So I know I haven’t posted in a few days, summer is a very busy time for me and I don’t spend nearly as much time at the computer as I usually do. Don’t think I’m abandoning ya’ll though (lol!), I’m still here. Anyway, I wanted to talk about a few things that a lot of online businesses do wrong that really bug me, so hopefully none of this describes you:

• Being boring: There are so many blogs that rehash the same information that no one cares about. Why would you start a make money online blog and then cover the exact same topics that have already been covered on bigger blogs? Why would you start a celebrity gossip blog and then only update it once a day? It doesn’t make sense. You COULD do these things, but you need to be creative and find a way to separate yourself from the crowd and tell readers why they should visit your site instead of others. In the case of the MMO blog reusing topics, you could outline the topics but have a focus on examples and links to sites that have implemented those specific ideas. In the case of the celebrity gossip blog, you could focus it on celebrity sex scandals. Just be creative and don’t try to fit in, because fitting in is for deuschebags.
• Looking boring: If you have some amazing content but you do nothing to capture people’s attention, they won’t know you have this amazing content and it will be totally wasted. Whatever your site is about, you need to figure out some way to make it “pop” and get people interested in it BEFORE they even read anything. Stak Loaded was recently reviewed by Our Blog Review, who said “Stak Loaded has the subtitle ‘How to make money doing nothing.’ This was very appealing to me and I quickly read on.” So even before the reviewer looked at any of the articles, they were already interested. Not EVERY post on here is about making money doing nothing, but that’s the underlying theme and I used a very catchy slogan to capture readers’ interest immediately.
• Shitty appearance: This is a huge problem that I know for a fact prevents a lot of businesses from generating business that they otherwise would have had. If your website looks like it was designed by a first grader, no one will take you seriously, no matter how good your content is, because as soon as they see the terrible design they’ll assume you’re a noob and won’t even look further. You really expect me to believe you made $100,000 last year, yet you can’t dish out a few dollars for a professional to design your site? If your site looks like shit, that shittiness overrides your product or content quality and makes your business as a whole look unprofessional. Yeah, you’ll still get some business, but not nearly as much as you would have.
• Telling ridiculous lies: There is a saying “fake it til you make it.” Some people think Shoemoney faked his $100,000 Adsense check so he would get more traffic, which he obviously would because his site is about making money online, and if he’s making 100 grand a month it’s safe to assume that most people would be very eager to visit his site and listen to his advice. Let’s assume the check was fake - it generated enough interest in his site to boost up his traffic to a point where he actually would make that much money, so he basically “faked it til he made it.” I don’t know if he did or not, and I don’t really care. What I want to point out is that some people try to lie about things like this and it’s so obvious they’re lying that it’s totally ridiculous. Do you really expect people to believe you get hundreds of thousands of visitors a month, yet all your posts have 0 comments? Do you really expect people to believe you make six figures affiliate marketing, yet a reverse Adwords search shows you bidding on the stupidest keywords ever and you know nothing about PPC? Do you really expect people to believe your blog has made you a millionaire, yet you have no traffic? Let’s be serious.
• Just being stupid: People do stupid things all the time. I recently saw someone asking for opinions as to whether he should do paid reviews on his blog. I looked at his blog and it looks like it gets about ten visitors a day. How much do you really think you’ll get paid for a review? $1? Are you joking?

After reading this, I bet Continue Reading »

I’ve been seeing a lot of people bragging about how much money they’re making blogging, affiliate marketing, selling ebooks, whatever. The people doing this bragging are almost always in the $100-3000 a month bracket, and they are so proud of this accomplishment that they feel the need to brag about it and act like they’re the ultimate badasses. Now, I’m not writing this to criticize people making $100 a month, I’m writing it for two reasons:

• To encourage you to shoot a lot higher. If you’re making a few hundred or a few thousand a month, you now need to reassess your goals and set the bar higher. Consistently making the exact same amount every single month is not nearly as impressive as learning more and expanding your businesses to continuously increase your earnings.
• To tell these people to shut the fuck up. If you’ve taken economics you know about “opportunity cost,” which is basically what you have to sacrifice to get something else, for example the opportunity cost of getting an A on tomorrow’s test would be not going out with your buddies tonight. The rest of this post will be about how to analyze opportunity costs and risks of business models and campaigns to see if you are actually “profiting” as much as you think you are.

Opportunity cost is very closely related to what we usually think of as “risks.” You might have two great business ideas but only enough time to work on one. The opportunity cost of working on one is not working on the other, and you are taking a risk - hoping the idea you choose to work on will be more profitable than the other would have been. There are three main things you have to “risk”:

• Time: A “problem” I frequently encounter is I’ll have lots of great ideas, enough money to fund all of them, but not enough time to work on more than one or two. I’m taking a huge risk when I decide what to do because if something fails, I’ve wasted a lot of time that I could have used to work on something else.
• Money: When most people think of costs and risks, they think about money. THIS IS THE NUMBER ONE PLACE PEOPLE TOTALLY FUCK UP. If you’re making $50 a day from Adsense, good for you, but if you’re working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, not so good for you, because if you’re willing to work all day, there are many many jobs that will net you a lot more than $50. Even if you’re making $100,000 a month, you might still be suffering a non-monetary loss, such as sacrificing your health, hobbies, friends, social life, or maybe you dropped out of school to pursue something that was extremely profitable for a few months but then went out of business. I could probably double my bank account if I wanted to, but there are things in my life that I’m not willing to sacrifice for that extra money.
• Legal: Depending on what kind of business you’re running, you need to analyze the legal issues and risks before rushing into it. Talking to lawyers and making sure everything is legally set is always a good investment. Obviously there are cases when you know there is a legal risk, but the monetary reward is so high that you don’t care. You need to be able to assess all aspects of possible risks to decide if what you’re doing is really worth it.

Whenever you’re brainstorming a new business plan Continue Reading »

Thanks to the worst hosting company in the world, this site had it’s lowest traffic day ever yesterday, pulling in a record low 198 page views from 85 visitors. It was down due to a password reset and database error from yesterday evening until just after noon today, so I’m not expecting today’s stats to be too great either. On average, Stak Loaded receives about 500-600 page views from 150-250 visitors, so this is a drastic decrease. I also made less than $1 from Adsense which is totally ridiculous.

I recently advised my readers to switch to 1&1 due to their superior hosting solutions and free Adwords vouchers, and now I’d like to emphasize that even more. 1&1 is the best shared host I’ve worked with, and Host Gator (the company that’s hosting this blog) doesn’t even compare. I’ve had problems with them before (check out this post for info) and this is definitely the last straw. For some reason my password was automatically reset yet again Continue Reading »

Have you ever seen a list of “the most expensive keywords,” things that you’d have to pay $50+ for if you wanted to advertise on Adwords? A lot of new MFA (sites built for the sole reason of generating Adsense revenue) site builders look for lists like this because their philosophy is, “I’ll pick the most expensive keywords, make a site based around those keywords, put Adsense on that site, and then when someone clicks my ads, I’ll get a huge payout because the advertiser is paying so much for those ads.” In reality, this is stupid and it doesn’t work.

One of the highest paying keywords is “austin tx dui lawyer,” and these lawyers are paying $80 and up per click, so you know if someone clicked their ad from your site you’d get a nice chunk of change. The problem with this is that Adwords tracks average daily clicks for all their keywords, and the average number of daily clicks for “austin tx dui lawyer” is 0.1. So if you were the only site built around “austin tx dui lawyer,” you’d get 1 click every 10 days. But there are hundreds of sites built around this keyword, so in reality you’d be very lucky to get 1 or 2 clicks a month. This is all independent of the fact that high paying keywords often have lots of competition from noob webmasters so you’d have to do some good SEO or ad network linking to get any traffic.

“But can’t I just tell my friends to click the ads? If I’m making $50 a click, I’ll tell a hundred of my friends to click on my ads and I’ll make $5000 with barely any work.” Yeah, this doesn’t work. Like I said, Google tracks the average daily clicks for all their keywords, and if the average is something like 0.1 and you’re getting 50 clicks a day, it’ll be so ridiculously obvious that they’ll ban you and you won’t make any money.

If you really want to do this, your best bet is Continue Reading »

I’m very good at getting people to work for me for free. I’m also very good at convincing people that I’m always right, even if I’m not. Being able to do things like this is by far one of the best business skills you can acquire, and while you obviously shouldn’t try to “manipulate” your friends (because that’s basically what it is), use these tips in business settings to make your work a lot easier:

Using emotion: If you want to change someone’s mind, you always want to appeal to emotion, not logic. You can literally PROVE someone wrong using logic and they still won’t change their opinion, because often the thing you’re arguing about won’t be exactly cut and dry, and let’s face it, people don’t like admitting when they’re wrong. It can also make them resent you and have the opposite effect from what you were trying to do.
• Establish credibility: Why would people listen to you if they don’t know who you are? If some random person I met at a party tried giving me business advice, I’d listen, but if it didn’t sound that great I’d just blow them off. If that same person pulled up in an Aston with $100,000 cufflinks, I’d listen, and no matter how absurd they sounded, I’d still try out some of their tips. Don’t be scared to show off accomplishments and successes to establish credibility - it can make or break a deal.
• Repetition: Sometimes if you repeat something enough, even if it’s not true, people will begin to think it is. It sounds stupid, but it works. Being constantly exposed to only one side of an argument also makes you a lot more prone to accept that side.
• The bandwagon effect: This has been psychologically proven and it does work. If you’re in a room with five people and Continue Reading »
  
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