There’s an increasing number of people that have created profitable online businesses by building a personal brand. If you can become someone that people know, like and trust to talk about a particular subject, there’s a ton of opportunity to create an income stream surrounding your personality and the content that you product. There are …
Every Wednesday morning, I spend an hour with 20-30 other entrepreneurs at event called 1 Million Cups at the Sioux Falls Design Center. I enjoy hearing speakers every week and pelting them with questions during the Q&A time. Before the event begins and after the event ends, there’s typically 15 to 20 minutes of time …
Every January, I help coordinate a Financial Peace University class at my church. The class shows people how to create a budget, get out of debt, setup proper insurance, plan for retirement and make other important financial decisions. All of the teaching in the class is about how to better spend money you already have, …
One of my company’s largest revenue streams is running contextual ads from Google AdSense. Our network of financial news websites garners approximately 3 million page views per month and we’ve found that AdSense is an extremely effective way to monetize our audience. Recently, I was searching for a good article about AdSense optimization tips and …
Over the course of the last 3 years, I’ve put a lot of effort into perfecting the opt-in mechanisms on my website. At any given time, I’m usually running 2-5 tests on my sales funnel to see if there’s a better way to get more customers from one step to the next. I know that …
I’ve made it a point to get better connected to the entrepreneurial community in the city I live in within the last year (Sioux Falls, SD). I’ve been going to a lot more events, have sponsored a few different things and have made some great connections by buying people lunch. As a natural consequence, my …
One of the foundational principles that I use in my business is that you should always be testing. You should continually try out different ways of doing things to see if you get better results. Consider every step of the process that your potential customers need to take before they actually become customers. If you …
A couple of weeks back, I had the opportunity to travel to Las Vegas for an event called Rhodium Weekend. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect going into the event, but there were a lot of people that I knew online attending the event that I was looking forward to meeting in person, like …
Whenever someone asks me what I do for a living, I have a hard time explaining that I publish an investment newsletter, operate a press release writing and distribution business, offer a service to help animal shelters to raise money and build educational training products for golfers. The various businesses that I’m involved in have …
When I was eleven years old, I spent a lot of time playing Sim City 2000 and its sister games, such as SimTower, SimCopter and SimEarth. I even made a website called “SimWeb” hosted on GeoCities that had cheat codes, saved games and demo downloads for my favorite games. One day, I had the idea …