If timing is everything which I posted about the other week then you can understand why Al is raking in so much cash just now, it isn’t luck as Al has actually been talking about the upcoming Xmas sales and revenue opportunity for quite some time and made moves to capitalise on it.

As with any success there will be the naysayers who will put it down to luck or scorn the ability of anyone else to replicate that success. One of the difficult things that soon comes to light when making money online through organic rankings or indeed domaining is that you need patience, lots of work, research, action and then more patience. We cannot control Google organic rankings overnight or the weather or seasons and that discourages a lot of people.Continue Reading

Making money online certainly isn’t as easy as some would like to make out, in fact at times it can be pretty damn tough going but there are opportunities online for most kinds of people and having a closer look at those main 4 groups of current earners shows new opportunities ripe for stepping into by a new breed.

The idea’s person
It has historically been the ‘ideas person’ that strikes big money and separates his/her self from the rest by striding forward with innovative ideas and new thinking, if you couldn’t come up with ideas and new concepts you were generally a foot soldier in the offline world and the early online days. Being able to create and conceive a great product or service is not something you can teach yourself. Ultimately an ideas person cannot succeed by themselves though, they need……….

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How did you start out?
What sites do you build?
Do you just build lots and see what sticks?

Personally I took a different approach when choosing my first genre, many years ago I subscribed to Wordtracker who offer a free email service whereby they email me the top searched terms, I still get this today. This would be more a reflective approach to look at what is already out there and what is already profitable and then to try and jump on the bandwagon by looking to obtain a piece of the action.

In this email you get

1/ The top 300 surge report
These are the top 300 queries from the last 48 hours, which represents the complete queries from the largest Metacrawlers on the web (Metacrawler/Dogpile etc..) for the last 48 hours.

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Databases are cool! That may sound like something that only a total computer nerd would say but I don’t care as they make me money.

Just over a year a go I had an idea for a site that I thought would be fun to do as a joint project with my daughter (I often look for projects that I can get the whole family involved in, a/ For fun and b/ For the cheap labour )

The site required the gathering of a vast amount of data so I decided to take a shortcut and purchase a database from Oddity Software. As the same database could be bought by anybody and I wanted mine to be unique so I combined it with another freely available database. This gave me unique content as well as adding value to the readers. As you’ve probably guessed I’m not sharing full site details in this post but I’ll to give a similar example of what I did.
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I’m into week number two of the holiday, I’ve ran out of clean pants and am currently sat in some Turkish café playing a lottery to see what today’s pizza will be like. Which got me thinking, what would be really cool is an online resort guide.

The way I’d see it working is as a user submitted review site, where tourists could write about the various places they’ve visited and eateries they’d got food poisoning at (only happened to my girlfriend once so far this year).

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Over the years I’ve learnt a great deal from various forums, websites and blogs. One of the motives behind the Friday roundup is to share links to useful information and not so easily found posts so as to minimize the cumulative time spent browsing through the crud. I find forums like Digital Point have many really knowledgeable members who have contributed to some excellent threads that many entrepreneurs would really benefit from reading. However for every good thread there are hundreds that are a complete waste of reading time and if you bring General Chat and the Politics section into contention then those 100s of pointless time draining posts could easily turn into 1000s.

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2 Months ago I revisited the subject of mini sites breaking them down into the 3 main types being, product based, information based & tool/calculator based.

I think it is pretty safe to say one of the most successful method is a tool or calculator based mini site. A tool or calculator does a simple job cleanly and quickly that is of use or service to the visitor thus making it extremely bookmark worthy and link worthy through social sites such as Digg/Stumble etc etc

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