With the growth of the Internet and the tremendous money-making potential of online tools, trends, and technologies, a good income is indeed possible. Your income potential is only limited by how hard you are willing to study and then apply your knowledge.

Is it possible to be a 100% virtual earner, earning your money from the Internet? What are the ways in which you can make money at home, using your own computer? What does it take to become an Internet Entrepreneur? How does one succeed at an online business in the midst of today’s economic crises?

Bob Martin asked those same questions when he moved from the United States to the Philippines. Now living in Davao City and making his name as one of the top Internet Entrepreneurs in the country, “Mindanao Bob” is making more money now than when he lived in the USA. Bob wants to show you how you can do it too!

With Virtual Earner: A Business Forum by Bob Martin, you can uncover many ways to earn a living in the Philippines. Invest in the potential of the Internet and reap the benefits of strategic online, offline and hybrid ideas for business. Don’t miss this opportunity to discover and prove –as Bob did– that making a living in the Philippines is NOT IMPOSSIBLE!

Details

VIRTUAL EARNER: A Business Forum by Bob Martin

Speaker: Bob Martin
Venue: K-1 Coffee Shop, F. Torres Street, Davao City
Date: Saturday August 9, 2008
Time: 3:00 pm (the seminar will start sharply at 3pm)
Seminar Price: P3,000

To register for the seminar, please either e-mail or call (or text) John at (0921) 467-8372.

The forum is created to provide an intimate and informal venue for learning how to make a living in the Philippines. It will also serve as a medium for opportunities to discuss new technologies, products, services, and business ideas with a qualified expert who has explored the possibilities on the Internet to become an 100% Virtual Earner.

Who is Bob Martin?

Bob Martin is an Internet entrepreneur based in Davao City. An American who has lived in Mindanao for the past eight years, Bob has resided in General Santos City, and now in Davao City, while owning and managing dozens of Internet Businesses.

For the past seven years, Bob has made his living exclusively through the Internet. He serves customers all around the world, and has used the Internet to enhance his earning ability to the point that he is making more money now than when he lived in the USA and had a regular job. Bob wants to show you how you can do that too!

“Becoming successful on the Internet is great, but one thing I really enjoy is helping others achieve the same,” says Bob. “It makes me feel good if I can show somebody a few simple methods, or share my thoughts with them, and watch them learn how to make a living themselves. I don’t really like it when others copy what I am doing, but when they look at what I do, and mold it a little bit to fit their interests, they can come up with something that is patterned after me yet totally different from my business. I think that is great, and it gives me a lot of joy to see a friend become successful by doing this.”

Bob has a business background in Retailing and in Manufacturing, having previously managed discount department stores and an electronics store in the USA. He is also a published author of more than a dozen books. His latest book is entitled 49 Ways to Make a Living in the Philippines.

Early Bird Bonus! - For the first 10 people who sign up and attend the seminar, they will receive a FREE COPY of Bob’s book, 49 Ways to Make a Living in the Philippines! That’s right, a book that is selling for $49.00 will be yours free when you sign up and pay to participate in the seminar(but, only for the first 10 people)! So, don’t miss out, sign up today!

To register for the seminar, please either e-mail or call (or text) John at (0921) 467-8372. Remember, the first 10 people who register will get a free copy of Bob’s eBook, 49 Ways to earn a living in the Philippines! ]]> http://business.auctiontopia.com/2008/07/26/im-giving-a-seminar-in-davao-city/feed/ http://business.auctiontopia.com/2008/07/22/determining-value/ http://business.auctiontopia.com/2008/07/22/determining-value/#comments Mon, 21 Jul 2008 23:38:36 +0000 Bob http://business.auctiontopia.com/?p=139 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.

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.

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.

Today, I am happy to announce that I was recently interviewed by Tom Nixon, and he has published the first part of the interview on his SmallPress Blog today.  To read the interview, just head over to Tom’s blog.  Tom is a long time reader of this blog, and some of my other sites.  He is an expert (I say that, he might try to shy away from it!) on Self-Publishing, and also in the area of Online Learning and Education.

Thank you, Tom, for featuring my book and my story on your site!  I appreciate it highly.

Basically, the book goes through 49 (actually 50 ways, because I have a Bonus Idea) Ways that you can live in the Philippines and earn your living while you are living here.  I have been living here since May 2000, and when I came here I did have a bunch of money, but I went through it too fast!  By 2002, I had only two choices:

1. Go Home
2. Figure out how to make money here

I chose to go with number 2, because I didn’t want to leave.  Sadly, few people (expats who move here) are ever able to figure out how to earn money here.  Most expats will tell you that “you can’t make money in the Philippines, it’s impossible.”  Well, I am living proof that they are wrong! In my book, I want show you how to make money here too!

The ideas that I present are real-life ideas that work!  Most of the things that I discuss are things that I have actually done to make money, and because of that I know for sure that they work.

I know of people who have come to live in the Philippines and after a few years they had to go home, because they ran out of money.  Don’t let that happen to you!  Why leave a lifestyle that you love, just because you don’t have money?  Making money is actually pretty easy, if you just know how to do it.  I didn’t know how in 2001 and before.  But, in 2002, I started learning how to make money, because I had to!  Let me show you how to do it too.

Let me be clear, I am not going to tell you that you can get rich quickly or easily.  I am going to say, though, that you can earn a good income if you are willing to work at it.  I don’t slave away, I generally just work a few hours per day, and I am living good.  How good is my life?  Well, I make a lot more money here in the Philippines than I ever made in the USA, I can tell you that.

If you read my sites, you already know that I make 100% of my income online through my various websites.  However, I know that some people are not comfortable on the computer.  That’s why I have ideas in the book not only for Online businesses, but also for Offline and for Hybrid ideas that mix online and offline strategies into a single business.  So, whether you want to earn your living at the computer like me, or you don’t want to even touch a computer, there are ideas for you!

I offer my book in two formats:  paper and digital.  If you order the digital version, you can download it immediately after payment.  If you order the paper version, I will ship it directly to your mailing address.

Guess what?  I also have a 100% Satisfaction Guarantee!  If you don’t think that the book is what you were expecting, you get the full purchase price back upon return of the book!  No fuss, no muss, no questions asked!  So, what do you have to lose?

Order Bob’s New Book TODAY!

In the article, though, I committed that I was going to put more concentration in that business to try to bring it back to life again. I mean, it was not dead (yet), but it was headed that way. My sales were down to only about 1/3 of what they had been in their hayday, and they were progressing downward.

What action did I take? My first thing was that I made some small, subtle changes in the website to kind of update it a bit. I also instituted a weekly sale. On the home page of the site, right up front and center is a listing of the items that are on sale that week. Why is something like this important? Well, it shows that somebody is home. The site is not just on autopilot. Somebody is behind the scenes making changes and there to assist people. When I put up a sale, I put what dates the sale is good for, something like “Prices good through June 15, 2008.” Why? Because it shows that it’s current, not something that I threw up there 3 years ago, and the site is long since dead. That gives people confidence.

Have I seen results? You better believe it! It’s been only (less than) two months since I published that article. You know what? I have seen sales increases of up to 100% per week compared to what I was seeing two months ago! That means that I am still down about 30% from where I was a couple years ago when the business was at it’s peak. However, traditionally, this is the slow time of year for the business in question. Mid-May through the beginning of September has always been the low time for that business. So, I am feeling that if I continue to nurture the business, keep my hand in play there, and build customer relationships, coming up in September and beyond, I could well expect to see the business recover completely.

It’s a good feeling to restore something that you have allowed to wither. It’s also a good lesson not to let it happen again. We get lessons in life every single day. Do you listen when the messages come? It’s really important to keep your ear tuned in for such messages!

One of the things that I learned from my first mentor was that Customer Service is the most important thing about any business.  Actually, I’ll expand it and say that Customer Service is the most important aspect of any part of your life.

Now, in some parts of your life, you may have to look at the word “customer” a little differently.

Marriage?  Your spouse is your customer.  Treat your customer right, and you’ll have a customer for life.

Friendship?  Your friends are your customers.

It applies to any kind of relationship.  However, this blog is about business, so let’s focus on that.

I contend that the very best way to keep a customer for life is through making mistakes.  What?  That doesn’t make sense, right?  Well, first, let’s all agree that everybody makes mistakes.  No matter how hard you try, how much you concentrate, you will make a mistake sooner or later.  It is how you deal with that mistake that will decide if you just lost a customer, or strengthened your relationship with that customer.

I have had incidents where I, or one of my employees has made a very serious mistake and a customer told me that we had lost his business for life.  He would never shop with us again.  Well, the gut reaction is to get mad, tell the person off, and say goodbye!  Forget him, right?  That’s not the way I do it.

First of all, consider that the reason that the customer is mad is because YOU made the mistake to begin with.  If you handle the situation right, you will not only keep the customer, you will also have a stronger relationship with him when he sees that you take care of mistakes.  Go out of your way to not only correct the mistake, but go above and beyond what the customer would expect!

Just as an example, I have a business where I sell flowers.  Roses and such.  Generally, we deliver these flowers to a man’s girlfriend in most cases.  If we make a mistake, the guy usually gets quite angry, because not only have we not done what he wanted, in many cases we might have even made him look bad to his girl.  That’s like playing with fire.  For example, let’s say that we delivered flowers that were not fresh, already wilted.  The lady tells the guy that the flowers were not so nice, then he gets angry at us, and says we can kiss his business goodbye.  We go out of our way, and we then delivery maybe 3 times the amount of FRESH flowers to the lady as our way of saying “we are sorry” to the customer.  Not only that, we tell the girl that it was her boyfriend who sent the additional flowers.  This not only corrects the problem, it makes the man look good!  You can bet, 9 times out of 10, the guy is so happy that he forgets all about his threat to start shopping elsewhere, and becomes even a better customer in the future.

Customer service is all about how you handle mistakes, which are inevitable.  Treat your customers good, step up to the plate and fix the problem when you made a mistake, and you will go far in business.  If you don’t do these things, your business may not survive long.

I do want to leave Wordpress and move on to something that is more stable, in terms of not having to do constant upgrades.  For a person who has one blog, or a couple, it’s probably not a big deal to do an upgrade a few times per month, as is often the case with Wordpress.  However, I have dozens of blogs, and those upgrades can be quite a time waster.  If there is a problem with an upgrade causing a site crash, you can throw away a full day or more.  Throw in the fact that plug-ins need constant upgrades too, and you’ve got a full time job there!

There is a problem, though, with leaving Wordpress.  Switching to a different platform means problems.  First, you have to migrate everything from your Wordpress installation to the new client.  This is not always an easy or seamless thing to do.  Sometimes it can’t even be done.  For example, I have one blog that has nearly 10,000 comments on it.  Moving comments is not easy all the time.  Almost all of my Wordpress sites have custom themes that I have either built myself or paid to have done.  Those themes won’t work with other software, they will have to be abandoned, or ported over to the new platform.  That won’t be easy, it will take time, or money, or both.

Thinking about this whole thing gets some ideas flowing in my head.  Is it healthy for so many people to be tied in to a single platform?  I am talking about the health of the Web here.  I mean, if you build up a site with thousands of posts, lots of content and such, you are kind of locked in, as I have pointed out above.

With all of this thinking, I have come to only one conclusion so far… Leaving Wordpress isn’t easy!  As with other aspects of life, I guess… breaking up is hard to do!

I have been published by some medium sized Publishers in the past, and it did not work out all that well.  Firstly, if you let somebody else publish your work, you aren’t going to make all that much money.  When I had a dozen or so books published back in the early 90’s, my royalty usually ran around 12% of the cover price of the book.  On some books I made a little (very little) more, and on some books a little less.  That percentage, though, doesn’t end up bringing you a lot of money.

The books that I wrote in the past were highly niche oriented.  In other words, they were books belonging to a very small category.  The average person would have never heard of them.  However, for people who were also interested in that niche, my books (at least some of them) were well known.  When you are addressing a niche (especially if it is a small niche) you are not going to sell a million books, because there simply are not that many people who are interested in the topic.  Heck, you won’t sell 100,000 probably.  I think that my best title may have sold 100,000 copies over the years, and the book was revised and updated each year.  So, on an actual per-real-book basis, it might have sold 20,000 to 30,000 copies of a single edition.  I considered it successful.

That was back in the early 90’s.  We’re talking nearly 20 years ago.  In those 20 years, the entire game has changed.  We have the Internet where we can self-market things, we can self-publish to a greater (and easier) degree than we could 20 years ago.  It’s a whole new ball game.

Another thing that is new this time around for me is that I have moved on to a whole new niche as well.  My old niche (Amateur Radio and Shortwave Radio Listening) is something that I lost interest in years ago.  My new niche is probably even more narrow than my previous one, which can be good or bad.  Good in that the smaller the niche, the more intense the followers can be, the more they are willing to spend, and the less competition you will have.  Bad in the sense that the smaller the niche the fewer potential customers you have.  However, if you are knowledgeable about the topic, even a very small and narrow niche can pay off big.

Part of my thinking, when it comes to the Self-Publishing game is that I will market my books myself, and not sell them through other outlets.  Some people’s first reaction is - “but, you’ll sell through Amazon, right?”  Well, no.  My intention is not to sell through Amazon or any other outlet, but only through my own websites.

Why?

1. In the area that I am writing about, I believe that I am so well known that I can produce enough sales on my own to make me very happy with the results.  I believe that if anybody is interested in the field that I am writing about, if they do a Google search, or any other search on the topic, I will be one of the first people that they find.  Even if I am not the first person they find when searching, if they are serious about the subject, I believe that it is impossible that they won’t find me.  If they are not interested enough to the point that they find me, I doubt that they would be buying any books on the subject anyway.
2. By selling through multiple sources, I believe that I would be turning my book(s) into a commodity, rather than my brand.  You see, if the book is available anywhere you look for it, it is suddenly a commodity.  A bunch of different places will compete on price, thus discounting what I am offering, and thus making it difficult for me to sell it at the full price.
3. By selling it myself exclusively, I can retain some semblance of direct contact with my buyer.  In my niche, one of my marketing tools is that I am available to my reader.  It can be difficult to maintain that availability, but I refine my operations regularly in order to ensure that I remain available, even though my audience is growing.  Having that personal “one-on-one” feel appeals to my readers, and I find that it causes my personal brand to grow and increase in value.  It makes me feel good, and it makes my readers feel that I appreciate them (which I do). If I was selling through Amazon and other such outlets, maintaining that personal connection would be much harder, probably impossible.
4. Amazon is a middleman.  All of our lives, we hear things like - “Avoid the middleman” and such.  Well, Amazon is nothing but a middleman between you and your customers.
5. Having that direct connection between you and your reader can lead to entire new ideas for additional products that you never even considered.  If a person buys from Amazon, they are much less likely to contact you directly with their feedback.
6. I have seen some areas where I feel that Amazon has displayed a “less than honest” way of doing business.  For example, currently they are trying to force self-publishers who use POD (Print on Demand) services to use an Amazon owned service, rather than the POD service that they have been using successfully for years.  This, frankly, reeks of trying to monopolize the market.  In addition, in the past, Amazon has strong-armed others (like Toys-R-Us) who were supposed to be their partners.  If they will play hardball with the big boys like Toys-R-Us, what will they do with little guys like me?  Frankly, I don’t even want to find out.

Well, those are a few of the reasons why I have decided to go it alone, without Amazon, without Barnes & Noble, without anybody but myself.  Here’s the thing…. if I try what is in my mind, and it doesn’t work out to the extent that I believe it will, I can always alter course and go a more traditional route!

So, what do you think?  Is it a wrong path to head down, or am I making the right move?