It’s been ages now since I wanted to put down to words some random thoughts I have on this so called web business.

I participate in quite a few webmaster forums, such as Digital Point, Sitepoint, Namepros and so on, and I see people making the biggest webmaster mistake over and over…

They think small!

Yes, read again, they think small!

Do you actually think you’ll ever get rich selling links to other webmasters, selling templates, newly created websites or whatever? Forget about it!

Digital Point, for example, has over 118,800 members (~ 42,000 are active) by the time I’m writing these lines, and you can’t even imagine how many of those are making over $1000 per day from various advertising programs and affiliate plans, and you know why?

Because they’ve noticed the world has 6.6 billion inhabitants and, according to the latest internet world stats, at least 1.2 billions use the internet… have you ever thought about this?

Are you still trying to sell stuff to 42,000 people when you have 1,248,357,426 potential buyers out there? Get a life!

Your real business is not inside webmaster forums, your real “becoming a millionaire” opportunity is not inside webmaster communities! Of course business can be done there, but the greatest deal you can get there is “knowledge”, something you just don’t buy out there, you can learn a lot from those forums, from being part of a community, from helping others out, but most surely you won’t get rich selling stuff to other webmasters.

Even if you sell a lot of links, blog posts, websites, directory listings and services, you’ll be only reaching around 0,00336% of the internet users, meaning the huge potential is still out there.

It’s time to start thinking BIG, it’s time to direct your websites to the real world.

Stop and think… turn your way round and you might just have a chance.

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This is no big deal, as you’ve probably already heard it 1000 times, but people tend to do it all the time.

Either you’re investing in the stock market or online investing, you must diversify your income sources.

At this online business, people tend to rely on adsense as their only income source, and then, if for some reason, that source fails to deliver as expected, people cry and blame Google.

Don’t you ever rely on one income source, there are tons of other quality ways to earn money online, there are programs for everyone, for every market and every website. I’ve blogged about these adsense alternatives before!

As for me I’m using 4 or 5 main programs, even though I have more income sources. Currently I’m using Google Adsense, Zangocash, ValueClickMedia, adBrite, Clickcash, BlackLabelAds and Comission Junction as my major income sources, even though I’ve already tested a few others that I still use every now and then.

In another post I’ll explain how and where I use these, what percentage of my income they represent and what can be done to maximize them.

Cheers!

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The month is not over yet and I’m quite happy to see that my online business revenue is the highest ever!

Last month I’ve had also the best month so far, but considering the whopping 38% increase I see in November, I have to be happier than ever before with my online ventures.

I won’t be disclaiming any ammounts until the end of the year, but expect me to put down some numbers as soon as I have my 2008 online business budget ready!

Do you have your own online business budget? Do you create one?

Well, you should, at least if you’re taking this business seriously. It’s like running a company, you must keep track of your income and your expenses.

During December I’ll try to make my online business budget public, for now I just leave you with this idea.

Get a piece of paper, excel, Google Docs, whatever and starting categorizing your expenses and income.

From the top of my head I remember the major numbers:

Expenses:

• Hosting (remember to check if your hosting is enough or if somehow you need a larger number of servers, or hosting accounts)
• Advertising
• Link Buiding
• Design (include both new pages, websites and banners)
• Writers (if you outsource your article and post writing, remember to check if you’ll need more or less writers)

Income:

• Direct Product Sales
• Affiliate Product Sales (include programs like Clickbank, Chitika, Comission Junction and others)
• Advertising (include programs like Google Adsense, Valueclick Media, AdBrite, ZangoCash and many others)
• Direct ad Sales
• Link Sales
• Subscriptions
• Other Services you provide (writing services, design)

This is really nothing very new that I’m telling you, but trust me, most people don’t do it. In fact 99% of webmasters don’t, the other 1% are probably the ones that take this seriously and really profit from this business.

To be 100% honest with you I’ve never done it before either, but I intend to do it for 2008 (in fact I have already started).

I ain’t gonna split all my sites (over 80 atm) 1 by 1 and start budgeting $100 sites, I’ll do it globally and maybe create a budget for the major categories. (vehicles, travel, celebrities, gaming)

Keep in touch! I’ll have more updates really soon.

If you prefer you might want to subscribe to our RSS Feeds and receive all the adStrategist posts automatically!
The perfect internet marketing solutions don’t have to be that expensive. They can be affordable too. Solutions like email marketing and link exchange cost nothing. An internet marketing program should know what it is supposed to do. That is the basic of search engine marketing.

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Another week as passed, and what a week!

The adStrategist Network is living some weird days as traffic from Google Images is rocketing, and I mean it.

Did you ever check your logs for Google (Images) as a main source of traffic? Well, I knew that every now and then this would happen with some sites, but what I didn’t know is that it could happen with 4 or 5 sites at once and more, multiplying the traffic by 5!

The image above shows the traffic details for one of those sites (URL undisclaimed…). You’ll be able to notice that after November the 3rd my traffic got a steady increase that is still lasting. A few images that I have posted at my sites got very high ranks at Google images search engine and I’m getting huge traffic from it.

Ok, but what are my conclusions to this? Would this be a result of the new Google Image Labeler program?

Here’s what I think and have to suggest to you:

• People love images. A site without any images is sad and poor.
• Search engines love images. Sooner or later you’ll get noticed and competition there is much lower.
• Always name your images properly, forget about rgsa66s5.jpg, as this is completly useless. Name your images the best you can, avoid spaces in the name, use “-” between words.
• Describe your images if you’re using wordpress or any other CMS that allows it.
• Watch your server logs closely and learn from it. Where is the traffic come from? Where is it heading to?

Bare in mind that this type of traffic converts poorly, so if you expect a large increase in your ads revenue just forget about it. You may double or so, but not much more.

I’ll keep you informed when this traffic jump ends (I hope it never ends. )

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One day I had to start this, so today is the day…

It’s been quite a while now since I’ve first started this online adventure, and these days I’ve been thinking that I should really start putting online my business logs, so here it goes…

First of all, who’s the adStrategist?

Well, the adStrategist is a 32 or 33 year old (can’t remember now) portuguese IT project manager that one day decided to start this onlone adventure. It all started with a small blogspot blog and today he’s managing over 80 live sites and 150 domains.

What’s with this business?

It’s not hard to find out what’s with this business… money, of course! Yes, you read well, I’m in this for the money, but who isn’t? You’re not? Then you’re a liar, get out of here!

What am I going to do around here from today?

I’ll try to teach you something, I’ll try to tell you what my business is, how it works, how I develop it, etc, etc…

What I won’t teach you is “How to get rich with adsense in 48 hours?” There are enough liars out there, so you’d better trust me. You won’t get rich with adsense in 48 hours!

I’ll be updating this quite regularly, trying to tell you what I’ve been doing online, what sites do I have, buy or sell, what business do I own, how do I profit from this and so on.

From now I just go playing around a little bit with a few of my Vehicles websites…

Oh! And happy halloween!

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