Alright, you asked us the questions, we’ll provide you with the answers!

Tess asks:

Hello,

I have a question. Which Wordpress Theme is this website using? I think it’s great!

Stanley: Previously, we were using a modified version of John Cow’s Milk It Premium Theme. The new theme that you’re seeing right now is a heavily customized version of the DarkZen theme.

Paulubiadas asks:

Aside from Commission Junction, what other affiliate network doesn’t need a need a call from the network to get your account approve.

I don’t have a telephone!

Stanley: Out the top of my head – Clickbank, PayDotCom. Also, like the others replied, Linkshare and Moreniche.

Tom – Free Blogging Success Ebook asks:

What is your favourite way to generate traffic to your blogs?

Stanley: Creating good content that people will naturally share and bloggers will naturally link to.

Josh: Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook have a huge potential traffic for your site, if utilized well.

Gloson asks:

How much traffic does The University Kid receive daily?

Stanley: 500-1000 unique visitors per day.

Nicole Price asks:

How much time per day do you devote to blogging?

Stanley: About 1 hour per day, while maintaining the site is a 24/7 job I spend most of my time running my internet business (blogging is just a small portion)

Michael Gaudet asks:

What auto-responder do you use at TUK to alert subscribers to every new post?

Stanley: Google Feedburner. I’ve also launched the TUK newsletter which will also alert subscribers when a new blog post is submitted. I use GetResponse for that (the best autoresponder service in the industry)

The Almost Millionaire asks:

Why do you not use adsense to generate revenue from this blog? It seems like with such good traffic and readership, it would do well?

Josh: A Direct Advertising solution is better than a CPC Advertising Network as there is no middle-man (i.e. Google), which means more revenue. This also enables us to have direct communications with the advertiser (e.g. about Price Negotiations, Ad Placements), something we can’t do with Google AdSense.

Stanley: Because you don’t make jack with Google Adsense. Just going to be a waste of real estate on the site. It’s way more profitable when you sell direct ads.

Ethan asks:

Now feel free to correct me if I am wrong, but it seems that TUK is a driven by social traffic, rather than search engine traffic – rending a contextual advertising service like adsense, almost useless.

Stanley: You are wrong about the social traffic. TUK is mainly driven by direct visits (i.e. people typing in the URL in their address bar). Second is Google. Third is Twitter. But you are right about that Adsense is almost useless for sites like TUK.

A asks:

Why do you think there are so few female internet entrepreneurs (compared to males)

When’s ProdigyMagic gonna launch? (it says april 2009!)

oh one more, where do you see the Internet going in the next 5 years?
Do you think it’s getting oversaturated, or just beginning its potential?

lots of questions

darn questions just keep coming to me

Question for both of you: What are some other good business books you recommend? (you mentioned the Rich Dad/Poor Dad series, the Four Hour Work Week)

Some I’ve liked are Freakonomics, Predictably Irrational; working through Microtrends right now. Always looking for good reads

Stanley: That’s a lot of questions Let’s take it one by one:

I have no idea why there are so few female entrepreneurs. Maybe it’s because of our culture – guys tend to be more geeky and tech-savy than girls. They are probably more into shopping. That’s just my guess.

ProdigyMagic.com will be launching soon. It’s been postponed because we (my business partner and I for ProdigyMagic – no it’s not Josh) decided that we wanted to do something else that is related to charity. Plus, we’ve both been overloaded with exams after exams.

The internet will continue to grow – exponentially. It’s nowhere near saturation and nowhere near it’s full potential. It’s only in its infancy and there are way endless platforms that have yet to be explored (semantic web, mobile apps etc) Especially in China, where internet penetration rate is only 22% (compared to 80% for USA) so there’s a huge room for growth.

Good books to read: A great one I just finished reading a few weeks ago was Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good (if you’re into web 2.0 startups). I also love reading Donald Trump and Seth Godin’s books – I suggest each and one of their books are worth it (except for Trump’s How To Think Like A Billionaire - that was his only rubbish). The Irresistible Offer by Mark Joyner and ProBlogger by Darren Rowse are also pretty good. I’ve also heard good stuff about Joel Comm’s latest book Twitter Power (haven’t read it yet) although based on past records Joel’s stuff always rock. And of course, eMillions

Huggies Diaper Coupons asks:

When first starting out in trying to make money online do you think it’s better to start with 1 site and try and make it grow and then profit big from it or start with many small niche focused sites and make smaller profits from each one.

Thanks,
Steve

Stanley: If this was 2006, I would have told you to build 100 small niche sites with each making $10 per month, netting you $1,000. But things have changed – a lot. Now, I would say focus on one and build it BIG from there. Pick a niche that you’re passionate about, that’s not too broad (that your blog looses focus) or too narrow (that your blog has no room to grow).

Melvin asks:

well my friend, do you have any plans of changing the theme here? if yes then when probably and what are the type of themes you are looking at?

Stanley: We just did a few days ago

Jonas asks:

How do you sell your Direct Advertising Spots? What is the program used and how can I do the same?

Josh: We use a WordPress PlugIn called OIOPublisher. This plugin handles all your advertising buying and selling proceses, so that you can focus on what you need to do – blogging. The only thing you have to do is approve the advert. The script can be installed on an unlimited number of domains and also works with PayPal subscription.

OIOPublisher usually costs $47, but for The University Kid readers, you can use the following code: INDIGO-UNIKID to get a discount of $10 off. You can easily make that money back with your first ad sale.

Jos asks:

I’ve made a complete revamp from complete scratch to give it a much cleaner look. Some of the things I kept are the logo and the orange color to keep it’s brand. For those of you asking, the theme I’m using here is a heavily-customized version of DarkZen, which you can download for free at DailyBlogTips.

Please do take some time to check the new theme out and let me know what you think. I’m still making small tweaks here and would appreciate your feedbacks (good and bad – preferably the latter so I can actually make changes ) The theme has been tested on Firefox, Safari, Chrome, IE8 and IE7. If you’re using IE6 (which it looks totally screwed up on)… well go get Firefox!

Here are just a few highlights:

New Theme With A Cleaner Look

We gotta admit, the old theme was getting… well very old and the site desperately needed a new cleaner look with a modern feel to it. I’m currently thinking about whether or not to give it a more of a “magazine” look by having a landing style front page (just like ProBlogger, JohnChow). Let me know what’s your view on that.

Easier To Subscribe

I’ve pimped up the subscription box to give it a better user-interface. One of the ways to boost the number of RSS subscribers is simply to make it easier for people to subscribe! I got rid of the email optin box for the RSS feed and a newsletter will replace that instead (see below). I’ve added an extra option for people to subscribe via Twitter as it’s getting more and more popular.

TUK Newsletter & Exclusive Ebook!

And finally… it’s been coming – the launch of The University Kid Newsletter! This is where you’ll get exclusive TUK content not available on this blog such as interviews, how-to guides, tips & tricks, cutting edge techniques and more! I’ll also be sending out weekly blog post updates, promotions and product recommendations that will help you make money online

Plus…

As an incentive, I’ll be throwing in a free digital copy to my #1 best selling print book eMillions: Behind-The-Scenes Stories of 14 Successful Internet Millionaires – yes the exact same book which hit #1 on Amazon in FOUR different categories last year. In this whopping 260-page book, you get to listen to the world’s most successful internet marketers revealing their rags-to-riches journeys to becoming internet millionaires – straight from the horse’s mouth!

I’m talking about stories like:

• How a college filmmaker from Florida turned an “experiment” into a $248 million blockbuster through the power of viral marketing (guess which movie was that?)
• How a former U.S. Army Officer turned a one-man operation into a multi-million dollar international corporation with customers in every Internet-connected country on the planet
• How a 17 year-old kid with $70 in hand built a $3 million Internet company from the ground up teaching people how to play piano by ear

Plus interviews from people like Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker, Mark Joyner, Michel Fortin, Yanik Silver, Joel Christopher etc. You might recognize few of these names

Anyways, enough about the product. The bottom line is you’re getting this all for FREE. I’ve never done this before… that’s because I truly wanted to overdeliver and do more than what’s expected. The key to becoming successful is to provide VALUE.

UPDATE: I messed up the autoresponder big time. I forgot to remove the split-testing code so you were directed to the eMillions squeeze page instead of the download link. Thanks for everybody who emailed me letting me know the problem. It’s been fixed now

Stats Updates

Also, I just wanna update you on the blog itself. It’s been just been a little over a month since the purchase of this blog. So what are the stats like after the takeover? So far so good:

• Revenue - $463. Mostly coming from direct advertising and affiliate sales. That’s 15% already returned on my $3,000 investment. Not bad for one month
• Subscribers - 1,290 subscribers. That’s 90 new RSS subscribers (I know it’s not a lot but not a bad start). Like I said, I’ll be launching a TUK newsletter shortly by giving away free digital version to my #1 best-selling book eMillions.
• Twitter - 9,350 followers. This is something new I’ve added to TUK. No dout social media is getting big and that’s going to be something that I’ll be focusing on a lot in the coming years
• Traffic – 11,400 unique visitors and just *slightly* over 100,000 pageviews… all in 40 days! Considering I haven’t done any major promotions, contests, campaigns etc that’s a pretty decent start.

Looking For Advertisers

I’m opening up to direct ads once again for the blog. My main focus over the past month has been on delivering value as opposed to making money. If anybody is interested in advertising on this blog, contact me here. The rates are still the same – $30 per month for 125*125 and $60 per month for 468*60. I’ve raised the price for sponsored reviews and paid plugs significantly because I wanted to decrease the number of those kind of posts and provide more content posts with great value.

Let me know what you think of the new design. I’m still testing out the design and making changes along the way. If you spot any errors or want to suggest ideas, please let me know.

No bais but I think the person who customized the theme did a brilliant job

P.S. I’m still taking questions for the Q&A so if you’ve got any please fire them away. I will be answering them next week.

Thought I’d take this chance to not only get to know you guys better, but let you guys know me better.

So the rules are simple: Just leave your question in the comments section below and I’ll answer all of them in the next blog post. Feel free to ask anything you want – internet marketing, make money online, entrepreneurship, myself (or Josh).

Fire away!

In all honesty I thought (and still kind of do) that Twitter was a waste of time. Yes, people are making with it – some lots of it, but I’ve looked at other marketing channels and found them more effective.

Anyways, one of the deals I struck a little while ago was to work a Twitter account for an offline Dubai based company – and so I’m going to work on that but also try using it myself.

I’m going at this with an open mind; I’ll look back in a month and decide whether it’s good or bad.

One of the benefits of Twitter I guess is that it’s easiest and less time consuming than instant messenger – quick messages between people. You can also communicate with some of the “big guns”, although they may not reply.

Anyways, as I said I’m giving it ago. Feel free to follow me:

http://twitter.com/LeoNetworks

I’ve followed everyone that followed me up till this point and will continue to do so.

Now, the purpose of Twitter is networking. So follow me, leave your Twitter profile link in the comments section and I’ll follow you. Feel free to recommend others that you’ve found to your benefit following – they can be in this niche or even out of it but interesting (humourous content, for instance ).

I’m going to try and see if I can round up anyone in Dubai using Twitter as I want to organise some kind of marketing convention here. We’ll see.

If you have tips for Twitter, feel free to leave them in the comments section too. As I mentioned, I’m pretty new to the service, out of choice but still. Cheers!

1. I have a low ticket (around $10) product going out for sale in around 24 – 48 hours. It will not be launched on this blog (don’t worry, I’ve always said I would not constantly ram products down your throats like certain other blogs) but I do need testimonials. If interested, contact me via instant messenger – first ten people will be sent the product. You can be as mean as you like, just be honest. You have to be reasonably coherent at English though.

MSN: JPereira.Owns@gmail.com

Yahoo: jasonpereira34

2. I’m looking for a talented designer. I’ve asked around for a few, and have a few available in the $50 – $100 per page range; if you’re someone that thinks s/he’s reasonably good and is willing to work, contact me via email with samples. This is for an exciting project that could do pretty well.  admin@theuniversitykid.com

3. I’m looking for high quality, personal story guest posts. Not “make money with your blog” or “how to leave an appropriate blog comment” type posts, but proper entrepreneur posts with your experiences, good or bad. “I did X and saw Y results”, stuff like that. As a lot of you know, I have exams coming up and anyways, my time on this blog has been limited with my other business activities.

4. Look out for a “make money with PLR” post or series on MMD soon. I love PLR, and I’ve been experimenting with it more and more over the last few months, with reasonable amounts of success. We’re still looking for post ideas for that blog, and we’re always looking for your input.

Thanks to all for the advice on MMD in my last post – I probably won’t be implementing donations because you guys said it would suck. Advertising… maybe.

5. I’m playing around with a few custom made scripts and programs being made… the real money is in promoting high quality, custom based projects (for whatever you’re doing). One of the ideas I had was for a chat type box.

The main idea is this – say I charge $100/hour for consultation normally. Which is reasonable, perhaps, but most newbies don’t have the ability to fork out $100 for one hour, or may find that one hour may not be enough to learn what they need to.

But… what if you could split the cost of consultation with others? You’d be splitting the time spent, of course, but you’d still be saving a lot.

So if I charged 10 people $10 for an hour of chat consultation, I’d still be making the same money. I’d also have a more people under consultation, so the conversation wouldn’t have any danger of stagnating. People (that want to learn) always learn better in a group, I’ve found. And if you’re in a group consultation, you don’t waste your time on idle chit chat that is although pleasant a waste of your money.

Of course, the chat would be available later for download, and you could even offer those that paid for consultation the rights to sell it. Another benefit.

It may work, it may fail, it’s one of the things I’m looking at though. Those that were around at the beginning of TUK may remember that I wanted to start a chat based website (similar to ILoveIM).. the idea still sort of stands, just for a different purpose.

When you have scripts, unique ideas for websites, you can develop them and offer them for sale. I’m going to look at flipping a few more “product” based websites, only with the product being a script or software instead of an eBook.

6. That’s it for now; my designer is still creating designs for tshirts and other merchandise for the offline clothing thing. More and more uni work that’s gotta be done too, sadly.

7. As with the previous of these update posts, I like to see comments; if you have a short question / query that you’d like an answer too, leave a comment below and I’ll get to you. Specific questions. Don’t ask something like “what is a blog”, but something like “what is the best way to drive traffic to my sport site XYZ.com” is a good one.

I should probably update this blog soon too, hmm…

I’ve been working on offline things but realised I still had a few online things to take care of that I’d been neglecting… this blog and a few others amongst them. Although I don’t have the time for various other blogs, I will be working on this one when I can (hopefully a couple posts a week) and MMD too (hopefully a post a week).

I also have quite a few blogs that have reasonable levels of SE traffic but aren’t making more money than they are currently simply because they aren’t being posted on anymore. I’ve talked to a few of my writers and found some more to see if they can continue to be updated. One of the better blogs is a blog about hot celebrities which is getting 200 uniques daily from search engines and only has 5 posts so far… hopefully that will hit it off.

I plan to use this blog to keep you guys updated on various things I’m doing, not just here, but related to all areas of my business. I also plan to use this blog to ask for feedback – although I’ve done tried most things myself getting ideas and help from others is always a good idea.

The end goal is to sell off all the other blogs so I can concentrate on one or two, and put the rest of my time into offline stuff. This blog may be one of those I look at selling… at the moment I haven’t promoted it for the best part of six months and probably should have sold it for the $6,000 I was offered when I last put it up for sale. I didn’t, though, so you guys are stuck with me a bit longer; before a sale is even thought of I’ll have to promote it a bit more so there may be a few things happening that you guys will benefit from (cash contests etc).

I’ll also be promoting MMD the same way; cash contests, probably create a new WSO (the first one brought in a large proportion of the 1,000 subscribers and I didn’t do anything after that).

Make Money Dynamo – Donations or Advertising?

Although MMD is bringing in some income (around $200/month through the Email / Zip submit post – affiliate commissions for Poll Factory) to be honest that’s not that much for the level of stuff we’ve put out so far.

I’d like the site to start earning money – $500/month to start with from a few sources should be achievable within a month or two. Now, how to monetize it.

There are numerous ways to monetize a site – affiliate products (something we’ll be doing more of – provide high quality content and tools to help make achieving the goals in that content easier, and people will check out the tools), banner ads, own product, a membership model, donations… I’ve been asking a few of my “e-buddies” on which would work best for MMD.

The first thing I thought about was selling banner ads – they do well enough on here and it could add around $300/$400 extra monthly with relatively no work on my part. However, having the standard banners that show up everywhere else would make MMD more and more like the myriad of other blogs out there… there’s no chance of us selling newsletter ads because we don’t want to spam people that have opted in to receive high quality, non promotional content.

A suggestion by one of the people that reads both blogs was to have a Donate button. Personally, I’m not a fan of them – they strike me as a tad cheesy, but if they were well received they’d provide far more money than your standard banner ad sales would, and the income would grow on a quality ratio – the more good content, the more donations would come in.

I’d like to know what you guys thought of the idea, since this is the first place I hit when I need feedback in bulk – a donate button, cheesy or fair enough? Would you prefer a donate button (which would be small but above the fold) to your standard 468 x 60 and 125 x 125 ads?

Let me know what you guys think.

Speaking of MMD, I just wrote a post on there and will be writing a few more as long as the ideas keep flowing over the next few weeks… check it out, it’s about how I made $3,000 my first week using Alibaba. Who said offline / online marketing wasn’t profitable?

As always, I’d appreciate post ideas since the content really is for the readers, don’t want to waste your time putting out stuff you couldn’t give a shit about. A new feature of the site is that we’re going to try and reply to every comment made there – something I stopped doing on here since I didn’t really have time and a lot of the comments don’t really need to be specifically replied to. Of course, I love the comments, and read all of them; if you have a question on something posted on MMD leave a comment there and I’ll put out a public reply.

I’m also trying to get Da Blogger going again after the guy that was working on it went MIA… luckily I have a boatload of unique articles related to this niche lying around that I ordered from a writer a month or so ago and haven’t used.

Last but not least, a website that is virally spreading amongst teens caught my eye the other day – F My Life. I quite like the concept, and it’s spread pretty brilliantly for a site to be started in January 2009 to have millions of uniques a month already. I like the flow of the site – it’s like a forum but less rigid and think that the type of layout used there could be useful for other “advice” type sites. I’ll be looking to see if I can get one of my programmers to play around with it and see if they come up with anything useful (that looks better, of course ).

This blog and Make Money Dynamo

The last couple of posts were both paid ones, and although I know paid posts are not the types of posts people like I did accept them because I thought both websites were the type of things that would interest those in this niche. Retire at 21 is an interesting site, to say the least and a competition is always good for getting you to kick on and make yourself some income (even if you don’t win). I did try to put out an idea that would help you in the competition post so hopefully it was of some use.

There will be another paid review on this blog, about Bloggers Base either tomorrow or the day after – after that there will be none for a couple weeks, minimum. I do turn down review requests (even paid ones) for things that may not suit this blog, but I accept most of the ones that do because well, they’re easy to do (most reviews take 20 odd minutes to write and publish), they help me find out new and interesting sites (any person willing to pay amounts of money to publicize their site usually thinks their idea is quite good) and also makes me money (in this week alone I’ve made close to $700 off paid reviews… not bad for the lack of time I’ve had).

As for Make Money Dynamo, it’s a bit of a pain, really. I hired someone to create a design for it, which was design but had a few flaws (namely the logo, which looked like shit) but anyways, took the completed design, asked for it to be coded – first person gave me many guarantees, flaked out, second person did the same. Luckily, thanks to Aweber subscribers have pretty much stayed the same without promotion – people find the site through links from other places and know that if they stay subscribed, they’ll get content as soon as it’s published. I’d recommend you do the same.

At the moment there are around 1,000 subscribers. I’m still looking for the theme to be coded (considering I can’t do it myself) and push on with it from there, but then again I’ve been saying that for the last month and nothing’s happened. Hmm.

A new project – clothing etc

I touched upon this when I came back from vacation – I do have a new project at hand, one that looks like it will be quite a bit of fun. Offline marketing is usually a lot more fun than online ones because you can see the actual, tangible results and of course you have the opportunity to be creative too.

Anyways, the idea is clothing, specifically the age range close to mine; I’m looking at selling everything from socks and shutter shades to tshirts and hats. I’ve been talking to various suppliers, designers, current business owners.

The idea is simple – an online store that you can order from and that ships directly to you (in this case, your PO Box). Not at all a new idea globally, but as this is a still developing country it’s a potential goldmine here. You’d be surprised, but at the moment there isn’t really a decent online store that does this in Dubai.

One of the sites that has been a great help is Alibaba.com – most will have heard of it. Basically it’s a place to find online wholesalers. I’ve talked to a few, had samples sent over and stuff is incredibly cheap – the markup on various things is incredible.

For example, shutter shades – they’re not of much use but people here pay around 40 dirhams (slightly more than USD $10) for them. They actually cost (and this is buying them from a factory, which probably keeps a decent amount as profit for themselves) around $0.5. That’s $9.5 profit per piece and you’re not really even doing anything to change it. I’m planning to order 600 or so in the next couple weeks – it would look cool in my room, to say the least.

The income generated from sellers in local stores here is quite a decent amount too – I went around to a few of the shops that sell clothing (the fake ‘good brand’ items – Lacoste polo shirts, Rolex watches etc) and a lot of them are clearing 5,000,000 per year dirhams (that’s about $1.4 million USD) in profit. Not bad for stores that are run by two or three people. By taking the process online (and marketing the site with flyers, contests and so on) I hope to cut out a lot of the costs (like rent, electricity, etc)

I already have the license etc organized so will probably look around and try to hire someone that can setup a decent e-commerce website – the last one I setup was a few months ago and to be honest, looked a bit rubbish.

How revenue’s keeping up

I’m not going to lie to you – my online revenue’s dropped quite a bit from say a month ago simply because I don’t have the time. I’m still making more than enough to cover my hosting bill a few hundred times over, mainly from passive sources.

I pretty much stopped site flipping because I’m looking for something more… challenging and fun (which is the reason for the new project). However, the streams I setup earlier are still bringing in income… as the below screenshot will show you.

This is from well… it’s not even a site anymore, but it’s a project that I setup a long time ago and just forget about (like a few dozen others). It’s ranked itself in a couple shirt engines for pretty uncompetitive keywords, and made around $300 since January off affiliate tshirt sales. If you want to know what the URL is Google “Tshirt Deals” or check out this blog’s footer (which I really should update… heh).

This used to be a blog with maybe 5 posts that took all of five minutes to put together… I’m an impatient person and when I saw it wasn’t making money I stopped working on it. However, it stayed up (I’ve now taken it down and used a direct redirect (if that makes sense) to try and earn more. A few of my affiliate landing pages are still getting hits, and still making money – nothing major, only a few dollars a day each but it adds up.

University

Although I don’t mention it much, as the domain of this blog would suggest I am in university… I missed the first couple of weeks because I was chilling on vacation and catching up is why I’ve been away from online stuff so much. I had a couple mid terms last week, so was almost uncontactable (that and a reason below) and one more this week along with a presentation so once that’s done I’ll have a bit more time hopefully (until the finals, at least…)

Email screwup and site flipping product naming competition

I haven’t forgotten about this; a few things.

First of all, there was a screwup with my Hostgator cPanel, which is where I get most of my email (all of it for this admin@ theuniversitykid address). I was getting emails, but extremely delayed and it was coming in batches… for example the emails for monday wouldn’t come through until friday, when suddenly hundreds of emails showed up. I thought no one was contacting me for once

I have more than a hundred suggestions and emails are still coming in so I will go through them slowly and see.If you want to contact me in the mean time please use the Gmail address on the contact page (JPereira.Owns[at]gmail[dot]com).

That’s all for now, I should really get back to the new Football Manager game I recently picked up studying. On a less serious note, Paypal finally started working with Steam so I picked up a few games – Left 4 Dead (which is awesome), Red Alert 3, Football Manger 09; if anyone wants a game hit me up on MSN.

This is a general post and hopefully you enjoyed the updates – if you have any questions email me or use instant messenger. I’m always interested in what readers are doing – any serious / not serious updates your end?

]]> http://www.theuniversitykid.com/whats-up-with-me/feed/ 36 http://www.theuniversitykid.com/learn-how-to-flip-500-1000-sites-competition/ http://www.theuniversitykid.com/learn-how-to-flip-500-1000-sites-competition/#comments Sun, 01 Feb 2009 10:32:58 +0000 Jason http://theuniversitykid.com/?p=463 Been a busy few days – catching up with various uni work and getting a few of my businesses back on track.

I’ve spoken a lot about Flip Noobs on here… most of you know that it was the first IM product I’ve put out in a while and to me, it was a success. Less than a day’s work (probably around 10 – 15 hours in total) on writing, editing, promoting it… and over $5,000 profit made.

I wasn’t too keen on IM products but this is a results business… and the results made me think differently. The success stories I received from Flip Noobs were pretty inspirational too, to me… complete newbies managing to make their first $50, their first $100 or even more on a brand new site that they put together following my advice. I want to hear more success stories.

Anyways… due to the recession, people (buyers) are looking for more for their buck… they want developed websites, sites with traffic, links, subscribers and revenue. Once you know how to build fresh websites, developing them is incredibly easy… and the payday is 1.5x – 5x or even more than that.

When I have time, over the next few weeks I will be developing a product describing the process of creating websites that sell for $500 – $1,000+… the same tips I use for my five figure per month business. What could $500 extra per month buy you?

This product will cost a bit more than Flip Noobs; however there will of course be a discount for readers of this blog, should any of you want it. Before it goes on sale though, I wanted to run a competition… giving away free copies.

I don’t have a name for this product as yet… writing it will be easy, naming it less so. Here’s where you come in.

Email me potential names for this product – short, brandable, related to site flipping and with the dot com extension available to admin@theuniversitykid.com

The people who put up the five best names will be sent the product free when it launches. An example of a good name was Flip Noobs – something like that but for developed sites. I’ve always thought leveraging the thoughts and ideas of a community is one of the best ways to do internet marketing… so take five minutes of your time to brainstorm and win something. Use Instant Domain Search to speed up the process.

Also… there will be a new, pretty sweet design going up on MMD soon… so stay tuned for that.

A couple months ago Stephane Grenier contacted me, wanting some buzz for his new blogging book (an actual physical book) and asked if I’d review it if he sent me a copy. It looked a decent product, so I agreed.

Anyways – I got the book a week or so ago – you can see a picture of it below. Camera quality is a bit shit, but hey, it arrived which is a bonus considering the postal system here.

Anyways… first, let me talk about the book.

The book consists of interviews with forty top marketers – not just bloggers, but also those that make money online through product sales, real business deals and other things. Some of the interviewees that you guys probably will have heard of are Aaron Wall (SEOBook), Seth Godin, Yaro Starak (Entrepreneur’s Journey), Trent Hamm (The Simple Dollar) and Stephane Grenier himself. You can see the rest of all that were interviewed over here.

I haven’t had the time to read the book too indepth (been busy with exams), but from what I’ve read it looks to be a solid product and definitely worth the small amount asked ($16.95 for a paperback). The book consists of forty interviews, all asking the same questions of forty top marketers, and you will learn a lot from it.

Some of the questions asked…

What is the common pitfall most new bloggers fall into?

If you knew what you know now when you started, what’s one biggest tip you’d give yourself today?

How long does it take to become a successful blogger?

What makes a blog successful according to you?

Remember, these are tips from those that have been there, done that. There are around twenty questions asked of each person, all related to blogging in some way.

You can buy the book here. (also available as an eBook but I’d recommend you get it in paperback).

Now… for the marketing lessons.

First one – it is awesomely easy to put together your own product.

I have no doubt that Stephane worked hard on this – you can see it in the final product, it’s quality. In fact, creating a ‘real’, tangible product is infinitely harder than creating a simple virtual one.

However, you can use the ideas in this to help you create your own digital product.

Stephane has used the leverage of others to create something of immense value – you can do the same.

Even if you have no clue of internet marketing, you can interview others that do and use that information to create a product of your own.

All you have to do is pitch your idea, plan effectively and you can create a simple product that you can easily sell in the $7-$17 price range.

Want something of greater value? How about audio interviews, or even a video one?

Here’s an idea for all of you.

Ask 5-10 marketers for ways to make money online. You can cover the basics, but ask politely and most will be happy enough to share specific tidbits of knowledge that they know work.

Get ONE (you’ll have to be persuasive!) marketer to agree to a one hour live session on Ustream.tv. You now have a high quality product as well as an online SEMINAR that you can easily sell for $50 if not more. You can even pay the marketer – $100 or $200, or just promise to promote it a lot. If you can get even 50 people interested in watching, that’s enough for most mid level marketers.

If you show the value that the marketer, and your customers will get, they’ll happily agree.The marketer can promote his stuff to eager customers; the customers get an hour to ask specific questions that they’re having problems with. Win / win.

Second one – physical stuff is easier to gain leverage with than digital stuff.

See, had Stephane created this only as an eBook, not to be harsh but I probably would have ignored the email… I get around twenty to thirty requests to promote eBooks weekly, and although some of them are decent, I don’t have the time to read all and then pick and choose.

A physical product on the other hand, if you physically mail something to a marketer… they’ll be a lot more likely to help you out. It’s not about the money… I could buy this book, as it’s cheap enough, but it’s sort of a novelty getting things for free in the mail. Way cool.

As you can see from the reviews page, there have been quite a few reviews of the product, lots of them on established blogs. Heck, take into account this blog alone – a paid review costs around $100, the product with shipping included can’t have cost more than $25 to send.

If you want some stuff (physical) of yours reviewed, the address is PO Box 450207, Dubai, United Arab Emirates. I’ll be waiting…

This is the last post you’ll see on here from me for a while now – I’m off on vacation to Hong Kong. The blog will remain in good hands – Ryan McLean will be a hired poster on here for the next month or so, and I have a few friends looking after this to make sure nothing happens while I’m gone.

If any of you stay in Hong Kong and want to meet up for a drink, send me an email to my Gmail address. Happy New Year, and all the best in your efforts to ramp up your internet business for 2009.

]]> http://www.theuniversitykid.com/blog-blazers-learn-from-successful-bloggers/feed/ 25 http://www.theuniversitykid.com/write-for-this-blog/ http://www.theuniversitykid.com/write-for-this-blog/#comments Tue, 09 Dec 2008 11:41:25 +0000 Jason http://theuniversitykid.com/?p=447 A lot of you have asked how the auction has been going… I’ll be honest, not too well. At the moment, the highest bid is around $4,500 – now, normally I would have sold for this price, however with the fact that I sold a 30 day old site for $4,000 a little more than a week ago, my expectations were raised a little bit

The market seems to be bad now – credit crunch, recession, all that. I also presume the blog is fetching less bids because I haven’t promoted it at all for the last 3-5 months in a row so traffic is at smaller levels than it was at its peak.

Anyways, here’s the deal.

Today or tomorrow, I will be listing this blog under Premium Sites for Sale, since that area is frequented (generally) by buyers with larger pockets and a better eye for a valuable brand. It will be a seven day auction, probably with the same reserve, buy it now etc.

If it sells for more than the reserve, I will no longer be the blogger that runs this site.

If it does not sell for more than the reserve, I will take on a paid writer to update and manage this blog while I am away, and continue running or sell in the new year.

So… I am looking for paid writers. Even if the site is sold, it’s likely that the new buyer will want to hire some paid writers.

I’m posting about this here first, to give a chance to anyone that reads this blog – I’d prefer someone that’s seen this blog before as you’ll know about how posts flow et cetera.

The job:

The pay will be $150 – $300 per month (if only one writer is employed).

Collectively, 10 – 25 posts per month need to be written. Each post will be around 500 – 1,000 words.

If you’re up for this, send me an email at admin@theuniversitykid.com letting me know your topics of interest, how many posts you can contribute and what you charge per post.

I may take on more than one writer, to provide people with variation… however, I do not want 50 guest posts going out in the time I’m away so would prefer to hire 1-3 constant writers that can put out decent posts. The topic will be anything related to this niche – internet marketing, entrepreneurship, making money online, blogging etc. You will also need to do some light marketing.

You will be allowed to promote a blog of your own but NOT a product / affiliate links. So basically you are getting paid to post on a 1,000+ RSS subscriber blog for an extended period of time. The pay is not spectacular, but it is decent.

Again, if interested send me an email at admin@theuniversitykid.com