photo credit: Lee Nachtigal

2010 was an interesting year for me across a number of areas. It was challenging in my financial planning business as I worked my butt off to help clients recover from the GFC. In the internet marketing world I achieved some of the goals that I set for myself earlier in the year, and I learnt many valuable lessons. I’ll share some of them here.

Have a clear set of keywords that you want to be found for.

In 2010 I sat down with the Google keyword tool and Market Samurai and spent a lot of time deciding on the keywords I wanted to rank for. In my financial planning business I had one keyword that was a priority and I’m happy to say that I’m number one for that keyword in my geographic area.

I set up a new blog in another niche and quickly ranked well for a couple of important keywords.

Deciding on a small set of keywords helped me become more focussed in my article writing, and helped me get smarter with page titles etc.

I Discovered You Tube!

Well, I new it existed beforehand, but I’d never taken the time to set up my channel. This year I took time to learn more about using You Tube, added a few videos and did a few different things that got my channel a page rank of 4! I’ll write more on this in future articles.

I’m no expert on You Tube, but videos will become a bigger focus over the next 12 months as I seek to rank well for multiple sites / pages for certain keywords.

I Built Up My Twitter Followers.

Using some of the tips I learnt from the Profit Geyser course, I developed a strategy for using Twitter that works for me. I’m using Tweet Adder to find people to follow, and HootSuite to manage my daily interactions.

I decided to focus on Twitter this year as I had a goal to increase traffic to my site. Twitter allows me to go and find people who may be interested in my site, rather than doing nothing and waiting for people to find me via Google.

I’m happy with my Twitter progress this year – I ended the year with a little over 9,000 followers.

Traffic, Traffic and More Traffic

There’s no point in writing good content if no-one reads it (not even my mum). So I set out to increase my site traffic.

I’ve already mentioned how I focussed on a small range of keywords and wrote articles around those terms. Twitter was also a great way to build up traffic – around 25% of my traffic now comes from Twitter.

I had a goal to write a few guest posts as another way to get noticed and I was fortunate to have my first guest post published on ProBlogger in September. I got a good increase in traffic over the next few days, but the bigger benefit was that it got me noticed.

As a result of the guest post, I was contacted by Srini from BlogCastFM who asked me to do an interview with them.  As a result of that interview, I received more traffic (and discovered a great new podcast).

I also added more articles to Ezine articles – these gave me a new audience and few were re-published elsewhere, providing me with additional backlinks.

Looking Good

I’ve been using Headway Theme for a while and in 2010 set out to learn more about it. My financial planning site was originally a combination of a standard Dreamweaver site with a blog attached to it. I was a bit sick of the way the main site was difficult to update, and I wanted to make sure the SEO was set up properly, so I set out to convert the entire site to WordPress using Headway as the theme.  It took a few hours of work to do (ok a few days), I found the forum very helpful and I also learnt a bit more about HTML and CSS.

When you get used to a WordPress theme, you tend to forget what features relate to the theme, and what are part of WordPress.  With the recent upgrade, the Headway developers have improved the theme and reduced the number of plugins I need to use.  The Headway SEO options are fantastic, the design options rock and it’s now so much easier to use.

I also changed the look of this blog and used the guys at LogoNerds to get a logo designed. I used them on another blog and they came up with an awesome design. I’m determined to build the Blogger Business Plan brand over the coming years and having a decent logo and a professional looking website is one way to do this.

Community is Good

I’ve spent a lot of time over at the Warrior Forum, reading and contributing to some of the discussions. I’ve learnt a lot for free from some of the discussions. I’ve bought some of the Warrior Special Offers and been disappointed by some, and very surprised by the quality of others.

Which brings me on to my final two points….

The Next Best Thing Will Be Released Next Week

Well, maybe not, but it’s a sure bet that next week a new internet marketing product will be released that promises to change the internet marketing world forever. This year it was all about Facebook advertising, Mobile advertising, Offline consulting and how to game Google.

2011 will have it’s own fads.

The important thing is for you to figure out what strategy you want to take to achieve your goals, and stick to it.

Focus

It’s so easy to go from fad to fad and never achieve anything.

Last year I focussed on a few key areas and saw results. This year I’ll expand on those areas and do a few extra things, but I’ll accept that there’s not enough hours in the day to do all the things that I’d like to do.

The best lesson I learnt in 2010 was to focus on one or two things and do them well.

People Rock

Finally, the thing I love most about blogging is the interaction.

As a result of my guest post (and my Twitter use), I met some cool bloggers who are doing great things online.

Here are just a few of the wonderful, helpful bloggers I’ve discovered over the past 12 months.

Eddie Gear has a great blog on Microsoft 2010, Word etc.

Tristan over at BloggingBookshelf.com is a blogging machine. He posts every day, and makes the effort to reply to every comment left on his blog.

I first came across Kim Roach on the Warrior Forum. She’s got a lot of great ideas and is worth following.

The Final Bonus Point – Relax!

OK, this really is the last point!

Relax.

I’ve just spent the past three weeks in New Zealand with my wife and two kids. We had a great time away and saw many amazing things.

We left two days after Christmas, so things were pretty busy in the last part of December.

I had good intentions of writing some posts in advance, and some while I was away, but it never happened.

A year ago I would have got stressed about that and put myself under more pressure. Not now. I’ve decided that it’s ok to relax. Whilst I find blogging to be a good way to wind down at night, when I was away it was even more relaxing to do nothing.

Sometimes we get so caught up in the business of our lives that we forget to stop, take a deep breath, and just enjoy things that are important to us.

What Did You Learn?

So there’s some of the things I’ve learnt over the past year.

What did you learn in 2010, and what will you do differently this year?

Leave a comment below.

In the internet marketing world, everyone seems to be fixated on how much money someone makes. Unfortunately people seem to be interested in the wrong number. You see, income is meaningless – profit is important. In this article we’ll look at the difference between income and profit, and help you learn more about increasing your profits.

Income – the big number

Income is what I call the ‘big number’. It’s the measure of how much money your blog receives.

So when a guru talks about a million dollar product launch and tells you all about the day they made one million dollars, they’re usually referring to their gross income.

In business, Gross Revenue (or gross income) is your income before expenses. It’s the total amount of money that comes in to your business, but doesn’t take into account any expenses.

Expenses Reduce Your Income

Every successful business has expenses. Expenses are the costs in doing business. For a blogger these can include web hosting, domain registration, design work, blog plugins, advertising costs, salaries, affiliate payments etc.

Having expenses in a business are unavoidable. You usually have control over the expenses you incur, and it’s important to ensure they don’t become too high.

Profit is what’s left

When we talk about profit, we’re usually referring to your net profit – the money left over after all your expenses have been deducted from your income. The aim of most bloggers is to make some kind of profit from their business.

Profit Case Study

Let’s look at some examples of income and profit for different business models.

Mikey has a successful blog. He launches a product that he’s created and which sells at $100.  Over the course of a year he sells one product a week, making $5,200 in income for the year. He has minimal costs in selling the product because it’s a digital product, so his total annual costs for hosting, product delivery etc come to $500.

Mikey’s net profit is simply his income less his expenses – $5,200 – $500 = $4,700.

But what if Mikey increased his expenses to earn more profit? What the! Let’s have a look at this example.

In the second year, Mikey decides to try something different. He enlists a bunch of affiliates to sell his products, offering a generous 50% commission on every sale.

In that year he sells four products a week, all via his affiliates (let’s assume he stops selling direct). Now he’s making $400 per week ($20,800 per year). But he also has to pay 50% of the revenue to his affiliates, leaving him with $10,400.  Assuming his costs remain fixed at $500 his profit after all expenses becomes $9,900.

In this example, his expenses increased, but his revenue increased by a greater amount.

So it’s possible to grow your revenue by spending more money on things like advertising, promotion, affiliates etc. Good business owners track their return on investment. so if they invest $1 in advertising, they want to know that they’ll get at least that $1 back, as well as some extra profit.

Know what you’re talking about

I’ve got friends in business who will brag about how big their business turnover is. Turnover (income) is a pretty meaningless figure. You can turnover $1m a year and have expenses of $900k, leaving you with a profit of $100k.

Or you could turnover $500k a year with expenses of only $100k, leaving a profit of $400k.

Which option would you prefer?

The Wrap Up

So, income is what you earn, profit is what you keep.

You do need to spend money to make money, the key is tracking your spending and making sure you’re getting a return on every dollar you spend.

What questions do you have about income and profit?

Do you know of businesses with high turnover and low profits? Leave a comment below and let us know what you think.

Image Some rights reserved by alancleaver_2000

Internet marketing is constantly changing and evolving, and there are lots of new ideas surfacing. I believe the internet provides some amazing opportunities for people to build successful businesses over the coming years.

I’ve written before about having a vision. It’s so important to have some goals and a direction for your life and your online business. But when it comes to choosing a model for your online business (or businesses), there are so many options to choose from.

One of the ways to learn more about any industry is to frequent the relevant forums and interact with people. It’s a great way of learning more, and being able to help others. Finding the right community of people can help boost your chances of success.

There are two forums I visit that are relevant to internet marketing.

Warrior Forum

Warrior Forum is a large community that covers all aspects of internet marketing.  There’s always some interesting conversations going on, and I’ve learnt a lot from reading through the posts.

The basic forum is free, but there’s an option to upgrade your membership for a one-off fee of $37.  This gives you access to the War Room which is a separate area with a lot more material.

You can waste a lot of time here because there’s so much information to digest.  Take your time in this forum, aim to pick up one or two good ideas each time you visit, and them take some time away to out into action the things you’ve learnt.

ProBlogger.com

Most people would have heard of Darren Rowse and ProBlogger.net.  Late last year Darren introduced a paid forum at ProBlogger.com.

It now costs $5.95 per month and has around 2,000 active members.  It’s smaller than Warrior Forum, but that’s ok because it’s different.

There’s a wide range of experience on this forum, ranging from newbies to people making a full time living from blogging and internet marketing.  There are opportunities to ask lots of questions and get feedback on your web site or ideas.

I’ve obtained some immediate benefit from the site.  Late last year I asked some questions about improving the SEO on my business site.  Within 24 hours I received a couple of great suggestions which I implemented and gave me a very quick boost in the Google rankings for my keywords.  The extra business I could receive from that would pay my membership for many years to come.

Other Internet Marketing Forums

I know there are many other forums out there – some paid, some free.  There are also many membership sites that cater to specific niches.  As time goes on I may become a member at some other sites.

For now, the challenge is to take the good ideas from these forums and implement them in my online businesses.  I gather this is a common problem that people are experiencing – they’ve got plenty of ideas, but just need the time and discipline to do them.

This is where I see an opportunity for BloggerBusinessPlan.com.  I can coach you and help you focus on the two or three priorities you need to focus on to build your online presence.

What other forums do you frequent?  What value or ideas have you received from them?

Thanks for visiting Blogger Business Plan.  I’ve been involved in marketing and business coaching for a while now and over the past few years have watched as selling goods and services over the internet has become more mainstream and accepted.

There are countless stories of people who have made their fortunes using the internet, but for every success story there are many others who have failed.

If you search on the topic ‘Make money online’ at Google, you’ll see there’s around 178,000,000 search results (in June 2009).  That’s a lot of sites that are telling you what to do. 

It’s a bit like the goldrush.  The people who made lots of money weren’t the miners, but the people who sold things to the miners – picks, shovels, clothing, food etc.

Personally, I think a lot of people who sell the ‘make money on the internet’ books and packages are full of hype. There are some good ones out there (and we’ll feature some here), but lets face it, the people who are really making money probably aren’t going to tell you their secrets.

Would you?  If you had a way of making money and a crucial part of that success involved staying ahead of your competitors, would you sell your secrets to the world?  Probably not.  You’d keep it to yourself.

The internet opens up opportunities to distribute your product that were unheard of a decade ago.  Bands can sell or give away music and build up an online following.  You can create e-books, audio or video programs and sell them, and your market is no longer local -it’s global.

Just because you’re selling via the internet doesn’t mean that the traditional rules of business and marketing strategy aren’t relevant!  In some respects they become more relevant because selling over the internet makes your product less tangible than selling face-to-face and therefore harder to sell.

This web site isn’t about hype.  We won’t try and sell you one method to make money online.

What this web site is about is helping you think of your blog or web site like a business.  We’ll help you develop a business plan that enables you to run your site more effectively, and helps you achieve the lifestyle you desire.

We’ll talk about marketing, different ways to attract clients, how to develop strategies and goals that can be measured, as well as give you tips on promoting your site and tracking your progress.  We’ll take methods that are proven to work in the business world, adapt them for the online world and show them to you here.

Please bookmark our site and subscribe to our newsletter.  We’ll keep in touch with you, send you regular updates and subscriber-only content.  And if there are particular things you’d like us to feature here, or questions you want answered, let us know.