I’ll be quite honest.  When I started this blog, I hadn’t for a moment thought about making any money with it. I actually bought he domain name with the intention of using it to keep my family informed of what we were all up to at a time when we had moved to Texas and they were all in California.  Then came my cooking blog.

That blog quickly became a business.  It makes an income, and though that income isn’t staggering, it is more than enough to pay for the hosting and maintenance of all the sites that I run.  The funny thing is, I don’t know when I started treating that blog like a business.  It just kind of happened one day.

This blog was still maintained off and on, usually reflecting whatever my current interests were.  It has no real niche other than general geekery.  It has been a writing blog, a tech blog and has finally settled into a blog about blogging.  It’s comfortable there.  I’m comfortable having it there. But it has never been a real part of my business.

This has been one of the biggest mistakes in my blogging career.  Not only have I failed to leverage the power of my own name, I failed to leverage the power of a successful blog that could have been driving traffic to this one.  I already have a fairly large readership.  Of these people many are professionals, almost all are bloggers.   In short, I have readers.  Ready made, waiting for me to nudge them in this direction. I have failed to do that until now.

Why the sudden change in thought?  To be honest, it’s not so sudden.  I’ve been stubbornly hanging on to the thought that Jerry D Russell dot Com was just “my little place” and should be left alone.  But then two things happened:

The first realization was that this is still just my little place.  It doesn’t matter if I move it from personal to business.  My other blog did that years ago, but it is still a source of great pride and pleasure for me.  This blog doesn’t need to be any different, and should really be more enjoyable because the scope is broader.

The second thing that happened was that I downloaded John Chow’s Free eBook The Ultimate Blog Profit Model. As I was reading through what he had written, I realized that it closely mirrored what another very profitable and popular blogger had said.  That blogger was Jaden Hair of steamykitchen.com.

Both of these people are from wildly different niches and wildly different backgrounds, but both have enjoyed monstrous success. For me, that has been the turning point.  Yes, blogging is still fun for me; It always has been.  That’s not going to change.

The difference is that very soon, there will be a business plan and a mission statement hanging above my desk.  Those will be referred to daily and followed.  It’s time to move forward and stop playing at one thing while pushing the other.  I currently have three blogs.  Each of those blogs is a Jerry D Russell dot Com joint.  All run under my name, so it’s time to turn this blog into the hub for all the others.

Are you treating your blog/website as seriously as you should?  If so, congratulations;  If not, go get yourself a business plan and a mission statement.  It’s time to get serious.

if you are just getting into affiliate sales there is a very real temptation to simply go after those products that make you the most money. I caution against this.

While there is potential profit in chasing each and every product with a high percentage of payout per sale, the potential for garnering a distrust between yourself and your customers by far outweighs any potential for a profitable lasting  relationship.

Before you decide you’re going to market a product or service you need to ask yourself if it’s something you would use yourself. If the answer is yes, then buy the product or sign up for the service and make sure that it works for you. If the answer is no, walk away, you shouldn’t be selling it.

I don’t offer this advice lightly. the decision to be ethical in your sales approach can be costly. Very costly. It’s simple to promote the heck out of some product that has no real use to your customers but turns large commissions for each sale, but this method of doing business comes at an even greater cost.

It will cost you your customers

A customer who feels that they have been slighted in the least is not likely to return to you for advice on their next purchase. It’s far more likely that they will tell every single person that they know how badly they feel they have been treated, thus costing you more customers, more revenue and a serious lack of trust in an open marketplace.

If you’re wondering why I so vehemently preach customer relations on this site, it’s because I learned a long time ago that making a small sale today and leaving my customer satisfied translates directly into more sales from that customer later. It was true when I sold retail, it was true in web development and it was true in technical support. A satisfied customer will most likely come back to you the next time he or she need something that they feel you can supply for them. They might even tell a friend or two.

If you’re selling or promoting software or programs on how to make money, it’s likely that if your customer runs into a problem, he or she will contact you before bailing out completely and walking away in disgust. If you have used the product or service you’re selling, you have the tools to turn the situation into a positive one. If you’re hawking snake oil… Well, don’t expect to see many “thank you” emails. It’s more likely you’ll be seeing chargebacks on sales.

Nice guys don’t finish last. They may get to the finish line later, but they have more to show for it.

If you promise what a product can deliver and sell it on its own merits, you stand to gain a collection of loyal customers, a good reputation and at least one of those “thank you” emails. Your customers will very likely trust you to recommend another product at some point in the future, since the first actually worked for them. This is what they call in marketing a “win-win” situation. You have a sale and you customer is happy.

This concept is especially important in times of economic upheaval. In times like these customers expect to get what they paid for. They don’t have a lot of disposable discretionary income. Make that sale count and it will provide a gateway for another. Blow it by selling your customer something he or she didn’t need and you’ve shot yourself in the foot in the worst possible way.

Stand behind what you sell. It may not make you a fortune in your first three hours, but it will build a solid foundation on which to make more sales in the future.

Paul Harvey was America’s most loved radio newscaster.  His broadcast graced the airwaves for seven decades and touched the lives of millions of people.  He was credited with creating the foundations for the modern newscast and awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush in 2005, the highest honor that can be awarded to a civilian by the United States of America. None of these things was a small accomplishment.

Mr Harvey passed away yesterday, February 28, 2009 at the age of 90. The voice that reached into 24 million homes and businesses each day has been silenced. To say that he will be missed is an understatement. He will be mourned by a nation in ways that few people ever are.  He wasn’t a national hero or a figurehead.  He was not someone whom we glimpsed on a screen and admired. He was a friend and  family member, warmly welcomed into our homes each and every day. Mr. Harvey’s passing is a personal loss on a national scale.

Paul Harvey has left us a legacy as sales people and advertisers.  Over the decades that he spent on radio, Mr. Harvey garnered relationships with manufacturers and service providers that he advertised in some cases for decades. He was quoted as saying that he was “…fiercely loyal to those who put their money where their mouth is”.  To think that he wasn’t approached by every company that could afford advertising time on his broadcast would be foolish.  They clamored after him. He could have easily earned millions of dollars acting as a shill for any number of products and the American public would have listened. He never did so.

Paul Harvey never advertised a product on his broadcast that he did not use himself and trust enough to recommend to his dearest friend. His integrity was such that it appears on every biographical page and wiki mention of his name.  He was known as much for his ethics as he was for his commentary.  America Trusted Paul Harvey and he in turn took it upon himself to be worthy of that trust, even though it could have benefited him greatly had he done otherwise.

To anyone willing to pay attention, the way Paul Harvey approached business has several valuable lessons to teach:

• Never sell something you don’t believe in.
• Treat your customer the same way you would treat your friends and family.
• Don’t look at the money you can earn over value to your customer.
• Never steer your customer wrong, they are trusting you to give them accurate information and to lead them to a solution to their problem however small it may be. That trust is a sacred thing and should not be violated.
• If you can’t give the customer what they want, refer them to someone who can.
• It is better to lose a sale today than to lose a customer or reader forever.

In today’s hectic and competitive business world it is sometimes easy to overlook these lessons.  In the Internet game it’s most often the most aggressive or most willing to compromise values that win big today. They flash on the scene stomp on the competition, promise the moon and make the sale, but where will these people be tomorrow?

The Internet has a long memory. Unethical companies quickly find that word of mouth on the Internet is just as effective as word of mouth in a small town in rural America. People that don’t like the way they have been treated will tell other people about their bad experience. That word will spread quickly.

In the past they would tell their friends over coffee or at the grocery store.  Today they will tell them on social networking sites like twitter, where a single comment in 140 characters or less can reach a million people within a few hours. If the word is positive, you stand to gain more customers.  If the word is bad, you stand to lose the trust of a very large number of people before you ever had the chance to earn it.

Paul Harvey never lost sight of these things and neither should we. His business practices are worth their weight in gold and can be proven easily. Mr. Harvey broadcast for seven decades.  In that time period many other broadcasters rose to high stature and then for some reason lost the trust of their listeners.  Their careers ended there, usually after only a few years. Paul Harvey’s career on the other hand, never faltered.  He worked his entire career to keep that trust, and you should be doing the same.

In closing, I wish to send my best wishes to the survivors of Paul Harvey. In particular I would like to say to Paul Harvey Jr. that your father was a man to be admired. I’m sure that you were proud of him and I am truly sorry for your loss.

As for me, I’ll carry the torch for ethical business practices and I hope and pray that others will rally to carry it with me. It’s a legacy worth living up to and something that is not nearly evident enough in Internet advertising today.

Good Day, Mr Harvey.  You will be missed.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been doing a lot of research on the subject of affiliate sales and affiliate marketing. In this short amount of time I’ve come to realize that 99% of the information that most people see on this topic when they first decide to venture into the world of affiliate sales is absolute chaff not worth taking the time to read through.

In my first three hours of research I was completely inundated with products offering me the one sure fire method that would jump start my online affiliate career. These programs promise all sorts of amazing results, from making a profit within the first three hours to making $700.00+ per day with just minutes of work on my part. Each one promises to give you all the secrets the top affiliate marketers don’t want anyone else to know. All you have to do is sign up for their program (for a fee) and they’ll show you how to get rich in minutes.

I call BullS**t!

The truth of the matter is this. There is no magic bullet. The promise of “if you build it, they will come” only works for baseball fields in small Midwest towns, not marketing niche sites. It may have been true in the early days of the Internet but it is most definitely not true today. Successful affiliates are doing well for the same reason any other entrepreneur does well. They work very hard at it.

I’m not saying that all of these programs are completely useless, but I do feel that he basic premise of most is to prey on the gullibility of people who really do want to learn new ways to supplement their income. Each and every one of the sales pages I visited tells the same story. “It’s simple”, “It’s Easy”, “we’ll walk you through a step-by-step method to make amazing amounts of money”, “it’s fun!”. The promise is for amazing profits with no effort, the same promise that’s heard all over the world on late-night infomercials and it’s the same in the case of the Internet. It’s a false promise.

The more reputable of these systems is selling information that anyone could have found for free on their own if they had just looked for it. In essence you are simply paying them for doing some of the legwork for you. My wife actually purchased one such affiliate program and made her money back within one month without spending another dime. The reason she did not continue was that she found she wasn’t really interested in the situation. Fair enough, the program delivered at least the basic tools for a complete novice to make some extra money. In this case it wasn’t a complete scam.

Other programs are nothing more than thinly veiled attempts to sell even more products that their customers will probably never really need, with the promise that these tools will help in making that first “Internet million.” The reality of this type of program is that they have taken the same basic skills detailed in more ethical systems and turned them into an affiliate marketing sales pitch of their own. In the end they’ll promise to refund the entire cost of their program if the customer isn’t satisfied (this probably happens quite often), but if their customer went through and bought several different tools and utilities as suggested, the company has easily made treble that amount of money off of that person.

It’s simple for an inexperienced or gullible individual to fall prey to companies like the latter and eventually find that they have spent thousands of dollars on useless software, bloated website hosting, design services and useless or outdated information. These people leave the experience disillusioned and disparate. They probably won’t try again, which is a shame, as there is money to be made if the situation is approached in the right manner.

That’s why I’ve decided to write an eBook on the topic. I want to take the mystery out of the process and point people to the right resources, tools that actually do work and people that can actually help them move forward without burying themselves in debt. As a byproduct I’ve come up with ideas for several other eBooks, all on topics that are designed to help people move in a positive direction toward their goals.

I have to be a bit vague at this point on topics and the actual titles and information these eBooks will contain, not because I’m not so excited about it that I don’t want to share it with everyone, but because I don’t want someone to take my exact idea and get it out before I have the chance to do so.

And how will I market this little gem, you ask?

With affiliate marketing, of course. I’ve already gotten a massive amount of help from dozens of affiliates, why not give back by hopefully earning them some money in the process. (Making a bit to help with hosting costs and other necessities doesn’t sound bad either.)

I’d love to know what you think about this. Is it worth the time? Does the topic interest you? Please leave your ideas in the comments. And hey, feel free to let other people know so that I can get as much feedback on the subject as possible.

Peace, I’m out.

Let’s get one thing straight.  Stimulus package or no, it’s going to take time for the economy to get back on track.  In the time being, it’s getting more and more difficult to get a fair price for the work we do.  This isn’t a conspiracy, it’s that advertisers are feeling the crunch just as much as we are and no one wants to risk any money that they don’t have to.

If you are counting on one source of income from your online ventures you’re in for a rude awakening. The amount you earned last week will most likely be significantly larger than the amount you will earn this week. If you haven’t noticed a difference in the amount you can earn per job or per sale, you are among the lucky ones.

If you think I’m sitting in a gilded room spouting these little tidbits of information you’d be wrong. In the past three weeks I’ve had four advertisers send polite emails telling me to pull the ads and links that I had on various blogs.  Each of them was sure to tell me that it was not the performance of these ads that prompted their decision, rather it was a change in marketing focus. What they really meant is that their companies are feeling the strain as well and they can no longer afford the advertising channel that included my blogs.

I have no hard feelings.  this is business and in tough economic times businesses need to cut back. if you do paid posts, you’ve seen it in the pricing for them.  What used to pay $10.00 for a few hundred words is now paying $2.50.  It’s a trend that is going to continue in every market.  Advertisers need people to buy their products.  When people aren’t buying, they don’t have the advertising budget to pay their affiliates or freelancers as well as they used to.  In turn, those people that are dependant on these companies for income accept lower payments, which brings the overall market down.

Diversity is the key

Diverse income channels was a good idea in a strong economy.  Now that the economy is depressed it’s not just a good idea, it’s an absolute necessity.  If you’ve got all your eggs in one basket, you’re going to suffer, if you survive at all.  That’s not a remark made lightly, it’s the plain simple truth.

now is the time to get out there and find other methods of making money.  Look to affiliate sales, freelance writing assignments and alternative forms of advertising.  See if you can barter links with other sites to get your traffic up.  At the very least your CPC revenues should increase with more traffic.

Look closely at any affiliate programs you may be using.  if they aren’t bringing in money, get rid of them. now is not the time to be stubborn and wait for results.  if it’s been there a month and made no money, its dead weight that is on;y eating screen real-estate.  Liabilities cannot be tolerated when money is tight.

The time for tough decisions is here.  There is still a lot of money to be made, but only those who are willing to work very hard are going to reap thee benefit of a good income in times like these.  What the future holds is still uncertain.  For the moment it’s time to tighten your belt and live lean.  if you’ve got the right mindset you may just come out of this in a far better place than you were when it wasn’t so hard. And at the end of this we’ll all have a lot less competition, because those who don’t adapt will go under, leaving more opportunities for those who did.

If you’re having trouble staying afloat in these troubled economic times and you are in the ales business, there is a way to help your business make it through the rough times. The concept is called Credit Card Factoring, and it’s simple enough in principle. You take a loan to keep your business alive. In turn you agree to pay a percentage of future credit card sales back to the company that loaned you the money.

This scenario can work if you are currently in dire straights but know that you can recover if given just a little more time. The interest rates are much higher than a traditional bank loan, so it is definitely not a first choice, but is an option if you find yourself with limited choices for funding from other sources. (And I’m not referring to people named “Vinnie” who loan money in back alleys. They should be avoided at all costs.)

As with any type of loan, this one has its pros and cons and should be considered carefully before you enter into any agreement. it’s your business, whether it be web-based or a brick and mortar operation. we’re all feeling the economic crunch. Weather what you can, resort to loans as a last resort. This is simply one more tool at your disposal.

Will you have any of this during the slow times?

Mastering the discipline of restraint may just be the most important tool in your arsenal as a budding pro blogger, freelancer or internet mogul. If you are generating any income at all from sponsored posts, paid reviews or even paid writing gigs, then you’ve probably seen it.  For a few days there will be well paid opportunities available everywhere, so many that you can’t fit them all in.  It’s like a money making heaven.  Then, a few days later you find yourself looking at a screen full of just about nothing, with no way to make your daily goal for income and no real chance of making that goal for the next few days.  This is the life of a freelancer, it’s the way things go.  It’s called feast or famine, and how you deal with it can make the difference between being successful as a pro blogger or freelancer and having to go back to the Evil Day Job.

Why am I mentioning freelancers and bloggers that do paid posts in the same paragraph?  Because by definition, they are the same thing.  There is no distinction between a person who accepts a job to write a 500 word article for $40.00 and a blogger that accepts a 300 word post for $20.00.  Both are freelancing.  Also, by definition all bloggers (with the exception of photo-bloggers, perhaps) are writers.  If anything the definition between the two only blurs in the editing department, since most bloggers are not the world’s best editors!

Now that we’ve got the definitions out of the way, what is a freelancer to do when there is a ton of work one week and no work the next?  For me the short answer is always to tackle as many projects as I can, when I can, especially if they present themselves early in the month.  If you can whip out double or triple your weekly income for the first week of a given month, a slow space in the middle isn’t going to cause you undue stress.  But if there’s a boom at the end and you’ve managed to keep up with your goals, just take what you can get and if possible, allow the extra to roll over into the following month.

In this way you start building yourself a slush fund for those slower times.  Think of what you do as a business.  If you owned a company that suddenly made a few extra million one month, chances are you wouldn’t just give all of your employees a raise, or pay them the next three month’s salary at once.  That money would go into the bank and pe paid out as usual.  If you can master the discipline to do this in your writing or blogging career, you’re well on your way to never being worried about a slump.

Of course, if you are consistantly going over the mark and find that you’ve got over two months worth of slush fund, it might just be time to consider giving yourself a raise.

In today’s world of high tech sales, marketing and promotional strategies, it’s only logical to make sure that your PR firm can handle high tech public relations.  This may sound like a daunting challenge for smaller companies, but the reality is that the right public relations firm can level the playing field between small startups and the big boys fairly easily in this new medium.

Enter the Loughlin/Michaels Group, a company with six years experience in the high tech public relations field. Their Jump Start Program is designed to help smaller businesses gain recognition and presence in the new marketplace, thus gaining your business the momentum it needs to succeed and grow in today’s world without having to risk the stability of your business with PR expenses.

You need to get your business off the ground and you need to do so with a company that has a rpoven track record of achieving results.  Make your choices based on past performance and go with an expert in the field.