Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

Today is Blog Action Day and this year’s topic is “Poverty”. Last year during Blog Action Day I covered What If The Water Runs Out?, a decidedly dire possibility, which thankfully improved a little in my hometown since I wrote that article (although the problem is far from gone).

This year I want to focus on something positive we can all do as entrepreneurs - we can give something back - in this case, to help people help themselves rise above the poverty line.

I remember clearly the first time I did exactly this, although to be honest I wasn’t doing it because my business was succeeding, I did it because I had just closed a business that failed because I made a mistake.

Very long time readers of this blog will know one of my very first forays into online business was a community website focused on the Magic: The Gathering card game. On my Magic website I opened up a small e-commerce extension, where I sold the cards individually and in sealed cases.

After enjoying moderate success with my online store I made a tragic mistake. I received an order from someone in Thailand for a full case of cards, with a value of about $600. I took the order through an offline credit card processor (called a “click-clack”), but before I did this I phoned the card fraud hotline to make sure the card wasn’t reported as stolen, as per the standard procedures provided by the bank.

The card checked out fine, I charged it for the case and shipped off the product.

Fast forward a few months and I had sent off over $15,000 worth of product to Thailand, when I received a letter in the mail, telling me the very first order had received a charge back request. Basically, the owner of the card had said they had not made the purchase and wanted their money back.

Over the course of the next few weeks over $12,000 was charged back. It was clear my Thai customers were fraudsters, using a stolen credit card, and I had lost a ton of money.

I recovered from that instance after putting in ALL my savings and some money from my father to cover the dept. I was so heartbroken about the situation that I closed the online store shortly after and went into a depression that took several weeks to recover from.

A Bad Situation Inspires A Positive Action

Read the rest of this entry >>

[ Add Your Comment | 47 Comments ]

Update Oct 14: The PPC Classroom people are in the process of launching their coaching program so the links for the free report have changed and now instead go to the sales page. I’ll chase them up about finding alternative access to the report - but it may be gone. Apologies if you missed out!

Go straight to the free report and videos that explain the details here -

• Free Report and Videos

Here’s the background story…

I remember this feeling quite clearly. It was about 3 years ago. I was living in a share house in Brisbane and my Internet business ventures were doing okay, but far from brilliant.

My proofreading business was paying the bills and ensured I didn’t need a job. My blog was growing and starting to make some money, but let’s say I felt far from comfortable with my financial circumstances. I’m sure many of you can concur with those feelings right now.

As a result of my situation I was easily swayed by different methods to make money online, but there was one thing in particular that I was really interested in because it seemed like a very FAST method to generate a return and potentially earn big dollars online in a period of months.

The method I’m talking about is using Pay Per Click advertising, like Google AdWords, and selling affiliate programs.

You buy traffic, send it to affiliate offers and tweak your campaigns to the point where you make more money in affiliate commissions than you spend on the per click traffic.

Once you get the numbers right you can really open the traffic floodgates and spend thousands a day on PPC traffic, knowing for each $1 spent you will make more than a $1 back. At least, that’s the theory and how the professionals do it.

There’s literally thousands of people who still use this technique to make anything from a few hundred dollars a month to a few million. In fact I know a friend in Sydney who last time I spoke to him, was spending about $5000 a day on AdWords, to make $8000 a day in commissions for a total profit of $3000 A DAY - amazing stuff!

I Got Distracted

Read the rest of this entry >>

[ Add Your Comment | 42 Comments ]

Press play to begin streaming the audio or right click the download link and choose save as or save link.

• Download the MP3 [ 30 Minutes - 14 MB ]
• Download Text Transcript [ 15 Pages - PDF ]

After Mitch’s interview hit the airwaves recounting how quickly his blog grew to 3,000 daily readers in his niche of college football, another success story emerged in the Blog Mastermind private members forum.

A Simple Change To Leigh’s Blogging Made A Big Difference

Leigh runs a blog called The Fat Loss Troubleshooter, and also joined Blog Mastermind during July 2008. Since then her blog has enjoyed huge growth, getting as many as 5,000 unique visitors per day AND - here’s the really good news - she’s making about $4,500 a month now.

This is one of the screenshots she posted into the Blog Mastermind members forum showing her biggest income source - her Clickbank account. As you can see she’s doing between $500 and $1,000 a week from Clickbank sales.

When I hear success stories like this from my students I have to find out what they are doing right and learn what techniques are working for them. I asked Leigh to join me on a case study interview call to find out how she is getting such amazing results so quickly with her blog.

In this interview you will learn…

• The change she made to her blogging style that made the big difference
• How she is now able to learn what her audience wants, rather than guessing what she thinks they want, which means more sales for her
• The techniques Leigh implemented to build her audience, in particular how she uses interviews to drive traffic to her blog
• What exactly Leigh sells to make money from her blog
• Her opinion of how a coaching program like Blog Mastermind can change your blogging and present a clear path to success
• Leigh’s plans for world domination

Here’s the download link again for the MP3 -

• Download the MP3 [ 30 Minutes - 14 MB ]

What I found particularly powerful about this interview was the way Leigh explained how her content writing changed.

The formula for a successful blog goes good content = more traffic = more money, so you can see how changes to Leigh’s content style made such a difference to how much money she now makes.

Success Is Not Guaranteed, But People Do Get Results

I’m never going to tell you blogging for money is easy. Every person I speak to who’s ever made good money from blogging talks about how much work they do, especially during the early days, however they also look at the work in a different angle - it’s fun.

When a passion is driving your work and you see results coming in, all you want to do is work some more. Positive reinforcement fuels passion and passion fuels work. It’s possible to get into a wonderfully positive cycle, if you are just willing to take the steps to move past the challenges and the naysayers.

Here’s to your blogging success,

Yaro Starak
Blog Coach

[ Add Your Comment | 37 Comments ]

Big thanks to Gideon from Get Your Video Online for letting me know about these two handy websites.

We all know how good video is for online marketing, in particular YouTube, but something that’s lacking is a way to spread video that is actually clickable. When I say clickable - I mean viewers can click the video and be taken to a page you designate, rather than the YouTube page or similar video sharing site. A simple text prompt to help stimulate the click would also be nice.

Well thanks to LinkedTube.com you can do this. What’s really great about the service is how easy it is to use. Just fill out a few variables, click “Get Code” and stick the video anywhere you like. There’s also some simple but helpful customization options.

If you want something a little more feature rich, try Overlay.tv, which lets you overlay more content over your videos, including product placement, text bubbles and clickable links, and it works on other sharing sites beyond YouTube too.

The only problem with both these services is you can’t impact the place where your videos usually get the most attention - at YouTube itself. However if your video marketing includes embedding videos all over the Internet, like in your social networking profile, on your blog or let’s say you use video as an affiliate marketing tool, these sites provide a handy service.

How about this for a good idea?

Find a great product you love and then find a great review of it in YouTube then use the LinkedTube.com tool to embed your affiliate link code as a clickable video post to your blog. That’s a nice way to make use of video content from YouTube for affiliate promotions. Just be sure to check you are not violating any YouTube or affiliate network’s terms of service.

Here’s an example I just did with one of my affiliate promotion videos -

[ Add Your Comment | 25 Comments ]

Although my New York City visit ended several weeks ago I still had some footage I wanted to get up for you, so here are the final two videos from my awesome time in the Big Apple.

This first video features a two minute interview with Alex from Guruofsales.com, who is a huge fan of my blog - so much so that he tracked me down while I was in New York, coming into Manhattan from Jersey by subway.

The video also includes exploring the markets and by far the highlight of my trip to NY - the ice cream sandwich from heaven.

The second video features a trip to Central Park, some brief footage on a tour bus over to Brooklyn with great views of the bridge at sunset, inside the world’s largest Toys R’ Us with me getting a little too excited about Lego, my day at the US Open tennis and ends with a look at the Statue of Liberty from Battery Park.

New York, well at least Manhattan where I spent my time, is an amazing place. I barely did half of what I wanted to in the week I had there. You could spend the entire week in just the museum of natural history or Soho of any of the cool little villages and hotspots. It’s definitely a city I recommend you visit if you get the chance. I’d like to live there some day myself for a few months in a row to really experience what being a New Yorker is like.

In case you are curious, we rented an apartment in the Upper West side for a week, which cost a total of $1755 USD, definitely the most expensive apartment I’ve rented so far on my travels, but for New York I wanted to splurge a little. It turned out to be in a great location, although for the price I was disappointed with the interior and the Internet wasn’t too reliable either.

Since we were rarely home the apartment’s shortcomings didn’t impact the trip too much, but as I’ve learned on my travels you can never be certain what you are going to get for your money. Sometimes I’ve been pleasantly surprised (like Vancouver), other times you’re not blown away (like New York). I’m certainly discovering a lot about how to locate short term rentals as I travel around the world this year.

I hope you have enjoyed the travel videos I post to this blog. Obviously they are not always strictly on topic, but they are certainly part of my entrepreneur’s journey. I’ve got more planned too. Next I have Montreal and Quebec City coming up (I just need to edit and produce them) and since I’m about to start the European leg of my trip the videos will keep coming.

Yaro Starak
Travel Blogger

[ Add Your Comment | 14 Comments ]