Business Builder Report

The Business Builder Report is a collection of my thoughts about building a business on the Internet. If you can remember “show and tell” at school then that’s how I would describe my online business and BBR. My web sites show how I apply what I learn. The BBR is how I tell about what I have done, what I am doing, and what I plan to do.

Last year I spent writing about my systems MAP (Management Activity Plan). The topics were loosely grouped into categories that included niche research, product R&D, marketing and advertising, testing and tracking, sales, fulfillment and follow-up, analysis, improvement and refinement. Next year some of these articles will be submitted to article directories and if time allows I’ll group, edit and publish them as ebooks. I mention this to give you some idea of how I copyright, syndicate and manage my original content.

One of the more remarkable evolutions of the year was WordPress that underwent 3 major upgrades. Its functionality grew from scaleable blog to include use as a content management system. Now WP touts the distinction of “state-of-the-art publishing platform”.

The outstanding growth of WordPress is in no small part due to the independent development of themes, plugins, and the idea forum. Kudos to the WP user base and the WP management and development team who have been able to harness the power of its community.

While I haven’t had time to review more of how others use WP, I thought it worth mentioning that Alex Sysoef (http://www.howtospoter.com) has produced the best custom programming and tutorials I’ve been able to evaluate. The person I’ve found to be the best communicator about the different ways WP can be applied, especially to marketing, is Pat Marcello (http://ovblogger.com).

My favorite software picks of the year goes to Affiliate Prophet and the OpenX ad server. Here’s a link to what I wrote about OpenX As for AP the upgrade to taguchi testing was the best money I spent all year. You can read my article here in the BBR.

Blogs and article directories have worked quite well for me at being free, automatic, self-sustaining landing pages for high paying affiliate links to offers from ClickBank and CPA networks. This form of passive or pull marketing was accelerated once I got the ad server up and running. The other no cost way that continues to get effective free advertising is submission of articles to directories.

Although PPC continues to be the fastest and most direct way to drive traffic to landing pages, it requires significant skills in writing ads that pull. Also, the return on investment is comparatively low due to bidding and affiliate competition. There is however, a good way to drive down costs of paid advertising and that is with a technique called arbitrage.

The best Internet marketing mantra I came across in 2008 that expresses the underlying assumption of most “how-to” offers is - “I will not market products online. I will sell products and market words”.

Thank you for reading the BBR. If you are seeking tips, techniques and opportunities to learn how I choose and apply Internet marketing tools, please subscribe to the waymore Ezine to get weekly updates.

business, marketing, publishing

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Brian Hack is an Internet analyst and business builder that writes for the Business Builder Report. He is a Publisher and Distributor of Audio + Ebooks at waymore.info. To get a steady stream of tips and opportunities to create, market and advertise your own products and services, you can subscribe to the free waymore Ezine at http://waymore.info

Two main sources of data come from what you can collect yourself and data supplied from the location where your ad is displayed. In both cases the data you get needs to be managed in some meaningful way if you are to benefit from any kind of analysis. I’ve put together a spreadsheet based on some of metrics discussed in the last post “Advertising Days Are Numbered”.

The example shows two types of ad buys. The first is a CPM campaign where a block of 5000 impressions was sold for $25. The second is a CPA campaign where the CPA publisher was paid $15 per sale. All of the calculations are based on formulas outlined in last week’s article.

In the first case, the cost to advertise was fixed at a low rate and the earnings per click profitable at $.79 above the CPM. The eCPC although profitable was limited by reach into a market of only 5000 impressions. The extent of the market can only be determined by successive or larger buys until the eCPC starts to diminish.

The second ad buy was paid per sale. Although the cost was significantly higher the resulting sales were higher, eCPC was higher, and the reach significantly greater. While overall costs were greater so were the profits.

In both cases, the ad channels were profitable so running the campaign again would be likely be profitable. The reach in each case is subject to diminishing returns as the audience that will buy, does, and returns diminish. This means the larger the audience the longer it will produce profit.

The CPM contract favors the publisher because payment is made up front for impressions whether or not a sale is made. This means the risk is borne entirely by the advertiser. The CPA contract favors the advertiser because sales offset the cost of advertising so CPA Networks were established to match advertisers with publishers. The CPA advertiser compels a publisher by means of high payout per sale usually at a rate paid to an affiliate.

If you want to learn more about collecting data about advertising campaigns and channels of distribution an ad server is the way to go. If you search on the word “ad server” you’ll notice OpenX near the top and there’s good reason for that. It’s open source and delivers an essential range of data acquisition, reports and ad management tools.

business, internet advertising

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Brian Hack is an Internet analyst and business builder that writes for the Business Builder Report. He is a Publisher and Distributor of Audio + Ebooks at waymore.info. To get a steady stream of tips and opportunities to create, market and advertise your own products and services, you can subscribe to the free waymore Ezine at http://waymore.info