When it comes to online advertising, it’s all about the “click“! However, the dynamic of what makes the person click is what is really important. When you are promoting an offer on a pay per click basis, it’s extremely important to keep your quality at a higher rate, but the same results apply when pushing a cost per action based offer too. The bottom line is, you want to be providing quality traffic for your advertisers. The better traffic and leads you can send their way, the more likely they will increase their ad spending with you, and will have a much longer and successful relationship.

Let’s look at three different ways you can start increasing the quality of your click throughs and leads generated.

Stop Trying to Trick the User

Remember those banners that would flash non stop and say that you were the millionth visitor and were awarded a prize? Those banners were doing exactly the opposite of what we are talking about here. They were going after as much traffic as they could possibly get, then sending their visitors to an email/zip submit type of offer. The data provided usually has a very fast turn over rate, and is sold to multiple media/ad buyers.

Instead of trying to trick your audience into clicking on a link, think about the ways that you can relate to your audience and make them want to convert. While an insane blinking banner may bring in a lot of clicks, the conversions might be terrible. Spend more time on targeting the right audience and giving them banners they want to see and can relate to. Your cost per click may be higher, but you will also see higher conversions and provide the end advertiser with better quality leads.

Make the User WANT to Click

One of the best ways to find an audience of people who are anxious to click on your little blue text links, is to provide them with exactly what they are looking for. Let’s take review and coupon sites for example. How many times were you searching for a product or service to buy, and you were just looking for the right review or coupon code? Once you found the information you were looking for, you would gladly click on a link in their web site to go forward with the sale or purchase.

This is exactly why coupon and review sites do so well. When is the last time you did a search for “web hosting reviews” on Google? The web sites paying to rank for these terms are paying a lot of money for where they rank, but all of the traffic to these sites are high quality. Sure, the site owners are probably getting $100+ in commissions per sale, but they know they can convert their traffic because they are providing exactly what their site visitors are looking for.

Pre-Sell Your Audience: Withholding the Click!

Another excellent example of getting high quality click throughs is through the use of video marketing. We can relate to this method all too well. How many times have you received an email from another guru/marketer, and you have to wait and watch their annoying video before being able to click to the next page and/or place your order?

It’s annoying, but it works! By making the viewer not be able to click away from the page, it’s actually making them listen and watch your video, with is continually selling them on the dreams of what their product can do for you… further increasing the chances they will stick around and buy once that final “Click Here to Purchase” link becomes available.

What Type of Traffic Are Your Providing?

Don’t get me wrong, there will always be a market and business of cheap, dirty and crap leads… but when you are looking for long term and high end commissions, lead quality is where your focus should be. When promoting any ad campaign and pushing volume, it’s important to keep in touch with your ad network or the advertiser directly. If you are pushing quality leads that continue to convert on their backend, they will gladly send a few more dollars your way to increase the volume and reward you for your efforts!

Gone are the days when you simply throw up a bunch of affiliate offer banners and hope for the best. Well, you still can do that, but you are destined for failure, and why would you want to anyway? With all of the information and targeting that you now have right in your hands, how can you pass up on the extra due diligence to make sure your ad campaign succeeds.

A new pet affiliate network that I’m working with has a wide variety of affiliate offers that any pet lover, pet blog or resource web site would love. While looking through their selection of offers, I thought it would be a great idea to take one of these offers, then show how you can study what you know about the offer, then start promoting it through different sources.

One of the well branded offers on the network is PetCareRX, which is a discount pet supplies and medication web site. The offer pays $30 per signup and is only for email promotion, but there are plenty of other offers on the network which allow other methods such as banners, social and web site advertising. Since PetCareRX is a well known brand, let’s go through some of the different ways we can research the company/offer, then build a campaign around their site.

Quantcast User Demographics

First let’s run over to Quantcast.com and pull a demographics report on the type of visitors that are going to PetCareRX.com. Right away we can see some key figure in the chart below. The ones with blue have the majority of percentage for each demographic. At a quick glance it looks like we have mostly females, who are 35-50+, caucasian, have no kids and a mid range income. While the information may not be 100% accurate, it’s a great way to get a quick feel on the type of demographics that might perform best with your offers.

Plenty of Fish = Plenty of Pet Owners

Next let’s head over to ads.pof.com and create some ad campaigns to promote PetCareRX. We aren’t going to focus on ad copy right now, but instead how easy is it for you to take what you learned from Quantcast, then put it into action at POF.

Check out the screenshot below from within the POF ads manager. How cool is that? I just targeted all of the demographics that were pointed out above, but I was also able to go even a step further and target only pet owners!

Facebook Ads = 1 Million Pet Lovers

While Plenty of Fish doesn’t tell you exactly how many pet owners they have on the network, the next best thing is to head over to Facebook Ads and create a campaign targeted to people that already have an interest in “Dogs” and “Cats”… and by the way, just targeting those two terms in the US brings in over 1 MILLION users! You can even target “PetcareRX” on Facebook interests, and reach 6,000+ die hard fans. Think about all of the other popular pet web sites and interests that could be targeted.

Google Keyword / Site Search

Wouldn’t it be great if you knew what keywords and search terms PetCareRX were bidding on to bring people to their site, or what long tail keywords people are coming across in the search engines, and getting to their site? Sure enough, we can do that! Head over to the Google Keyword tool and run a report, but not under the keyword section, but instead for the petcarerx.com web site. Google will then pull up a massive report of relevant keywords that you can use to advertising your landing pages and search engine marketing.

Help, I Need More Banners & Ad Copy!

It’s a growing trend that affiliate networks are not providing as many banners and ad copies as they used to. For such a scenario, you can usually head over to Moat or MixRank and pull up a ton of banners and creatives that are running through out the web. Unfortunately neither of these sites had any banners or creatives for PetCareRX… what to do? Get old school and head over to Google Images and perform a search for the domain name / site you want to advertise, then use the “Exact Size” feature and you will probably find some banners that you were looking for, like the screenshot below.

Putting Everything You Know into Action

Woah, we just covered a mega ton of information on how to promote an offer. Best of all, this same process can be used to break down any affiliate offer or web site out there. In this example, PetCareRX was only available for email promotion, but imagine of how many other campaigns are out there for social networking, cpv, search and banner advertising… a ton! Never before has it been so easy to break down WHO is buying WHAT, and how you can TARGET their exact DEMOGRAPHICS in an ad campaign.

Since I’ve already laid out everything for you on how to make money with pet affiliate offers, why not head over to PetAffiliateNetwork.com and check out what other offers they have on the network.

The book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey is a popular book in the self-help community. It’s a book with many layers and a lot of online marketers have difficulty applying the underlying principles to their own lives. In this post want I want to relate the seven habits explained in the book to online marketers and how you can apply them.

1. Be proactive

The first three habits are about taking charge of yourself. Thus, the first habit is about being proactive.

One of the reasons people want to get into online marketing is to escape the 9-to-5 and to be able to work anywhere with a laptop and access to the Internet. Now to get this freedom for yourself, you have to take initiative and this is where most newcomers fall off the boat.

People who are new to the this industry will look for other successful online marketers and study how they made it big. There is nothing wrong with this, but the problem I see over and over is that people get stuck in this research phase. Very few people get past the hump to take action. Instead, most think that it will happen on a random day that they escape the cubicle life.

This is not being proactive. Instead, it is time to get started. Stop reading how others have made it, and start moving forward to the land of the New Rich. Focus on yourself and put steps forward to stack that paper. Whether that means registering a new domain, hiring someone, or putting money into a campaign….just do it. Don’t wait for the right moment. The right moment is now.

2. Begin with the end in mind

Now that you are putting in the effort, the next habit is about having clarity in what exactly you want to achieve. You need to be absolutely clear with yourself that you want to go this path of making a living online. This habit is about envisioning a picture in your mind of what it feels like to have escaped the 9-to-5 and to have made it. You want to be able to smell the success. You can vividly imagine how different your life is going to be. It’s like you can almost touch it.

If you don’t have a clear picture in your head of how much better your life is going to be, it’s going to be a lot more difficult to achieve your goal. It is like driving in foggy weather. You can’t see far ahead, you can’t go fast, you hesitate a lot and frustrating be drive in those conditions. On the other hand, having clarity is like driving your car at full speed with a GPS system and a beautiful girl next to you. It’s fun, comfortable and you get to your destination fast.

Once you have this vivid picture in your head, achieving that goal is going to be a huge force in overcoming obstacles. Motivation comes and goes, but by having the end in mind, you can go through the ups and lows because you know how much of an impact the end result will have on your life. Once you know what your desired life looks like with a burning to desire, I will have no doubt that you will get there.

3. Put first things first

Now that you are actively putting yourself in motion by being proactive and by gaining clarity, the third habit is about figuring out the steps to get to your destination. The idea behind “putting first things first” is that you are able to prioritize the things you need to do to achieve your goal. The previous habit is about knowing what your end result is, and this habit is all about making sure you are always working on things that bring you closer to that end result.

There are a lot of ways to make your first buck online. One is not necessarily better than the other, but for each you need to be able to prioritize what needs to get done first. Most new online marketers think reading and researching is the most important part. In reality, this is not the case at all. Speed of implementation, building up your bankroll, and testing the market are actually far more important. These are things that you should do as soon as possible.

Put your first dollar on the line as soon as possible, then do some reading. While getting more knowledge is not a bad thing, it is usually not the most important thing to do. Try things out and then read on how you can improve what you have tested or setup. Always do the things that are the most important which bring you closer to your goal. When in doubt, be proactive and take action.

4. Think Win/Win

The following three habits are about cooperation. It is no secret that every successful online marketer has good relationships with others like the affiliate networks, partnerships, joint ventures, and his own staff.

To surround yourself with great people and to have to those relationships, you need to work on the habit of thinking win/win. This fourth habit is crucial for becoming an successful online marketer. Strive to have agreements with people that benefit everyone, not just yourself.

Take for example your relationship with your affiliate managers. A lot of people look at the affiliate manager and affiliate’s relationship as a division of roles where the affiliate is giving the most value and the affiliate manager’s job is just facilitating the affiliate. You would think the affiliate is the one making all the money, right? That’s not completely true.

Most affiliate managers get bonuses and have commissions if they do well, so they have an interest for their affiliates to do well. Knowing that, when you communicate with your affiliate manager, think win-win.

How can both of you become better off when you two work together? Let your affiliate manager know that you have his or her interest in mind because this helps you build a better relationship with your affiliate manager. And the better the relationship, the more the affiliate manager will help you to do well which him or herself too. You win. He or she wins. The network wins. Everyone wins.

This does not only apply to your affiliate manager, but anyone you want to become friends with or work with, such as your traffic sources representatives, people on your team, and so on.

5. Seek to understand first, then be understood

Once you have the cooperation of the other people, the next habit will help you strengthen that relationship even more. Covey talks about “seeking to understand first, then to be understood” to encourage you to build a relationship where both people are on the same page and respect each other.

The gist of this habit is that you have good relationships with people but it starts with initially setting aside your own agenda and being open to be hearing other people out. Most people are ego-centric and have no empathy for the other person. That is not a great way of strengthen a relationship. Put away your own agenda and hear out what others have to say to you, then see how you can help each other out.

This is especially useful for networking and I have seen this first hand how effective this habit is. The people at the conferences who don’t apply this habit are the ones who broadcast the loudest how great they are. Instead, the effective people are the ones hearing out what online marketers need and then seek out a solution if there is a match. As you can see, this goes hand-in-hand with the previous habit. By hearing out others and thinking win/win, you can have effective cooperation.

6. Synergize

At this point, you have your people around you, everyone is onboard and on the same page. Now it is time to work together and make it happen. This habit is about working together to take things to the next level.

The reality is, nobody becomes successful by themselves. That is why it has been emphasized by the previous two habits how important relationships are for effectiveness.

Even though it might seem that a lot of online marketers are famous (some even infamous) because of the work they did and they have a personal brand, you usually never see the team behind that person and the relationships he or she has. Usually they have other online marketers sharing advice, the affiliate managers, the representative of a variety of traffic sources, and a team of people working with the marketer.

Don’t get me wrong, you can be successful by doing all the work yourself. That doesn’t mean it is the most effective way to do it. The idea behind this habit is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Work with other people and bring each other up. That is why in the online space you’ll see plenty of joint ventures going on, but for someone who is just starting internet marketing you have to do it differently. Start building a team, work with your affiliate managers, and connect with other online marketers so you can work together to go to the next level.

7. Sharpen the saw

The last habit is about self-renewal. As you continue to work for long periods of time your productivity goes down unless you regularly review your work and your life. The book gives the analogy of a woodcutter who works every day, but becomes less productive over time because he refuses to take time out to sharpen the saw.

In the beginning it is all about hustling and working your way up, but don’t forget to take breaks while you’re doing it. Especially when you have hit milestones, zoom out and think of why it went well. Or if you didn’t make any major progress, try to see what happened and how you can improve things. Especially when you do a lot of testing and work on your campaigns, you need to sharpen the saw on a regular basis.

This guest post was written by +Thanh Pham, a writer and productivity nerd who regularly blogs about time management.

Let’s face it… running an online business takes a lot of dedication and work. It’s stressful and needs to be treated like a real business. Just because we have blogs, conference parties and seems like everything is cake, there is really a ton of grunt work that is put into every ad campaign, web site and blog that finds success. Running a small business is serious work, and should be treated no differently than any other business or life changing task.

The Idea of Running Your Own Small Business

There’s two types of people in the world. Those who work for themselves, and those who work for other people. There is nothing wrong with the path you decide to take, and running your own business definitely isn’t for everyone. If you have a family and costs that need to be paid, it will take a lot of work, dedication and sacrifice to have those responsibilities looming over your head month after month without a secure pay check coming in every week.

With all of that said, the benefits of running your own business can pay off big. Along with all of the stress and dedication, comes big benefits such as potentially making a lot of money, being your own boss, and building a business the way you want and maybe even selling for millions of dollars in the future. You can only work so many hours, and make a limited amount of money when you are working for someone else, but when it’s your own business, you are in control of your salary and the business’ earnings.

What Does It Take to Run a Small Business

Personally for me, it was an undying drive and dedication that brought me to where I am today. I always had a passion for business and thinking up new ways to make money. When I first started making money online, I was around 15 years old, and didn’t have a lot of financial responsibilities, which helped put me in a unique position to start my own business. At the same time, I was also investing everything I made right back into the business, and never took any investment money or loans to start the company. I started from scratch, learned everything I could about making web sites and affiliate marketing and everything else that has brought me to where I am today.

So what does it take for YOU to start your own business online? I keep saying it, but it’s the truth, you actually NEED to WANT to do this. I have so many friends that think I am so “lucky” to be where I am, but there are thousands of hours and blood, sweat and tears behind every successful business. For every successful idea, there are thousands of wasted hours and dollars lost in failed ideas. The bottom line is, you need to have the drive to keep going til you hit that next big success!

Depending on what type of business you want to create, you will need some investment money. To start with a web site or blog, your investment is minimal (not counting advertising dollars). You can get started with a domain and web hosting for just a few dollars a year. If you wanted to focus on affiliate marketing and creating ad campaigns, you would want to start with at least $500-$5000 to get an idea of how campaigns works, while turning them profitable.

For every successful web site or ad campaign we build, there are tons of failures we’ve hit before them. The difference between those who succeed and fail, is the driving passion and dedication to not fail, and keep working those extra long nights and learning what it takes to make a profit.

You Have an Established Small Business… Now What?

Congratulations, you now have a successful business and are your own boss, now what? All the time people are saying “Why would they keep working?“, in reference to the millionaires and billionaires out there running big companies. The answer is simple, go right back to what we talked about in step one… it’s all about the passion! When you are in business long enough, and doing well at it, it’s more like a game than anything else. You want to keep succeeding, hitting new levels (whether that is revenue or personal goals).

This is the driving force behind every business and online marketer who stays up to 5am in the morning, continually pushing out new ad campaigns, and pushing conversions for that extra 1%. We are the future of business and if this is the game you want to play, you have to take it seriously and never doubt yourself for a second!

I received compensation from Visa for sharing my views in this post, but the views expressed here are solely mine, not Visa’s. This post was sponsored by Visa Small Business as part of their #gobiz Sweepstakes for @VisaSmallBusiness. Visa will be rewarding small business owners with $10,000 in prizes for their hard work from October 25^th through November 17^th. Visit here http://hosting.thetenthwave.com/visasb/ for more details, and follow @VisaSmallBiz for ways to help make your small business more efficient and successful. Discover more at http://visa.com/business.

Having already sold a few thousand copies of my “Flip This Web Site” guide I released a few months ago, I was approached by oDigger.com to bring an exclusive deal to my readers and users of their site. If you haven’t seen oDigger already, it’s just like Groupon, but focused on affiliate marketing software, products and courses. The original price of my web site flipping guide was $67, but is now an insanely reduced price of only $14.99, which is 77% off!

Flip This Web Site $67  – Now Only $14.99

This is a limited time promotion through oDigger, so if you haven’t grabbed your copy already please do! Get the book!

Since the release of the book, the business of buying and selling web sites on Flippa has just been exploding. With over $77,000 in new site sales every day on the web site, it’s truly become the world’s largest marketplace for buying and selling web sites. From $50 sales, all the way up to $1.1 million, Flippa has been responsible for some huge web site acquisitions.

Let’s take a look at some of the recent news and posts that have been written on Flippa and the type of web sites that are selling on their marketplace.

What’s New in the Web Site Flipping World?

• Make Money with Angry Birds Web Sites – We all know that Angry Birds is one of the fastest and most profitable companies around when it comes to apps and online gaming. But they aren’t the only ones. Many web site owners are creating Angry Birds related web sites and selling them for thousands of dollars through Flippa.
• Flippa Increases their Success Fees by 400% – The title actually sounds worse than it is, but I believe it was a necessary change for Flippa to make. This major pricing change will only affect sellers, and sites that sell for more than $40,000.
• Flippa Kills Their Trust Score – Another big change to Flippa recently, was their change from their old “Trust Score” to a new system that would show only feedback, but also the amount of revenue done through their account. This a great new feature and gives sellers a much better idea of who is bidding on their web sites.
• Celebrity Gossip Blogs that Have Sold for 6 Figures on Flippa – It’s always great to see how others are making web sites and selling them for big money on Flippa. This post will show you two celebrity and entertainment based web sites that have sold for over six figures!

The latest version of Flip This Web Site is now over 150 pages and has been updated with all of the latest changes to Flippa, along with a few tips and case studies. Grab your copy now.

Halloween is one of the most anticipated holidays of the year. It’s the day when you get to dress up and be whatever you want, run around to house and get stuff for free. For families with children, it may cost them up to a week’s paycheck, and for the millions of companies around the world that sell costumes, decorations and candy, it’s almost like Christmas!

As an internet marketer, Halloween is the mega start for making money in the 4th quarter of the year. If you missed out on this years Halloween spending spree, here are some figures to get you excited and ready for next year! Even though the country is in financial disaster and many people are out of jobs, the Halloween spending still keeps hitting new highs. Let’s take a look!

2011 Halloween Season

• 7 out of 10 Americans will celebrate Halloween
• 41 million Trick or Treaters in 2010
• $72.31 average spend per person (costumes, candy etc)
• Total of $6.8 billion spent on Halloween related products

- Source: CNN / US Census, National Retail Federation

2011 Popular Halloween Costumes

You can usually tell what the hot costumes will be for the year, by looking at the best selling movies of the year. In 2011, the best selling costumes were super heroes such as Captain American and Green Lantern, along side with popular celebrities such as Lady Gaga and Charlie Sheen.

Want to get a jump on next year’s Halloween costumes sales? Take a look at the new movies coming out in 2012, and start making your Halloween costume sites now! Just quickly looking at the list, you know GhostBusters, Men in Black, the Avengers and Wizard of Oz will be big costume sellers in 2012.

$310 Million Spent on Pet Costumes

As much as parents love to show of their kid’s costumes, apparently their dogs are right up there on the list. Over $310 million dollars will be spent this Halloween on pet costumes. In addition to getting pet costumes at stores like PetSmart, PetCo and Target, they are also a huge seller online!

The big seller among pet costumes, are pumpkins, hotdogs and devil dogs!

Before/After Halloween Sales

Just because today is Halloween, it doesn’t mean there isn’t any more money to be made. Many costume web sites like BuyCostumes and CostumeCraze make all of their massive profits on Halloween, but they also hold some huge discounts and sales the days and weeks right after Halloween, which many people are still buying for. These web sites are also selling costumes through out the year. Holidays and events like Christmas (Santa and Elves costumes), New Years (fun glasses, hats), Easter (Bunny Costumes) and celebrations like birthdays, graduations and bachelor parties, keep the sales coming in through out the year.

There is plenty of money to be made in the Halloween and costume market, so if you didn’t get a chance to cash in on the craze this year, make sure you are ready next year, and it’s a revenue generator that you can count on year after year!

I truly feel that the ways of teaching and learning how to make money online are shifting. No longer do you have to buy software, only to be left in the dark after watching an amazing testimonial or crazy long pages about how you will make thousands of dollars over night with a new program. No, the shift for learning how to make money online is now focused on paid membership forums. A couple weeks ago I wrote about how I’ve been active on StackThatMoney forums, and really like the concept they have going there. I can also say the same for IMGrind Forums, which is run by two very successful friends of mine, who are also extremely well known in the affiliate industry, Ryan Gray and Ralph Ruckman.

Why is IMGrind Worth a Paid Membership?

As an member of the IMGrind Forum, you will have access to thousands of posts and new ideas and case studies on how to make money through the use of web sites, ad campaigns and continually improve your ad copies and return on investments.

Once you are logged in, you will see the latest, hottest and most viewed threads going on inside of IMGrind. I wish I could show you some of the content that is in each of these areas, but you will have to settle for just the titles until you login and see for yourself.

IM Grind Community Statistics (as of 10/27/11)
Threads 1,466 – Posts 7,009

One of the popular threads on the forum is one from Ryan Gray which goes into detail on how he created an arbitrage web site that generated $61,796.49 in about a two-month period. The thread is loaded up with powerpoint slides walking you through the process, then an extra 5 pages of comments, posts and more guidance from Ryan and other users. If you are great at creating campaigns that usually lose money or break even, this case study is a great example on how to make money “after” the lead/signup takes place, bringing in pure profit afterwards. This is just a small example of the type of premium content found within IMGrind.

As an active user on IMGrind, not only do you get to read and learn from people who are really making money in the industry, but you will be able to work with them and learn how to improve your ad campaigns. I personally get emails all the time from people asking me how to improve ad campaigns or want to learn how to make money online… and I simply don’t have the time or resources to answer and respond to everyone. Through the use of forums like IMGrind, it’s a new way to get consulting that would cost you thousands of dollars, but help build a community in the process.

IMGrind vs. StackThatMoney

In full disclosure, I am an active member of both IMGrind and StackThatMoney and really love what both of these forums have to offer. Though they are both based in the affiliate marketing niche, they do vary in what they offer. StackThatMoney is more focused towards ad campaigns and offering a wide selection of tools for research and campaign building. IMGrind focuses more on the process of building out your own campaigns, lead generation, sales funnels and web sites, while also covering more advanced areas such as such as pay per call, product fulfillment and becoming your own merchant/advertiser.

Both forums offer a tremendous amount of value, and for anyone who is serious about rubbing shoulders with the top people in the industry and learning new ways to make money online, I’d gladly recommend both, then if you could only afford to stick with one, see which fits your marketing style best.

IMGrind Live in NYC during AdTech / Affiliate Summit

Everyone in the internet marketing world will be desending on New York City for AdTech and Affiliate Summit during November, but members of IMGrind will get to have a little celebration of their own. Members of IMGrind will have access to a private live seminar on August 20th at the Hilton in New York City.

The price to Platinum Members of the forum is $267.00 for a live event ticket and recording, which will include sessions on the following. You must be a member of IMGrind to attend this exclusive event.

• “Facebook Arbitrage” – An out of the box method we have been using for $5,000+ days on Facebook.
• “Dating Domination” – Methods you will NOT find anywhere else online. Simply because there are no other AFFILIATES doing this.
• “PPV List Secrets” – 20,000 subscribers on your email list a week. It’s that simple. You will have a “holy shit” moment when you see how.
• “Job Site Thief” – Watch how I literally steal Job Site traffic. I’m even going to give you my squeeze page template that I murder with.

The Cost of NOT Joining IMGrind

Here’s the deal. You can buy all the software and make money online programs out there, but once you buy, many of them leave you in the dark. When you are a member of IMGrind, you get 24 hour access to killer content found in their forum, as well as support from Ryan Gray and Ralph Ruckman. The cost to me a premium member of the forum is $99 a month (use coupon code ZACJOHNSON and get 20% off your first month – Now only $$61.60 for the first month). This comes out to less than a wimpy cup of premium coffee a day. If you can’t invest that type of money into yourself and your business, then you probably shouldn’t be working to make money online in the first place. You are your business, and you need to make the connections and investments to bring it to the next level.

Head on over to IMGrind and become a member, or leave any questions you might have in the comments section below and Ryan Gray will be eager to answer any questions you might have.

Flippa just came out with a new set of rules and adjustments for buying and selling web sites on their marketplace. You can read the full page, which is a bit lengthy, or you can read the recap I’ve put together below.

While some people will probably be angered by the price changes, it’s really all just part of the business. For anyone who pays attention to the stock market and has been keeping an eye on NetFlix, the stock has tumbled from $300 a share to $70 a share, since they made a price adjustment to their rental/dvd membership service. I don’t think the changes at Flippa will hurt their business model in the slightest, as they have established themselves as “the player” when it comes to buying and selling web sites, and the new changes will really only effect higher end sales in the $10k+ range. Additionally, the buyers of web sites will not be affected by these changes, as they are mainly listing and feature changes.

Change to Featured Listing Pricing

One of the most attractive features on Flippa when listing a web site, is to go for the main page listing. This cost was previously $40, and now increased to $50 (a 25% increase). This can be looked at in a good and bay way… good because less people may use this feature, which means your listing will stay on the main page longer, and bad because it’s an extra $10 more.

Change to Privacy Upgrades

Outside of buying and selling web sites, Flippa is an amazing resource for information. One a web site is listed and sells, it’s on the web site forever for others to view. That is of course unless you pay an upgrade fee to have the auction listed blocked from search results, removed after the auction ends, or requires a confidentiality agreement.

Flippa has lowered the price for removing auctions after they end from the web site from $100 to $30. To take advantage of this feature, you would select the “Hide Listing from Public View” option during the upgrades process. While the decrease is nice, I think this is one of the least used upgrade features.

Change to the Success Fee Cap

Lastly, we get to the success fee cap and that’s where the majority of price changes have been made. Flippa wants to stress that they are “not changing the success fee”, but instead changing the success fee cap to $2,000, from the original $500 that was in place. When a web site sells, Flippa gets a 5% success fee, which is where they make a profit. Since more web sites are selling on Flippa for over $10,000 it’s only fitting they would put this change in place.

For example, a web site sells on Flippa for $10,000 (Flippa gets a $500 success fee). Under the old plan it didn’t matter if a web site sold for $10,000 or $1,000,000… that success fee would still be $500 for Flippa. With the new change in place, that success fee is now capped at $2,000 instead of $500. If a web site sells for $40,000 or over, you would then have a $2,000 success fee.

Let’s see how this works under a few different scenarios. (From Flippa)

1. Website sells for $80 – no change as the minimum success fee remains unchanged at $5.
2. Website sells for $8,000 – no change as the existing 5% success fee of $400 is applied
3. Website sells for $18,000 – this is beyond the previous cap and the 5% success fee of $900 is applied
4. Website sells for $80,000 – this is beyond the new cap so a success fee of $2,000 is applied (ie NOT 5%)

In the end, the price increase is fractional, especially for large web sites. I’m surprised something like this wasn’t put in place earlier, but it makes sense to establish yourself as the premier marketplace for buying and selling web sites before making any big changes. The bigger question is if Flippa will continue to make changes to their web site and if more price changes are coming.

The comments over at Flippa are going both ways, some happy and some angry. In the end, Flippa is still the best place to buy and sell web sites, and unless you are selling sites for over $10,000, nothing is really changing anyway.

If you’d like to learn how to make the most money when buying and selling web site through Flippa, be sure to check out my 140+ page book called “Flip This Web Site“, which also includes bonus videos, case studies, mini niche guides and more.

How many times have we seen companies get offer millions or even billions of dollars, then either walked away from the offer, or gladly accepted it? Time and time again we see founders and CEOs make the huge decision to risk the odds and try to grow their company to something amazing, or take the money and run. One of the best examples that comes to mind is Marc Cuban, who sold his Broadcast.com company to Yahoo in 1998 for $5.9 billion in stock. After the sale Cuban diversified his money to avoid the coming market crash, and is now the owner of the NBA team the Dallas Mavericks, and worth an estimated $2.5 billion.

That’s a great example of someone taking the money and running and everything working out for the best. All too often it never works out that well. Let’s take a look at three well known web sites, their founders and their decisions on whether they should take the money and run.

MySpace.com / News Corp

Everyone remembers MySpace, but no one dares to waste time with it today. What was once one of the top web sites on the internet, MySpace introduced the world to the importance of social networking and having “friends” online. In 2005, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp company acquired MySpace for a cool $580 million dollars, which many called an early exit by the founders of MySpace. Two years later in 2007, MySpace was offered an insane $12 billion dollars in stock from Yahoo, which Murdoch then turned down. Fast forward to present day and MySpace.com was sold for a lowly $35 million to an investment group by News Corp. In the end, that’s a $580 million dollar investment, with the lost opportunity at $12 billion dollars, then a kick in the pants at the end when Rupert lost his initial investment and walked away with a sad $35 million. The founders of MySpace walked away the winners in this one!

Twitter / Google

One of these days Twitter will have a business plan and start making money, right? Well, that doesn’t seem to matter, as they are still getting offers to acquire the company. In 2010, Twitter turned down an offer from Google for $10 billion to acquire the company. Twitter is currently now valued at $8.4 billion, but the continuing problems with their business model may put a damper on their overall evaluation and future bids for the company. While Twitter continues to grow in size, so does the competition against Facebook and Google+.

Groupon / Google

Google loves going after new companies and start-ups that are gaining everyone’s attention. This time they went after the daily deals site Groupon, with a $6 billion dollar offer that was refused! (2010) Instead of jumping at the idea of being an instant billionaire, Groupon founder Andrew Mason is taking his chances with the company and looking to launch their own IPO and go public. Since the initial bid for Groupon by Google, the daily deals industry has had it’s ups and downs on the real valuation of these companies and how effective the companies using daily deals are really benefiting.

Facebook / Microsoft

The largest social network in the world is still grabbing everyone attention. Now with a valuation of nearly $50 billion dollars, and with a real business model, Facebook is still being sought after by many of the world’s largest internet companies. Microsoft DID invest in Facebook at the level of a $15 billion dollar valuation, but they were not able to acquire the company, like many have tried. Mark Zuckerberg is still in control at Facebook, while the world awaits any future take over and IPO announcements.

I’ve personally had the option to sell one of my web site for a seven figure payday, but decided not to, as I didn’t like the overall structure of the business agreement, nor the company I would be partnered with. As easily as it is for so many people to say “What an idiot, take the money!“, in so many of these situations, that’s why we are entrepreneurs. We know business and we take risks. Entreprenuer has a great article on the founder of GiftZip.com, and the thought process he went through when he decided to sell his start up.

If you owned any of the web sites above, would you have taken the money and run… or continue to build out your company and potential networth?

Have you ever wanted to run your own web hosting service, or wanted to know how other services can charge only a few dollars a month for web hosting? It’s actually easier than you think. When you order cheap web hosting through a service like HostGator, which costs under $10 a month, you are actually placed on a dedicated server with a bunch of other web sites. By placing a bunch of people on the same server, hosting companies can offer low monthly costs, while still generating a great deal of revenue.

If you ever wanted to start your own hosting company, you would essentially do the same thing. Order a large dedicated server, then break up your clients into smaller hosting accounts which you then bill on a monthly basis. This is what 16 year old Mate Hegedus has been doing with his web hosting company, and he would like to show you how to do the same.

How to Setup Your Own Web Hosting Service

To walk through the whole process and get a better understanding, you can create your own free unlimited hosting company at no cost whatsoever, by visiting Powrhost.com! Once setup, you will be provided with free and unlimited hosting with no ads!

So how can a 16 year old do such a thing using just his MacBook?

YouHosting is a company that allows everyone to go and turn just their own domain name into a hosting business. You don’t even need to buy a domain name as you can just simply get one for free at www.cz.cc.

Without paying a single dime, you may allow your clients to have 10GB of disc space each and a whopping 100GB of bandwidth each month! And it really is that simple to create your own hosting company.

Simply go to YouHosting.com and sign up (it really is free). YouHosting will then tell you to point your domain’s nameserver to them and then you can just choose a pre-done theme and voila! You have your very own hosting business. The image below walks you through the process of how their service works.

Registration literally takes a minute and you can easily set up how much bandwidth you wish to allow in certain packages and how much you wish to charge users should they wish to upgrade for more bandwidth. You can really run a super powerful and competition ready free unlimited hosting website for no cost whatsoever!

But how can we make money from this?

As mentioned earlier, you can easily add your own upgraded packages which users can purchase should they need more MySQL databases, email accounts of more bandwidth.

Here is a screenshot of my master control panel’s packages selection:

As you can see I am only providing free unlimited hosting, but I could just as easily add upgrades to generate revenue.

You can also add advertisement to your client’s webpages, allowing you to generate revenue from that. Adding advertisements literally takes a few seconds and you can just simply take your Google AdSense code and put it in there!

You Can Also Sell Your Web Hosting Service

With the help of Flippa, this should be extremely easy for you. My own free unlimited hosting gets over 10 signups a day on its own and is hosting over 1 million page views a day. This was achieved with relative ease and I am sure I could do it too. My secret? I do not place advertisements onto my client’s websites but I do place a back link on their site back to Powrhost so that it has a better SEO.

Now all you need to do is get the first couple of users to your hosting site and that shouldn’t be too hard of you have a mailing list and you can just as easily place an advertisement into a hosting forum (something I am planning to do to catapult my site’s usage even more).

YouHosting’s control panel truly is revolutionary. It gives you access to do everything that you may need to do. You can set up domain names which your customers can use a free subdomain, you can create automatic email replies and YouHosting will even create and code your whole HTML website for you. All you have to do is just direct a domain name to their servers, get a free account and you have a fully functional hosting provider!

The super admin panel even allows for customers to submit their tickets should they have any queries:

Running your own hosting company, you will run into issues relating to support, downtime and possible security and software issues. Before jumping full on into your own hosting, make sure you have a good understanding of what’s going on, as you will be hosting web sites for other people, and it isn’t necessarily something you can just walk away from.

This guest post was written by Mate Hegedus who is a 16 year old internet marketer from Hungary.