The traffic volatility of a start-up blog
July 20, 2006 | Filed Under rich on eBay, learning from failure, Start ups, How to create a successful blog, Practical tips | 1 Comment
This is the stats over unique visitors to this blog the last month. The big spikes are due to the post about the “from mailroom clerk to CEO game from 1982.” This post was submitted by myself to fark, reddit, digg, shoutwire, joystiq and other PR & buzz sites and received some attention. If you think you have a post that will be of interest to such sites I see no problem in submitting them.
Not all hot tips from you to other sites are successfull though. My idea about selling 100 signed copies of a celebrity author’s book on eBay did not catch on. I sent some e-mails around promoting it, but no success. It was criticized for it’s unethical flavour and blatant use of child labour. It was so bad that it did not even generate a single spark of controversy.
Opportunity for bloggers with a long term horizon, short term profits suicides can sign up at PayPerPost
July 18, 2006 | Filed Under short term profits, money, Start ups, Entrepreneurship, Practical tips | 3 Comments
Yaro Starak is recruiting two bloggers for his Small Business Branding blog. The recruits will not get paid anything to start with, but if they prove their value he is willing to share the profits of the blog with them. The blog has a page rank of 6 and good authority within its niche. By taking the job Yaro tempts:
“Your public profile will be enhanced as will your personal brand, being exposed to the nearly 1000 daily readers who come to SmallBusinessBranding.com through the web and RSS readers. If our relationship proves successful SmallBusinessBranding.com will be re-branded to include your photographs, biographical and contact details.”
This is an opportunity to lay down some work now and milk the profits later. Do you have a brain? Do you want to raise your profile and know what to do with your increased reputation afterwards? Then go ahead and do it. The other way around is to make a few dollars short term and kill your own brand on the way by working for Pay Per Post.
Blogosphere links:
First impressions of Pay Per Post
Personal finance blogger considers making the suicide
My blog is now available through bloglines and all these other RSS things. Sign up via Feedburner and become the 2nd person to subscribe.
Make some money on Sunday’s World Cup final
July 6, 2006 | Filed Under Start ups, rich on eBay, Entrepreneurship, Practical tips, Business Opportunities, Money making as young | Leave a Comment
I surf around the money making sites of the blogosphere and found this little piece of gold: sell shirts that you make at a CafePress store on eBay.
Sunday is world cup final. Italy - France. Using this scheme you can make some money on Sunday. After the match is over you can sell shirts with the following slogans, sold on eBay (depending on the match incidents):
Italy - France: 2-1
Thierre Henry and Cristiano Ronaldo: The jokes of the Premiership.
It was not offside!
I am sure you can come up with your own suggestions.
The risks of selling your blog
July 6, 2006 | Filed Under Art of the Deal, Start ups, Entrepreneurship, How to create a successful blog, Money making as young | 1 Comment
College-Startup.com is a damn good blog with a great positioning in the blogosphere: One college student, on a quest, to make money.
Now it is put up for sale. Starting bid $1000. The price includes a Google PR rank of 5, unique design, pages indexed in Google, all the posts, a high technorati rank, links from high profile sites like ProBlogger and a monthly income of about $100 if I remember correctly.
The minute after I read the news, I removed my permanent link to College Startup.
But why Money Matador? Why are you removing the link to such a jolly fine blog?
The success and quality of blogs are heavily correlated to the inputs of the owner. A new owner may continue what was already started, he may even improve on the “product.” Or he may just put up lots of spam pages and monetize it with adsense to milk the juice of the site. Even though, there are probably cheaper domains to buy if you want to go that down that route.
Either way, I take down the link and wait for the outcome.
Hah! Nobody cares if your little pimple blog removes the link
Probably very true! But, if some other more influential blog owners think like me..
Another issue is the damage to the blog if it is not sold. Will the readers of the blog have the same relationship to it when they know the owner tried to sell it and was unsuccessful?
Let’s finish with a conspiracy theory
I am just writing this post to negotiate a lower price than the “buy now” price of $6500.
Edit:
He has already received a bid of $1200 and a blog real estate expert claims it is worth at least $1600.
How to get rich with credit card debt
July 2, 2006 | Filed Under credit cards, You've gone to the finest schools allright, Start ups, Entrepreneurship, Practical tips | 10 Comments
I attended a class of “Entrepreneurship” a few years ago. The lecturer mentioned some untraditional ways of funding your start-up. When traditional ways of acquiring capital like bank loans, angel investors or venture capital failed there are always opportunities for the creative entrepreneur. He told us that he knew a few entrepreneurs that started their companies with the help of credit card debt.
Examples of credit card money making ideas you can use straight away
Get started in the world of credit card debt start ups with these examples:
Idea #1: Selling on E-bay
Buy cheap goods from China. Pay with your credit card. Get the goods. Unload it on eBay. Pay credit card debt. Repeat.
Idea #2: Early bird, buy airline tickets from low cost airlines
There are a few times every year when low cost airlines release new routes and tickets. Subscribe to their e-mail lists and you will get informed when this is happening. Then you pull out your card, buy all the cheap tickets available. You wait a few weeks or months and start selling them with a healthy profit. A ticket that costs £10/$18 6 months in advance may cost £50/$90 a few weeks before departure. Your price must be a bit below the cost of buying it directly from the airline in order to attract buyers to “unknown you” instead of big safe low cost airline. It is a matter of trust, but price can compensate.
The window of opportunity for this idea is closing fast due to increasingly hefty fees from airlines for changing the names on the tickets.
Word of warning: Only use credit cards to buy money making assets
If you are using credit cards you are likely to get an annual interest on the debt of 15-25%. It is essential to buy money making assets that have the potential to create a profit, so that you can pay back your debt as fast as possible. Keep the fancy cars or computers to a minimum.
Did you know?
June 27, 2006 | Filed Under Start ups, Entrepreneurship | Leave a Comment
You can start a business in one day. Just remember to not start promoting it until the DNS have properly propagated.
Make money on commuting
June 23, 2006 | Filed Under Start ups, Entrepreneurship, Practical tips, Business Opportunities | 1 Comment
A guy earns $100 - $300 a day by helping people to drive in the car commuter lane. The best part of it is that he doubles the price if there has been an accident and the traffic is particular bad that day.
Capitalism at its finest.
Business idea from Dane Morgan: Songversations
June 22, 2006 | Filed Under Start ups, Entrepreneurship, Practical tips, Business Opportunities | Leave a Comment
My comment on the opportunity: Pretty nice idea, I think it could catch on and go viral. Just wondering if there is an open source script already that you can use or if you need to develop the solution from scratch?
A downside of the idea is that the site will probably generate low value adsense ads so you need other ways like eg. Allposter to monetize it.
10 reasons your great start-up is gonna fail
June 21, 2006 | Filed Under Start ups, Entrepreneurship, Money making as young | 1 Comment
When discussing entrepreneurship, starting your own company, making money on your own and so on with friends and acquintances, a lot of people seem to have a very pessimistic outlook on their opportunities to create wealth for themselves.
The law of Jante
This is of course written from a North European standpoint where the “Jante Law” often comes into play. Allow me to quote the law, from Wikipedia:
“There are 10 different rules in the law, but they are all variations on a single theme and are usually referred to as a homogeneous unit: Don’t think you’re anyone special or that you’re better than us. The 10 rules are:
- You shall not think that you are special.
- You shall not think that you are of the same standing as us.
- You shall not think that you are smarter than us.
- Don’t fancy yourself as being better than us.
- You shall not think that you know more than us.
- You shall not think that you are more important than us.
- You shall not think that you are good at anything.
- You shall not laugh at us.
- You shall not think that anyone cares about you.
- You shall not think that you can teach us anything. “
It is damn difficult to make serious money if laws like this keep you down.
Using services like Scriptlance, Getafreelancer and RentACoder to get work done cheaply
June 19, 2006 | Filed Under Services like Scriptlance and Getafreelancer, Outsourcing, Start ups, Entrepreneurship, Practical tips | 8 Comments
This type of service is facilitating buyers of services like coding, programming, website design to get in contact with sellers/providers of this type of work. The buyer post a project outline together with a maximum budget and sellers outbid each other in order to get awarded the job.
There are a lot of Indian and Russian programmers bidding for the projects available. These are countries known for cheap hourly wages. “Yes! Cheap labour to do my projects! I wil stop using my fellow countrymen’s expensive services!”
If the project management and selection process is done right, it is no doubt that these services may give you a cost efficient way to build and launch your online enterprise. In a few days, I will return with some posts about my experiences in this area. Until then, check out the services: