I’ve been reading a book from my collection called The Light Stuff. It’s a book you won’t find too easily, except maybe online since a few Amazon sellers do have it. Being published in 1982 will do that to a book. The book has nothing to do with business, rather it is humor about the space program.

The quote comes from Wernher von Braun, one of the rocket scientists from the early days of the space program. And here it is:

Early to bed, early to rise
Work like hell – and advertise!

Rather good advice for any business, wouldn’t you say? Except that many of us would probably change that to late to bed and leave the rest as is.

Technorati Tags: quote, quotation, wernher von braun, advertise

No, not niches you want to sell on on eBay. Niches you want to create your own sites and find affiliate products for. I hadn’t given this one much thought until I read about The eBay Method.

Most especially, I had never checked eBay’s Pulse.

Pulse lets you see the most popular searches, and you can refine by category until you find searches that meet your criteria. I think it’s pretty safe to assume that people browsing on eBay are looking to buy, and while they may be looking for a bargain, their interest may well indicate interest from other people as well. People you can sell products to from an affiliate site. Read the rest of this entry »

You may have heard that people don’t read online. I just read a post today over at GrokDotCom that indicates otherwise.

They’re quoting results from an eyetrack study that actually show people read more of an article online than they do when reading a broadsheet newspaper or a tabloid. The statistics are pretty interesting.

Thinking about it, I deciced I wasn’t all that surprised. Why else are things like articles considered to be one of the best ways to market your home business? It is not just the search engines. Articles get people reading.

Then there are all the product reviews. Do you really think Amazon lets people do those just for fun? No, they encourage people to review products because they know people read them and it increases the odds of a sale. Read the rest of this entry »

Amazon just keeps marching on offering tools for affiliates. Despite the somewhat low pay, they do seem determined to make themselves highly flexiible for affiliates. That’s certainly something to appreciate.

Their newest offering is Context Links Beta. You’ve probably seen other companies offer similar programs, where you create content and they add links to the text automatically. All you have to do is add the code to your pages.

For those of you concerned about the flexibility of this program, you may feel encouraged to read about how much you can customize: Read the rest of this entry »

I posted a few days ago about Google’s new pay per action program. Today I read a great post over on Shoemoney analyzing some of the potential issues Google may face. It’s very much worth the read, as are some of the comments.

CPA as a model has some issues, and Shoemoney points some of them out, such as fraud. Google has gotten pretty good at detecting click fraud – I wonder how well they’ll do on CPA fraud. Then there’s handling chargebacks, as well as other issues.

Perhaps the biggest issue may turn out to be how easy it is to get a site into Google AdSense, versus how hard it is to get a site into many CPA programs. If Google isn’t pickier about these things there could be some major issues. Read the rest of this entry »

Many home business owners do it all themselves – writing, marketing, product creation, customer service, order fulfillment and so on. Others say that’s a huge mistake and recommend outsourcing as much as possible so that you can earn more.

Which is the right way to go?

Each way has its advantages. The best one will simply depend on your needs and your budget.

That budget is an important issue for many home business owners. Particularly when you’re first starting out finances can be extremely tight. And then you hear about the people earning thousands and thousands every month doing it all alone.

It’s tempting. Read the rest of this entry »

I saw this over on Search Engine Land, and thought it was pretty interesting. I don’t plan on being an early adopter of pay per action ads as either an advertiser or a publisher, but I do like that they’re having the option now available.

You can read all about this on Google’s AdWords blog. It’s in beta at the moment, but that is of course the Google routine. You have to be in the United States to participate, and advertisers must have conversion tracking in place, so that Google knows when to pay on conversions.

Payments are flat fees, not percentage based at this time. That’s certainly easier to handle for right now.

On the publisher side of things, you also have to sign up to be a part of the beta. You get to choose the pay per action ads you show, so you may have more luck finding relevant products or services to advertise on your site.

So why am I not interested? Read the rest of this entry »

Most feel that the Amazon.com affiliate program isn’t the best one out there, but it has just come up with an interesting option you may want to consider. You can now earn 10% on video downloads through their Unbox program.

You will have to log into your Amazon affiliate account to read about this on your own and make links for it, but I can give you a quick summary. The movies can be downloaded to a TiVo, DVR or computer. The emphasis is very much on marketing to TiVo owners, but if you look carefully you can see that movies can be downloaded to PC as well.

This could be useful for many different sites. Parenting sites could reference it about children’s movies or date ideas for parents. Then of course there are the obvious celebrity gossip sites, movie review sites or television discussion sites that could really enjoy this.

Technorati Tags: Amazon unbox, tivo, movie downloads, television episodes, affiliate programs