Even content-rich websites need time to make money

If you have been reading our blog, particularly the piece on generating a steady stream of revenue from nano-publishing, you might be tempted to think that you can get rich overnight if all you could do is to write. We said it before and let us repeat that before you see any substantial income, you will need to put in months of work.

Here are a few facts to know:

1. Attracting high-quality traffic is key to success of a website. This, however, can take a lot of time. While Google, the largest search engine, is also the easiest to work with, it will be months before you see hundreds and thousands of visitors a day (our analysis shows that you will need several thousands visitors a day for substantial income). Your website will be crawled in a matter of days. With other search engines it is a different story. Not only it is costly to register, they attract so few search queries that they are not worth bothering, except for Yahoo. Having said that, just being crawled by Google does nothing to traffic. You have to a have a higher Page Rank as well so that your website is shown in the first one or two pages in a search. Getting these high-value links can take close to a year. While some link exchanges, etc. do help but mostly it is the links from related, high-quality websites that increase your Page Rank. This analysis is based on two websites that we have launched in 2004: iProceed and LuvCube.
2. Do not be discouraged if you do not see any significant results in first six months to one year. If you abandon it, you will regret it later. Because during this period you are essentially planting the seeds of what could be a great piece of real estate on the Internet. While MYNIPPON and Lindisima are our largest (in terms of visitors, page views, and income) websites, even a smaller (but older) website like eCreativa attracts great traffic since it has been around so long.
3. Never forget your reader. They are your customers. If you serve them well, they will pay you back (in form of word-of-mouth marketing and links to your websites).

Related article: How to increase your ranking in search engines?

Exploit power of images in web design

A lot of people have written to us asking about the role of images in web design. This is what we know about images:

1. Images, particularly high-quality, appropriate photos make the website more appealing to visitors and their eyes are likely to go right to the area of the images (thus, a great locations for ads is next to an image).
2. Images consume a lot of memory and bandwidth and can slow down loading of pages, turning many visitors off and motivating them to hit the 'back' button (so use smaller size images and optimize them for the web).
3. There are many thieves on the Internet who will steal your images in two ways (1) simply copy and paste your image in their website (2) put a hyperlink to your image without even asking for permission or acknowledging the source by giving you a visible link. Thus, you pay for bandwidth while someone else enjoys the benefits. Technically, you can make it 'difficult' for the novice webmaster but there is no way to make it impossible.
4. Images are searchable by search engines and if you name them the right way and use alt text, visitors may be able to find your image (and thus, the page and the website). Unfortunately, a lot of visitors that are seeking images are least interested in reading something meaningful or clicking on an ad. So use this strategy carefully. You may end up getting too much unwanted traffic.
5. Images can, however, be a great tool to communicate very targeted messages. Here is an example to prove a point through images that information technology does not matter. Here is another example of putting an eye-catching photo next to the target area.

Retirement planning for small businesses

If you are like us, you are probably a small business (or self-employed). And like many small businesses that do not know where their next dollar will come from, most of us ignore retirement planning for ourselves, but even worse, for the employees. Thus, a big disincentive for working in a small business is the lack of good retirement programs. (Related article: Retirement planning if you work for a large firm)

Another important reason why you should be thinking about retirement planning is that if you don't save and plan for retirement now, you will literally be working forever. And if you work like us (about 60-70 hours a week), you don't want to do that.

Retirement planning options for small businesses and self employed

• Start your own 401(k) program. It is not as difficult/expensive to set up as you think. In fact many financial institutions, particularly Fidelity, Vanguard, Schwab, etc. have schemes for small businesses and self-employed individuals.
• If you are self-employed, there are several other retirement plans, e.g., SEP, Keogh, Solo 401(k), IRA, etc. So do your research to see which one works for your individual tax situation and pick accordingly.

Content management tools to simplify nanopublishing

At some point, your website will become too large. Good news! However, it also means that you will need a system to efficiently manage content on your website. The key to success of a website is allowing your visitors to find what they want to peruse in the easiest way possible. To be able to provide that you will need a system to collect, format, publish, and link all the content in a way that old content and new content support each other and are consistent in their look and feel.

What you will need is a content management system. There are several companies that provide high quality content management solutions. Of course, we would like to mention Refresh Software right here in our neighborhood. We have heard great things about them at various networking events. Some other firms active in the content management space are Ektron, which is also based close to where we are and we also visited their counter at a trade show in New York City, Octigon, APW, IBM, Serena, PaperThin, OpenText, RoboInfo, Omnibility, etc.

How to pick a content management system?

• Check out the offering first and actually use it. Do not buy it till you are sure that it meets "your" requirements.
• Negotiate the fees and license in such a way that you can use it for multiple URLs. Even we manage five websites now and it would not make sense for us to have five licenses.
• Find out how you will migrate to the new content management system. It should be easy and simple; otherwise you will burn a lot of resources in moving your website.

Recommended article: Developing a simple content management strategy

Blog or website; what is best for AdSense

This is a question that has often been asked to us. In sharing our research so far we have essentially said that it is up to you to determine what works best for you. While blogs are easy to create and require no maintenance, websites can be a lot of work to create and maintain. While operating a full-fledged websites requires some degree of technical competence, a blog is as easy to use as an online email program.

Which one is better for Adsense? Blog or website

While individual results may vary, from our network of websites and blogs (about a dozen), we have found that the CTR is higher for websites than for blogs. Or in other words, you are to likely to make more money from websites than blogs.

What are the other benefits of websites?

1. You have total control. You can do whatever you want with your design, layout, architecture, etc.
2. You have a lot of flexibility in how you display ads, where, how many units, etc. With a blog, you have too many restrictions and you are stuck with one format.
3. We are also hypothesizing that in the minds of the readers, blogs are perceived as personal diaries rather than full-fledged businesses (that carry good ads).

Related article: Business bloggers wanted

Increasing your website's ranking

The rank of your website could make or break your business. The biggest advantage of a high rank of your website is the position at which your website is displayed in a search. Since only a finite number of websites can be displayed on page one or two in a search result, it is not easy to maintain a rank (there are always other websites trying to dislodge your website from that rank). Here are some tips to increase your website's ranking. These tips are useful not only for nanopublishing websites but also for ebusiness websites:

1. Think of your customers/readers and create products/content that is good for them rather than playing the ranking game. Like the word-of-mouth marketing, if you have good products/information for your readers, your visitors will talk about it and put links to your page. That way you will get a lot more relevant links (which are much better than links from unrelated websites).
2. We only worry about two search engines: Google and Yahoo. Other search engines are out there but it is best to simply ignore them. Thus, you should worry about only these two and optimize your website accordingly. While Google still allows you to add your website in a simple form for free, Yahoo now charges for listing (it is worth spending the money).
3. Don't waste money with search engine optimization (SEO) firms. Get a better webmaster instead because if your current webmaster is incompetent enough not to do search engine optimization for your website, he needs to be fired right away.
4. Don't bother to add your website anywhere else, particularly with those firms that promise thousands of links to your website if you pay them money. They never bring any meaningful (or quality) traffic and Google simply ignores links from irrelevant website (e.g. if a sports website links to your website on gardening, it does not impact your ranking). Most of these firms basically SPAM other websites with an email requesting a link (MYNIPPON gets hundreds of such emails a day and our SPAM filters basically delete them even before we see them and we are guessing that is what most other websites do). We feel sorry for all those webmasters who are naive enough to pay these crooks for getting links that they never get.
5. Keep innovating (if you sell products on your ecommerce website) and keep writing good content (if you are a nanopublisher). That is what increases and maintains your rank.

Related article: How to market your website?

Choosing a web hosting company

If you want to have a proper website that you want to run as a business, one of the most important things that you will need to have is a web hosting company. Let us share our experiences so that you can develop the right criteria to pick a web hosting company.

Before we do that, here is a little background. When we first started in 1999, we signed up with Hostway. Since we were small and relatively new to the Internet, we did not realize that we may not have picked the right company. When we grew, Hostway simply wanted to rip us off by charging a huge fee to upgrade to higher level plan. By that time the hosting business had become pretty competitive (and rates were rapidly falling) with numerous choices so we switched to HostRocket. They promised enormous bandwidth but apparently it was only a promise that they never intended to keep. It is unbelievable what companies will do to mislead customers. While we never exceeded the bandwidth we were supposed to get, they still threw us out (imagine a company declining to do business with us) with the lame claim that our website was attracting so much traffic (wish that was true; it would have been great news to us!) that it brought down their server. Finally, we found HostforWeb and wow! It has been a delight working with them. Since then we have switched three more websites in our network to HostforWeb. We pay less than $10 a month for this website which has approximately a quarter million visitors and a thousand web pages. Great customer service, never a problem publishing, and simply a smooth hosting experience for us.

What to look for when picking a web hosting company?

1. Don't believe anything that the company says in its sales pitch. Instead do some research on the Internet. If you don't find anything, it doesn't mean that they are good. Our recommendation: go with the recommendation of someone you know and can trust and someone who has experience hosting a website like yours.
2. Think of the future. Will you be able to use the same company when your website grows?
3. The web hosting business has become rather ugly so companies will do anything to get your business even if it means that they will treat you bad later. So don't just pick on price.

Related article: How to find a web hosting company?

Business model transformation

As we pointed out in the introduction to the ebusiness blog, mynippon.net underwent a business model transformation in August of 2004. The process took approximately three weeks and we shifted the center of gravity from an affiliate-programs based revenue model to pay-per-click advertising model for reasons that we have been discussing through this blog. So we would say that from a 100% affiliate-programs based model we have now shifted to 10-90 model.

We have identified several faults with affiliate programs in their current forms and how they are not based on the principle of mutual success (they are heavily biased towards the merchant). Until the industry comes up with programs that are based on mutual-win, only naive affiliates will base their business models on affiliate programs alone. Others like us are rapidly redesigning (or redesigned it during last 18 months) their business models on PPC advertising.

A business model transformation of this type does not, however, mean that you should abandon these merchants altogether. So let us say that you think that for VOIP based telephone, you will really like to recommend Vonage but you do not want to use the affiliate program route. So what you need to do is to mention the term "Vonage" in the body of the article. Since most companies (or their business partners) typically bid on the name of their company, chances are that they will be one of the advertisers in AdSense contextual ads. If you want to see an example of how this works, take a look at our article on how we use Vonage to save on our phone bill.

Building a business with affiliate programs

A question very often asked by entrepreneurs is if they can build a real business (for the purpose of this article we are defining it as equal to real median household income of ~ $43,000 for each person employed in the business) with just affiliate programs. A perusal of the websites of merchants that rely on affiliate programs and a host of other websites on the Internet might lead you to believe that affiliate programs provide you with a 'get-rich-quick" program. The answer is that for over 95% of the people the affiliate programs produce essentially pocket money. Yes, there are affiliates that have real businesses but these are not businesses that can be started overnight by anyone and money will not come the next day.

The limitations of affiliate programs

1. Since the clickthrough rates for affiliate programs tends to be pathetically low, high traffic is key. While you might be tempted to "buy" traffic from all the sellers out there, it doesn't work very effectively in increasing revenue with affiliate programs. Traffic quality is key and you can't buy that by redirecting traffic to your website through some hideous means. Quality traffic is build over time through content management that leads to inbound links which result in higher page rank and the cycle continues. This can sometimes takes months to years.
2. If your visitors click (and you can use many creative techniques to motivate your visitors to click) but do not take the next desirable step (for you to make a commission), they have left your website. Doesn't help you much. You did all the work in attracting them to your website but it was a total waste. This is a major issue for content-rich websites.
3. Many merchants actually pass on all the costs associated with chargebacks and other types of credit card fraud even though you had nothing to do with it. These criminals just happened to be on your website.

Suggested business model

Use affiliate programs as one of the channels for generating revenue for your website. There are other revenue streams, for example, advertising, that provide a more stable stream of revenue. You might also want to consider advertorials, product placement, product recommendations and endorsements, etc. (all for a one-time payment).

Web design for increasing clickthrough rate

If you are a commercial website, you expect that your visitors will take an action that will create income for you. For a content-rich website like ours designed to push ecommerce for our advertisers, a desirable action by our visitors for us is a click on an ad. Once the visitor reaches the ecommerce website, the desired action can be a purchase or something similar.

How can good web design increase clickthrough rate (CTR)?

1. Avoid clutter at all cost. Most human beings don't like clutter in their lives and so is true on a web page as well.
2. No (our pick is this one) or minimal animation. It it a distraction and an irritant.
3. Make navigation easy.
4. Place your ads so that they are neither intrusive nor hidden. (Take a look at this page http://www.mynippon.net/beauty/belly-dancing.htm)
5. Place your ad in a place in the article where the reader is likely to say, "Gee, I need more information on this" or "I gotta buy this stuff." (Take a look at this page http://www.mynippon.net/beauty/lose-weight-have-fun.htm)
6. You can use an image to draw attention towards the area where the ads are. (Take a look at this page http://www.mynippon.net/RomanceNews0120/story9.htm)
7. Use bullets, have small paragraphs, and get to your point fast. Most readers do not have enough time to read a long introduction.
8. Limit the number of links in the article. If your goal is to have them click on an ad, then you must provide only one link at the end to a relevant article. So if the reader does not click on an ad, s/he will click on another article and stay on your website rather than hit the "back" button.

You might also want to take a look at another very clean design that we use on iProceed.com targeted at the busy business reader.

Monitor website visitors for advertising effectiveness

Do you know where your website visitors are coming from? If you do not have this metric accurately captured, you will be wasting a lot of dollars. We learned this lesson the hard way.

As everyone knows, today it is possible (and cost effective) to measure the geographic location of your visitors with a high degree of accuracy. It wasn't so just two years ago and whatever tools were available were unaffordable by small businesses like ours.

Being an English language website we attract visitors from all English-speaking countries and to a small extent even from non-English speaking countries. While US has always been, and still is, the largest market for us, MYNIPPON is very popular all over the world. However, visitors from other countries can rarely purchase the products that we recommended (as part of our affiliate programs). The result: While we attracted a lot of visitors and had an impressive click rate, our conversation rate was pathetically low because these visitors could not purchase these products for a variety of reasons (shipping cost too high, lack of US$ denominated credit cards, prices too high, etc.).

Message to you as a content-based business entrepreneur: If you have a lot of non-American visitors, most affiliate programs will not work for you. So first invest in a web analytics software to get a good understanding of visitors to your website and only then pick affiliate programs. Many companies have warehouses in many locations and often ship free anywhere in the world (e.g. Strawberrynet).

If not, Google AdSense makes most sense because with this advertising program you can show local products to your visitors which they can actually afford and buy.

Related article: Google AdSense is a serious threat to affiliate programs

Minimize public service ads with AdSense

As we discussed in our previous article, public service ads can be a serious waste of effort for real businesses that leverage high quality content to generate revenue. Of course, you can eliminate public service ads by using your own banner instead (sophisticated users can even show advertisements from Google competitors). However, the best thing to have is never to have the situation that you need to deal with public service ads.

While we have not yet perfected the system to have minimum possible public service ads, here are the learnings from our experience with our network of websites:

1. Always do some research before you even create any content. If a quick Google search does not show a lot of ads on the right hand side, chances are that your article is unlikely to show any ads either. While you might still need to write an article because it will be of interest to your readers, but you can do other things with advertising space on that page.
2. Ask the question that, based on your article, is it possible for a reader to buy a product or service. In other words, unless there is a product or service (that a business will likely sell), there is no advertising. So always pick topics that include some product or service, preferably something that is sold online or surfers are likely to find information about it online.
3. Some topics attract more advertisers than others. Business (check out our sister website iProceed that always attracts ads), cooking (our cooking channel), beauty, health, and fitness (our beauty channel), dating, romance and relationships (our romance channel). So as you decide what business you want to be in, these are good questions to ask.
4. There are many tools on the Internet (including on Google's website) that show you how to find out what the related terms are and what terms are more commonly used by surfers to search a specific subject. Once you know the most popular terms, you can use these as keywords even though your overall content might not change much.
5. Make your article long enough so that you can use the keyword about a dozen or so times without driving the reader nuts with too much repetition. Of course, as you might already know, the keyword should definitely be in the file name, title, and in the first paragraph.
6. When you first publish your content, you might or might not see any ads. Not to worry. As Google points out, sometimes it may take a while. We have had cases that the ads did not appear for days even though our website is crawled by Google at least twice each day.
7. Check repeatedly for a couple of days and if you still do not see any ads, you might want to edit the article and see if you can add a paragraph or two to increase the keyword count.
8. Finally, stay away from any offensive words at all (particularly mention of any body parts, intimate activities, four-letter words, and anything else that is not G-rated).

Related article: How to develop high quality content to attract good advertisers?

How to substitute public service ads from AdSense?

If you have listened to our advice and started publishing content for generating income through advertising, you have probably seen public service ads. While all businesses should think how they want to contribute to non-profit organization, this article is designed to help you with those situations when you would like to eliminate public service ads for purely business reasons. While Google has an explanation on its website, we (technically unsophisticated team at MYNIPPON) found it to be too difficult, until we sat down one to day to figure it out ourselves.

Here is a very simple explanation of how to get rid of public service ads (or PSAs). We will only describe an example of a 160X600 size ad that you will replace with a banner directing visitors to your home page (there are many other complicated things that you can do but this is what we think is the best):

1. Create a page in the mother web of your website and name it 160600.htm (you can choose other names but we find it easy to follow this protocol since it is easy to remember when generating code for other sizes).
2. Keep the page totally empty of any HTML code. Now insert an image (your banner) of size 160X600 and insert a clickable link to your home page. See an example at our sister website: http://www.iproceed.com/160600.htm
3. You already know how to generate the ad code in your Google account. All you will need to do now is add one more line with this link information. Rather than using the complicated explanation that Google has, simply type the following in a notepad file and make sure that you insert your URL:
   google_alternate_ad_url = "http://www.iproceed.com/160600.htm";
4. Copy this line of code and then paste it below the line with the code for google_ad_client (it will become the third line)
5. You are done. Now use this code in place of the old code.
6. You can repeat the process for other ad sizes.

Use VOIP to save on phone bill

A lot of our readers were intrigued when we mentioned the reasons for our high profitability. We watch our costs very closely. Apart from what we mentioned there (we fly coach and avoid business trips as much as we can), one area that we have made tremendous savings is the tele-communications, or in simple words, telephone bill (we will deal with other areas where we manage our costs very carefully in later articles). We switched to a new technology called voice over internet protocol or VOIP in November of 2003.

What is VOIP?
This is a non-technical explanation. Instead of sending the phone calls over traditional phone lines, they are sent over the Internet (which you typically access if you have a broadband connection). Thus, your phone call is identical to an email or a chat or surfing of a website. In other words, it is as cheap as sending an email, or almost free (you will need to pay a small monthly fee to a VOIP provider and pay by the minute for international calls). So if you have a broadband connection you can use VOIP technology for your phone system and literally drive down your business telecommunications expenses by as much 75% (as we did).

How does VOIP work?
While you will need to research each of the dozens of companies (Vonage, Packet8 Broadband, Lingo, IDT, Nortel Networks, Avaya, AT&T, Verizon, etc.) that are active in VOIP for your specific needs, switching to VOIP is generally quite straightforward and painless. Whether you have one line or 50, the installation is inexpensive and easy. In fact, we were able to make the switch on our own without any technical help. We opted for Vonage but we encourage you to research as many VOIP companies as you can to figure out the best package for your specific needs.

Are there any disadvantages of using VOIP?

1. We have not noticed any difference in quality at all for domestic calls or calls to Canada.
2. For international calls, the quality is somewhat lower (depending on what country you are calling, time of day, etc.) but you can compare it to the quality on a cellphone.
3. You might still want to keep at least one regular phone line in your office just in case there are any problems with your broadband connection.

How to develop content for a blog or website?

We have been discussing how you can replicate the MYNIPPON business model to develop a web-based content publishing (sometimes also referred to as nanopublishing) business that produces income through advertising. At this time, according to the statistics available, believe it or not, there are more advertisers and less places on the Internet to advertise. No wonder Google is trying to increase its inventory as fast as it can to meet the demand from advertisers. There is simply not enough search inventory available and that is why Google is relying heavily on contextual advertising (through its AdSense program: the one that we use). You are encouraged to do your research in an area that you are interested to find out who the advertisers are, how many publications are available, what is the best method to reach the readers (blog or website), and anything else that you think will help you better design your business model.

In our previous article we provided insights on how you can develop your content-based advertising business plan and suggested outlines of a content rich website/blog that you can develop to create a second stream of revenue and make it a primary stream of revenue once you achieve critical mass (like us).

How to develop content for a blog or a website? Ten principles of content management developed by MYNIPPON

1. Pick a topic that you know really well. So if you know about fishing or carpentry or video games, share your (unique) knowledge with the world.
2. Do not try to be what you are not. If you do not know anything about a topic, stay away from it. You have no way to add value. But let us say you still want to write about astrophysics because you are so interested in it. Well, it is best to admit up front that you are not an expert and are only learning about it. Share what you learn with your readers and ask for them to contribute. Honesty is key to establish credibility and a dedicated base of readers who will eventually become your sales and marketing team (by word-of-mouth advertising, adding links on their websites to your websites, etc.)
3. Be honest and have the highest standards of business. If you mislead or provide wrong information, your chances of becoming a real business are remote.
4. Remember these four tips from Google, particularly if you want to make money from advertising:
   - Focus, and be as specific as you can.
   - Write content related to real products.
   - Don't start a blog or a website just for money.
   - Use a professionally designed template (there are a lot of them freely available)
5. Write in easy-to-understand language, unless you are writing for a very sophisticated audience. The easier to understand your content is, the more visitors you will attract. A website on astrophysics may be designed to attract only those who have doctoral degrees but if you make it easy enough, you might be able to attract high school students too. Imagine the impact you will then have on your traffic.
6. Make your article keyword rich and make them very narrowly focused on just one topic. If you want to talk about related topics, create new articles instead.
7. You can go ahead and find out if there are advertisers for a specific keyword by doing a Google search for that keyword. Overture also has a tool on their website. At times, you will need to write content even if there are no advertisers or no product to sell; after all you can not have incomplete information.
8. Some keywords have more expensive advertisements than others. So as a rule of thumb if the product is expensive (cars, diamond rings, yachts, enterprise resource planning software, etc.) or the market is competitive (weight loss, legal service, etc.), the bid prices are high. For low value products, like toilet paper, the bid prices are rather low. But even with the same keyword, there can be variations on the bid price depending on what form of keyword is used by people who search. So the price for "diets" and "diet" and "weight loss" and "lose weight" are very different. Do your research prior to writing an article and then incorporate the keywords strategically.
9. Another important point to note is that the produce/service you are talking about should be preferably available for purchase online. It is indeed true that brick-and-mortar businesses are also advertising online but since no transaction is completed online they are likely to spend less on advertising. On the other hand when a transaction can be completed online, advertisers are very serious about converting a visit into a sale. For example, an online dating website is far more likely to spend a higher percentage of its advertising budget online compared to a local day spa.
10. Be ethical in your business practices. Do not try to cheat and use unfair practices. Not only are some of these practices illegal, you are unlikely to get rich. However, if you take the standard route of hard work and value creation for your readers, you will end up creating enormous wealth for yourself.

Related articles:

New trends emerge in advertising as 18-34 segment moves away from TV to Internet

Traditional advertising in danger; the new 3Es of advertising

Make money like we do with content

How do we make money? This is one of the most frequently asked questions to us by our fans, and of course, our network of friends, business associates, and partners. So here are a few important facts about MYNIPPON before we give you our money-making secrets. We also suggest that you keep reading till the end even if you do not understand certain things. There are plenty of other helpful links on this page.

• MYNIPPON is not a hobby (though it used to be at some point when it stared in 1999).
• We are now part of the eCreativa network that includes other very successful websites like Lindisima, LuvCube, and iProceed. All these websites combined together attract over half-a-million visitors each month.
• We derive over 90% of our income from advertising (that includes PPC, affiliate programs, advertorials, etc.).

Why are we so successful when many online content businesses are struggling?

1. We happen to be in the right place at the right time and our costs are under control (unlike the folks at Boo.com, we fly coach, only if we have to; otherwise, we love doing business by email/ phone, online chat, etc.).
2. While MYNIPPON was started in 1999, it never really was intended as a big business and that is why we did not sign up even with Amazon until late 2003. However, active content management on the website throughout its existence allowed the website to occupy
   enormous real estate on the web (lots of inbound links, crawled by almost all search engines on the planet, listing in all kinds of directories, added to favorites by thousands of visitors all over the world, etc.).
3. For dozens of keywords we are now on page one of Google (and other leading search engines) search results. We have never spent a penny on advertising and search results and word-of-mouth is what brings traffic to our website.
4. When we publish new content, it gets crawled within 24 hours by search engines and starts showing up in search results within a matter of days. This premium position on the web allows us to launch new channels on existing and new websites and push them at a higher speed as we have successfully done with LuvCube and iProceed.
5. Another reason that we now are in a sweet spot is that most of the websites that were launched during the tech boom basically disappeared leaving only a few websites like ours. By having a steady presence and regular updates, we became favorites of search engines and directories. As we are now learning from our efforts with LuvCube and iProceed, it is not easy to make a new website popular without spending a lot of money on advertising. Fortunately we have two highly popular websites to drive traffic to our new websites in the portfolio but for a new website it is going to be difficult in the beginning.

So how can you make money like we do?

You can actually make money by doing what we do, that is, creating high-quality content, that is fun, useful, and is directly related to products/services available for purchase online (we will provide more on the subject of how to pick topics and how to write content that people like later on). It is not a get-rich-quick scheme. You will need to work hard for it but will have fun doing it since for all practical purposes we run our business from the beach. Here is how the system works:

1. Content is king. We use the music analogy for content. No matter how many songs are out there, there is always someone out there who is waiting to listen to a new song. The appetite for new content is insatiable, and if you write great content, you can go very far. People are always looking for new perspectives and ideas. Even more interesting are stories of real people (that we get in plenty from our readers). Everyone knows that to lose weight you have to eat less and exercise regularly, but millions of websites talk about losing weight in a million different ways and someone, somewhere is reading it saying, "Wow, this is really neat!" So if you can write, just get started.
2. There are two options for you to do so. You can do what we do, that is, have both a website and a blog. They both have their pluses and minuses, and in our case, we have them both because we need both for different strategic reasons. Plus, we have the resources to manage both. You can pick either one or both. A blog is good for those starting out since you can start blogging if you know how to type and a few other basic aspects of computers/Internet (to add a few bells and whistles that we will mention later on in our blog). A website can be slightly more difficult to manage for newbies.
3. You will need to sign up with a advertisement consolidator like Google with its AdSense program. Google is reportedly recruiting high-quality publishers very aggressively and traffic and page views are not part of their criteria for approval. There are many other companies that have AdSense like programs but some have difficult approval criteria, others do not pay on time or do not have enough advertisement inventory. We strongly recommend Google. Google AdSense is the largest and the best.

Helpful articles:

A how-to guide to blogging to develop into a business

What is a blog? How does it work?

Where should I host my blog?

Welcome to eBusiness blog: content management drives sales

Welcome to the eBusiness Blog. In this blog we will focus primarily on our highly successful website MYNIPPON and share with our readers how we leverage nanopublishing to run a profitable enterprise that drives ebusiness for some of the largest companies in the world. This blog should be of interest to content providers/developers, ebusiness companies, marketers, publishers, writers, bloggers, entrepreneurs, investors, technology watchers, and anyone else who is fascinated by the marriage of nanopublishing and ebusiness.

Brief history of MYNIPPON

Like many other websites, MYNIPPON started (around Christmas of 1999) as a hobby (that could produce some income to pay for website maintenance). Since it was never a full-fledged effort and the Internet bubble burst by the time MYNIPPON achieved critical mass in traffic, the only source of revenue was a small charge for putting links and personal ads that we carried.

The website went through a series of transformations from 2000-2003 but the hobby paid off in terms of popularity. By Christmas of 2003, the website attracted over 100,000 visitors a month but very modest income. It was around that time that we signed up with two affiliate programs (Amazon and ClickBank). To our pleasant surprise, the income suddenly jumped, particularly from the ClickBank affiliate program. At that point, we started to create more targeted content and signed up with the LinkShare affiliate program. The number of visitors, page views, and income all grew rapidly, in relative terms.

We were highly encouraged by our success and decided to work full time on the website. We joined the Commission Junction network to be able to access other marketers. With about 15 or so different marketers that we signed up with, we saw a significant jump in income but the growth was no longer linear. Our initial hypothesis that, if we increased the number of impressions (and even if we managed to keep the CTR at the same level), our income would grow further, did not materialize. In fact, our income now was flat despite rapid increase in traffic and page views.

It was at this point that our sister website Lindisima joined the AdSense program and the financial performance was remarkable. We achieved totally unexpected results. Sometime in June, we scaled back our efforts with affiliate programs and decided to embrace AdSense. During June and July of 2004, we launched two new websites: LuvCube and iProceed. The idea was to diversify the type of ads/visitors, and of course, increase revenue.

It was not until the middle of August 2004 that we could get back to MYNIPPON and do a business model transformation of a website that now had almost a quarter million visitors a month and half-a-million page views. Our income (from affiliate programs) had not grown much since March/April and it was at this point that we decided to significantly scale back almost all our affiliate programs and completely focus on AdSense. With the help of a 2-week marathon, the website was completely redesigned and relaunched in the third and fourth weeks of August. The performance has been beyond our wildest expectations.

What can you expect to gain from this blog?

We will share our secrets as we build this nanopublishing business with the prime objective of driving sales for companies that are truly committed to ebusiness as a meaningful channel for their business. We will provide plenty of help to those who want to develop similar nanopublishing businesses that can develop fun and quality content designed to push ebusiness for their advertisers. Our expertise is content management, not technical details. In that respect, we will provide plenty of useful information for folks like us who know how to write but still have difficulty with technology.

We expect our readers to do as much research as we do and then share the knowledge with us. Sadly enough, there is not a lot of quality information easily available for non-technical entrepreneurs and research is, therefore, key. To develop this business we spend about 10% our time conducting research, visiting as many websites as we can, gathering best practices, and then refining what we learn from our business to share it here in our blog. Our current interests include ebusiness, nano-publishing, content management, consumer trends, advertising, and whatever else we need to do to create value for our enterprise.

So once again, welcome to the eBusiness blog.