KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays (4 page)

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Authors: Joel Comm,Mark Victor Hansen

BOOK: KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays
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Sergey Brin’s and Larry Page’s idea of ranking sites according to the number of times other sites linked to them meant that their search engine didn’t just deliver the right results, it also delivered the best results.
 
Suddenly, the Web wasn’t just a random collection of sites that were difficult to navigate. It was a world that came with its own tour guide, who could point out the best places for anyone to visit regardless of their subject of interest.
 
If you wanted to know about stamp collecting, architecture, or celebrity news, Google would tell you. And it would not just tell you which site mentioned those things.
 
That was incredibly useful, and it enabled Google to quickly pick up vast numbers of Internet users keen to find a shortcut to the best content on the Web.
 
Up to that point, all Google had done was build a service users liked. No one was paying for it. Google still hadn’t invented a cash register. That happened in 2000, when Google began accepting ads on its search results pages. Because the ads displayed depended on the search term the user entered, they were always relevant. And because they were text-based, they were also unobtrusive. Ads were displayed based on the price the advertiser was willing to pay, as well as the number of click-throughs they had received in the past.
 
It wasn’t a completely new idea. (A site called
Goto.com
, which would eventually become Yahoo! Search Marketing, had been selling ads in a similar way. Yahoo! even sued Google for patent
Figure 1.2
Google’s AdSense program: The service that launched a million KaChings.
 
infringement in a case that was settled out of court.) But it did create the Internet’s loudest KaChing ever. Even if the idea didn’t come out of nowhere, Google certainly developed and implemented it better than anyone else. Today, Google is said to have 82.7 percent of the worldwide search market. In 2008, its total revenues, almost all from advertising, amounted to more than $21.8 billion.
That was good news for Google. The company had created a cash register that enabled it to accept money from companies that wanted to approach the millions of users it was picking up each day.
 
But the good news for everyone else was that Google also handed out cash registers free of charge to any Web publisher who wanted one.
 
The invention of AdWords, the system that Google uses to sell advertising space, might have made a deafening KaChing sound. But through AdSense (the publishing side of AdWords) that ring has been echoing around the Web ever since (
Figure 1.2
).
 
It’s a system that’s open to anyone with a web site. Sign up at
www.google.com/adsense
and you’ll be given a few lines of code that you can place on your Web pages. That code will automatically serve up ads from Google’s inventory, and those ads will be based on the content of your web site.
 
It’s an incredible thing.
 
You get relevant, unobtrusive ads, and you are paid every time one of your users clicks one.
 
It has to be the easiest KaChing in the history of commerce.
 
Sure, there are strategies you can use to maximize your earnings. When I first started using AdSense back in 2004, I made $40 a month. That’s not KaChing. That’s ker-splat.
 
But once I’d optimized my ads, blended them into my sites, and tested a bunch of different strategies, my AdSense income skyrocketed. Today, I regularly receive monthly checks from Google for more than $15,000.
 
Now
that’s
KaChing!
 
What’s important here, though, isn’t just the amounts. It’s the simplicity.
 
Web site templates, content management systems, and blogging platforms have opened up Internet publishing to anyone who knows how to turn on a computer and operate a keyboard. With Google AdSense, we now have a way of turning those sites into money that’s just as simple.
 
We have the store, and we have the cash register.
 
In fact, we now have lots of cash registers. We have different types of cash registers on our sites, and we can put them in different places. Google’s AdSense system is primarily a cost-per-click (CPC) program. As a publisher, you are paid every time someone clicks on an ad. But you can also use other services to be paid on a cost-per-action (CPA) basis: When someone buys, you earn a commission. You can also earn on a cost-per-mille (CPM) basis: You receive a small amount of money for every thousand times your Web page is loaded and the ad shown, regardless of what the people who see it do.
 
And that’s just advertising. As you’ll see throughout this book, there are now plenty of other ways of generating a KaChing from a successful web site, including information products, coaching, and membership sites.
 
This is the New Web Order. It’s a place that’s open to anyone who wants to join. The pioneering days are over. The strategies, methods, and approaches have all been tested, proven, and simplified. The tools are available, they’re free, and they’re waiting for anyone who’s willing to pick them up, use them, and learn how they work.
 
Perhaps the best way to think of Web publishing today is to compare it to photography. Anyone can take a simple picture. A basic digital camera costs next to nothing and will let you shoot pictures of your family, your cat, and the sunset at the beach. When you take good pictures, you’ll get a little thrill of satisfaction that will encourage you to take more. It won’t be long before you’re thinking of upgrading and buying a fancy camera that will let you play with exposure and focusing and do all of the other things that fancy cameras do.
 
That will encourage you to learn about photography, and the more you learn and the more you shoot, the better you’ll get. You might never be commissioned to shoot the cover of
Vanity
Fair, but as long as you enjoy what you’re doing, your skills will improve to a level that allows you to perhaps sell the odd photo on eBay or iStockphoto, or hire yourself out for weddings and events.
 
On the Internet, anyone can get started with a simple web site or blog. You can plug in AdSense or one of the other Internet cash registers that are now easily available. You can begin making money—and you can continue making even more money as you grow and learn.
 
It’s not a process that takes place overnight. In fact, the learning process never ends. But the sooner you start, the sooner you’ll hear that first KaChing.
 
To get started though, you’ll need a topic. Just as store owners have to know what kind of products they want to sell, so publishers have to know what kind of content they want to offer.
 
It’s a vital question, and it’s something I discuss in Chapter 2.
 
2
 
Your Uniqueness Equals Cash
 
We’ve seen that the Internet has democratized opportunities in two ways. The low cost and ease of building a web site now means that anyone can own online real estate. You don’t need to know anything about the Internet to put up a blog or create a site. You can buy them almost ready-made, off the shelf. What flat-pack design has done for amateur furniture makers, templates, content management systems, and blogging software have done for web sites.
 
And you don’t have to waste brain cells trying to think up ways to monetize your site, either. With Google handing out cash registers, there’s always one very simple way of making money from your users. Once you are used to that method, it’s just a short step to all of the other strategies discussed in this book.
 
There is another way that the Web has opened up to everyone, though, and it’s no less important.
 
It’s made us all into experts.
 
Or rather, it’s enabled all of us to earn from our expertise, which isn’t quite the same thing, because you’ve always been an expert. You might not have a doctorate in cheesecake making or a Nobel Prize for your contributions to world crocheting, but if you know more about those things than most people do, then you’re an expert on that topic.
 
Note that I don’t say that you have to know more about those topics than everyone else does. You don’t have to be the world’s leading expert to earn from your knowledge on the Internet. You just need to have knowledge that other people don’t have but want.
 
Everybody has knowledge like that.
 
If you do origami in your spare time, then you’re an expert on origami. Sure, there are people who can fold paper better than you can. But they don’t have a web site that shares their knowledge. You do. (If they do have a web site, then their site discusses ways of making paper animals, while yours will explain how to fold paper boxes.)
 
If you like sports, then maybe you’re an expert on your local football team. If you’re into cooking, then perhaps you’re an expert on barbecuing, baking cookies, or making whatever type of food you like to cook the most.
 
Everybody is an expert in something because everyone has to fill 24 hours of his or her day with something. Even if you spend half that time on the sofa watching television and the other half in bed sleeping, then you’re an expert on sofas, daytime soaps, and a dozen ways to waste your time. As long as people want to know about those things, the Internet will give you an opportunity to make money from that knowledge.
 
You might not pick up millions of users. It’s certainly possible that if you launch a web site about knitting with yellow wool, you’ll find that only a fraction of the total number of people interested in knitting will stop by to look. But those people will likely be dedicated knitters. They’ll be the ones most likely to click on an ad, buy an affiliate product, or sign up for a paid subscription to your newsletter. It might be a tiny subject, but because it’s on the Web and therefore available to everyone, everywhere, you can land enough users to bring in enough money to start building a profitable online business.
 
That’s the value of the long tail—the Internet’s ability to build revenue-generating audiences for the most specialized of topics. And it means that any knowledge you have has value and can generate a KaChing online.
 
Choosing Your Niche
 
The first step is the easiest—and the most enjoyable. In fact, the best way to know you’re doing it right is if you enjoy it.
 
Yet even at this stage, people still get it wrong.
 
I’ve lost count of the number of people who have approached me at conferences and workshops and asked me what their web site should be about. I can’t help them there. I have no idea what your web site should be about either. I do know the principle that should underlie the subject of every profitable web site: It must be a topic its publisher enjoys and is interested in.
 
Forget about the apparent value of the topic for now. Forget about the fact that some topics are more likely to make money than others. Build a web site that’s designed only to make money and you might hear a little KaChing in the beginning, but by the time you’ve built up a large enough knowledge of Internet business to make big money, you’ll have run out of ideas and be so bored with the subject that you’ll stop adding good content. Maintaining the site will feel like a chore, and when that happens, you might as well have a j-o-b. It will feel just as painful.
 
It won’t be as profitable though, because when you get bored with your site, you can be certain that it won’t be long before your users get bored with your site, too. The Internet is filled with the skeletons of dead web sites that started with the idea of making cash and then faded away as the publisher became bored and moved on.
 
When you’re looking for your niche, don’t think about money. Don’t worry about the KaChing. That will come. Think instead about what interests you.

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