Archive for April, 2006

My new hedge…

Sunday, April 30th, 2006

hedge

OK, so it’s not the best picture of my new hedge. :-)

I want my hedge to be like a real hedge overnight… five or six feet, healthy, bushy and like a hedge should be. But I know that’s not going to happen overnight. I know it… even though I’m not happy about it. So what do I do? I water the hedge each day and give it plant food once in a while to get it to grow at an optimal pace… hopefully my new hedge will get to the height I want as quickly as it can. :-)

…which reminds me of starting an online business… you want it to throw off hundreds or thousands of dollars immediately. You want that “on the beach sipping cocktails” lifestyle to happen overnight. You know it won’t… even though you’re not happy about it. So what do you do? You help your business grow by adding pages to your websites daily and releasing a new product periodically. One day the business will reach the size you want and it will be throwing off the profits you want… but it won’t happen overnight.

This story reminds me of an article Jim Daniels wrote about his fruit trees in spring 2003. I wonder how well his fruit trees are doing now… and if anyone had started their online business in response to Jim’s article, how well it’s doing three years later… it’s probably successful and throwing off profits.

Don’t delay. Start today and keep growing your business a little bit each day and you’ll see the results over several months.

Here’s the link to Jim’s article…

http://www.bizweb2000.com/gazette/fruit.htm

See Jim, I read and remember your articles. ;-)

The Scam Free Concept…

Saturday, April 29th, 2006

The idea behind both “ScamFreeZone.com” and “ScamFree.com” is that I wanted to build websites where people could learn about making money online free from scams. There will always be people who haven’t encountered a “pyramid scheme”, a “get rich quick scam”, a “chain letter rip off” or a “Nigerian fee swindle”… I wanted to educate people on what to avoid, as well as what could be done to make money online properly.

Personally, I think the Internet will be the greatest invention of my lifetime. At the end of the day, the Internet is just a distribution medium… it only transfers bits and bytes to and from people’s computers. But what’s incredible is the reach of the medium… people can send and receive email, upload and download pictures, read news, go shopping, listen to music, sell software and ebooks, access digital libraries, check their bank account details, visit bulletin boards, play online games and so much more. It’s amazing.

From a personal point of view, I’m interested in starting and growing online businesses. The ease with with you can get online, grab a domain name and start building webspages is just incredible. The startup costs are tiny compared to an offline business… and even smaller now that you can get domain names for about $10 per year. I remember when it was $70 minimum registration fee for a 2 year dotcom domain registration from Network Solutions… that was probably the biggest single cost to starting an online business if you already had a computer. After that, you simply build webpages, write sales copy for your newly written ebook, link to a payment processor and send your new customer to a download page after a successful payment. The transaction could take place at 3am your time and, as long as nothing goes wrong, you don’t need to interact with that customer. You’ve got an automated business! Of course, that’s an ideal purchase… you will get customer questions, feedback and comments… but compared to the offline world where your business couldn’t make sales unless someone was there to process the sale, the online world allows a great deal of automation of the whole process.

But… here’s the problem…

I’ve changed over the last decade. I’ve realized that the main scam in your lifetime is probably not going to come from the Internet. The main scam you’ll encounter is the way in which you’re kept in slavery by the banks. When you’re young you aspire to buy your own house. When you’re able, you put down a deposit and the rest of the purchase price is paid by your bank… that’s your mortgage. Generally the mortgage runs for 25 years… a life sentence. In fact, the word “mortgage” comes from “mort” (Old French/Latin) meaning death and “gage” (Germanic origin) meaning “pledge”… so you have pledged to pay the mortgage until you die. Isn’t that nice?

I’ve had two mortgages since I started the ScamFreeZone. I’ve paid one off and moved to a bigger house where I started a second mortgage. I’ve managed to pay off over half of the second mortgage in two years. There is no WAY I’m paying off a mortgage over 25 years. Did you know that, with a general interest rate, you’ll end up paying the same amount you borrowed in interest? Borrow $100,000, pay back that $100,000 PLUS $100,000 in interest. Nice little earner… for the bank.

So, my aim is now to help people avoid the biggest “scam” of their lives… their mortgage. Pay it off early. Don’t pay massive sums in interest. Don’t make the banks richer. Pay every penny you can onto your mortgage and make it disappear… then you won’t have to pay a monthly mortgage payment or payment protection insurance… and of course, you won’t pay rent… so probably your biggest single monthly outgoing since your teenage years will have disappeared.

That’s when you’ll be “Scam Free”!

Of course, if you have debts with higher interest rates than your mortgage (credit cards, personal loans etc), you should pay those off first. Once they’re paid off, put the money you were paying on those cards and other debts onto your mortgage. Once that’s paid off you can put the money you were paying on your mortgage into stocks, shares, bonds, rental properties and other mechanisms to earn you passive income. When your passive income exceeds your monthly expenses, you will be effectively retired. :-)

So who wants to join me? Who else wants to use the Internet revolution to make money online, pay off their debts, and become “Scam Free”? I pledge to help all those who want to follow the path to becoming “Scam Free” with advice, tips, reports, software and hopefully, an inspirational story. Here’s the start of it… when I began the ScamFreeZone, my net worth was effectively zero. I was in a one-bed rented flat with a beaten up car and was working as a Ph.D. student getting paid by a cancer research charity. Fast forward almost a decade and my net worth is close to half a million dollars. I still have a small mortgage… but only because house prices in Britain are just ridiculously high…. which is down to people’s greed along with the greed of the banks. People get wealthier as their average earnings rise, but instead of spending that money on investing in their future by buying shares they go out and spend on houses… which increase in value… which forms a vicious circle… everyone spends their extra money on houses and we all end up where? With massive mortgage debt and houses over-inflated values. In Britain we now owe 1.17 TRILLION POUNDS of which almost a TRILLION is mortgage debt and 200 billion is consumer credit (loans, credit cards, store cards etc). Presumably this money has to be repaid. Also, presumably, the banks are charging us a fortune in interest. Don’t be part of this scam. Become Scam Free!

My projected “Scam Free” date is 1st January 2008. When’s yours?

A New “Neil Shearing” Offer

Friday, April 28th, 2006

I just clicked the “send” button at my autoresponder company, GetResponse, to do a promotional mailout to 28,000 people offering them a chance to grab a reprint right to my latest product, Insider Rollout Secrets. I’m only making 20 rights available as I want to minimize the competition of people offering the product and I want to add a scarcity aspect to the rights. On top of that, as each right is sold, the price goes up. Take a look…

http://www.scamfreezone.com/insiderrights/

With the volume of people being sent the offer, the limited number of rights, the low price point of the first few rights and the fact that the price increases with each right sold, I’m hoping to make a few sales today. :-)

Easy Content For Your Site…

Thursday, April 27th, 2006

Find out how to get 400 articles per month, plus a ton of other goodies including how to “ban-proof” your websites by reading this 19-page PDF report containing over 60 minutes of video… and it’s free… for as long as I can keep Mike from charging for it. ;-)    Here’s the link:

http://www.scamfree.com/articles/

The press release went out

Wednesday, April 26th, 2006

You can check out the press release by clicking here. It managed to get picked up by Google News, so that’s good. According to PRWEB, who distributed it, the stats for the press release are:

The number of times your press release was picked up by a media outlet: 82

How many times your press release was accessed from our site and other distribution points where we have the ability to measure a click through: 6,628

…which looks good to me, even though I have nothing to compare it against. :-)

The only reason for the press release was to get some inward links from the press release being reprinted at other sites and thereby garner some attention from the search engines… specifically Google… which is why I checked if Google News was carrying the press release.

I’ll be searching for “Neil Shearing Gatecrashes the Blogosphere” (the title of the press release) to see if it appears on any webpages. 

What I do for a living…

Wednesday, April 26th, 2006

People are always asking me what I do day-to-day. Well, this is an average day… checked email and several websites for how well my business is doing, took my wife out for a cream tea, bought some plants to extend our hedge, planted plants in garden (hope they live… I’m not a gardener!), lunch, answered a few emails, spent time discussing future projects with my Russian programmer via Instant Messenger. Verified and added a few links at Incomemax.com. And now it’s mid-afternoon and I’m writing this blog post. :-)

It’s a bit strange having an online business that you run from home… the Internet is always there… so I could be always working… but the whole point (for me) is to work only a few hours each day and enjoy the rest of the time with my family. The kids grow up so fast, I don’t want to be stuck in a 9-to-5 job (is it 8-to-6 nowadays or does that include the commute?) and never see them. By the same token, there’s not much point in working from home if you’re hiding away in your office morning, noon and night. Striking a balance is hard… but not as hard as the alternatives. :-)  

Spreading the word via a press release

Tuesday, April 25th, 2006

I don’t normally pay for any promotions, but I’d like to test the effectiveness of press releases. I’ve paid PRWEB a cool $40 to issue a press release about this blog tomorrow, April 26th. At the moment, Google show zero links into this site even though I know people have linked to it… including my own links from my other sites… and if you search for this site at Google you’ll find an old cached page from April 11th (I don’t know how long that link will work for).

 So, I consider this blog as a promotional blank canvas… let’s see what the press release can do to get some attention! :-)

Free Guide To Making Money With Ebooks

Monday, April 24th, 2006

My mentor, Michael Campbell, has written a short report on how to make money online with your own ebooks. Like everything Michael does, it’s quality. Don’t be fooled by it being free… most people assume free equals garbage. In this case, free equals gold-dust. If you want to find out how to make money online creating and selling your own ebooks, download this free report (right click on the link and select “save file as” then save it to your desktop). You’ll need the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to open the PDF file.

I hope you enjoy the report. If you do, you may like my Internet Success Blueprint and Insider Rollout Secrets.

Top 50 searches…

Monday, April 24th, 2006

Have you ever wondered what people are really searching for? Which keywords and keyphrases would be great to build a site around and act as a jump-start to affiliate income or Adsense income? Do you want to know without spending hours downloading, installing and configuring software. Do you want to know for free? OK, here you go…

http://50.lycos.com/faq.asp

On that page you’ll find the weekly top 50 search terms and an explanation of which terms were omitted. The results are from Lycos, which I thought no longer existed, but they claim to get 12 million searches per day… so the top 50 will be a decent guide to what people are searching for. :-)

What the heck is Dragonball? Anyone else confused, or is it just me? :-)

New header…

Monday, April 24th, 2006

OK, so the photo is one I took in my garden… I did the editing in Paint Shop Pro and I hassled the blog’s PHP code until it showed the header properly… eventually. If you like the new header, great… if you don’t, well, there’s no-one to blame but me. :-)

Incidentally, I was trying for something “positive, different and colourful”. :-)

No need to register. :)

Monday, April 24th, 2006

Instead of having to register to post comments, you can now just fill in the comment form and let me know your thoughts instantly. :-)

I’ve added a CAPTCHA mechanism to the form which asks for a four-digit code displayed as an image so that autobots and spamtools can’t add comments, but humans can. Feel free to let me know what you think about the individual posts or the blog as a whole. :-)

Best Adsense Day…

Monday, April 24th, 2006

It’s official. I had my best Adsense day ever yesterday when comparing my eCPM figures!

The eCPM is the effective amount of money you’re earning per thousand page impressions. It’s the measurement people use to buy and sell banner ads. I remember the “early days” when people were charging hundreds of dollars per thousand banner ads… which dropped like a stone when people realized all those banner-shaped graphics were ads and started to tune them out. The result was that banner ads could be bought for just a few dollars CPM.

So, eCPM is more of a standardised measure than just your “earnings” because your earnings vary with the traffic you get each day… but eCPM averages out the earnings per thousand impressions so you can tell if you’re effectively making more money!

On the eCPM measurement, yesterday was my best day ever! It was actually my third-highest earnings day ever… but on the two higher earnings days I got more traffic but lower eCPM’s. In fact, 11 out of 12 of my highest clickthrough percentage days have been in April 2006… so my clickthrough rate has shot up recently, meaning I’m effectively earning more per thousand page views!  (now I just need to boost traffic dramatically too!) ;-)

Get ready to learn the secrets to soaring clickthrough rates and truly maximize your Adsense income… coming on Tuesday 2nd May! :-)

St. George’s Day

Sunday, April 23rd, 2006

I’m happy to live in cyberspace. I actually enjoy the freedom of the Internet… charging in dollars, selling worldwide, making friends from all over the globe. :-)

But once in a while it’s fun to mention something specific to “home”. And here’s an example… today is St George’s Day… the patron saint of England who died on this day in 303 apparently. What’s interesting is that I had no idea today was St George’s Day until I read about it on another blog. Unlike St Patrick’s Day, most English people probably couldn’t tell you when St George’s Day is… and if you said it was today, the most likely response would be a polite, “really!?:-)

Customer Churn vs Customer Retention

Sunday, April 23rd, 2006

The only way to build a long term viable business is to nurture your relationship with your customers. It’s especially important online where things move so quickly you can be forgotten in an instant. In fact, as I’ve spent more and more years online, this is one of the aspects of online businesses that has shocked me the most…

Everyone says to build lists because “the money’s in the list”. Well, it may surprise you to know that your lists have a massive churn rate… they are most definitely not stable or permanent. Don’t think that you can build your list to 20,000 people and retire.

The people who joined your lists 6 months ago may well have abandoned that email address… and if they joined 12 months ago or, shock horror, 2 years ago, they’re almost certainly just a dead email address. So, in my opinion, you’re looking at a 2-year viability of an online business. That means, if you come back after 2 years, your lists will be almost stone cold.

(I know one guy who had a great list… his writing was superb, insightful and helpful. He came back to the list after 18 months and asked people to resubscribe… and got an 18% response. He only got that because he had a great relationship with his list initially… I expect most people would struggle to get to double digits!)

So how do you keep your business going? Well, here are some ideas…

1: have a constant influx of new customers/subscribers… just don’t think of retiring early!

2: make your business indispensible to your customers so that they won’t ever leave you… and if they change email address they’ll notify you of the change.

3: Stay in contact with your customers often… recommending products of value, offering quality reports, tips and help. Build a solid relationship with your customers and they’ll repay that effort by being loyal repeat purchasers.

4: Recognize the fact that your list may have a 2-year lifespan and act accordingly. If you haven’t emailed your list for a month… do so! Give them a quality freebie just to say “hi” and keep people interested in you and what you offer.

Here’s a personal example of how I decrease customer churn (thereby increasing customer retention). When someone cancels their Private Site account, my server automatically sends them an email…

> Hi ,
>
> I just saw that you cancelled your membership.
> I’d really like to know why…perhaps I can make
> changes and improvements to win you back :-)
>
> Please let me know when you get a few seconds.
>
> Regards,
> Neil Shearing, Ph.D.

That email has got some interesting replies… such as…

> I had to change my credit card details to Paypal
> I had maximized the one they were taking money out of.
> I did not relies it would cancel my subscription to you.
> I will join up again immediately.

> I cancelled the old credit card in my Paypal account, but
> please send me a link to renew it.

> the only reason I cancelled was because pay pal deducted
> money from my checking account and I was $2.00 short.  So
> I am going to sign back up again.

> Made mistake and need to reactivate.
> Please resend membership

How many of those people would’ve noticed that their membership had been cancelled and rejoined if I hadn’t sent the little note asking why they’d cancelled?

Probably none.

So try to consider ways in which you can create your online business with built-in methods for keeping your customers happy and minimizing your customer churn rate. It will go a long way to improving your long term business success.

Thinking Digital

Saturday, April 22nd, 2006

Here’s the point of this post, for those who are in a hurry… ;-)

The people who are most successful online are those who use the advantages of the medium to the maximum extent.

What does that mean? Well, it means you can’t think like a business that runs offline with “bricks and mortar”. You need to see this as a digital environment, and take advantage of that. Consider the size of your potential audience… millions and millions… that’s a phenomenal advantage over almost any other business. Consider the ease of creating and selling a digital product… a totally new way to sell information and software. Consider the ease of publishing, like this blog.

Let me introduce you to someone Bill Gates called, “one of the most dynamic people I have met”..  Richard Duvall. He set up the online bank egg.com in 1998 and they now claim to be the world’s largest online bank. By cutting out the traditional bank’s overheads, and allowing people to access their accounts online, Egg became a massive success.

Fast forward several years and Richard has launched Zopa.com (it stands for Zone of Possible Agreement). Basically, this is an online lending exchange where regular people can lend money to other regular people through Zopa. The lenders say what rate of interest they want and Zopa tries to match their offer to borrowers. This is a truly innovative way of using the digital medium to achieve a better way of lending and borrowing money. The rates are usually better for both parties because the overheads of Zopa are lower than traditional banks but, more than that, nine out of ten people prefer to borrow from other people and not banks, so Zopa brings lenders and borrowers together with a “human” face.

Consider other online systems that bring people together… ”peer to peer” music exchanges, online auction services and Internet phone calls. They make maximum use of the Internet’s ability to connect millions of people.

Currently Zopa is a UK system, but they’ve secured funding for a US launch. Remember, you heard about it here first… I hope. ;-)

 If you’re in the UK and want to sign up as a lender or borrower, please let me know and I can invite you… which will earn us both £30. Just post a comment to this thread saying “invite please” and I’ll contact you.

So, egg.com and zopa.com are great ideas from one person. They work well because they are using the best advantages of the digital medium… the Internet… to provide a service at a better cost, and in a more convenient way, than has been done traditionally.

How can you apply those concepts to your online business? Are you trying to shoehorn a physical business online without adapting? Can you see a potential way to do an offline business better online? Are you missing opportunities by not thinking “digitally” enough? Only by making maximum use of the medium will you be most successful.

Thanks for visiting!

Friday, April 21st, 2006

It’s a party! I invited some friends to take a peek at the new blog and recorded 4,186 visits in 24 hours!

Not only that, but we rocketed this blog to 6,257 on Alexa.com which means this blog was the 6,257th most visited site on the Internet (according to Alexa)… not bad for a site only running for less than a week!

So… thanks for visiting and please stick around… I’ve got lots of cool posts planned for the next few days. :-)

10 seconds to build and host a new page? That’ll be Google then!

Friday, April 21st, 2006

Wow, this is a real eye-opener! I managed to create a webpage in 10 seconds, and it’s hosted and ready to view online at: http://neil.shearing.googlepages.com/home

It’s very, very basic… what do you want from 10 seconds effort? ;-)

How does it work? You can use your Gmail account info to log in at this page… then Google displays a basic HTML editor in your browser… you just type text and highlight links. There are advanced controls for adding images, messing with fonts and layouts… but for sheer simplicity this has the “wow” factor.

Thanks to Alex for the tip… :-)

 BTW, if you don’t have a Gmail account, you can get an invite by giving Google your mobile phone number in (certain countries only) and getting an invite code sent to your phone via SMS (!)

Alternatively, add a comment to this post requesting an invite and I’ll try to send you one… I have a few available. :-)  

Firefox fixed? :-)

Friday, April 21st, 2006

Well, that was a fun hour… hacking code and trying to work out what was going on “under the hood”. :-)

In the end, all I had to do was remove this line of code from the very very top of the page…

*!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd“>

To be honest, I have no idea what that code does… apart from the fact that removing it makes the blog display normally in Firefox… at least on my machine.

If anyone would like to enlighten me as to what that code is for, and why removing it “fixed” the problem, I would really like to know. Please post a comment and I’ll read it/approve it. Be sure to include a link to your site if you have one. :-)

Edit: OK, now I’ve spent a few more hours figuring this out and found another area of the Internet I was blissfully ignorant of! Thanks to everyone who pointed me to resources to learn about DOCTYPES… it turns out to be all about browser compatibility… and thanks to the Firefox users who reported the problem and tested the fix… but the biggest “thanks” to Alex who suggested a DOCTYPE that worked for both Internet Explorer and Firefox. And yes, this is the same clever Alex who provided these freebies I wrote about below. :-)

Browser compatibility? Harrumph. When I started, it was Netscape Navigator or nothing! ;-)

Thanks for the Firefox notes…

Friday, April 21st, 2006

I appreciate all the emails and comments about the Firefox browser guys. I’ve just installed it and, oh brother, does Firefox turn my Blog into a dog’s dinner! It looks awful!

ugly firefox Click to enlarge. 

I’ll try to fix it, but I’m not familiar with Firefox, so if anyone has any troubleshooting tips, I’d love to hear them.

By the way, if you want to post a blog comment you’ll have to register… and then I’ll have to approve it. Sorry for the inconvenience but there’s no way I’m allowing spam comments (or worse) to appear on this blog. It’s supposed to be fun and lighthearted. :-)