or lack of), and the normal question about whether it’s a good time to start a web business.
Apologize upfront. I’m still stunned at his success, so I spent most of the conversation sounding as such, and Duncan was under the weather with a sick child at home, so he was a little distracted. There was also a strange echo on the line, but you get the gist.
Download the podcast
Markus is a one man show, earning $10,000 a day from Google’s Adsense. In fact, he mentioned after the show that that number is now dated. We discuss his business, how he runs it on only several Window’s systems (Microsoft’s perfect advertisement), Adsense, SEO’s getting into web sites development, his web design (or lack of), and the normal question about whether it’s a good time to start a web business.
Apologize upfront. I’m still stunned at his success, so I spent most of the conversation sounding as such, and Duncan was under the weather with a sick child at home, so he was a little distracted. There was also a strange echo on the line, but you get the gist.
Download the podcast
Blogging for Dollars:$60,000 revenue every month
It's not just a hobby - some small sites are making big money. Here's how to turn your passion into an online empire.
By Paul Sloan and Paul Kaihla, Business 2.0 Magazine
(Business 2.0) -- Michael Arrington is a partying kind of guy. While showing off his home in Atherton, Calif., he boasts about how he crammed 500 people into his one-acre backyard at a bash in February. Then there are the official parties, like the one he threw in mid-August at August Capital, a nearby venture firm. Arrington posted an open invitation on his website at 3 a.m. By sunrise, all 500 spots were taken; the onslaught of traffic crashed his site. "I knew it would be fast," says Arrington, who houses so many out-of-towners in his ranch home that he often isn't sure who's crashing on which mattress on which floor in which room.
Arrington, a 36-year-old entrepreneur behind a long list of unrecognizable startups, has suddenly become one of the rising stars of Silicon Valley. Why? The answer lies in TechCrunch, Arrington's blog about new technologies and companies. In the year since he launched the site, he has amassed such a strong following that he's become a go-to person for VCs and tech execs looking to leak corporate tidbits or announce news. More than 1.5 million readers regularly check out his site. But here's what gives Arrington real distinction: He's pulling in $60,000 in ad revenue every month. That's 10 times what the site was making earlier this year, which was when Arrington, convinced of the potentially monstrous riches ahead, quit his day job as president of a startup to blog full-time.
With Internet-like speed, blogs have gone from self-indulgent hobbies to flourishing businesses. Real businesses, with real revenue streams from real advertisers--not overhyped next big things with pick-a-number valuations based on selling out someday to some overenthusiastic big-media sugar daddy. Boing Boing, a four-person operation that bills itself as a directory of wonderful things, is on track to gross an estimated $1 million in ad revenue this year. The digital-media news site PaidContent.org, headquartered in the second bedroom of a Santa Monica apartment, is set to post even more than that. And Fark.com, a site packed with sophomoric humor run by a lone guy in Lexington, Ky., is on pace to become a multimillion-dollar property. In short, some of the most popular blogs, long the bane of the mainstream media, are themselves becoming mainstream.
What has changed? For starters, blogs today benefit from what might be termed uneconomies of scale: They are so cheap to create and operate that a lone blogger or a small team can, with the ever-expanding reach of the Internet, amass vast audiences and generate levels of profit on a per-employee basis that traditional media companies can only fantasize about.
At the same time, advertisers--shunning old-line media in favor of the Web--are discovering the unique power of blogs. Blogs offer a personal touch in the mediascape; small sites have become our guides to a content-saturated world. As such, their recommendations are highly valued by readers--which naturally has made advertisers take notice. In recent months, big-name companies like Banana Republic and Coca-Cola (Charts) have for the first time run campaigns on blogs, in the belief that blog communities often consist of concentrated numbers of the passionate and influential people all marketers want to reach. Intel bought its first blog ad in March; now all its ads run on blogs as well as traditional outlets. Says Thom Campbell, head of media strategy for Intel (Charts), "The audience on blogs is the cream of the crop."
But before you quit your day job, consider that this isn't easy money, nor is it guaranteed to last. For one thing, the market is small right now: Web ad agency Organic puts ad spending on blogs at $40 million this year. Bloggers are typically selling only about a third of their available ad space at top rates. (The rest goes at heavily discounted prices.) And as with any business dependent on the mercurial ad market, prone as it is to sudden skids, the threat of crashing and burning always looms.
Still, the blogging-for-dollars phenomenon is only in its infancy, and already blog ad spending is roughly twice what it was last year. With overall Web advertising expected to grow by 50 percent to $23.6 billion in 2010, it's certain that more and more ad dollars will land on blogs. For a growing cadre of bloggers, the opportunities to score fat profits from pumping out posts on whatever their particular passions might be are widening--and one consequence could be a radical reshaping of our notions of how to build a successful media company.
The monetization of blogging can trace its roots to late 2002, when Google (Charts) created a revolutionary system that allowed anyone with a website to run ads. The technology, called AdSense, matched ads with a site's content. Each time a visitor clicked on a linked ad, the site's owner got paid (a model now referred to as cost-per-click advertising). For the first time, anyone could be a real publisher with real advertisers, with no need for the big sales forces that magazines, newspapers, and other traditional media employ.
For do-it-yourselfers, however, the revenue stream created by AdSense in its early days was for the most part simply beer money. At the same time, display ads--the banners, buttons, and skyscrapers that had fallen into disfavor with the bursting of the Internet bubble in 2000--began to make a comeback on major destination sites such as Yahoo (Charts) and MSN. Marketers pay for those kinds of ads based on a formula known as CPM, which stands for cost per 1,000 impressions.
The promise of these two Web advertising models whet the whistles of wannabe publishers, and among the first was Nick Denton. He bet that he could run sites as low-cost one- or two-person operations and offer advertisers ready-made, easily targeted niche audiences. He reasoned that he could eventually one-up automated systems by handselling display ads for his sites at premium CPMs. But to lure advertisers into uncharted blog waters, he initially gave away ad space for free.
Denton launched his company in New York in 2002 with the media gossip site Gawker and the gadget blog Gizmodo. Gawker Media now runs 13 sites, including such edgy titles as Defamer and Wonkette. Denton recently announced that he's "battening down the hatches" and selling two sites, but his core properties are on a tear: Gawker Media sites clocked 66 million pageviews in June, more than double the traffic they saw a year earlier. Denton won't discuss financial details, but industry experts estimate that Gawker Media will bring in as much as $3 million in revenue this year. Gawker Media's average CPM is between $8 and $10; CPM rates on Google AdSense and competing automated systems are estimated at anywhere from 50 cents to a few bucks.
Another pioneer, Jason Calacanis, provided a big shot of momentum to the blogging-for-bucks phenomenon last October when he sold Weblogs Inc., his conglomeration of 85 sites, to AOL for a reported $25 million. "Everyone in the ad industry took notice after that deal," says Mark Kingdon, CEO of Organic.
All the while, big-picture changes have been unfolding in the background, contributing to today's blogging business sweet spot. By constantly improving its algorithms, for instance, Google engineers have made AdSense a far more powerful placer of more-varied and better-targeted ads; AdSense alone is expected to generate sales of $4 billion this year.
At a more fundamental level, the Web has become deeply embedded in our daily lives, for business and pleasure, in ways no advertiser can ignore. Today 71 percent of American households have Web access; Americans ages 13 to 24 now spend more time online than they do in front of the TV.
As for blogs, they've exploded: There are 50 million of them, and two new ones are launched every second, according to blog search engine Technorati. To some experts, all these developments mean but one thing. "This time, Web advertising is for real," concludes Karen Francis, CEO of San Francisco-based ad agency Publicis & Hal Riney. "And marketers are all looking for new opportunities online."
Trying to provide those opportunities has become the mission of a host of would-be blog entrepreneurs. John Battelle, a founding editor of Wired magazine and the creator of the now-defunct Industry Standard (as well as a freelance columnist for Business 2.0), was working on a book about Google when he had an epiphany: Where mainstream publishers were spending a fortune buying subscriber lists and shoving subscription cards into magazines, bloggers were building huge audiences for free. Yet even popular bloggers couldn't make a living full-time; existing networks like Google and BlogAds weren't paying enough.
Unlike Denton, Battelle had no interest in owning sites. He figured he could simply peruse the blogosphere and analyze Web tracking data to find out which bloggers were already generating heavy traffic, and then serve as a middleman between them and advertisers. He launched his startup, called Federated Media Publishing, last fall with seed money from the New York Times Co. (Charts) and eBay (Charts) founder Pierre Omidyar.
Battelle compares FM's model to a record company. He and his team are the band managers; the bloggers are the bands. The key difference is that bloggers own their content, earning 60 cents of every ad dollar. Like a band manager, FM works closely with its acts, yet ultimately it's up to the bloggers to keep pumping out material. "If they stop writing, the ads go away," Battelle says.
He has signed about 75 of the most popular bloggers of various stripes and hopes to land a few hundred in all. His authors range from tech-oriented guys like Arrington and Om Malik, who writes about telecom on GigaOm and just left his full-time gig with Business 2.0, to Heather Armstrong, whose deeply personal Dooce site is bringing in enough money to allow her family to live comfortably. Her enterprise has a staff of two: Armstrong and her husband.
FM's eight-person sales force has been aggressively approaching big marketers, armed with detailed and persuasive demographics. The data has helped FM steadily boost ad rates on its sites. The average CPM doubled in the past six months to roughly $8. The aim is to get rates between $20 and $30, which, Battelle says, would put his blogs on par with sites like CNET and NYTimes.com. But thanks to the uneconomies-of-scale twist, overhead at FM sites like Boing Boing, Battelle's top act, is almost invisible compared with that of any mainline media concern.
Journalist Mark Frauenfelder founded Boing Boing, then a paper-based cyberpunk zine, in 1988 and took it online in 1995. Four years later he accepted a freelance assignment to write what became one of the first stories about blogs--and afterward decided to turn his zine into one. He discovered the power of building traffic by "deep linking" to specific stories or items on other sites. Other bloggers would return the favor, and the community grew. "I was getting a thousand visitors a day, and I thought, 'Oh, that's fun,'" Frauenfelder recalls.
Eventually he discovered that the more posts Boing Boing put up, the more traffic grew; he recruited three friends to keep the posts coming hot and heavy. By 2004 the site had 20,000 visitors a day, rivaling many mainstream magazine sites. But the team was spending about a thousand bucks a month in Web hosting fees. That's when Frauenfelder called Battelle, a former colleague, and began selling ads for the site. Today, Boing Boing's roughly 325,000 daily visitors make it the most lucrative property in Battelle's stable. Though not all of Boing Boing's ad inventory is sold, the site will gross more than $1 million this year, based on CPMs and traffic. "It's turned out to be a good business," Frauenfelder says.
But Battelle believes an eccentric blog called Fark.com, a collection of reader-submitted links to amusing videos, jokes, and curiosities from all over the Web, could become the most profitable site in mainstream blogdom. Already it vies with FM stablemate MetaFilter for the top spot in blog traffic rankings. Fark founder Drew Curtis made up the site's offbeat name as code for the real F-word when posting in chat rooms in the early 1990s. In 1993, while a student in England, Curtis began sending e-mail messages to friends back home with weird items he found in the news. In 1999 he decided to post them on a webpage.
Fark is incredibly cost-efficient: Almost all of its content is generated by its readers, and aside from Curtis it has just two contract employees, both tech guys. Fark devotees post links to news items accompanied by rubrics like "spiffy" and "dumbass," annotate them with blurbs of text, and open them up for comment. Controversial items about politics, religion, or sex ignite all-out flame wars--and, naturally, boost traffic, which overall stands at 40 million pageviews a month. The beautiful part is that virtually none of the content (pictures, videos, etc.) is hosted on Fark, which simply links to the goodies. This means that, despite its huge traffic, Fark doesn't incur the crushing bandwidth fees that eat into profit at sites like video trove YouTube.
Without a dedicated sales force, however, Curtis had trouble drawing mainstream advertisers. That changed after News Corp. (Charts) purchased MySpace and AOL bought Weblogs, moves that only boosted advertiser interest in blogs. "That hit like a hammer," Curtis says. Within days of the Weblogs sale, Curtis inked a deal with his first major advertiser, the National Hockey League. Curtis recently signed on with Battelle's FM and cut a side deal with Dennis Digital, a division of Maxim magazine's publisher. Dennis approached Curtis because Fark's audience demographic matches Maxim's. Curtis won't disclose his current revenue but insists that he can soon log monthly ad sales of $600,000 to $800,000. Battelle expects Fark to become the first indie blog to earn a million dollars a year in profit. "Fark's going to get there," he says.
Arrington also stumbled into the blog business. He was tossing back drinks at a bachelor party in Belgrade in 2005 when another Silicon Valley entrepreneur called with an idea for a startup based on the new technologies that have come to be lumped together as Web 2.0. Arrington began doing research about the emerging tech trend. He couldn't find one comprehensive source, and as he compiled his information, he decided to post it on a blog. "It was purely a hobby," he says.
People began reading. People began posting. Traffic grew. In addition to building many startups, during the 1990s Arrington had been a lawyer at the Valley's prestigious Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, where he worked on IPOs and mergers, and his sources from those days began feeding him information. In March, for instance, he published screenshots of Google's new calendar application before its release. He was quickly contacted by a Google attorney, who asked that he reveal the source of the leak. (He refused.)
More and more people started to flock to TechCrunch to read scoops and analysis about new ventures. Arrington's big financial boost came a couple of months ago when he redesigned the site. He created six small boxes and announced that he was selling ad space. They sold out in a few days.
That's no surprise, considering how affluent and techie his readers are. Thirty-six percent say they spend more than 40 hours a week viewing online content, and even better, they check out TechCrunch multiple times each day. More than a third earn salaries topping $100,000, with 12 percent making more than $250,000. It's a coveted group for some advertisers.
"Sixty percent of our business is from startups," says Jeff Kearl, chief marketing officer for software maker Logoworks, which recently bought a TechCrunch sponsorship. "Arrington's blog is the epicenter of the startup community."
Big brands also want in. Apple and Hewlett-Packard just signed on to advertise on TechCrunch. Intel is planning to run ads on the site, complementing ads the chip giant has already placed on sites like Boing Boing and Gizmodo. A major appeal, Intel's Campbell says, is that a blog's unique interactive properties can vastly increase the reach of an ad, as it bounces around the Web and triggers comment on myriad sites.
Intel's current campaign for its Core 2 Duo chips brags about performance measures, something Intel hasn't done in its ads in years. By running these ads on blogs occupied by tech fanatics, Campbell expects that people will test the company's claims and write about them. "We're going out on a limb," he says. "But I'm always looking for integrity where we advertise. And these authors are passionate about their subjects."
Success stories like Arrington's have helped spur a gold rush-style stampede into the blogosphere. One of the most ambitious efforts comes from Sugar Publishing, founded in April by 32-year-old San Francisco software entrepreneur Brian Sugar with $250,000 of his own money.
Sugar Publishing's mainstay property is PopSugar, a fast-growing celebrity gossip site with 12 million monthly pageviews, an audience that took sites like Boing Boing and Fark years to build. Sugar Publishing doesn't expect to earn a dime until the end of next year, but just two months after it was founded, a Boston-based VC offered to pump in $2.5 million, valuing the company at $10 million.
PopSugar and a new generation of blogs, like Egotastic and PerezHilton.com, have built massive followings in just the past few months by devoting themselves to celebrity gossip. "We create editorial for an ADD culture," Sugar says. His ambition is to drive traffic from his gossip blog to 12 ancillary sites he'll launch during the next two years, all of them aimed at women younger than 35. The projections that Sugar shows investors claim that his small blog empire will bring in $15 million in revenue in 2008 and $40 million in 2009.
Far-fetched? Maybe. But consider this: Sugar hasn't even hired a sales staff yet, but Banana Republic already approached Sugar Publishing and bought out its entire ad inventory for a week in July. The campaign, called "Drop Your Pants," offered customers a discount if they donated pants to charity. It was the company's first blog buy.
"People who read blogs are more likely to recommend products," says Chris Nicklo, Banana Republic's vice president for brand management. "There was an amazing viral explosion."
The rapid march into the blogosphere isn't limited to entrepreneurs and advertisers: Investors are moving in too, including some with lofty pedigrees. Alan Patricof, a highly regarded VC who early on bankrolled the likes of Apple (Charts), AOL, and New York magazine, recently invested in ContentNext, the publisher of PaidContent.org and other blogs run by journalist Rafat Ali. Ali's blogs are logging about 5 million pageviews a month, and he's on pace to generate revenue of more than $1 million this year. And VC firm Softbank Capital just invested $4 million in Arianna Huffington's political and news blog, the Huffington Post, a site also backed by $1 million from Patricof's firm.
Despite all the ferment a critical question remains unanswered: Do blog ads work? Sure, readers can click on ads and view an advertiser's website, potentially even making a purchase, but that rarely happens. Intel's Campbell says the industry standard is a click-through rate of less than 1 percent.
But major advertisers aren't just looking for click-throughs; they're looking to get in front of the right audiences. "Blogs are very targeted, so one would project that ROI is very good," says Publicis & Hal Riney's Francis. "But it's still early. What may get ad dollars today may not get them tomorrow."
Any downturn in the economy and ad market will, of course, hurt bloggers. The sheer numbers of blogging-for-dollars artists charging into the game could also muddy the market and put pressure on ad rates. And profitable blogging is hard work; a solo act like Dooce's Armstrong must post constantly to keep her traffic and ad revenue up. "There are days when I panic," she says.
Still, in some ways the lean, do-it-yourself ethos of blog businesses makes them ideally equipped to deal with business cycle blows. It's far easier to weather a downturn when your costs are next to nothing. Plus, many players are diversifying, even within the blogosphere. "I know that I'm riding the Web 2.0 wave," says Arrington, who points out that he turns down frequent VC offers, some in the $5 million range, because he doesn't want to give up editorial control. Now he's preparing for a day when the wave crests.
He just launched a gadget site and staffed it with a former writer for Gizmodo, which is part of Denton's network and is packed with big-name advertisers such as Nokia and Sprint. He has plans for a gaming site and a site devoted exclusively to analyzing heavy-duty enterprise software. Even as he expands, however, he expects to keep his expenses--now about 12 percent of revenue--at no more than 30 percent.
And occasionally there are bonuses. With little effort, Arrington got dozens of sponsors, mostly Web 2.0 startups and VCs, to bankroll the party he held at August Capital. So after a night of revelry, Arrington had pocketed an extra $50,000. Now that's something to blog about.
By Paul Sloan and Paul Kaihla, Business 2.0 Magazine
(Business 2.0) -- Michael Arrington is a partying kind of guy. While showing off his home in Atherton, Calif., he boasts about how he crammed 500 people into his one-acre backyard at a bash in February. Then there are the official parties, like the one he threw in mid-August at August Capital, a nearby venture firm. Arrington posted an open invitation on his website at 3 a.m. By sunrise, all 500 spots were taken; the onslaught of traffic crashed his site. "I knew it would be fast," says Arrington, who houses so many out-of-towners in his ranch home that he often isn't sure who's crashing on which mattress on which floor in which room.
Arrington, a 36-year-old entrepreneur behind a long list of unrecognizable startups, has suddenly become one of the rising stars of Silicon Valley. Why? The answer lies in TechCrunch, Arrington's blog about new technologies and companies. In the year since he launched the site, he has amassed such a strong following that he's become a go-to person for VCs and tech execs looking to leak corporate tidbits or announce news. More than 1.5 million readers regularly check out his site. But here's what gives Arrington real distinction: He's pulling in $60,000 in ad revenue every month. That's 10 times what the site was making earlier this year, which was when Arrington, convinced of the potentially monstrous riches ahead, quit his day job as president of a startup to blog full-time.
With Internet-like speed, blogs have gone from self-indulgent hobbies to flourishing businesses. Real businesses, with real revenue streams from real advertisers--not overhyped next big things with pick-a-number valuations based on selling out someday to some overenthusiastic big-media sugar daddy. Boing Boing, a four-person operation that bills itself as a directory of wonderful things, is on track to gross an estimated $1 million in ad revenue this year. The digital-media news site PaidContent.org, headquartered in the second bedroom of a Santa Monica apartment, is set to post even more than that. And Fark.com, a site packed with sophomoric humor run by a lone guy in Lexington, Ky., is on pace to become a multimillion-dollar property. In short, some of the most popular blogs, long the bane of the mainstream media, are themselves becoming mainstream.
What has changed? For starters, blogs today benefit from what might be termed uneconomies of scale: They are so cheap to create and operate that a lone blogger or a small team can, with the ever-expanding reach of the Internet, amass vast audiences and generate levels of profit on a per-employee basis that traditional media companies can only fantasize about.
At the same time, advertisers--shunning old-line media in favor of the Web--are discovering the unique power of blogs. Blogs offer a personal touch in the mediascape; small sites have become our guides to a content-saturated world. As such, their recommendations are highly valued by readers--which naturally has made advertisers take notice. In recent months, big-name companies like Banana Republic and Coca-Cola (Charts) have for the first time run campaigns on blogs, in the belief that blog communities often consist of concentrated numbers of the passionate and influential people all marketers want to reach. Intel bought its first blog ad in March; now all its ads run on blogs as well as traditional outlets. Says Thom Campbell, head of media strategy for Intel (Charts), "The audience on blogs is the cream of the crop."
But before you quit your day job, consider that this isn't easy money, nor is it guaranteed to last. For one thing, the market is small right now: Web ad agency Organic puts ad spending on blogs at $40 million this year. Bloggers are typically selling only about a third of their available ad space at top rates. (The rest goes at heavily discounted prices.) And as with any business dependent on the mercurial ad market, prone as it is to sudden skids, the threat of crashing and burning always looms.
Still, the blogging-for-dollars phenomenon is only in its infancy, and already blog ad spending is roughly twice what it was last year. With overall Web advertising expected to grow by 50 percent to $23.6 billion in 2010, it's certain that more and more ad dollars will land on blogs. For a growing cadre of bloggers, the opportunities to score fat profits from pumping out posts on whatever their particular passions might be are widening--and one consequence could be a radical reshaping of our notions of how to build a successful media company.
The monetization of blogging can trace its roots to late 2002, when Google (Charts) created a revolutionary system that allowed anyone with a website to run ads. The technology, called AdSense, matched ads with a site's content. Each time a visitor clicked on a linked ad, the site's owner got paid (a model now referred to as cost-per-click advertising). For the first time, anyone could be a real publisher with real advertisers, with no need for the big sales forces that magazines, newspapers, and other traditional media employ.
For do-it-yourselfers, however, the revenue stream created by AdSense in its early days was for the most part simply beer money. At the same time, display ads--the banners, buttons, and skyscrapers that had fallen into disfavor with the bursting of the Internet bubble in 2000--began to make a comeback on major destination sites such as Yahoo (Charts) and MSN. Marketers pay for those kinds of ads based on a formula known as CPM, which stands for cost per 1,000 impressions.
The promise of these two Web advertising models whet the whistles of wannabe publishers, and among the first was Nick Denton. He bet that he could run sites as low-cost one- or two-person operations and offer advertisers ready-made, easily targeted niche audiences. He reasoned that he could eventually one-up automated systems by handselling display ads for his sites at premium CPMs. But to lure advertisers into uncharted blog waters, he initially gave away ad space for free.
Denton launched his company in New York in 2002 with the media gossip site Gawker and the gadget blog Gizmodo. Gawker Media now runs 13 sites, including such edgy titles as Defamer and Wonkette. Denton recently announced that he's "battening down the hatches" and selling two sites, but his core properties are on a tear: Gawker Media sites clocked 66 million pageviews in June, more than double the traffic they saw a year earlier. Denton won't discuss financial details, but industry experts estimate that Gawker Media will bring in as much as $3 million in revenue this year. Gawker Media's average CPM is between $8 and $10; CPM rates on Google AdSense and competing automated systems are estimated at anywhere from 50 cents to a few bucks.
Another pioneer, Jason Calacanis, provided a big shot of momentum to the blogging-for-bucks phenomenon last October when he sold Weblogs Inc., his conglomeration of 85 sites, to AOL for a reported $25 million. "Everyone in the ad industry took notice after that deal," says Mark Kingdon, CEO of Organic.
All the while, big-picture changes have been unfolding in the background, contributing to today's blogging business sweet spot. By constantly improving its algorithms, for instance, Google engineers have made AdSense a far more powerful placer of more-varied and better-targeted ads; AdSense alone is expected to generate sales of $4 billion this year.
At a more fundamental level, the Web has become deeply embedded in our daily lives, for business and pleasure, in ways no advertiser can ignore. Today 71 percent of American households have Web access; Americans ages 13 to 24 now spend more time online than they do in front of the TV.
As for blogs, they've exploded: There are 50 million of them, and two new ones are launched every second, according to blog search engine Technorati. To some experts, all these developments mean but one thing. "This time, Web advertising is for real," concludes Karen Francis, CEO of San Francisco-based ad agency Publicis & Hal Riney. "And marketers are all looking for new opportunities online."
Trying to provide those opportunities has become the mission of a host of would-be blog entrepreneurs. John Battelle, a founding editor of Wired magazine and the creator of the now-defunct Industry Standard (as well as a freelance columnist for Business 2.0), was working on a book about Google when he had an epiphany: Where mainstream publishers were spending a fortune buying subscriber lists and shoving subscription cards into magazines, bloggers were building huge audiences for free. Yet even popular bloggers couldn't make a living full-time; existing networks like Google and BlogAds weren't paying enough.
Unlike Denton, Battelle had no interest in owning sites. He figured he could simply peruse the blogosphere and analyze Web tracking data to find out which bloggers were already generating heavy traffic, and then serve as a middleman between them and advertisers. He launched his startup, called Federated Media Publishing, last fall with seed money from the New York Times Co. (Charts) and eBay (Charts) founder Pierre Omidyar.
Battelle compares FM's model to a record company. He and his team are the band managers; the bloggers are the bands. The key difference is that bloggers own their content, earning 60 cents of every ad dollar. Like a band manager, FM works closely with its acts, yet ultimately it's up to the bloggers to keep pumping out material. "If they stop writing, the ads go away," Battelle says.
He has signed about 75 of the most popular bloggers of various stripes and hopes to land a few hundred in all. His authors range from tech-oriented guys like Arrington and Om Malik, who writes about telecom on GigaOm and just left his full-time gig with Business 2.0, to Heather Armstrong, whose deeply personal Dooce site is bringing in enough money to allow her family to live comfortably. Her enterprise has a staff of two: Armstrong and her husband.
FM's eight-person sales force has been aggressively approaching big marketers, armed with detailed and persuasive demographics. The data has helped FM steadily boost ad rates on its sites. The average CPM doubled in the past six months to roughly $8. The aim is to get rates between $20 and $30, which, Battelle says, would put his blogs on par with sites like CNET and NYTimes.com. But thanks to the uneconomies-of-scale twist, overhead at FM sites like Boing Boing, Battelle's top act, is almost invisible compared with that of any mainline media concern.
Journalist Mark Frauenfelder founded Boing Boing, then a paper-based cyberpunk zine, in 1988 and took it online in 1995. Four years later he accepted a freelance assignment to write what became one of the first stories about blogs--and afterward decided to turn his zine into one. He discovered the power of building traffic by "deep linking" to specific stories or items on other sites. Other bloggers would return the favor, and the community grew. "I was getting a thousand visitors a day, and I thought, 'Oh, that's fun,'" Frauenfelder recalls.
Eventually he discovered that the more posts Boing Boing put up, the more traffic grew; he recruited three friends to keep the posts coming hot and heavy. By 2004 the site had 20,000 visitors a day, rivaling many mainstream magazine sites. But the team was spending about a thousand bucks a month in Web hosting fees. That's when Frauenfelder called Battelle, a former colleague, and began selling ads for the site. Today, Boing Boing's roughly 325,000 daily visitors make it the most lucrative property in Battelle's stable. Though not all of Boing Boing's ad inventory is sold, the site will gross more than $1 million this year, based on CPMs and traffic. "It's turned out to be a good business," Frauenfelder says.
But Battelle believes an eccentric blog called Fark.com, a collection of reader-submitted links to amusing videos, jokes, and curiosities from all over the Web, could become the most profitable site in mainstream blogdom. Already it vies with FM stablemate MetaFilter for the top spot in blog traffic rankings. Fark founder Drew Curtis made up the site's offbeat name as code for the real F-word when posting in chat rooms in the early 1990s. In 1993, while a student in England, Curtis began sending e-mail messages to friends back home with weird items he found in the news. In 1999 he decided to post them on a webpage.
Fark is incredibly cost-efficient: Almost all of its content is generated by its readers, and aside from Curtis it has just two contract employees, both tech guys. Fark devotees post links to news items accompanied by rubrics like "spiffy" and "dumbass," annotate them with blurbs of text, and open them up for comment. Controversial items about politics, religion, or sex ignite all-out flame wars--and, naturally, boost traffic, which overall stands at 40 million pageviews a month. The beautiful part is that virtually none of the content (pictures, videos, etc.) is hosted on Fark, which simply links to the goodies. This means that, despite its huge traffic, Fark doesn't incur the crushing bandwidth fees that eat into profit at sites like video trove YouTube.
Without a dedicated sales force, however, Curtis had trouble drawing mainstream advertisers. That changed after News Corp. (Charts) purchased MySpace and AOL bought Weblogs, moves that only boosted advertiser interest in blogs. "That hit like a hammer," Curtis says. Within days of the Weblogs sale, Curtis inked a deal with his first major advertiser, the National Hockey League. Curtis recently signed on with Battelle's FM and cut a side deal with Dennis Digital, a division of Maxim magazine's publisher. Dennis approached Curtis because Fark's audience demographic matches Maxim's. Curtis won't disclose his current revenue but insists that he can soon log monthly ad sales of $600,000 to $800,000. Battelle expects Fark to become the first indie blog to earn a million dollars a year in profit. "Fark's going to get there," he says.
Arrington also stumbled into the blog business. He was tossing back drinks at a bachelor party in Belgrade in 2005 when another Silicon Valley entrepreneur called with an idea for a startup based on the new technologies that have come to be lumped together as Web 2.0. Arrington began doing research about the emerging tech trend. He couldn't find one comprehensive source, and as he compiled his information, he decided to post it on a blog. "It was purely a hobby," he says.
People began reading. People began posting. Traffic grew. In addition to building many startups, during the 1990s Arrington had been a lawyer at the Valley's prestigious Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, where he worked on IPOs and mergers, and his sources from those days began feeding him information. In March, for instance, he published screenshots of Google's new calendar application before its release. He was quickly contacted by a Google attorney, who asked that he reveal the source of the leak. (He refused.)
More and more people started to flock to TechCrunch to read scoops and analysis about new ventures. Arrington's big financial boost came a couple of months ago when he redesigned the site. He created six small boxes and announced that he was selling ad space. They sold out in a few days.
That's no surprise, considering how affluent and techie his readers are. Thirty-six percent say they spend more than 40 hours a week viewing online content, and even better, they check out TechCrunch multiple times each day. More than a third earn salaries topping $100,000, with 12 percent making more than $250,000. It's a coveted group for some advertisers.
"Sixty percent of our business is from startups," says Jeff Kearl, chief marketing officer for software maker Logoworks, which recently bought a TechCrunch sponsorship. "Arrington's blog is the epicenter of the startup community."
Big brands also want in. Apple and Hewlett-Packard just signed on to advertise on TechCrunch. Intel is planning to run ads on the site, complementing ads the chip giant has already placed on sites like Boing Boing and Gizmodo. A major appeal, Intel's Campbell says, is that a blog's unique interactive properties can vastly increase the reach of an ad, as it bounces around the Web and triggers comment on myriad sites.
Intel's current campaign for its Core 2 Duo chips brags about performance measures, something Intel hasn't done in its ads in years. By running these ads on blogs occupied by tech fanatics, Campbell expects that people will test the company's claims and write about them. "We're going out on a limb," he says. "But I'm always looking for integrity where we advertise. And these authors are passionate about their subjects."
Success stories like Arrington's have helped spur a gold rush-style stampede into the blogosphere. One of the most ambitious efforts comes from Sugar Publishing, founded in April by 32-year-old San Francisco software entrepreneur Brian Sugar with $250,000 of his own money.
Sugar Publishing's mainstay property is PopSugar, a fast-growing celebrity gossip site with 12 million monthly pageviews, an audience that took sites like Boing Boing and Fark years to build. Sugar Publishing doesn't expect to earn a dime until the end of next year, but just two months after it was founded, a Boston-based VC offered to pump in $2.5 million, valuing the company at $10 million.
PopSugar and a new generation of blogs, like Egotastic and PerezHilton.com, have built massive followings in just the past few months by devoting themselves to celebrity gossip. "We create editorial for an ADD culture," Sugar says. His ambition is to drive traffic from his gossip blog to 12 ancillary sites he'll launch during the next two years, all of them aimed at women younger than 35. The projections that Sugar shows investors claim that his small blog empire will bring in $15 million in revenue in 2008 and $40 million in 2009.
Far-fetched? Maybe. But consider this: Sugar hasn't even hired a sales staff yet, but Banana Republic already approached Sugar Publishing and bought out its entire ad inventory for a week in July. The campaign, called "Drop Your Pants," offered customers a discount if they donated pants to charity. It was the company's first blog buy.
"People who read blogs are more likely to recommend products," says Chris Nicklo, Banana Republic's vice president for brand management. "There was an amazing viral explosion."
The rapid march into the blogosphere isn't limited to entrepreneurs and advertisers: Investors are moving in too, including some with lofty pedigrees. Alan Patricof, a highly regarded VC who early on bankrolled the likes of Apple (Charts), AOL, and New York magazine, recently invested in ContentNext, the publisher of PaidContent.org and other blogs run by journalist Rafat Ali. Ali's blogs are logging about 5 million pageviews a month, and he's on pace to generate revenue of more than $1 million this year. And VC firm Softbank Capital just invested $4 million in Arianna Huffington's political and news blog, the Huffington Post, a site also backed by $1 million from Patricof's firm.
Despite all the ferment a critical question remains unanswered: Do blog ads work? Sure, readers can click on ads and view an advertiser's website, potentially even making a purchase, but that rarely happens. Intel's Campbell says the industry standard is a click-through rate of less than 1 percent.
But major advertisers aren't just looking for click-throughs; they're looking to get in front of the right audiences. "Blogs are very targeted, so one would project that ROI is very good," says Publicis & Hal Riney's Francis. "But it's still early. What may get ad dollars today may not get them tomorrow."
Any downturn in the economy and ad market will, of course, hurt bloggers. The sheer numbers of blogging-for-dollars artists charging into the game could also muddy the market and put pressure on ad rates. And profitable blogging is hard work; a solo act like Dooce's Armstrong must post constantly to keep her traffic and ad revenue up. "There are days when I panic," she says.
Still, in some ways the lean, do-it-yourself ethos of blog businesses makes them ideally equipped to deal with business cycle blows. It's far easier to weather a downturn when your costs are next to nothing. Plus, many players are diversifying, even within the blogosphere. "I know that I'm riding the Web 2.0 wave," says Arrington, who points out that he turns down frequent VC offers, some in the $5 million range, because he doesn't want to give up editorial control. Now he's preparing for a day when the wave crests.
He just launched a gadget site and staffed it with a former writer for Gizmodo, which is part of Denton's network and is packed with big-name advertisers such as Nokia and Sprint. He has plans for a gaming site and a site devoted exclusively to analyzing heavy-duty enterprise software. Even as he expands, however, he expects to keep his expenses--now about 12 percent of revenue--at no more than 30 percent.
And occasionally there are bonuses. With little effort, Arrington got dozens of sponsors, mostly Web 2.0 startups and VCs, to bankroll the party he held at August Capital. So after a night of revelry, Arrington had pocketed an extra $50,000. Now that's something to blog about.
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