Entrepreneurs-Journey.com Down-To-Earth Advice For Bloggers and Internet Marketers

It’s interesting as a marketer to watch how the Internet has changed over the last ten years, especially what has changed for solo entrepreneurs and small business owners.

When I started investigating how to make money online in the late nineties, most strategies were e-commerce focused, or built specifically to take advantage of the dot-com bubble.

You either set up a website to sell something physical like Amazon.com did for books, or you set up some kind of service and focused solely on user-acquisition, since most entrepreneurs were more interested in growing fast rather than making profits. The logic being you could figure out a way to make money after you built a huge user-base, but you usually get bought out way before that happens, so you exit rich, even if the company doesn’t make a dime.

I was keen to cash in on the dot-com bubble myself, though being in Brisbane Australia, not exactly a hot-bed for Internet start-ups at the time, it wasn’t easy.

I remember calling a mastermind meeting at my friend’s house to discuss opportunities. We had some good ideas, and some bad ones, but nothing really cemented together. My friends went off and started or continued their careers, while I went back to fiddling around with different web projects in my spare time.

Back then there was no blogging, or social media, or even Google. AdSense and Adwords didn’t exist yet, and affiliate programs were only just becoming readily available in different niches.

That’s why so many people had to focus on selling physical items using online stores. You could make money with advertising or information publishing, but most people didn’t have a clue how to do it. There weren’t courses or all the free information we have about these subjects today to help guide you. You had to figure it out yourself.

Fundamentals Stay The Same

As I’ve watched things change over the previous years I’ve noticed a few key fundamentals that haven’t change, namely –

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A broad range of players in the Internet video industry, minus Google meet today in order to arrange a set of “collaborative principles” for Internet video. They hope this movement will help Internet video to continue to grow, while also protecting copyrighted material.

Headlining the group were CBS, NBC, Fox, Myspace, Disney, and Microsoft.

This conference is being planned because of the increased demand of companies to respect their copyrighted material. Viacom, as you may have known has a pending lawsuit against Internet video superstar YouTube, and this is no doubt, one of the major reasons of this United Nations-like gathering.

A recent study (read offline) shows that almost 35% of software (including operating systems) is pirated. This is just a flash in the pan when you start considering illegal mp3 downloads, which make up almost 65% of all music downloads.

I have no clue what these media giants think they are going to do to stop pirating, but I applaud them for trying. It’s become clear that Internet piracy will get worse before it gets better.

Bryan – EJ News

Talk about an odd couple. Social networking giant Myspace has teamed up with internet phone provider Skype to bring Voip (voice over internet protocol) service to Myspace IM users. The proposed service update would provide Myspace IM users the ability to enable voice chat.

This will bring voice chat to Myspace in a big way. Skype is the worldwide leader in Voip technology, and this pairing should provide a fantastically intuitive edge to social networking.

Earlier this week Myspace announced their API release, which would be huge for third party developers. This second big announcement could be just what Myspace needs to edge out Facebook once and for all in the social networking market. Facebook seems to be the more innovative company, but with over 80 million registered users, how could anyone not be bullied by Myspace?

This race for social networking supremacy is far from over but Facebook is rumored to have a “big announcement” coming within the next few days or weeks. Speculation would lead me to believe that the proposed 4 billion dollar partial buy-out of Facebook, may be the announcement that we are waiting for. All of this is strictly speculation at this point though. I guess we’ll have to be surprised together.

You may recall I signed up for ReviewMe and began with a review of ReviewMe, taking advantage of their opening promotion to pay bloggers to help spread the word about the new service. My review was more of a discussion of the viability of bloggers being paid for reviews, which you can read here – Should Bloggers Accept Money For Reviews?

Since that review I have been offered six more paid reviews between this blog and the Small Business Branding blog, which I am in charge of as well. For the Small Business Branding reviews I contacted a few of the writers who blog there and offered them the reviews, but they were declined because of lack of familiarity with the subject matter of the review. In my case for the reviews ordered on this blog, I have either felt the subjects were not relevant enough for my readers, were too difficult to write about in an interesting manner or I simply couldn’t slot the review into my hectic writing schedule. You only get 48 hours to accept a review so you have to act quickly.

It’s worth noting that I have collectively turned down $750 USD in review revenue in a month’s time, which for some may not be much, but for me is still significant enough cash that I care, as I’m sure many other bloggers would too. The effectively hourly pay rate would probably have been around $100 an hour – not so bad. It’s also a sign that this service has some attention from advertisers, but I am curious how many reviews are making on to blogs and how much impact the reviews are having for the advertisers who purchase them. I’m sure the staff at ReviewMe are watching the search engine and publicity data closely for each completed review.

MySpace Bulletin Postings

There were a couple of reviews requested via ReviewMe that spiked my interest, but I turned them down for the reasons mentioned above. Yesterday I received a review request for a service that grabbed my attention, so I decided to accept the review. As per the ReviewMe policies I would like to let you know that the following is a sponsored review, but I think this is a service you may be interested in – in fact I may even test it out myself!

Social Media Marketing

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Do you know MySpace? It’s an extremely popular social friendship site frequented by a lot of teens from around the world, in particular the USA. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp bought MySpace when it purchased it’s parent organisation for a whopping $580 million back in July 2005.

MySpace has a high value because of it’s massive userbase, which in turn provides a potentially rich source of advertising income (let’s just say its $580 mil purchase price included a lot of money for future potential). Given the audience is a young demographic it’s a very lucrative market for advertisers. Teens are notoriously hard to reach because they constantly change opinion and their tastes fluctuate frequently (do teenagers still watch TV?).

While most people reading this blog won’t ever consider buying adspace on MySpace the potential to use it to market your business should not be overlooked. I recently heard that bands have used MySpace as a marketing vehicle to increase their exposure. Thanks to the sheer volume of members and active users, if a music single (mp3) goes viral just within the MySpace…err…space, it can mean big things for the band. Why not apply this technique to your business?

Not every business is going to suit the MySpace demographics, but if yours does then take a few seconds to think about the potential if you can pull off a successful campaign. If you can “crack the cool” and get something popular within MySpace that also promotes your business, the publicity payoff could be monumental, and (in my opinion) enough to launch a start-up.

Blog marketing is popular because it’s cheap, has broad scope and is effective as an awareness builder without being obtrusive like “blast” advertising. Web communities like MySpace may provide similar marketing benefits if you can make it work for your business. There is no secret formula, and just like any viral marketing campaign it can be quite a hit and miss process and certainly not an exact science.

It could be as simple as creating a widget or a song, or a video or an image and attempt to “infect” the MySpace community with it. I’m sure if a consultant specialized in MySpace marketing and of course achieved results, their services would be in high demand (anyone out there?). A marketer who knows how to utilize any of the current social software services for generating publicity and can consistently bring in results has a very cutting edge business opportunity, one that I expect faces very little competition currently (maybe because it’s not possible to do it consistently).

If anyone has attempted to use MySpace.com to market their business I’d love to hear about it. Please leave a comment.