Web Empire

Maybe it was the root canal I had last week, but I’ve been thinking about roots lately. Not family, but root causes. What is it that keeps people from succeeding in their online endeavor to make money? What is holding you back?

Some people say it is due to not taking action. That isn’t the cause, it is just a symptom. Others claim it is perfectionism, waiting for everything to be perfect, and of course nothing ever is.  But again, that is a symptom, not the cause.

The main reason people do not get ahead is fear. Fear of failure. It is kind of a self-fulfilling prophesy: people fear failure, so they fail to act, and hence fail to make money. They become so involved in researching what they should do, that they never actually do anything. They start on a project, then when it isn’t perfect, abandon it for something else. They fail out of fear of failing.

Building a Web Empire, instead of a single web site, is one means of dealing with this fear. You don’t need to succeed with every site, when you have dozens, or even hundreds of sites. You just need to learn what works and what doesn’t. If you build one site, you have all your eggs in one basket, to use an old cliché. With multiple websites,  one or two or ten can fail, yet you will earn money on the others.

But not even one, let alone two or ten, need really be failures. You learn by doing. If you set as the basic goal of every web site that it must earn its hosting cost, you have a basis on which to judge sites. Put ten sites on a $9.95/month web hosting service, and you only need to earn $1 per month from any of those sites for them to remain viable. Based on that criteria, it is difficult to create a true ‘failure’ of a site — any site can earn $1 a month with little effort.

But of course there is no profit in having sites that just cover their own costs. A few such sites, however, provide traffic and links to your more profitable sites. They may not be earning much directly, but they contribute to your overall success. And success is where your focus should be, rather than possible failure.

If a site does fail, chalk it up as a learning experience. I support sites for three months, then if they do not pay their own hosting, I look for an alternate plan for that site, based on the domain. I may entirely re-write the site, giving it a new face and format as well as subject, if I can rationally do so consistent with the domain name. By the end of a year (the term of domain registration I originally pay for) I have at least three (given development time) tries at getting it profitable. If at the end of that time it still can’t earn its own hosting costs, I drop that domain. You can bet I’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t in the process.

That is not failure. It is learning. I pay on average $9 for a domain and $1/month hosting, or $21 per year for my sites. After many years of creating sites I have not had a total failure in several years, but I still have the occasional site that needs re-writing after three months. The markets change, and the web changes, and the only constant is change — so you must continually learn, or you will be left behind. The best way to learn is by doing, and being very observant of the results.

I’m getting ready to leave for a few days, and thought I’d leave with a short post about the purpose of business. I’ll be on the Pacific coast a couple hours south of Puerto Vallarta, in an area where the beaches go on and on. The place my wife and I will be staying in has no Internet, and no phone. There are Internet Café’s nearby, but I don’t plan to visit them.

Why are we in business, those of us who are self-employed? To make money, of course, but why? It is not money for money’s sake. It is the freedom. It is being able to choose where and how we live (we live in Chapala, in central Mexico). And it is also being able to choose how much we work. I’m choosing not to work for the next few days, but to relax and reflect on 2007, and decide what I want for 2008.

Since I use WordPress I could have posted daily messages for the time I will be gone on this blog. It might have been a slight benefit for the SEO ranking. In fact I have done just that with some of my other blogs. But since this site is about the realities of creating and managing your Web Empire, I thought it a good idea to emphasize the benefits as well as the work involved.

I should be back before the new year begins … or maybe not.

I know the secret to instant riches, and you probably do too. Rob a bank.

That’s it. There are no instant riches on the Internet. You can’t build a Web Empire working four-hours a week. You can maintain your Web Empire working four hours a week (or less), if it is well designed, but it will take years of hard effort to get to that position.

If you have a website, you have a start. If you don’t have one, then start one today. Go to wordpress.com and start a free blog. First, you might want to try this little experiment. Go to Google and type in:

site:wordpress.com blog

Now, go to those sites and check their pagerank. If you have Firefox, you can use the SeoQuake plug-in and then you won’t even have to visit the sites, it will show you the pagerank for each right on the Google results page. Right now it shows two PR6 and six PR5 on that page, not including the WordPress site itself. Then go to the second page of results. There, I’m seeing one PR7, four PR6 and several PR5 sites. Skip all the way down to page 10 of results, and we still see blogs ranging from PR4 to PR6.

Wouldn’t you like a site with PR4 or above where you can link to any other site in your Web Empire? Links like that are a valuable resource. You won’t find instant riches, but you can add the foundation stone (or another building block) to your Web Empire.

One of the problems with organizing a multitude of websites into a Web Empire is that there are just too many on-going projects to work on. You have ideas and plans, and get started on this project then that — but never finish anything. Everything is a work in progress.

There are two things you can do to avoid this problem. First is focus, the second is pruning.

Focus on one thing at a time. Keep at it until it is finished. Move on to the next thing.

Seems simple enough, but I have to admit this an area where, even though I know the best procedure, I often fall short myself. It is just too easy to come up with promising ideas. It is easy to get excited about a new project, much more difficult to remain interested in a project that is growing old. Once all the problems have been solved, and only routine tasks are required to complete the project, it is easy to set it aside for ‘later’ — even though we know later never comes.

Typically, this routine stage is either entering new information into a website, or promoting that site. You have done the site design and optimization, coded wonderful little bits and pieces into it, and now it is just a matter of finishing up content, or going through the various hoops of promotion.

If you can not bring yourself to keep at it until it is finished, hire someone to do the routine parts. Typically, entrepreneurs building an Internet Business want to hire out work they can’t do — like programming — and do the rest themselves. Fine, so long as you will actually do it. If you won’t it is just the same as if you can’t — hire someone else! Make sure it gets done.

The second part of the solution is pruning. Prune out those projects that will eat up too much of your time. Sure, they may be promising — but you need to prioritize. The best websites for your Web Empire are those you can make and then ignore for years at a time, while they continue to make you money. You should only have ONE high maintenance site — typically your blog — the rest should run on auto-pilot once they have been created.

Again, you can hire someone to do the ongoing work for a high-maintenance site, but that solution is much less satisfactory than one-time hires for finishing projects. You build on-going expenses that way, and it is best to try to keep those to a minimum. Better to prune it out — drop the whole project — unless it is tremendously profitable and worth the extra expense.

I got an email today from someone backing-out of an agreement to purchase a text link on one of my sites. This person said, (and I paraphrase) “I’m sorry I’m going to have to pass on this, I’ve just learned that Google doesn’t allow paid links.”

Google doesn’t allow? Who runs your business — you or Google? Do you find yourself optimizing your site just for one search engine? Do you rely on income from Adsense? Don’t do it! Never put all your eggs in one basket, as mama would say. They are in the business of selling paid links — of course they would prefer if you didn’t compete with them!

They do have over half the search traffic (right now) so I’m not saying to ignore them either. And the adsense program is a great way to earn additional income from your sites — but don’t rely on any single source for the bulk of your income. Diversify your income streams, so that if one dries up, or even fluctuates wildly, it will not create a panic situation.

If you are serious about earning money from an Internet business, you have to keep control of your business — don’t give all the power to an external entity. They are minding their business, not yours. They will always do what is best for them, regardless of how it might affect you.

There are lots of ways to make money online — selling display or text ads, affiliate linking, subscription sites, reselling other people’s products, selling your own products, etc., etc. Build your Web Empire using as many different techniques as you can. Not all on the same site, and not all for any particular vendor or company. Diversify both the sources and the types of income, and you will build a secure Internet business.