"When you are through changing, you are through." - Bruce Barton Change is inevitable. Apart from death and taxes, change is the only thing in this life that we can count on. This past year has found me in the midst of much change. After a number of years as an author, speaker and entrepreneur, I have spent the last year quietly reassessing my life. Taking some time away from work, I've been tending to... Continue Reading

The Internet now contains over 124 million websites. They cover every topic you can imagine, many that you would never have imagined, and some that you would never want to imagine. Continue Reading

When Google launched Wave back in 2009, it was met with a mixture of head-scratching and hand-raising. Because it was invitation-only, there was huge demand from people who wanted to try it out. (Invitations were even said to have sold on eBay for $70 each). But people -- both those who had tried it out and those who wanted to -- wondered what it was for. Continue Reading

I'm going to try something new. Typically, I write articles designed to inspire or educate. Occasionally I'll discuss a product or service I think you'll find valuable. And from time to time I share a little bit of my own life with you. I have an idea for a weekly "roundup" of sorts that I'll use to discuss things that are happening with me, my business, in the industry or whatever else crosses my mind... Continue Reading

Internet marketing isn't about technology. It's never been about technology. The computers and the Internet, the multimedia uploads, webinars and ebooks are all just a means to an end. They're tools for transferring information from one place to another. The revolution that has allowed us to build online businesses, even from our living rooms, garages and bedrooms, isn't a technological revolution. We've just enjoyed the benefits of those changes. It's a community revolution. Continue Reading

I have no idea what I'm doing. I know, I'm supposed to be the expert, right? I'm the guy who wrote a best-selling book on earning money with AdSense, and another top-seller on Twitter. I've built a gaming site that was sold to Yahoo! and put together content sites that each deliver five-figure incomes in advertising revenue. If I don't know what I'm doing, who does? Continue Reading

Creating a successful Internet business is all about bringing in users and turning them into cash. The more of those users you can convert, the more money you'll make. Your clickthrough rate - the percentage of users who click on an ad - is a measure of your ability to convert your users. A good website will have a clickthrough rate (or CTR) of around 3 percent. Or to put it another way, even a... Continue Reading

Twitter isn't the only microblogging service on the Web. It's not even the best microblogging service on the Web. In Twitter Power, I describe a number of sites that also let members post short notes to tell friends and followers what they're up to. Plurk, for example, is alive and kicking, and it looks great. It has neat icons, a clever, horizontal timeline and all sorts of add-ons and gizmos that make it look a... Continue Reading

Affiliate products make up a large part of my income. They're one of the revenue streams that I use on my websites and I often recommend selected products to the people on my mailing list. I use them for all sorts of reasons - and money is only one of them. Sure, an affiliate commission will always be worth more than an ad click but that's only the start of it. I also like the... Continue Reading

People create Internet businesses for all sorts of reasons. Some of them are looking to give up their J.O.B.s. Some dream of being of being their own boss. And others can't wait to make tons of cash, retire to their private island and leave the work of traffic generation, content production and ad monitoring to their staff. That's all fine. I don't have a problem with any of those reasons. Provided they're all accompanied by... Continue Reading

One of the most exciting developments that has occurred on Twitter in the months since I put together Twitter Power has been the release of all sorts of statistics about the site. We've learned, for example, that many of the site's users are middle-aged, high earning business types rather than the kids that create pages on MySpace. We've found that only a small proportion of Twitter's users are writing most of the tweets while the... Continue Reading

What do users really want? It's a question that publishers ask themselves all the time. We look at the comments our articles receive. We review our stats. We check the popularity of keywords. We ask for ideas on Twitter. And we do all sorts of other things that try to second-guess what's going through our users' minds so that we can deliver content that interests them most. But maybe we're asking the wrong question. Continue Reading

I'm scared of change. There, I said it. It's not big news though. Everyone is scared of change. Change is a scary thing. It means giving up what you have now for something better that you can only hope you'll have in the future. It's risky. It's dangerous. It's disruptive. It's also thrilling, exciting... and inevitable. Continue Reading

I love giving things away. I know, I'm supposed to be a marketer. I'm supposed to know how to get the full value for everything I supply. But every year, I give away tons of fantastic freebies. I give away content, e-books, videos, training sessions, teleseminars and all sorts of other wonderful things. If I had to calculate the total value of the goodies that I pass out for nothing every year, I'd need to... Continue Reading