Web 2.0 and Marketing

Web 2.0 is an industry buzzword. It is not just all hype however. I think that when it comes down to it, the term web 2.0 really does have meaning and your actions on the internet are apart of it. O’Reilly breaks it down best. They have a great breakdown of comparisons for 1.0 vs 2.0 – and anyone who has used these services and has a technical background will have an appreciation for the comparison. These simple services have transformed, to make it possible to target markets and segments very easily. It puts so much more information at the consumers fingertips, but also allows you to really get into their faces if you can harness the power of the new internet that is among us. Web 2.0 may not be defined in any dictionary, or be a real term at all. The bottom line is whatever you want to call it, the internet has evolved into a place where you can strategically market yourself, a service, or product and drop it on the lap of the consumer. Going about it the right way is the challenge, and keeping up with it may be even tougher. This is going to be the basis of a series of articles I post in order to educate people on how to use different services and applications to promote yourself or your business and products. How you act on the suggestions is up to you but these guidelines will at least help point you in the right direction and clear up some of the common questions and ideas. (source: SynergyShop).0 and Marketing

Internet Business for Young Entrepreneurs

Google will fight Yahoo in Display Ads Business

Google had made a preparation to grab Internet Display Advertising from Yahoo, a lucrative market that had long been enjoyed and dominated by Yahoo!. Google’s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, has said repeatedly that display advertising offers one of the company’s best prospects for expansion, now that growth in its text ad business has slowed significantly. The new advertising exchange is a cornerstone of Google’s display strategy, and one of the main reasons Google bought the ad company DoubleClick last year for $3.1 billion.

Google executives say the new system, called the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, will greatly simplify the process of buying and selling display advertising, allowing many more publishers and advertisers to benefit from it.

Currently Google finds itself in the unfamiliar role of underdog. As one of the Web’s biggest publishers, and a seller of ads on a network of top sites like eBay and hundreds of newspapers, Yahoo is the king of the display advertising business. In 2007 Yahoo bought Right Media, a pioneering ad exchange whose business has grown steadily since, in part because many of the ads that run on Yahoo are brokered through it.

Still, analysts say Google’s push into the business could shake up the market. DoubleClick has had an ad exchange for some time. But the new system will automatically allow hundreds of thousands of advertisers and publishers who now use Google’s AdWords and AdSense systems to run their ads and ad space through the exchange.

“Marketers are going to be able to effectively reach 100 percent of the Internet audience and do so at a high frequency,” said William Morrison, an analyst with ThinkEquity Partners. “That is very difficult to do on the Internet right now, outside of a handful of major Web sites like Yahoo and a few others.”

Ad exchanges have been hailed as the future of the industry for some time, yet Mr. Morrison said that they only account for between 10 and 15 percent of the display advertising business. He said it was unlikely that the DoubleClick exchange would catch up with Yahoo’s exchange within the next year. But the Google exchange could become dominant over the long term, especially among premium brand marketers and publishers, he added. (source: NYT)

Android installed quietly in More Mobile Phones

Google's Android platform isn't often cited when end users discuss the leaders in the mobile phone market. Typically, those discussions are dominated by companies such as Apple, Research In Motion and even Microsoft. But it's Google that's quietly gaining ground in the space.

The company is behind more phone releases running its Android operating system than you might think. Aside from the T-Mobile G1—the first Android-based phone to hit store shelves—HTC's MyTouch 3G is currently offered to consumers. HTC also announced the Tattoo Tuesday that promises some neat functionality for European users. It's the company's fourth Android-based phone.

But HTC isn't alone. Companies like Motorola, LG and even Acer have signed on to produce Android-based products. Google's partners in the Open Handset Alliance have joined at such a rapid rate that the company hopes to have up to 20 Android-based phones available by the end of 2009. It could more than double that number by the end of 2010. And yet, Android doesn't receive the kind of respect or attention Apple does. It's an afterthought when it comes time to analyze the mobile phone market.


Admittedly, that is mainly due to the fact that Android doesn't hold the kind of market share its competitors do. In fact, it's trailing far behind Apple's iPhone, RIM's BlackBerry devices and even Windows Mobile.

But it may not stay that way much longer. Unlike Apple, which has tied its future to one product, Google decided to follow in Microsoft's footsteps and open up its software to vendors. And unlike Microsoft's Windows Mobile, which provides a subpar experience, Google's Android mobile operating system is a fine alternative to the iPhone.

The Experience

In the cell phone market, providing an experience is a key success factor. If a phone doesn't have a touch-screen, doesn't sport some kind of multitouch technology and doesn't have an App Store, most users won't find as much value in it. Those are requirements that Apple has put in place, and like it or not, its competitors have to play ball.

And Google is playing ball. Its Android operating system boasts outstanding software that appeals to just about anyone who uses it. In fact, it's a nice alternative to Apple's iPhone software.

Search Engine Optimization Techniques

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a way to optimize a wibsite so as to make it easily searched and found in the world of cyber space by a Search Engine with the purpose of increasing visits to the website.

Thus the easier a wibsite is searched, the more likely that the website is visited by a web visitor. It then has a better chance to have its content or advertising content be seen by a visitor.

There are two basic SEO Optimisation techniques, namely the On Page and the Off Page techniques.

The On Page technique is a method to make a better website appearance, in its design, its we page content or its web theme. While the Off Page technique is a way to develop many links toward our website or blog, such as by providing link from our comment to a blog, guest book, through our chatting activities, mailing list, etc.

Social Media Guidelines for Employees

Oh, social media. You're taking up so much of our time and energy that companies need to tell us how to behave.

On one hand, it seems silly. Most of these guidelines are common sense, but common sense may not be enough where personal opinions and legal and human resource departments collide.

I don't blame them. In fact, I think there are smart things being said in these guidelines that would have been nice to have around years ago.

Protecting business and fighting negative perception are important to every company. The last thing they want or need is for employees to be out there in the social media sphere of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or anywhere else spouting false information, making their work life too transparent or arguing with other employees publicly.

Two companies taking social media seriously are Intel and IBM. Intel is taking it so seriously it apparently has created a department dedicated to the practices of smart social media, says ZDNet's Jason Hiner.

From a human resources perspective, it's a really wise move to have clear guidelines and policies, and for most employees, it's good to know where your company stands on posting information--especially with issues of legality, copyright, company secrets and the like. I could very well see other companies borrowing from Intel's and IBM's social media guidelines.

Here's why:

• They accepts that things are going to change with emerging social technologies


• They lay the behaviorial framework that it would expect to see


• They protect themsleves in case of bad behavior, slander or offensive lawsuits


• Implicit in these guideline is that for the right infraction you could be fired


• In the case of Intel, they require training for employees and bloggers

So, what are Intel's guidelines? Here are some of the details:

• Be transparent
• Be judicious
• Write what you know
• Perception is reality
• It's a conversation
• Are you adding value?
• Your responsibility
• Create some excitement
• Be a leader
• Did you screw up?
• If it give you pause, pause

The one that sticks out to me is "create some excitement," but if you are blogging or promoting Intel in social media, than there is certain level of buzz they are trying to generate. Makes sense, but feels like less of a guideline and more a tone they want. Respectfully, it feels a bit forced, but it's in their best interest to keep it as positive as possible.

IBM is another technology company that has its social computing guidelines publicly posted--and they are a bit more detailed about what they think participants should behave. IBM goes so far as to say that it discourages IBMers from being political or religious where IBM is part of the discussion--subjects that can easily flare up in social media. From the IBM guidelines:

Respect your audience and your coworkers. Remember that IBM is a global organization whose employees and clients reflect a diverse set of customs, values and points of view. Don't be afraid to be yourself, but do so respectfully. This includes not only the obvious (no ethnic slurs, personal insults, obscenity, etc.) but also proper consideration of privacy and of topics that may be considered objectionable or inflammatory--such as politics and religion. For example, if your blog is hosted on an IBM-owned property, avoid these topics and focus on subjects that are business-related. If your blog is self-hosted, use your best judgment and be sure to make it clear that the views and opinions expressed are yours alone and do not represent the official views of IBM.

While having these guidelines helps establish the legal framework that these companies need to be able to operate in, it works as an added benefit to employees that they know where they stand if they post things deemed controversial. In IBM's case, it even has guidelines for virtual worlds behavior given its well-documented use of operating in that space.

In its virtual world guideline, the company goes so far as to advise about the appearance of your avatar, if that avatar is in fact doing IBM business virtually.

My advice: make sure your avatar has a shirt on and doesn't have a head of snakes.

Hijacking Smartphone via SMS Mesage

Black Hat Researchers have uncovered a bevy of vulnerabilities in smart phones made by multiple vendors, including one in Apple's iPhone that could allow an attacker to execute malicious code without requiring the victim to take any action at all.

The iPhone bug allows an attacker to take complete control of the coveted device simply by sending the owner an SMS, or short message service, message, said Charlie Miller, principal analyst at Independent Security Evaluators. He said he informed Apple's security team of the vulnerability several weeks ago and has yet to receive an official response.

The vulnerability is the same one Miller discussed three weeks ago, when he said he wasn't sure if it would allow him to do anything other than remotely crash an iPhone. Now that he's had more time to analyze the bug, he says he's confident he can remotely hijack the devices by doing nothing more than sending a malformed SMS message.

The bug resides in CommCenter, a service that's responsible for handling SMS, wireless and other functions in the iPhone. By default, it runs as root and isn't limited by an application sandbox. That makes it an ideal vector for taking control of the device. What's more, the messages are delivered automatically and often aren't easy for users to block.

The attack is carried out by dropping the last byte or two from UDH, or user data header, contained in the message, something that's fairly trivial to do.

Miller's discovery is the result of an aggressive fuzzing endeavor he and fellow researcher Collin Mulliner carried out over the past few months and laid out during a talk at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. It threw more than 500,000 specially manipulated SMS messages at smart phones running operating systems made by Apple, Google and Microsoft to see how they might react. To save the researchers a bundle in fees charged by the phone carriers, they created a man-in-the-middle channel between the devices' application processor and modem so the messages didn't have to be sent over the network.

Mulliner also reported several bugs that can cause smart phones running Google's Android and Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating systems to crash. Because SMS messages are stored on carrier servers until the recipient is online, hackers can create long-lasting denial-of-service attacks by queuing up a large number of the malformed SMS messages.

Their talk came on the heels of one given by researchers Luis Miras, reverse engineer for RingZero, and Zane Lackey, senior security consultant for iSEC Partners. They showed it was possible to deliver MMS, or multimedia messaging service, messages over rogue servers that completely bypass the systems carriers use to block communications containing malware, spam and other malicious content.

That makes it possible for them to spoof the phone numbers of the sender, allowing them to masquerade as a recipient's bank, friend or other trusted party. They can also spoof the date and time stamps that appear on the messages.

One possible attack might involve sending a message that purports to come from the victim's carrier that warns the phone needs to be updated immediately and contains a link to software that creates a backdoor on the device instead.

The attack works by manipulating certain fields in the message headers so they include values that are intended to be used only by the carriers. (source: dan Goodin - The Register)

The Dawn of the US Postal Service

By Brigid Schulte - Washington Post

Dorothy and Andrew Yankanich moved into their $18,000 brick rambler in Wheaton in 1966 and soon began what would become a daily ritual: Walking across the street to the squat blue mailbox and dropping off bills, birthday cards, letters, catalogue orders and whatever else needed to be sent on its way.

For 43 years, in rain and s hine, through the raising of seven children, the friendly box they could see through their front window's lace curtains was always there.

Until, one day at lunchtime a week or so ago, it wasn't. Yankanich, 82, watched as postal workers hacked at the rusted bolts and hauled the box away for good.

Across the country, stalwart blue "collection boxes" like the one on Flack Street in Wheaton are disappearing.

MORE THAN HALF OF ALL U.S. POSTAL SERVICE BLUE MAIL BOXES NATIONWIDE ARE GONE

In the past 20 years, 200,000 mailboxes have vanished from city streets, rural routes and suburban neighborhoods -- more than the 175,000 that remain.

In the Washington area alone, half the blue boxes that were on the streets nine years ago have been pulled up and taken to warehouses to molt in storage or be sold for scrap, leaving 4,071 mailboxes remaining in the District, Northern Virginia and the Maryland suburbs.

"It was a nice-looking box," sighed Dorothy Yankanich, 77, looking out on the empty concrete slab across the street. "That was my exercise. Going across the street with the mail every day."

FUNDAMENTAL CHANGE IN THE WAY AMERICA COMMUNICATES

Although some communities have mounted protests -- angry customers in one Maine town planted a snowplow and backhoe in front of a threatened mailbox -- the vanishing boxes are only the most visible sign that something fundamental is changing in the way Americans communicate.

The boxes are disappearing because most of us, unlike the Yankaniches, no longer use the mail as we used to.

The U.S. Postal Service says it removes "underperforming" mailboxes -- those that collect fewer than 25 pieces of mail a day -- after a week-long "density test." Snail mail is a dying enterprise because Americans increasingly pay bills online, send Evites for parties and text or give a quick call on a cellphone rather than write a letter.

LARGEST DROP IN MAIL VOLUME IN 234-YEAR HISTORY OF U.S. POSTAL SERVICE; LARGER THAN DURING GREAT DEPRESSION

Combine the impact of new technologies with the gut punch of the recession, and in the past year alone, the Postal Service has seen the single largest drop-off in mail volume in its 234-year history, greater even than the decline from 1929 to 1933 during the Great Depression.

That downward trend is only accelerating. The Postal Service projects a decline of about 10 billion pieces of mail in each of the next two years, going from a high of 213 billion pieces of mail in 2006 to 170 billion projected for 2010.

POSTAL SERVICE SEEKS EMERGENCY RELIEF, WITH $6 BILLION REVENUE SHORTFALL

The situation is so dire that the Postal Service, which is projecting a $6 billion shortfall by the end of September despite a recent postage rate increase, will go to Congress this month to seek emergency relief, looking to cut home mail delivery from six days a week to five.

Already, the Postal Service has cut hours at hundreds of post offices across the country, including 56 of the Washington area's 386 outlets. It has consolidated routes, dropping 158 delivery routes locally, offered workers early retirement and imposed hiring and salary freezes.

POSTMASTER GENERAL: POSTAL SERVICE IN "ACUTE FINANCIAL CRISIS"

Still, said Postmaster General John E. Potter, the service is in "acute financial crisis."

"We're like air," said Postal Service spokeswoman Deborah Yackley. "People just take it for granted that we're always going to be there. Well, if you want to keep your collection box, would you mail a letter, please!"

Back when the Yankaniches were courting, the world was different. They met in 1952 at a turnpike diner in Pennsylvania when Andrew Yankanich, a World War II veteran, was on furlough. They knew each other all of two weeks before he shipped out.

LETTER-WRITING AGE GONE FOREVER

So they wrote each other while the U.S. Navy sent him around the globe. "That correspondence went on for two years," he said. "You can't imagine how exciting mail call was every time we hit port." On the strength of what they wrote in those letters, the couple married when he returned and have stayed together for 56 years.

Even now, Yankanich buys a stack of cards every month to mail to family and friends with birthdays and anniversaries coming up. He has a computer and could pay his bills online, but Dorothy doesn't know how to. They're the kind of people who have always known their mailman's first name and leave him presents at Christmas.

But other than holiday cards, they rarely get letters anymore. "A lot our age is gone," Dorothy said. And they were the ones who wrote.

PayPal Case Study: Social Media Ignorance

By Axel Schultze, Social Media Academy
Paypal was one of the first online payment services and had a great start but over time lost the edge. The company seems to struggle with their internal administration and adjusting their business processes to meet customer needs.

Company Background
Paypal has 160 million customers
Their support centers work shifts and deal with approximately 60,000 support cases every day.
Over 1,000 support people handle on average 60 calls per day.
You cannot email or use other ways of communication than phone, fax or post.

Support team
To deal all day long with frustrated customers is not a very pleasant job, so fluctuation is rather high and the level of competency very low. It takes on average three calls to find a competent person. Some customers suggest you don't use a case number as you don't want to get back to the same person.
Most of the support calls are very low level issues with routine answers, nothing special, simply based on lack of user help and a pretty confusing system administration (a user voice nails it: "This is done by a bunch of engineers and never reviewed by business people"). Many functions are even unclear to the internal teams. Support staff admits it is not very intuitive if it is anything other than pushing the pay now button. Everybody can read that in great detail in thousands on public complains.

Customer Experience
People still really like the product. Some even donated a website like http://paypalsucks.com/newforums/. Lots of discussions with thousands of valuable inputs that - as it appears- non of the paypal people ever read. Paypal instituted a feedback form that customers are asked to fill out after each and every support case. Even so many people probably are too angry to even bother, some do, I did. But that source of customer feedback evaporates in the dysfunctional organization.

More Market Research?
Now the latest hit was that I received an invitation to participate in a survey - yet I have to be "elected" to join. However I get $200 if I participate after I am elected. But it looks like I have to drive to Mountain View to do the in person interview. A "market research institute" actually is doing the gigg. I don't want to know what that cost in total.

So here is a company that has free feedback from millions of users and thousands of cases but just doesn't bother to care - instead pays a research institute to create yet another source of feedback?

Paypals Social Web Presence
There is a paypal account on twitter, mainly tweeting "please follow us so we can DM you" - 63 updates, following 123 people
There are hundreds of paypal groups on Facebook from paypal fans to paypal frustrated customers
There are 18 groups focusing on paypal on LinkedIn with over 3,000 members
There are paypal customers on MySpace and many other sites, the feedback is priceless.
Yet paypal seem just not to care.

Even internally people know what the issues are: A support person inside paypal (very nice and very professional) "...I know, we asked numerous times to fix those issues but nobody seem to listen".

How to actually fix the problem
Social Media for Paypal could become a life saver. Not as a marketing gigg but to improve and fix a dysfunctional operation.
1) At first a company team would aggregate and distill the customer feedback using established assessment methods and available reporting tools.
2) Then develop a customer supported advisory board and rigorously execute - fixing the top issues.
3) Tackle more problems and just grind through the list from top to bottom.
4) Ask the folks from "paypal sucks" groups and sites to HELP.
5) Using the, by then established, processes to figure out how new features need to be developed (co-creation)
6) Get feedback in a structured way through groups and networks rather than through useless questionnaires
7) Create forums where customers help customers, supported by maybe even less but better educated paypal support people

Non of the above has anything to do with sales or marketing - just building a better company.

Who Is Responsible?
Is this the responsibility of Dickson Chu Vice President of Global Product and Experience? Or is it Ryan D. Downs Senior Vice President, Worldwide Operations? Or is it Scott Guilfoyle Senior Vice President, Platform Services? Or Barry Herstein Chief Marketing Officer? Philipp Justus Senior Vice President, Global Markets, responsible for growing the company? Everybody has his/her fair share.

But No, Scott Thompson, the President is the one who need to engage his executive team in a cross functional initiative to fix the dysfunctional organization.

Social media is not a cool marketing gigg - it is a strategic engagement to react to the major changes in our society reflected by changing customer behavior and an ever more demanding market.

What Really Makes Your Customers Loyal?

If you’ve seen the results from a survey of your customers’ satisfaction, you probably walked away with three things:
1. Findings – good and bad – that were close to what you expected.
2. Data that surprised you – ratings that were higher or lower than expected or issues your customer had not previously raised.
3. A lingering question – “Now what?”

What leaders really want from customer satisfaction surveys (or customer focus groups, or any customer feedback collection methods) are answers to those “big” questions. What levers can their organization pull to retain their most profitable accounts and turn customers into raving fans?

Loyalty versus Satisfaction
While measuring satisfaction is a valuable practice for many reasons, research shows that customer satisfaction ratings aren’t necessarily a clear indication of whether your customers will be loyal. In other words, satisfying your customers’ requirements might not be enough to maintain your competitive edge.

However, there is also research that shows that how willing a customer is to recommend you is a good indicator of future loyalty. If your customer is willing to put their own reputation on the line to recommend your product or service, chances are they’re going to be loyal.

Tracking your customers’ willingness to recommend can help you predict which customers are most committed to your organization, but it takes a combination of key questions to get to the drivers of what makes your customers loyal.

Kano’s Analysis: How it Works
Using a method first introduced by Noriaki Kano, regression is used to show which parts of the customer experience are most critical to increase their future buying behavior. A simplified example is shown below:

Step One: Measure customer satisfaction for key performance factors
Step Two: Measure how important each factor is to your customers
Step Three: Measure customers’ willingness to recommend you to a colleague
Step Four: Determine the strength of correlation between the following:

Independent variables (key performance indicators)
and
Dependent variable (willingness to recommend)

This analysis will give you a plot of your key performance factors based on a customer’s stated importance (what the customer says is important) and derived importance (what the customer’s behaviors show to be important through the strength of the correlation).

By looking at the relationship between stated and derived importance, each area of performance can be categorized as follows:

Key Drivers: High stated importance and high derived importance
Key Drivers represent areas that customers say are important to them and are closely linked to loyalty. Simply put, high marks in these areas are essential to sustainable competitive advantage. On the flip side, not living up to customers’ expectations in these areas will have a negative effect on loyalty.

Value Add: Low stated importance and high derived importance
Value Add areas are the unspoken motivators or opportunities to delight your customers. Often these are unexpected features or services that excite customers. These aspects of the customer experience can be what builds a unique value proposition and can differentiate a product or business from the competition. Identifying and excelling in these areas drives customer loyalty.

Expectations: High stated importance and low derived importance
Expectations are the areas in which poor performance can lead to dissatisfaction, but good performance will not necessarily raise loyalty. An example of this is seen in the temperature of coffee or tea. Hot is expected but won’t cause someone to be a raving fan. Cold, on the other hand, will leave a lasting negative impression. Conforming to expectations is critical, but you cannot rely on these areas alone to increase customer loyalty.

Low Yield: Low stated importance and low derived importance
Low Yield factors have a small impact on overall customer satisfaction; the customer states these things aren’t that important to them, and they don’t drive loyalty either. Taking a close look at the areas that are Low Yield can help you divert resources to things that actually matter.

What’s Next?
No matter how satisfied your customers are with your performance, there are bound to be opportunities for your organization to improve. But not all efforts to please your customers will have equal impact. Using the methods shown above, you can decipher what really drives customer loyalty and allocate your scarce resources – people, capital, time, energy, and creativity – toward efforts that will have the highest potential payoff.
(source: Nick Wassenberg- Customer Think))

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a website from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Typically, the earlier a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a web site web presence.

As an Internet Marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

The acronym "SEO" can also refer to "search engine optimizers," a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. The term "search engine friendly" may be used to describe web site designs, menus, content management system and shopping carts that are easy to optimize.

Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO or Spam dexing use methods such as link farms and keyword stuffing that degrade both the relevance of search results and the user-experience of search engines. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques in order to remove them from their indices.

Striking the Internet Oil

Prosperly Way

If you’re like me you have the dream to own your own internet business. That was my dream many years ago. I could tell that working for someone else was not for me. I had a very hard time with authority and people telling me what to do and when to do it. I literally went through a new job on average every 3 months. I’m sure it concerned my wife a little but I was not willing to accept the misery I was feeling working for other people.

During that time I had educated myself in search engine optimization and decided to take the plunge and start my own SEO company. The company quickly became a financial success for me as I was making over $10,000 a month. The company was also taking up a lot of my time and was very labor intensive. If I wanted to make more money, I was required to take on more clients and work more hours. I didn’t feel successful because I was working a full time job the time for the income I was making. I was self employed but my clients were my boss. I needed to become a business owner.

Success for me is measured by freedom. Not just financial freedom but freedom from obligations like work and other time commitments. I want to come and go as I please and work on my schedule. If I want to go to a movie during the day then I think I should be able to. If I want to go home and spend time with my kids then I should be able to. I like to golf and if I get the desire to golf on a beautiful day that happens to be a weekday I should be able to do it. That is the freedom I am talking about. I believe in working hard and getting things done, but I want it on my terms.

I quickly realized that although my internet company was a success I knew there had to be a better way to earn a great living online. Through much research, many pitfalls and a lot of hard work the Prosperly Way was born (It wasn’t called that back then). I figured out that I could run one or more internet businesses that would make money for me whether I was sitting at a desk or not. I knew I was onto something life changing and over the years I developed a system that allows me the freedom I always wanted with the income that I deserve. Now I want to pass this priceless knowledge onto you.

Prosperly Websites

There a millions of ideas out there that you could use to start an internet business. And everyone I talk to has at least one idea that they would like to take online. I always encourage everyone with an idea to try it out. You have so much to gain and so little to lose. In order to live the Prosperly way, we have come up with a list of specific characteristics that define a “Prosperly Website”. You should always try your best to implement these characteristics when purchasing or starting an internet business.

First let me explain our philosophy. Our philosophy is that the real value of a website is not how much profit it makes, but how much profit a website makes divided by how much time it takes you to run the website.

Let’s say you own two websites. Site A makes $4,000 a month and it takes you 40 hours a week to run. On the other hand Site B brings in $1000 a month and only takes you 2 hours a week to run.

The Real Value of the Site A is $25 per hour worked.
The Real Value of the Site B is $125 per hour worked.

This may or may not seem obvious to you bu

t Site B is much more valuable. Think of it this way, if you owned 4 sites that performed just like Site B you would have revenue of $4000 a month but only be working 8 hours a week to accomplish this, instead of the 40 hours a week that Site A would require. That means you would have an extra 32 hours a week making the same income as Site A. What would you do with the extra 32 hours a week?

Site B is a Prosperly Website.

Our goal at Prosperly is to teach you how to take your existing website or create a new internet business and turn it into a website that is a Prosperly Website. If you can create a full time income online with Prosperly Websites, then you will finally have the freedom and live as you want to live. You can travel the world, spend time with your family and do everything you wanted to do in life. Our guide will help anyone with any type of internet business, but our goal is to help you get the freedom as we define it to live life as it should be lived.

Exit Strategy

We have come to realize that Prosperly websites have a very high resale value. It seems that everyone wants to get their hands on these automated money makers, and they will pay a premium too. Within a 1 month span of 2009 we sold 3 of our Prosperly websites for a total that we are to embarrassed to even talk about (it was that high).

We have created some awesome website flipping tools that we have used over the last year to find these websites that were in major need of TLC but had the right traits to quickly fix them up and turn them into Prosperly websites.

These tools allow us to quickly evaluate websites, find hidden gems on the verge of being big money makers, and tools to help us optimize and increase rankings of websites we buy.

Whenever I show friends these tools the first thing they say is “can you send me the link to that?” We have never made these tools available to anyone else because we never really thought we should and because we have been too busy developing them and using them to make money for ourselves.

You Can Get Access To The Prosperly Tools

Now that we see how useful these website flipping tools are and how much success we have had using them we are seriously thinking about making these available to all of you in the near future.

If this is something you would be interested in, enter your email below and we will let you know when we are ready to make them available to you.

Step 1: How to make Money Online

Almost every single person who has not started their own website asks me, “what can I do to get started.”

This is the answer to that question. We are going to teach you exactly what we suggest to anyone who wants to build a successful internet business. Whether you want to flip websites or just build valuable internet businesses I think this will help.

Here is the first List:

1. Evaluate Your Interests and Skills - One of the first things we tell people when they come to us wanting to start an internet business is this:

1. Get a piece of paper.
2. Draw a line down the center of it.
3. On one side write “Interests” on the top of the page.
4. On the other side write “Things Im good at” on the top of the page
5.Now fill in the list on both sides.

The “interests” list should be things like hobbies, things you really enjoy doing or reading about.

If you are starting an internet business, you definitely want to go into something you have an interest in. One person I was helping get started came to me and told me they had already started 3
websites and we’re looking for more. One of the websites was a site about dogs.

I asked him why he started that website and he told me he thought there was potential there. “Well are you a dog lover?” I asked. He said not really. “Do you know anything about dogs?” “No.”
So I asked, “then why would you start a website about dogs?”

When you start working on a website you are going to spend many, many hours looking at the same website. You will spend many hours thinking about the industry, coming up with new ideas to make the site better. Choose something you are interested in or you will end up hating your internet business, and that is not good for long term success.

The Second List

The second list “Things I’m Good At” should be of things you are good enough at or know enough about that you could teach other people how to do it. Everyone is good at something. In your life experience you have gained knowledge that not everyone else has. That information can be valuable to other people.

For example it could be how to make rocking chairs, how to replace a variator on a scooter, how to increase your vertical leap etc.

Now that you have this list completed, look at it. These are the industries you should look into when deciding what internet business to start.

I recently spoke with an old friend who called me to tell me he hated his job and wanted the lifestyle I had. (I get these phone calls a lot) I asked him to make this list and since he used to work selling and installing plumbing fixtures I told him one of the things he could put on this list is he knows how to install all types of plumbing products. This is something he could teach other people.

I have a brother that runs a fire restoration company. He has learned the ins and outs of the business and knows what it takes to be successful. He could teach other people about this business.

You will use this list to choose the niche of your website. This list will be the guide as we go out looking for potential websites to buy or a website to start from scratch.

Lookout for step 2 to how we make money online coming soon.

(Adam & Jesse: prosperly)

Step 2: Evaluating Prospects

All right, you should have your list completed from Step 1. Now that you have decided the areas you want pursue we need to find out if there is any money to be made in those industries. For example if collecting donkey socks made your list, there may not be a market for that online right now.

So in order to make sure that all of your internet marketing efforts don’t go to waste we have created a video that explains some of the things we do to evaluate whether there is demand in a certain niche and if it is worth our time to pursue it.

Check out the video below and leave a comment and let us know what you think.

Step 3: Looking for websites to buy

All right I have finally decided to post this. I apologize for making you all wait this long but we had very good reasons which I will not go into here. Considering how much you are paying for the info I knew you would understand. :-)

Now that you have chosen your industry and found out that there is real potential to see if you could make money in that industry, the next step is to go out and find a website that will work for you.

This is when you need to make the decision on whether to buy a website or build one from scratch. In my estimation it is always better to buy an established website rather that build a new one. You let someone else do all of the grunt work and then you step in a make the necessary changes and increase the value of the site quickly.

The only time I would say that it makes sense to build a website from scratch is when you are entering an industry where nobody really knows SEO that well and you are confident that you can quickly enter and move up in the rankings quickly.

The only other reason would be if you look and look and just can’t find a suitable website to buy in that industry and still want to get started.

I have created a video that explains one of the ways we actually go about looking for websites to buy. There are other ways than the one I talk about here but it will give you a good start.

Before I show you the video I need to tell you that we have been contemplating long and hard on whether or not to even continue with this series. We know that some people have begun to abuse the information we have given out and that has disappointed and demotivated us in our efforts to teach others.

The information on internet marketing and website flipping is valid and valuable. We really do want to help others succeed online but there are always those few who ruin it for everyone else.

We have decided to create a Prosperly membership and allow only members to access the video for step 3. The membership is free but we need to be in complete control of who gets access to this free information.

If you still wish to proceed and don’t mind becoming a member at Prosperly then click on the link below:

Flipping Websites - Finding Buyers

I know I am jumping ahead in the sequence of how we find a website to buy, fix it up and then sell it but there is information in the middle that we are not ready to share just yet.

People often ask us how we find buyers for the websites we sell. The simple answer to that question is we don’t.

In fact, when we first got started in internet marketing, flipping websites never even entered our brains as a possible business model. It all sort of happened by accident as many new business ideas do.

Our goal was to have 12 websites that all made $300 a day by the end of 2009. That would have been about $1.3 million a year. As we were building up the websites we owned we had people inquire about buying our biggest websites within a two month time span.

We weren’t looking to sell but they really wanted to buy the sites. So after selling the first one and seeing how much we made ($250k) we realized that we were on the right track with the type of websites we were running.

Then as mentioned we received offers for two more of our sites. One buyer wanted both sites. One of these sites was our biggest money maker and we were hesitant at first and then finally conceded to sell. (Keep in mind that at this point flipping websites was not our business model)

Two days before the sale of the websites our big site lost most of its rankings. The buyer backed out with the agreement that if we got the rankings back he would still buy.

That is when we realized that flipping websites was the right business model for us. We saw how quickly the rug could be pulled out from underneath us and realized that selling a website at its peak is the best method. Take a website, fix it up, the site makes money, then you sell for a hearty profit. Repeat.

Why did these people want to buy our sites so bad? Because these sites receive all of their traffic through search engines so we didn’t have to spend money to make money.

Also the sites run themselves (see Prosperly Way). You really can buy one of these and make money without adding much time at all to your work schedule.

You build a good site like this and you will have people asking you to buy. It has happened to us over and over again. We have never put one of our sites on the market and yet we flip websites for a living. Build Prosperly style websites and you will be able to dictate when you sell your websites. (prosperly.com)

Google Adsense generated US$1.68 Billion Revenue in 2008

Google recorded revenues of $5.52 billion (£3.38 billion) during the second quarter of 2009, a three per cent rise on its earnings for the corresponding period of last year.

The search engine said net income for the three months to the end of June was $1.48 billion, up from $1.25 billion in Q2 2008.

Revenue from Google-owned sites also rose by three per cent year-on-year to $3.65 billion, or 66 per cent of the total.

Meanwhile, partner sites generated revenues of $1.68 billion through the site's internet marketing service AdSense.

Google saw an increase in the amount of revenue generated from outside the US during the second quarter. The figure climbed to $2.91 billion, representing 53 per cent of total earnings. This is up from 52 per cent of revenues in both the first quarter of 2009 and the second quarter of 2008.

"These results highlight the enduring strength of our business model and our responsible efforts to manage expenses in a way that puts us in a good position for the economic upturn, when it occurs," said Google chief executive Eric Schmidt.

Recent figures from comScore show Google accounted for 65 per cent of the US search market in June.

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