We’ve been more than behind in getting these out, other priorities have… well, taken priority.  Yes, that’s not an excuse - so please bear with us until we get this all straightened out.

So this is Edition 13 (hence the black cat) of the Internet Business Blog Carnival - I hope that you enjoy this weeks submissions!  Once we’re back on track, you’ll also see a return of our top picks PLUS our audio podcast of the submissions.

• Cindy King presents Book Review - Landing Page Optimization posted at Cindy King, saying, “no matter what you do you have to start with a great landing page. here is a review of a book that teaches yo how”
• Dr. Joe Capista presents Why can’t I achieve my goals? posted at The Success Triangle, saying, “If you want what you say you do, you have to set goals. It’s not that difficult and the results will amaze you. Get a blank book. On each page write down your goals in a specific category and date it. Not only should you write your goals down, you must review them morning and night. Write your primary goals on a 3 x 5 card to make the review time more targeted. Doing this will keep you on target with what you want.”
• Fred Black presents What Can You Learn from Watching Big Product Launches? posted at Fred Black: Internet Business Blog..
• Ian Richardson presents More proof on the way on building backlinks posted at Make Everything EzyAs123, saying, “An article(with embedded video ) on how to build backlinks”
• Joseph Ratliff presents Making Money Online The Hard Way…Why Are You Doing That? | The Profitable Business Edge 2™ [del.icio.us] posted at The Profitable Business Edge 2, saying, “Are you making money online the hard way?”
• Karen Bryan presents 3 steps to marketing your travel business posted at Europe A La Carte Blog, saying, “Some basic steps for marketing your business which apply to all online businesses, although the article is written about my travel business.”
• Kathleen Gage presents Why most training programs don’t work and what you can do about it! posted at Street Smarts Marketing & Promotions, saying, “Have you ever talked to someone who took a training course and complained because the course “just didn’t work”? Or maybe you took a class, but didn’t feel you got much out of it. Was it that the course was no good or maybe you had some part in why you got so little value out of the money and time invested? contend there are always two sides to the story. Primary reasons why training courses, whether they be teleseminars, webinars or events where trainer and participants are all in the same room, don’t work are varied.”
• Adele Durr presents SFI EyeEarn posted at My Experiences Honest Real Work At Home Reviews.
• Kurt Schmitt presents 7 Ways to Deal with Duplicate Content posted at Free Website Traffic Tips.
• Liz presents Growing your business - when is it time to bring someone else onboard? posted at Nitro Marketing Blog, saying, “As a small business owner, how do you know when it’s time to bring in help?”
• Matthew Paulson presents The Benefits of Small Business Blogs posted at American Entrepreneurship.
• Randy Rhodes presents Protected: Testing Processes Using MuVar posted at Internet Business Blog.
• Randy Rhodes presents Depression, Girls, and Wholesale Domination posted at Woody Maxim.
• Robert Phillips presents I?m Not as Bad As Others posted at CYBERCA$HOLOGY.
• Rusty presents Motivational Product Or Cult Propaganda? posted at MoneyXperiment.com.
• Sarah Paine presents Is Risk Aversion Ruining Your Business? posted at Sarah Paine, saying, “Take a look at how your fear of risk may cripple your chance to succeed in running an online business. Discover how acknowledging this fear can help boost success.”
• Stefan Töpfer presents Do you have concern for your business or only for yourself? posted at The Small Business Blog, saying, “You need to think of your business first, before you worry about yourself.”
• Steve Faber presents - The Best Home Based Business Opportunities For a Bad Economy posted at Home Based Business Success.
• Terry Dean presents 5 Keys to Successful Internet Business posted at Integrity Business Blog by Terry Dean.
• Tim Gary presents Have You Been “six-packed” by Your Thinking? posted at Internet Success Bites.

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In order to succeed you need to not only emulate what other successful individuals do, but ensure that the product or service you are selling is in demand and that you are able to market it.

For example, you are a web designer.  However there are millions of other web designers on the Internet.  How are you going to set yourself apart?  You could…

1. Spend hundreds (or thousands) on PPC campaigns, OR
2. Spend time spreading your name and building your reputation, OR
3. Combination of the two, with less emphasis on PPC

What would you do?

The obvious choice, in my opinion, is #3 - spend MORE time building your name and reputation, but combining that with well placed PPC campaigns or other forms of advertising where you will get results. 

How do you know what will get results?  Couple of ways.

1. Trial & error - but it could cost you dearly with very little payback,
2. Testing + trial & error - you quickly identify what works, and what does not.  This really isn’t trial + error, you are testing specific items such as headlines, font style, font sizes, etc.,  I’ve got some information on testing for a future post…

In building your Internet Marketing Business, you need to combine several techniques to bring visitors to your site — visitors = traffic.  But it doesn’t stop there.  You then need to convert those visitors, the MONEY is in the conversion.  The money might also be in the list, but it start out at CONVERSION.  Once you’ve converted a visitor into a purchaser, chances are that you’ve got a customer for life.

How do you know if your product or service will sell?  Market research.

Performing market research is very simple.  You already have the tools available to you.

Performing Market Research Using the Internet

As you head into a lucrative market place, you need to ask yourself these questions about the business you wish to undertake:

• What needs are you trying to fulfill?  You should know this already, this is the first step in conducting your market research.
• Whose needs are you trying to fulfill? In other words, who will be your customers?  This is one of the questions you are going to answer through market research.
• Why will customers buy from your business? Do you have a special edge, something that differentiates you from your competition?
  • How will you fulfill their needs? In other words, what products or service will you provide?
• How will you market to and reach prospective customers?  Again, this is another question you will answer through your market research

What you are trying to find out through market research is:

• Is there a market for the product or service I am trying to sell?
• How big is that market?
• How crowded is that market?  Who is the competition?

There are several ways to do this.  You can get quite a bit of information by performing research using Google websearch or you can purchase reports developed by market research organizations that may have gone through and already conducted research on your area of interest.  There are some areas that sell no matter what:

• How to make money online, the make money online niche
• How to lose weight
• How to look younger
• How to look better
• How to save money
• How to find a job
• How to live longer

Get it?  Vanity sells.

Using CraigsList, eBay, Google or AdWords to Perform Market Research

CraigsList, and eBay are excellent tools to use to perform market research.  If you have a product that can sell to the CraigsList or eBay crowd, chances are you can be successful. 

CraigsList does not provide any tools to mine their database, you will need to do things the ‘old fashioned way’. 

eBay does provide a market research facility, but you do need to pay for it - http://pages.ebay.com/marketplace_research/ you can also try http://labs.ebay.com/. 

As I’m not to up on eBay, I can’t share as many resources with you - HOWEVER I am doing my own research into eBay market research tools and will share that with you once it has been completed.

Google & AdWords can also be used to conduct market research.  Do a search for say “dog grooming supplies” and look at what is returned.

In my search, Google returned 2.7 million hits.  There were also numerous AdWords advertisements for the search term.  But it doesn’t end there.  You need to find out if those sites are making money — they won’t tell you, but you will have to make some conclusions (based on assumptions).

Here is a website that could help you out - http://www.spyfu.com - here is the link to the particular term I mentioned (dog grooming supplies) - http://www.spyfu.com/Term.aspx?t=461548.

SPYFU tells me that the cost per click is anywhere from $0.68 to as high at $2.34 and that the cost per day is between $5.88 and $30.00.  The CPC is getting pretty high, but the fact that advertisers are willing to pay that much would mean that there is money in this market.

I clicked on the first link in Google for dog grooming supplies, to see what types of products this site sells (www . prodoggroomingsupplies . com).  They sell many products, and various prices.  Being at the top of Google organic results means that they will get a lot of hits to their site.

I also checked the AdWords advertisers (I did not click on their links, to avoid them getting dinged for an exploratory look as I have no intention to purchase any dog grooming supplies).

I found the same thing - the company www . pooch . ca sells many types of dog supplies such as dog carriers, dog apparel, dog boots, dog life vests, dog training supplies - in short A LOT of items for the pooch in your family.

Something else to think about when conducting your market research:

A point to bear in mind is some keyword research tools use the data from pay per click search engines to calculate the number of searches conducted for a given keyword, and this figure is not that realistic. Keyword research utilities such as WordTracker use data from the major metacrawlers like Dogpile to calculate very realistic keyword search statistics, and will give you the number of times any given keyword or phrase was searched for during the previous three months and a predicted count for the next 24 hours. (source: http://www.paldredsolutions.com/home/articles/authors/273/Gregg-Hall)

There are also many online tools out there to help you perform your market research.  Here are a few that I’ve used and have been very happy with:

• AdWords Analyzer
• Keyword Research:
  • WordTracker
  • KeywordElite
  • https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal.  What I like about Googles tools is, the results are from Google plus they show you the advertiser competition for the keyword phrase, and the search volume for that keyword phrase

Tomorrow, I’ll go deeper into performing keyword research using FREE tools and how you can determine whether a niche is worth getting into.

Here is an additional resource that will help you think about what the type of internet business you should get into and what you should be thinking about:

• http://www.jamesbrausch.org/what-do-you-do/

James had this to say about generating traffic (emphasis is mine):

As I mentioned earlier, traffic is just people.

If you aren’t getting a lot of traffic to your site then one of three things is occurring:

1. You aren’t offering anything that people really want.

2. You aren’t offering it in the way people recognize that they want it (actually a copywriting issue).

3. You don’t have enough roads leading from where the people that want what you offer are… to where you are.

If you have a particular interest or burning question - comment on this post and either Robert or I will do our best to answer that question for you.

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I’ve got some work for you.

My Google Reader has about 20-30 blogs in it, I do my best to read them religously everyday but not always possible.

I’d like to find out from YOU what your favourite blogs are, and why.  This is a GREAT time to plug your fav blogs and tell a little about them.

What makes them so great?  What are they doing exceptionally well?  What keeps you going back day after day, after day… well, you get the picture.

Simply reply to this post - although the posts are moderated, I do check them all out.

I’m looking forward to hearing from you!

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and a bit of a controversial video for those bush lovers…

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So I was on BlogPerfume, as I’m thoroughly addicted to website statistics and wanted to see how our RSS is moving along.  It was great to see that they’ve fixed part of the stats that predicted how many RSS subscribers you would have in x period of time.  At one time, it predicted we’d have MILLIONS in a year.  Although I agree with that, it’s probably not realistic.

This is what we found today, when we did a check for our site RSS stats:

As you can see, we’re growing nicely — not phenominally like other sites but we’re happy.

Next up…

This more real.  I can see us getting to 700 subscribers in a year or so.  Again, not rocket ship ride but we’re OK with that.

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Uhhhh, no.  We wouldn’t put you through that much torture to show you us in our birthday suits… but this is about YOU.  Well, us also…

Are YOUR 404 pages as naked as a porn star on their debut DVD?  Are they as bare as Marge Simpson in this image?  Well, then you gotta do something about it!

I was reading a great post over at Balkhis, Optimization of 404 Pages to Improve the Bounce Rate and thought to myself…

“hey…what does OUR 404 page look like…” so off I went to test it out at http://www.oibo.org/anything and my gosh!  Was I shocked.  It was as bare as…well, you know. 

So we took some of Balkhis advice and pumped up our 404 page so that it isn’t so bare and just a little more inviting.

Now that your blog has been up and around for ages, why not take a look at what visitors see when they hit YOUR 404 page.

Is it PUMPED UP on steroids…er, links to content on your site?  Or is it bare?

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Looking for a list of Web 2.0 companies?  Want to develop the next big thing?  Or are you going to try and create a mashup?  Here are a couple of good resources for you:

First one is CrunchBase, they’ve got an excellent list of Web 2.0 and other tech resources - their directory contains over 3,700 companies and 8,000 individuals.

 TechCrunch blog is an excellent resource for information, like this (rather old) post on “34 More Ways to Build Your Social Network”

Another excellent resource is Go2Web20.net - that bill themselves as “The Complete Web 2.0 Directory”.  This site is great, but it seems to take forever to load-up — that’s perhaps because they display a log of all the Web 2.0 companies in their directory and there are just a few of them out there.

There is some great information you can find here, for example I came accross a site called Lucratives.  What’s Lucratives all about — well, although I did not intend to do a full-scale review of all the sites listed (too many) I did go through one of the many that caught my eye  The name of the company is lucrati.es and it’s billed as “The Exclusive Internet Marketing Resource”.  Here is what’s on their front page, followed by my mini-review of the service.

The Lucratives Community aims to fix this… It contains the Best Internet Marketing Links and Tips in an easily accessible and well structured format. All with one common goal - to help internet entrepreneurs become more knowledgeable and profitable online.

What makes Lucratives different?

Only contains articles that will allow you to develop as an Internet Marketer, not your everyday news stories.

Includes must read posts from various internet marketing blogs - All in one place.

Well structured site menu covers the different aspects of Internet Marketing, allowing you to easily find exactly what you want.

It’s self-moderated; we all decide what stays and what doesn’t.

So when I keyed in lucratives in Google, it found the .NET site, not the .ES site.  The .NET site reported an error:

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare tpl_function_checkactionstpl() (previously declared in /home/lucrativ/staging/plugins/function.checkActionsTpl.php:2) in /home/lucrativ/public_html/plugins/function.checkActionsTpl.php on line 5

But when you click on the logo, the site resolves to the .ES (so the URL is http://www.lucrativ.es).

There is some great internet marketing information on Lucrativ.es, and as such we’ll be making more use of the service.  But it’s essentially like DIGG.

They don’t offer a widget or button, but a bookmarklet that you’d plop onto your IE or FireFox browser.

I went and tried submitting a story (mine, of course).  First thing that happened, is that their spell check did not work.  No worries.  I know I’m a good speller.

You can select a category from a pretty exhaustive list, and finally enter a trackback and click on “Preview & Submit”.  And that’s it, you’re done.  It appears that each new submission is automatically given 5 stars - I mean, you would flag your own entry as 5 stars, right?  So they’ve done this for you.

Your post shows up initially in “upcoming” and eventually would show up in their main site.

Here is what their User Control Panel looks like…

Will this fly?  Who knows… but as I went through the stories, there is some great internet marketing information available.  At the very least, if your blog is MMO, IM or along those lines you should probably be submitting to Lucratives and looking at the return — meaning, are you getting visitors from them?  If so, then continue on with what works.  If not, drop ‘em and try another method.  However as they are focused on Internet Marketing and Business you should see some successes from posting entries at the site.

Lucratives has 11 main categories:

1. General Guides
2. Web Products
3. SEO
4. Income Generation
5. Business Development
6. Content
7. Analystics
8. Personal
9. Outsourcing
10. Timesavers
11. Resources

Each also have sub-categories.  For example, under Web Products they list:

• eBooks
• Blogs
• Content Based Websites
• Online Communities (they spell it Communitys)
• Web Shops

All in all, the site is very friendly and easy to navigate.  We will continue working with Lucrativ.es to see if indeed it will be lucrative for me.

I popped on over to CrunchBase to see if they were listed there, but they do not show up on CrunchBase and unfortunately there is very little information on the site that tells you about the management, the team, when they started etc.,   They DID have a Contact Us form though…

It would have been nice to know what the process is; that is how long it takes for an entry to go from upcoming to published - but alas alot of crucial information is just not there.

If you’ve worked with lucrativ.es, can you tell us more about them?

What did you like/dislike.  Was it lucrative for you?  Did you see visitors streaming in?  Or are they more of value as they are getting indexed more often and as such the spiders will find your site?  Please do share your experiences with Lucrative.

Image is from http://www.learnit2.com/tutorial%20018/index.html

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It can happen to the best of us.  Credit card, mortagage, GAS, clothing, FOOD, taking care of the kids, kids activities, etc., etc.,

So what can you do?

Well I was over at Richard Lees site, who had written up a post about Vic over at Blogger Unleashed who had a post about Pay It Forward and that lead me to Lisas’ website GotNoDough.com and this post - My Attempt at Making a Miracle Happen.  Phew… anyway…

Lisa shares some great tips, and common sense advice when it comes to managing your money like:

• Using Coupons To Get Great Deals
• Tips To Lower Heating And Cooling Costs

Lisa shares her families ups and downs, definately a brave thing to do!

Why not help Lisa out by visiting her site, perhaps Digging some of her posts or even donating to help her and her family out of their latest crunch which threatens their livelihood?

You’ve heard the phrase “Pay It Forward” and “What Goes Around, Comes Around” - do the right thing.  NOW.

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I was up surfing some of my favourite sites, and I landed on John Cows and found a great post - http://www.johncow.com/skribit-social-suggestions-might-be-cool/ so followed it through.  As I said previously, I’m a widget junkie — but recently went through and got rid of some widgets.

…anyway, I couldn’t resist and installed the skribit code on the blog.  You can find it on the sidebar, waaaaay down there.

Not sure how it will work - this was installed at around 10:00pm PST on May 4, 2008 - so time will tell.

What is Skribit?

According to the folks over at Skribit - Skribit is a user-generated content suggestion application for blogs. Effortlessly assemble what your readers really want to hear.

It’s supposed to help bloggers cure writers block, and readers to interact with the bloggers by letting bloggers know what the reader wants to read about.

How Does It Work?

Here is a Skribit that has some suggestions in it…

The boys/girls over at skribit also have a blog set-up, you can view it by clicking on it http://skribit.com/blog/ - it is pretty bare right now, since they started up not too long ago.  If after using skribit you want to rate them, head over to this post - http://skribit.com/blog/2008/04/24/get-satisfaction-with-skribit/ and the pop over to http://getsatisfaction.com/skribit and rate them.

If you are using Skribit, can you share your experiences?  It looks to be a great little item that may move up from the bottom rungs of the sidebar to somewhere closer to the top.

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OK - I’m 30-ish, so what the hell am I doing getting all up and addicted to… VIDEO GAMES! What did you think I was going to say?

So as I’ve mentioned many times, my son goes to a montessori (he is currently working at about a grade 1 level - he’s 5 years old) and they teach him all kinda neat stuff that kids his age don’t normally get because most are busy playing or are at pre-school playing with play-doh and holding hands, singing in circles.

So his teacher tells me to get him a Nintendo DS or Sony PSP since it will help build his eye-hand coordination and help him concentrate on tasks. She also recommends several games — Spiderman 3 WAS NOT ONE OF THEM.

So I go out and pick-up this slick, black Nintendo DS. It’s sweet. At first, I’m not too keen on it, but I bought him SmartBoyz, Diego and Spiderman because he loves the movie, and I figured what the hell.

So he starts playing it. And I’m watching. And he hands it to me.

You try, papa - he says.

It’s the last he’s seen of it! We’re competing for the black piece of plastic. So over the last two weeks, I’ve become thoroughly addicted to this bloody game. I am hunting for cheats online, trying to figure out how to get unlimited health and buying up everything I possibly can using my hero bucks.

Soooo if you don’t see me posting as regularly as I do, hopefully Robert will pick up the slack because I’m off to play with my kids Nintendo DS Spiderman game!

…oh what does this have to do with MMO or IM? Absolutely nothing. But this next bit of information might be useful to you. Have you seen those little Asus EEE PC’s? Well, I spotted one at Staples today — and man is it sweet! Nice and tiny — but unfortunately I felt a little overpriced at $399.00.

I checked Staples (Canada) online store, and they are not listed there yet so they are pretty new to Staples. Interestingly enough, Staples is not listed as a place to buy the Asus EEE PC on Asus’ website either but somplace as kooky as The Source is listed. Hmmm… Most places have it listed at $399.99 HOWEVER NCIX has it listed for $299.99 - $100.00 CHEAPER than anywhere else; but they also have no stock.

If you’d like more information on the Asus EEE PC, just head over to their website - http://eeepc.asus.com/ca/index.htm and read up on it.

Basically the ASUS EE PC is a teeny weeny PC:

• At 7″ and weighing only 0.92kg, you can take the Eee PC anywhere.
• Bumps and shocks are no longer issues. With a dependable solid-state disk, you get unparalleled shock-protection and reliability.
• Power-efficient design provides longer operating time when on the go.
• You’re always connected with built-in WiFi 802.11 b/g that automatically detects and connects to the Internet at any hotspot.

If I remember correctly, the model on sale at Staples is Asus EEE PC 4G (4gb solid state disk versus 8gb) and I believe it was available in black, and white. It also came with 512mb memory — so this definately is not to be used as a development machine. It really is for surfing and e-mailing, not much else (at least in my opinion).

So it is worth it plunking down $399 on a PDA… er, sorry I mean PC. Well I’m not sure. I’ll probably pick one up to try it out and see. Unfortunately this is a MMO blog, so that means Asus won’t be sending one over anytime soon for me to review free of charge.

Hey - ASUS BOYS! If you’re reading, I’d love one to demo for keepsies! Just let me know and I’ll give you my home or work address and you can lickity-split send one over to me!!

If someone out there has one of these puppies, can you tell us more about it? Do you like it? Advantages? Disadvantages? Buy it? Save our money?

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