$20,000 From ONE Web Page

Take a look at the screenshot, in a few weeks I’ll be showing you how I do it.

A Day In The Life Of

I was going to write a “proper” blog post for you today, it was going to be the best blog post ever, it would have loads of colourful pictures, loads of funny words, some political satire and a sprinkling of information, but as I sat down to write the post my accountant called and arranged a meeting for the afternoon so I had to put the blog post on hold.

It’s now 6.45pm and I’ve just finished my Tea (it’s what us strange people from up ‘t north call our evening meal) and I know I need to write a blog post, but in all honesty I’m very tired and don’t have the energy to create a full post, so I’ve decided to put together a little tongue in cheek “a day in the life of..” type post.

Being a full time Internet marketer is no easy task let me tell you! So let me take you back to the futur…back to the beginning of the day, and show you what I did.

I woke up at around 8am and went downstairs for some breakfast; I fancied a laugh so I turned on the TV and navigated my way to Sky Channel 509 – Fox News. It was the morning after the final presidential debate and I fancied some “fair and balanced” coverage of the debate, I was actually in luck, they were re-showing the debate in full so I watched “The Maverick” and “The Yes We Can” trading insults until around 9.30am.

At 9.30 I decided I’d better get off my ass and do some work, so I powered up the PC for the day. I always spend the first 1 – 2 hours of the day approving affiliate commissions for the Boomerang List Builder, and answering support tickets and approving new orders for my hosting company, D9 Hosting. The D9 Hosting tickets are an ongoing task throughout the day, but so far today has been a good ticket day!

All new orders were also genuine which is always good! With hosting orders you have to be very careful when processing them, a lot of spammers like signing up with false details and then using our servers to send spam, but going through each new order manually means we have a very good track record for keeping spam away from our hosting. This improves our email deliverability rate, and keeps the servers running as stable as possible.

After the normal morning tasks were complete, I started to set up the payment processor for a new offline service that me and Paula will be launching in the next couple of weeks, it will be something else under the “D9” brand and without wanting to blow my own trumpet I think it will be really cool.

We actually got a call to our D9 Hosting UK phone number yesterday, I answered and it was a nice chap enquiring about the new service, he’d actually stumbled across our “beta” site on Google (I didn’t even realise they had indexed it!) and then wanted the service so much he tracked down our D9 Hosting phone number, so that gave me a kick up the backside to get on and finish the website.

During setting up the processor, I needed to get our “SWIFT” code from our bank, so payments can go into our account. I called up the bank but I don’t think the code the lady on the phone gave me was correct, so I’m going to call back tomorrow and hopefully I’ll get a different person on the other end of the phone.

So with that out of the way, I moved onto another new project, a live chat/help solution for D9 Hosting. I managed to get it going quite quickly, and existing clients should be able to see the live chat button if they log into their client area.

I did have 1 question about the software though, so I went over to the live chat providers help desk and opened up a live chat session. Usually with live chat services, you have a generic picture of a helpdesk agent to look at, but I was taken by surprise when I saw what looked like “The girl next door” looking back at me.

I’m realistic enough to know the actual person on the other end of the chat was probably nothing like the picture…and was probably not even female, but it was nice to see something different from the generic “stock man/woman with headset”. So if you ever request a live chat over at D9 Hosting and the operator looks like Brad Pitt, suspend logical thinking and go with the flow. 🙂

By the time I’d finished playing with the live chat system, it was around 1pm and time for some food.

I had a prawn cocktail pasta salad type thing, 8/10 – it was nice and tasty.

After dinner I set off to the accountants.

He’d just about finished doing my 2007 accounts, but needed some clarification on a few things. Including my incredibly complex/stupid PayPal income and expense details. Apparently it doesn’t help when some things are in British Pounds and others are in US Dollars, oh well, I’m sure he’ll get there in the end.

After an hour and a half with the accountant I drove home and got back to work. Just as a side point, if your car has an AUX input and you have an I-Pod, buy an I-Pod AUX cable on eBay for £1.99 – best purchase I’ve made in a long time!

I got back to the PC at about 3.30 and had a chat with Paula about a few business plans for the future, answered more tickets and actually took part in our first live chat session – it was with Paula but who cares!

It was coming to the end of the day so I started to wind down; I went on Facebook and posted on a few forums.

I then went downstairs at about 4.45pm and watched some TV and did some farm jobs. I then had the evening meal at about 6.00pm, and then came back onto the PC to write this blog post.

Before I started the blog post I went onto iTunes and purchased a couple of new tunes to listen to on repeat whilst I wrote this blog post. I went for a couple of Cher songs, probably not the best choice in hindsight but we live and learn.

That pretty much takes us up to where we are now. The next thing I plan to do is post this on my blog, “Digg” the post. Then I’ll go downstairs and watch Bones and the last part of TNA Bound For Glory. I’ll then come back on here at around 10pm to do a final email/ticket/blog comment check for the day and then head off to bed at around 11.00pm.

So there you have it, a day in the life of a full time Internet Marketer – thrilling isn’t it!

I Think I’m Under Charging You

It was my Dad’s birthday last night, so we all went out for a meal – Me, Mum, Dad, Brother and his Girlfriend. As we walked through the stiff creaky door we approached the rather intimidating manager, she towered over us like a menacing menu bearing giant, but it was raining outside so we didn’t mind, all we wanted was to sit down and eat after a hard day.

We were directed to a table, the wooden floor banged as we pulled back our sturdy wooden chairs and sat down to read the menu. Looking around we could see we were the only people sat in the eating area, nobody said anything, but I could tell we were all thinking the same thing – How is Dan going to turn this into a blog post?

Quite easily actually 🙂

Fast forward a couple of hours and we were waiting for the deserts to arrive. On the menu was a very strange “Chocolate and Rhubarb Crumble”…but that’s not important right now. We were all chatting away, well, four of us were chatting away – my brother appears to still be shaking off the shackles of puberty so he managed a grunt every now and again.

Conversation turned towards my brother’s girlfriend, who happens to work for a local IT company that provides web hosting, design, coding and other similar services to schools and businesses across the UK.

With me running a similar venture in D9 Hosting, I was curious to see how the company was run. After a bit of background information, we turned to pricing, where I was amazed to hear:

“We charge £250 to install Google Analytics”

£250 for Google Analytics! That’s almost $500 to place a few lines of JavaScript on a page!

They also charge a similar price to setup Google Docs for customers, and charge an arm and a leg for web design and hosting. Their monthly sales target is £100,000 (about $200,000) and with those sorts of prices it won’t surprise you that they meet it most months.

Now there’s no way we could charge you that sort of price for any of the services I’ve mentioned, you would all probably have a rough idea of how much to pay for that sort of work – and it would be a lot less than £250!

*FYI, there’s actually a couple of Google Analytics “How To’s” on this blog, you’ll be able to find them using the search bar on your right*

BUT, the vast majority of offline businesses are still more than happy to pay top dollar for IT services, be it web design, hosting, script installation or consultation, and what’s more. I think that 95% of you reading this are more than capable of providing these services – skills you pick up on your Internet Marketing journey are more valuable than you could ever imagine.

Just ask yourself if you can install Google Analytics?

I’m sure most of you answered “Yes” to the above question, and I’m sure you know some offline people who run websites, why not see if they’d be interested in having you install it for them?

That’s just one example of taking what you’ve learnt in the online world, into the offline sector, there are many, many more ways to do this. I am currently working on a big offline project with my D9 Hosting partner, Paula, that should be launching in the next few weeks so stay tuned for that.

Nothing much to add, just really made the post to open your eyes to the opportunities that exist away from the PC screen!

That’s all for today, I was going to hold off writing this until Thursday but thought I’d get it down on paper whilst it was all still fresh in my head.

As always comments are my friend and yours, so do leave one if you have any questions.

Cheers,
Dan

P.S. I had a Bacon & Cheese Burger and a Knickerbockerglory (sp?) for desert – 7/10

The Biggest News Story IN THE WORLD…Brings Back Less Than 800,000 Results On Google

I think I must be going for the worlds longest post title, how did I do? 😉

Unless you have been living under a rock the past few days, you will already know about the worlds biggest scientific experiment that started today. I’m no scientist, but in short, scientists are going to re-create the “Big Bang” that created the universe. (Allegedly)

Depending on who you listen to, this will either tell us how the universe was formed and lead to better cancer treatments, or it will go horribly wrong and we’ll be sucked into a huge black hole and spend the rest of eternity floating around in “black matter” whilst hungry aliens feast on our humble remains.

The story is so big that even Google are getting in on the action, if you are reading this post today (Wednesday the 10th September 2008), head on over to the Google home page and take a look at the Google logo.

If you are reading this after the day it was written, here’s a screen shot of the page so you don’t feel left out:

The image around the logo isn’t some kinky S&M device, it’s actually an image of the “Large Hadron Collider” (I think) from which the experiment will be run. If you then click on the image on the Google home page, it takes you to the search results for “Large Hadron Collider”.

And this is where my search engine marketing mind kicked in.

This is the biggest news story in THE WORLD today, no matter where you live, if you put the news on TV you will see something about this experiment. So you’d expect Google to be overflowing with millions of organic search results, and loads of Adwords ad’s selling books and DVD’s on related subjects.

BUT on Google there are less than 800,000 results, and even more surprisingly there are ZERO adwords ad’s! (On google.co.uk, .com had 1 ad)

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but can you imagine if you had started to build up a site containing information on the project when this was first mentioned a couple of years ago? With less than 800,000 results on Google, an old website with a good domain name and content would be absolutely overflowing with traffic today.

You could have monetized with Google Adsense or sold related products via the Amazon affiliate program, your main concern would be if your server could handle all the traffic!

I think it’s probably too late now to jump on the LHC band wagon, but you can see how easy it is to miss out on an opportunity. This project has been no secret, yet it seems that very few people had the hindsight to profit from this massive worldwide event.

I for one will be keeping a very close eye on any future worldwide news items!

And to finish off I’ll put your mind at ease by saying that the actual “Collision” that will re-create the big bang isn’t due to happen until mid-October, so there are a couple more blog posts left before the end….and if you want to check the current status of the project to see if it has destroyed the world yet, you can do so here:

http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/

Thanks for reading, and as always feel free to leave a comment!

Regards,
Dan

P.S. The website link in my closing paragraph is an awesome example of a viral website, just a shame they haven’t monetized, they could have made a killing!

New Blog Design (Not suitable for people with a Blue allergy)

What do we all think of the new blog design? I went for over 2 years without a theme change so it was tough to say good bye to the old theme but I like this new one. Unlike my old theme this one supports widgets so I was FINALLY able to lose my widget virginity!

The main difference is the big opt-in form to the top right of the page, and the removal of all the contextual ad’s. (Adsense)

The adsense earnings from the blog were nominal to say the least so I’m putting all my efforts into attracting new readers to the blog mailing list, rather than looking to make a few cents from adsense every now and then.

I also took the opportunity to move the blog away from the old host and moved it over to our own D9 servers, so it should now load faster for you when accessing posts!

I’m also looking for a new tag line to go under the “El Passo Blog” text at the top of the page. Any suggestions? If so please leave a comment and I’ll give something to the winner…..I don’t know what it will be yet but you can rest assured it will be something amazing! (probably)

Cheers,
Dan

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