Photo by pasotraspaso

New Year’s Day is just a few days away. Have you made any New Year’s resolutions for your internet business?

Actually, rather than create hard and fast resolutions, I believe it is more productive to think about the successes and failures you have had in the past year, and then to set some goals for the new year.

Here are some things you might want to think about:

1. What worked for you last year? If it worked for you last year, why not expand on it, doing more of the same - only on a bigger scale?
2. What did not work so well? You can learn a lot from your failures as well as your successes. Analyze what went wrong and decide what you need to do differently in the future. It might be that the particular idea should be abandoned, but it could also just mean that it needs to be revised a little to be successful. Think of all your projects as experiments, and learn from the failures as well as the successes.
3. Are you taking your internet business seriously? Maybe the reason it is not going so well is just that you have not spent enough time on it. You can’t expect to be haphazard about your business and still succeed. You need to treat it as a business, even if you can only work on it part time. At least during the time you can devote to it, be whole-hearted and businesslike about it.
4. Have you been focusing on the right things? I believe a business will do best with clear goals that you focus on. A lot of internet marketers make the mistake of hopping from one thing to another and losing focus easily. In the new year, try to focus on one thing at at time, so that you give it a chance to succeed. It is ok to abandon something that is not working, but be sure you gave it a fair chance first.
5. Have you set some firm goals for yourself, and have you written the goals down? This is something that is a lot more important than you might think. Studies have shown that people who write down goals for themselves will have a much better chance of achieving those goals than people who don’t write them down, or, especially, those who don’t even have goals.

   For example, think about your income goals for the next year. Write down a figure for how much you want to earn from your business. After you do that, you can break it down into monthly, weekly, or even daily goals.

   Personally, I have an income goal that I want to achieve this year, and I have written it down. Let’s see if having it written down helps. (I’ll let you know next year.)

I’d like to share with you some of the plans and thoughts I have for my business for next year.

First of all, l have noticed that, once I worked out some personal issues that I was grappling with, I suddenly was able to have a clear vision for my business. I found that when my personal life was up in the air, I could not form a good business plan either. Thank goodness now that has changed, so I expect great things from my business this year.

Some of you may know that I have moved a few times this past year. I have now settled down in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. My business address is still in West Bend, because that’s where I have my business mailbox. I will move it to Sheboygan eventually.

Side note: Did you know that Sheboygan is the bratwurst capital of the U.S.? I heard that on the radio the other day. Some of you might not even know what a bratwurst is… it’s a spicy sausage, very popular in Wisconsin, which originally comes from Germany.

Anyway, back to my business plans:

1. Build an email list. I don’t have an email list set up for this blog yet. As I mentioned in a previous post, I was thinking of creating an email newsletter.

   I now have a great idea of how the email newsletter will be structured. I don’t think anyone else is doing this. It will be a good way for you to learn about making money online. I’m not going to say any more until I roll it out, but I think you will really like it.

2. Post regularly, at least once per week. I used to try posting 3 times per week on this blog, but that got to be too much. But I want to post at least once per week, to keep the blog current. It might not always be on Mondays, but look for a post once a week from now on.
3. Create more videos. I have found that I need to do this regulary, or else I get out of the mode of doing it. It’s kind of like exercise. You get out of shape if you don’t do it on a regular basis. I haven’t created videos for so long that I have forgotten the Camtasia settings that I used, or even where my microphone is. So that’s something I need to get back to. Some of the videos will be free and some will be paid products.
4. Which brings me to: Create more products. I am going to start creating products on a more regular basis. There are so many things I know how to do, that I could create products on. I am sure the same is true for you too. You know more than you think. So maybe you should be thinking of products you could create, as well.
5. Continue creating websites. For a while at least, I am going to continue to create websites to sell on Sitepoint. It is a good steady source of income. It does take some work to set up the sites, but I have only had one site that did not sell, and I know why. I won’t make the same mistakes again. Most of the others have sold for $99 at the buy-it-now price. A few have sold for less, but they have still earned me money.

   One thing I am going to do differently there is to charge for hosting. I have a reseller account set up at Hostgator. So far, I have been offering a year’s worth of free hosting to my website buyers. In the new year, I will only offer one month of free hosting, and then charge a minimal amount for hosting. After a while, it will add up.

So I hope you have enjoyed this little peek into my plans for next year. Don’t forget to review your own internet business, and make some business plans of your own.

I wish you all the best for next year. May it be happy and prosperous, no matter what you decide to do.

– Pat Doyle

Photo by Natalie Maynor

I have been creating some niche blogs and selling them on Sitepoint. I might soon do the same with other (non-blog) websites.

So far, I have been selling them in the Startup Web Site section.

It has been going ok, but it takes a while to create the content for the sites. That’s why in the future I might do sites without articles, as they will be faster to create. Ironically, the sites without articles will be easier to maintain, as they will be updated automatically.

I will try and remember to post links to my auctions in the sidebar of this blog, in case you are interested in any of the sites.

By the way, I have not been online or posting as much as I would like. I am beginning to wonder if a blog is the best way to go, in my marketing efforts. I guess I am rethinking my business strategy.

I might go more towards having my best advice in an email newsletter. I have not created a newsletter for this blog since I moved to my new domain name of patdoyle.com. I will try to do that soon so that I will have a way to contact you with tips and stuff without having to write a whole blog post every time.

Still, it is nice to have the blog as a “home base”, so I will certainly keep it around, even if I don’t end up posting very often. We’ll see. Try to bear with me as I work these things out. I have been having some issues in my personal life as well, so these things have been taking more time than expected.

Anyway, check out my auctions on Sitepoint. If you are good at creating websites, selling them on Sitepoint can be a way for you to earn some money. If you are not good at creating websites, you can look on Sitepoint for websites to purchase.

- Pat Doyle

Photo by The Consumerist

Well, I did it, and it wasn’t too bad. (Except for this - see update below.) I moved my blog from www.patbdoyle.com to www.patdoyle.com (without the “b”).

The hardest part was upgrading to the latest version of WordPress - I hadn’t done that in a while. Somehow I lost all my categories, but that’s ok. I had lost them a while ago when I tried upgrading before. I’ll just put them back later.

I moved from DreamHost to Hostgator too. Hostgator has Cpanel, which Dreamhost does not have. If they both would have had Cpanel, it would have been even easier.

So here is what I did to move the blog.

1. I copied all the files in my root directory (all the files under patbdoyle.com) to my hard drive, using FTP.
2. I backed up my WordPress database to my hard drive using the “export” function in phpMyAdmin on Dreamhost. This is where Cpanel would have been easier - you can just go to “Backups” and do a database backup in Cpanel.

   There are a lot of settings in phpMyAdmin that I did not know what to do with. So I just followed the instructions in the WordPress documentation: http://codex.wordpress.org/ Backing_Up_Your_Database. That worked just fine.

3. The database backup was in zipped format, so I unzipped it on my hard drive.
4. I opened the database file with Notepad++, my favorite text editor. You could use plain Notepad too. I did a search and replace, changing “patbdoyle” to “patdoyle”. This changed all the URLS from patbdoyle.com to patdoyle.com.
5. Now here is where I did something weird. Because I used phpMyAdmin to backup the database, I should have used phpAdmin on the new domain, to restore the database (using the “import” function). Instead, I tried using the “Backups” option in Cpanel, where you can restore a database.

   This did not go very smoothly due to the differing formats. Lesson learned - do the restore the same way as the backup. If you can go from Cpanel to Cpanel, this is easy. If not, then go from phpMyAdmin to phpMyAdmin. If you do use Cpanel, make sure you zip the file up again first. Otherwise the restore won’t work.

6. Now go to the files you have downloaded using FTP, and edit the wp-config.php file. (I used Notepad++ again. Or you can use Notepad.) You want the DB_NAME in the wp-config.php file to match the database name that you created. Hostgator puts your username as a prefix on the database name, so I had to add the prefix to the wp-config.php file.

   You will also need to look at DB_USER and DB_PASSWORD in this file. These need to match the database user and password that you are going to create in the next step. If your host uses a prefix, then put it there.

   Also, look at the DB_HOST. Most hosts just use ‘localhost’ as the hostname, so that is what I had to put here. Dreamhost uses something else, like ‘mysql.patbdoyle.com’. If both hosts use ‘localhost’, you will not have to change this.

7. Now, in Cpanel on the new domain, go to “MySQL Databases”. You will see there is already a database there, because we already imported/restored it in a previous step. But we still have to add a user. Make sure the username and password match what is in the wp-config.php file. Then, after you add the user, you have to add the user to the database (on this same screen, just scroll down a little). Check the box for ALL privileges.
8. Ok, we are done with the database, but now we still have to move all the other files to the new domain. These are the files you copied from the old domain to your hard drive using FTP. Now we will use FTP again to copy these files to the new domain. Note: For Hostgator, you put all these files in the public_html folder. Make sure you copy the version of wp-config.php that you modified with the correct database information.
9. Ok, you are done! If you did everything correctly, you should be able to log in to your new wordpress blog using the same username and password that you used on the old domain.

   I did have to make a few other tweaks where I had hard-coded the old domain name in some of my theme’s files. I also had to register the new feed with Feedburner and replace the name of the feed on the new blog.

10. After that, I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress. I was quite a few versions behind, so this was a lot of work. I am not going to go into this here, since it has nothing to do with transferring your domain. Just a word to the wise - deactivate all your plugins before you start the upgrade process. They are not kidding when they tell you to do this.

    Hopefully you will have kept up with the WordPress upgrades all along, so you will not have to do a major upgrade all at once.

11. The last thing you will want to do, after checking to make sure your new blog is ok, is to redirect your old blog to your new blog. To do this, open the .htaccess file at your old blog and put the following commands right at the top of the file. (What comes after these commands will not matter, but I would not delete the rest of the stuff, so it will be easier to undo the redirect if you need to - just delete the first few lines to undo it.)

    Here are the redirect commands:

    Options +FollowSymLinks
    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

    Replace “newdomain.com” with your new domain name.

    Don’t ask me what all this means. I just googled it, and I found this, and it works.

By the way, the only reason this blog transfer was so easy was that earlier that day, I was copying a WordPress blog I had just created, for a different reason. I had to go through all this with that blog, but it was a lot harder because of the trial-and-error I had to do. I hope I have saved you from some of that trial-and-error. Once you have the steps down, it is pretty easy.

These instructions might not make much sense now, but if you are in the middle of it, and looking at the files and your Cpanel, it will make a lot more sense. Also note, if your host does not have Cpanel, that’s ok. Use whatever your host has. The steps will be much the same. I just think Cpanel makes it easier because it is uniform - a lot of hosts use it.

You can use the same steps if you are just moving your blog to a different host, but keeping the same domain name. You can just skip the steps of replacing the old domain name with the new one, and of doing the redirect at the end.

I hope this post is useful to somebody. Some people requested it when I announced that I was going to be moving my blog.

Update: Just when I thought everything went smoothly, I got a rude awakening. My automatic Blog Broadcast emails from Aweber sent out 10 emails at once - for the past 10 posts of my blog. I quickly sent out an apology email, but two people still unsubscribed. I can’t blame them - who would want to get 10 emails in a day from the same blog?

When I redirected the old blog to the new one, the feed also got redirected. Since the Blog Broadcast in Aweber works from the feed, it thought that there were 10 new posts to broadcast. Lesson learned: Turn off your automatic blog broadcasts before you redirect your blog! My apologies again to those who got all those emails

- Pat Doyle

Photo by NEOPIXX

I feel bad for the people that take up those challenges, like creating 30 sites in 30 days, or creating 100 sites, etc. I am not trying to target any one campaign, because I don’t remember the details of any of them, but they all involve creating a large number of sites in a short amount of time.

The only thing these challenges accomplish is to wear people out and discourage them. If you don’t know much about creating moneymaking websites, how is repeating the same mistakes 100 times going to help you?

I could understand it if you created one site, learned from your mistakes, and did better on the next one. Then creating multiple sites could actually help you. But if you are just mass-producing sites, and they are all the same, then creating a huge number of them will not help.

The theory is that if you can earn $1 per day from each site, then creating 100 sites will get you $100 per day. Well, I have news for you: it is very hard to get $1 per day from each of 100 sites, unless you know what you are doing. 100 times zero earnings is still zero.

So what should you do? I suggest that you should concentrate on one site at a time, until you become accomplished at creating moneymaking sites.

Once you know how to create successful money-earning websites, then you can start to produce more of them at a time. But at first, while you are still learning, create one site, and get it to earn some money.

You will learn more doing one site than you will from burning yourself out on 30 sites at once. With one site, you can keep trying different things, and watching the results. You will be able to promote one site better than you can promote 30 sites.

When you are commenting on blogs, you will know which site to put in the “website” field of the comments. You will get attached to your “baby” and be happy to promote it to others.

You will have time to make a decent site that others will want to visit. You will be able to participate in social networking and promote the site. You will be able to concentrate on creating content and getting links for one site.

Just try this for a month or two. Pick your favorite one of your sites, or if you don’t have any worth building on, then create a new one. In either case, just focus on that one site. Post to it as often as you can. Get as many good links as you can. Test out different ad placements. Test out ways of getting more visitors.

Even if you are in the sandbox, work on the site. Unless you are in a competitive field, you will probably be out of the sandbox within 3 months. Meanwhile, you have built a solid site. After a while, you can put AdSense on the site, if that is your business model. You will start to see money coming in, because you have built a good site and are getting visitors.

Won’t it give you more confidence to have one good site that is actually earning you money than 30 or more sites that are not earning anything?

Once you have figured out how to make money from one site, then you can start to build more of them. At least by that time, you will know what you are doing. Instead of repeating the same mistakes with each new site, you will be building the new sites on a strong foundation of knowledge, and they should do well also.

What do you think? Agree, disagree? I think there will be some strong opinions on either side of this issue.

- Pat Doyle

Photo by alfons069

I don’t believe that we have seen the worst of this financial crisis yet. No matter whether the bailout bill finally passes or not, this country is in for some tough times. There will definitely be job losses and the housing market will continue to go down.

What does this mean for your business?

First of all, if you don’t have an internet business yet, why not start one in your spare time? This way, you will have a jump start on a new business, just in case you lose your job. I think this is definitely worth thinking about.

If you already make a living online, then this is the time to make sure that you are diversified. Don’t put all your eggs into one basket. The online world is not immune to what is happening in the economy. There will definitely be changes coming.

Some niches and business models will be more affected than others. You or I can guess at which ones might do better, but it’s hard to be sure. That’s why it’s important to have multiple sources of income, or at least be in multiple markets. If all your income is coming from one place now, start thinking about how else you can make money.

I believe that as more people lose their jobs, more people will be trying to replace their income by attempting to make money online. This could be an opportunity if you are selling products to help these people. On the other hand, this could also cause more competition in the “make money online” area.

If you are an AdSense publisher, then your results will probably vary by niche. Yes, I’m sure Google and AdSense will still be around for a long time. But the particular advertisers that are advertising on your blog might go out of business or just cut back on their advertising. But others might do more online advertising, finding that to be more cost-effective than advertising offline.

As people start trying to save money, they will be spending less. There are some things that people always spend money on, and other things that will be vulnerable. I’m not in the gambling niche at all, but I think gambling and other forms of escapism will grow larger as times get tougher. People will want to forget their troubles.

Also, luxury items might not do badly, if rich people continue to spend. After all, it is mostly the poor and middle class that will be really hurting in a financial downturn.

If you create information products, think about what kind of information people will need in tough times. If you guess correctly, you might do really well.

I think your guess is as good as mine, as to what will happen and how best to continue to profit in your internet business. I really think you should start thinking about it, though. And it won’t hurt to experiment with new things.

What are your thoughts?

- Pat Doyle