Virtual Earner

If you’re going to get involved in business, usually that means you’re going to be selling something.  Not all businesses mean outright sales to make money, but, it can be argued that every business involves selling something.  I’m not going to make that argument right now, that’s a whole different story there.  However, for the sake of this article let’s agree that if you want to make money, you have to sell something.

The question is, how do you determine the value of the item you’re going to sell?  I mean, it if you have an item that’s really worth $100, and you’re selling it for $10, you’re probably going to sell a lot of them, but it’s a losing proposition. I mean, even if you don’t realize you’re losing money, you’re selling the item for less than it’s worth, and that’s not good for the seller.  On the other hand, if you’ve got an item is worth $10, but you think it’s worth $100, and you price it at $100, nobody will buy. In your mind that item is worth every bit of $100. But, if nobody else thinks is worth $100, it’s not.

I used to make a living selling stuff on eBay.  I guess I have about five years experience of selling on eBay, and three to four of those years eBay was my primary moneymaker.  In those years without eBay I wouldn’t have really had an income.  It is my opinion that eBay is the perfect marketplace.  If you put an item up for sale on eBay, you get what the item is worth.  Now there are things that you can do to influence the worth, but in general, the final price of the auction is what the item is worth.  When I say that you can influence the value, what are you talking about?  Well, a lot of things enter there.  The quality of your description of the item is a big factor.  You should have a lot of good pictures.  You should play the item and make it look really good.  These things, and others influence how much you’ll get for the item.  If, for example, you list an item with like a one sentence description, no photos, and little information, you probably won’t even sell the item.  If you do though, you’ll get very little for it.  How can that be?  How can an item be worth the final price, yet you that hardly anything for it?  The value of the item described is worth the price you got.  You gave it a poor description?  Well you did let people know what it was, and the price they gave you was based on what you told them it was.

in the end, it is my believe that the value of an item is based on this statement:

An item is worth precisely what a willing buyer will pay for it, and a willing seller will sell it for.

This simple sentence, precisely defines what an item is worth in my opinion.

No matter what kind of business you’re in, make sure that you are not underpricing the item that you’re selling.

Over at 45n5 Mark has been talking about making money off things that you enjoy, or like doing.  As a matter of fact, he has an interesting video about this concept, let’s have a look:

I have used a lot of methods to monetize websites, I’ve done it through advertising like AdSense, affiliate ads, and other methods.  Over the last six months, though, as I have alluded to before, I have taken a special interest in monetizing one of my sites.  This particular site did not monetize well with any kind of advertising that I tried.  However, it was the site most precious to me, one that I love a lot, and really a daily part of my life.  Because of that, I wanted to find a way to make money from it.  So I introduced several new moneymaking possibilities on the site.  These included things like advertising services, much like what Mark is talking about in his video.  Recently, I started offering a few e-books that were really targeted to that site as well.  You know what?  That is my number one earning site now!  And, I’m doing things that I enjoy, things that I love, and in a lot of ways things that I would be doing every day anyway, even without the site.

You know, I have come to the conclusion that offering my own services and selling my own products is the way that I like to go.  Firstly, I find it is more profitable.  Secondly, I have control over what’s on the website.  I am not at the mercy of Google or somebody else putting ads on my site that I can’t approve.  Thirdly, the premium products that I’m selling offer additional value to my readers.  These products are specifically about the topic that I write about, thus it is certain that these are things my readers are interested in.  A year ago I was strongly into the AdSense  thing, but mostly, I kind of abandoned that.  At least I’ve decreased it.  Most of my sites are highly specialized, very niche oriented, and my niche is very narrow.  In terms of how many people it attracts.  Because of this, it can be difficult to get ads that are targeted properly.  However, when I create my own products and advertising things that I do myself, I get to choose how targeted those things are.  And believe me, they are targeted to my customer.

Yes, I still make money off of AdSense, but not nearly what I used to make.  And now my earnings from Google are about one third of what they were last year.  However, my total earnings are higher than they were last year, and these self-made products and services are what accounts for that.  Whenever you’re selling advertising, unless you’re talking about direct ad sales, you only get a portion of what the advertiser pays.  People like Google or others get a cut as well.  When you make and sell your own products, or selling your own services on your site, you get the whole thing.  You can actually sell it to the customer for less than what Google would and still get more money from the sale, because you’re cutting out the middleman.

The other thing that I find is it is easier to make that money.  Why?  Well, if you build up a good side and you have a good following the people, those people trust you.  They know you.  Many of them visit you everyday online and read what you have to say.  You have established a relationship with those people.  Thus, if you come out with an e-book or some other product that you did yourself, they know what to expect.  If they thought that your writing wasn’t very good, they wouldn’t be visiting your site anyway.  Since they obviously feel that your site has value, by extension they would also feel that your products have value.  If the product that you offer is something that they are interested in, it’s likely that they’ll buy.  So it’s good for you, and it’s also good for them because they get information that they want and need.

Thanks to Mark for bringing up this topic on his site, 45n5 is a site that I like to visit every day.

Okay, so you have a blog and you want it to be popular!  Of course, who wouldn’t want their site to be more popular?  Well, there are things you can do to bring on more popularity.

One thing that I really believe in is to build a community type site.  Make everybody feel like they’re part of the community, encourage them to join in, and talk back to them when you can!

What do I mean by that?  Well when people participate on your blog by leaving comments, respond to them!  Engage them in conversation.  Don’t just ignore them.  Some people feel that they write a blog post, and they’re done.  They’ve done their job.  Now other people can come and leave comments, but the job of the blog author is finished.  Well, I don’t see it that way.  The more you respond to your commenters, the more they feel like they’re part of the site.  Engage them, challenge them, when you do this.  They’ll come back for more.

Take a look at the graphic above.  This is a screen capture from the control panel of one of my other blogs. Over on the right side, where you see the little gray area with the number inside that shows how many comments were left on each particular post.  So if you notice the post at the top got 54 comments, followed by 29, followed by 6, by 33, 29, 103, 28 and again in 28.  What is that 6 doing in there? It’s been a long time since I’ve only had six comments on any post.  So, how did this happen?

Well, on a particular day that this post went public, I was really busy and I was unable to respond to the comments.  As you can see that man little interest from my readers.

So, do you want people to participate on your blog?  Leave comments?  Keep coming back to check what’s new?  Well, you need to engage your readers than!  Respond to their comments, let them know what you think!

I know people who have blogs, and a lot of them complain to me that nobody participates on their blog.  Nobody comments.  It just seems dead.  Well, at times I left comments on their blogs, and there was no response.  I kept going back to see if they responded to what I said, but nothing.  So, after a while, I just quit going there at all.  So in my eyes, their blog did die, at least for me it did.

The graphic above tells the whole story.  If you engage your readers, they’ll be back for more.  If you start getting a few more comments like that, more readers will join in.  It’s a never ending circle.  The participation on your site just keeps growing.

Don’t let your site die!  Engage your readers.