James Avery’s blog

November 1, 2009

How long could you live without money?

Filed under: Blogging, Internet, Making Money Online — Tags: , — admin @ 3:41 am

OK, let’s take a break from any posts about making money online. How long could you live without the stuff for?

I’m just skimming through a blog written by Mark Boyle, who is approaching the end of living for a year without money - a concept he terms as the ‘freeconomy‘. I’ll have to admit that there’s a lot that I like about some of the basic ideas of the Freeconomy - in essence, the idea that not everything is about money money money - but for me, this is always something to exist alongside our greedy capitalist world, not as a replacement for it.

Apparently, Mark’s big conversion was from watching ‘Gandhi’ during his final year as an economics student at university. I think that’s when many of us started our conversion away from wishy-washy idealism and towards how things work in the real world. Still, every day without spending money is a day when an internet marketer can’t fail to improve his or her bank balance - but I guess not spending money, and just not using it full stop, are two separate concepts. I still prefer the former, but it doesn’t take an idealist or a beatle to tell you that money isn’t everything, and that all you need is love - most entrepreneurs and self improvement manuals will tell you that aswell. You just might have to fork out a small amount of cash to pay for them.

October 7, 2009

Thoughts on Compound Growth - Possibilities and Dangers

Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Making Money Online, Social Networking — Tags: , , , , , , , , — admin @ 12:55 am
Compound Growth of an Online Business

Compound Growth of an Online Business

On Sunday, I posted about how little I was actually earning from my blogs, and how I hoped to enter a steep learning curve in order to improve this. I’ve never been shy of writing content, but the social media arena has always been something I’ve never quite got round to entering. So I decided to hold my hands up and admit to being a total newbie, and see where things go from here. I have entered the steep learning curve of twitter, blog promotion and blog optimisation, and I am looking forward to enjoying the ride. So how realistic is it to expect to follow a growth curve which keeps on going up, and how can website builders ensure that their growth is exponential, rather than just solid and linear. Or is linear growth better?

Well, I have always found the prospect of compound growth far more exciting. Prior to turning my attention to blogging and offline print maps, I maintained a 60-70% annual growth rate on Flightmapping.com. Of course, the big question when anyone makes claims of massive growth is what level they are starting from. It doesn’t take a maths genius to work out that 1000% growth from £10 per month is still just £100 per month. But what if that is just the start, and within a few short months, you can double that figure again several times over?

Of course, the possibilities are endless - and there is no reason why a relative beginner can’t build up a substantial and stable income through building highly relevant content-focussed blogs - providing that there is a revenue stream which can be built from them. It is no use blogging about a subject which either has very few potential readers (although believe me, on the internet, there are people out there into just about anything), or which is just not going to generate much revenue (note to self - stay away from long political rants!).

So what are the dangers?

Judging by the endless streams of spam on twitter, the first pitfall has to be to go down the ‘I made millions of dollars online and so can you’ route - almost all of these systems are built on bringing more people in below you in the pyramid, and they just aren’t actually out there to generate any kind of sustainable income, except for those who are in right at the very start. Quality content blogs take time to build up, and this is the big question. Do you have the time to spare? Can you sit back and wait for your websites to grow? Well the good news here is that you will never have to sit around twiddling your thumbs - on the internet, everything can move like lightning, so it’s totally unlike opening a retail store and waiting for the punters to come in off the street. The simple question is - can you build up your website(s) quickly enough? Well, as long as you are starting off by building your website as a secondary income generator, the answer should always be yes. Expecting to become a millionaire overnight is almost certainly going to land you in disappointment.

So even if the rate of growth slows down as you get bigger, it still pays to go for explosive growth.

Happy blogging!

October 3, 2009

Last month I made a paltry £10 through blogging. I just want to double this each month!

Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Internet, Making Money Online, Time Management — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — admin @ 1:06 pm

Forget about all these wild claims about making thousands online from signing up to someone else’s automated scripts programme!

I don’t want to earn a fortune, I just want to double this amount every month for a year! Hang on a minute, after a few months, this starts to look quite juicy:

September £10
October £20
November £40
December £80
January £160
February £320
March £640
April £1,280
May £2,560
June £5,120
July £10,240
August £20,480

Oh, the powers of compound growth! Of course, doubling for the next few months should be child’s play, but who knows what will happen after that.

To clarify - I am looking at building up Adsense and perhaps other affiliate revenue from blogging alone, and not from Flightmapping.com, which is a dedicated travel website, albeit one built using very last millenium web 1.0 Architecture! Flightblogging.com is a standalone blog related to, but getting very little traffic from, Flightmapping.com, and my own personal blog is now building up slowly too. I also expect to re-instate a couple of other long standing blog projects, whereas the World Tube Map concept may evolve into an online discussion with some revenue opportunity, but the main aim of this is to actually sell physical printed maps, which don’t count as online revenue.

You might ask why current earnings are so low. The reasons are simple - I am a relative latecomer to the social networking and blogging scene, having put so much effort into building Flightmapping.com as a content portal, and focusing purely on SEO around the quantity of text, rather than playing the link building and social networking game. I am declaring my hand as a newbie in this field - and I want to learn - FAST!

Hopefully progress will develop with some good advice from friends old and new.

As always, keep your seat backs firmly upright, Pay Attention Meticulously, and enjoy the journey!

September 7, 2009

Can you like any music if you listen long enough?

Filed under: Making Money Online, Music — Tags: , , — admin @ 10:36 pm

Something I’ve been wondering about for a while - what makes people get into music, and how easy is it to appreciate new bands and genres?

My music tastes are centred on a certain city up north, so I’m seeing how quickly I can get into Elbow, who’s only song I’ve really known before is the absolutely outstanding ‘One Day Like This’ from the album ‘The Seldom Seen Kid’. On Thursday, I was playing around with the iphone in the Glasgow Apple store (I’ve already got an Ipod, which I just wanted to charge for the train journey home, and I’m happy with my mobile, so an iphone isn’t really on my shopping list). The 30 second listen function gave me a quick overview of what Elbow were about, and as they are already in the genre I’m used to, I was liking what I heard.

But how quickly do people get into bands generally? And what’s the biggest driving factor? I’ve always enjoyed live shows, so as Elbow are playing the MEN in Manchester in a couple of weeks’ time, I’m going to start doing some ‘revision’. HMV wanted £12 for two of their other albums, but Amazon.co.uk has ‘em for under a fiver, so I’ve decided to sign back up to their affiliate programme.

If you fancy giving these guys try, click on the Elbow link below:

September 6, 2009

Make Anything Possible (TM) - M.A.P. Template

Filed under: Chess Board Maps, Making Money Online, Time Management — Tags: , , — admin @ 2:33 pm

This is designed for printing out at A0 and hanging on the wall, but it still seems to look fine when printed A4. This is a continuation from the original ‘chess board map’ concept, with room for some more ‘pie in the sky’ ideas.

The aim is to have a template to plan out any creative concept - or just to plan a week’s work in a mind map format, rather than trying to fit everything in to a linear 9-5 type grid format, which just isn’t relevant for creative thinking.

Naturally, I’m not going to give the full game away here, but the basic template is free to use. If you are planning anything geographical, then the ‘box’ could still be simplified as a world map down to ABCD (Alaska, Beijing, Chile, Dunedin / Desert Island - or any other variation on the theme). For England, I use cArlisle, Berwick, Cornwall, Dover - there’s no room for pedants pointing out that Cornwall is a county, this is a box for outside the box thinking, so the whole point is to have rough boundaries, not anything that has to be strictly enforced.

The ‘roof’ of the house could be used for ‘big sky blue’ thinking, or for anything which might make up part of a plan, but which wouldn’t fit in the box.

Hope this makes some kind of sense, it isn’t supposed to make total sense, because it is a template, not an answer. But the basic concept remains - using simple maps, and breaking evertything down into small chunks, there’s no reason why you can’t Make Anything Possible.

MAP = Make Anything Possible

MAP = Make Anything Possible

March 31, 2009

No, this website has nothing to do with James Avery Jewelry

Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Making Money Online — Tags: , , , , , , — admin @ 11:12 pm

I’ve just done a quick customisation to the WordPress template to show Google Adsense, and those who know me from the UK affiliate industry might wonder why AdSense has decided that four terms relating to jewellery had been picked up as the most relevant for my site. Well, the simple answer is that in Texas and the US Southwest, James Avery Jewelry are quite a well-known brand with over 40 stores.

According of their own website:

Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and raised in the Chicago area, James Avery was first introduced to the scenic Texas Hill Country, by way of the U.S. Air Corps. Cadet Avery landed in San Antonio where he was stationed at Lackland Air Force Base. Here he found inspiring surroundings and a “can do” attitude in the people.

So is there a connection between us, apart from a name and a shared interest in aviation, even if under totally different circumstances? Well actually there is. Back in the days I was scratching around website at university, James Avery Jewelry didn’t have their own website, so people came to mine, trying to get in contact with them.

There was nothing much I could do apart from give a phone number, but it did result in a large amount of traffic to my otherwise bland and uninteresting website. I saw an opportunity to make a little bit of pocket money from some affiliate links, and a couple of years down the line, realised that I could also use affiliate marketing to make money from Flightmapping. So here we are now with a whole load of their rivals advertising for James Avery keywords on my own website, but I am glad to say that there is now both a James Avery Jewelry website, and an affiliate programme, run by Commission Junction, who incidentally are one of Flightmapping.com’s largest partners in the UK.

James Avery senior stepped down as CEO of the JA jewellery company in May 2007, passing management down to his son Chris. Meanwhile, this James Avery Jr continues to take much of his inspiration from his renegade doctor father, who is also a James (Gordon) Avery, a keen triathlete and passionate Geographer!

March 19, 2009

A little rant about blog spammers

Filed under: Blogging, Making Money Online — Tags: , , , , , — admin @ 3:52 pm

Thankfully, most of my blog spam is now stopped by Akismet, but it never ceases to amaze me how many people there are out there who think they can make money on the Internet by spamming other people’s blogs. The worst offenders must be those automatic script generators which create a new post on the spammer’s blog and basically just copy the first 100 words also of a legitimate blog post somebody else has written. Now I’ll freely admit that making money on the Internet is nothing like as easy as some people would have you believe — I’m not trying to sell any kind of Internet moneymaking tool, so I’ll just tell it as it is; but why even bother trying to create websites which just steal everyone else’s content?

The bottom line is that if you want to make money from the web, you will have to be doing something unique yourself, otherwise you might as well not bother. The Internet is not like the High Street, where you can just repeat somebody else’s franchise model, or open up another branch of the store using the same formula that worked in another town. On the web, you are potentially competing with every single other website around the world to get attention to your product or service. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you can’t get your foot in the door, as there are so many opportunities out there to explore, but you do have to make sure that you are providing something unique, otherwise you can never seriously expect your site to either rank well in the search engines, or to be able to generate any worthwhile inbound links.

But why bother getting worked up about this? Maybe it is because I’ve always worked on the basis that I will only put up content that has at least had some element of processing by myself or one of our writers — but I suppose that there are always going to be some areas of a website, such as news, where there will be many close similarities between different online portals. However, this exception only applies to small areas of the site, and I still think that if you can’t put together your own opinions, then you really shouldn’t be on the web.

Here endeth the soapbox sermon.

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