Man oh man…what a tough choice. How is one supposed to select something knowing that either choice is right? It’s one of those “there is no wrong answer” type questions that my professors ask from time to time and it is my responsibility to convince them that my choice is the better of the two. This time I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place and need to cast my vote of support for either Tyler or Gyutae. It’s like choosing between your favorite movie or your favorite song…it’s a difficult choice for sure!

The Contenders

Tyler “the man, the myth, and the legend” Cruz has been my “coach” these last few weeks, has provided me with some valuable tips to make my site better, has given me the awesome opportunity to make guest postings on his site, and has really inspired me to be a better blogger in general.

Gyutae “nice guys finish first” Park has also been influential in my blogging sphere as of late. Gyutae is proving to be a marketing maven and has been able to generate huge buzz for his site by giving away 1 review (valued at $450) on John Chow’s website, and has brought traffic to his and others’ sites by offering free blog audits to anyone who makes 10 genuine comments on his blog. Gyutae is a genuine nice guy and is rapidly making a good name for himself in the blogosphere.

The Prize

This is where the contest gets interesting. As with every contest, there seems to always be a winner and a loser with the winner getting a big prize. Think the Superbowl, the BCS Championship, the World Series, the World Cup, Wimbledon, World’s Longest Fingernail, and so on. The winner gets something for winning.

With this contest, the winner doesn’t really win anything but the voters are the ones who win. If you vote for the winner, you enter for a chance to win up to $100 paid for by the LOSER of the competition.

In addition to perhaps winning $100, each candidate is giving away a freebie to sway voters one way or another. Gyutae is giving away a free T-shirt to his first 30 voters and Tyler is giving away 100 free Entrecard credits to each of his voters. Some schwag for a vote can’t hurt, right?

My Vote

Unlike big government elections, I feel as though my vote actually counts in this race, and it is with a great degree of difficulty that I cast is. The aforementioned candidates are both very deserving of my vote. This is not a popularity contest nor is it a measure of the quality of the website. I am not voting on the basis of monthly earnings nor am I voting on the basis of friendship. I am, however, voting for the candidate with whom I can relate the most, I am voting for the guy who started his blog at the same time that I started mine and I am voting for the guy that makes me feel like I can reach my goals just like he is reaching his.

Also, since I like movies and sports where the underdog is triumphant, I am voting for Gyutae’s Winning the Web. I know that Tyler has some tricks up his sleeve and like the Chow vs. Shoemaker RSS contest, Tyler will probably unleash the hounds closer to the end of the contest.

How are you currently making money online? Are you doing well what you do “just because” or do you have a plan of action? Do you keep an active watch on your stats as well as trends in your niche? If you’re like I was, you probably had all of your eggs in one basked at one point or another, and you may still have only one plan to make money online. After the performance of my main website started to decline, I had to go into panic mode for a little while and try to figure out what I could do in order to start making some cash online. The plan is still coming together but instead of just 1 site up and going, I have a total of 6. These sites are a combination of affiliate sites and eBay stores. Their performance has not yet reached close to their potential and I am working on figuring out what it would take to make these sites shine.

If you’ve ever had an income stream online, you’ve probably thought to yourself at one point or another that you really should have more than one way to make money, just in case something would happen to your site. These are 5 reasons to do it now:

1. Trends Change

It should be no surprise to learn that we live in a fickle, materialistic society. People want the latest and greatest things at a moment’s notice, especially when it comes to technology. If you have a website that revolves around technology, you’d better be prepared to act quickly and serve those people who may no longer be interested in your product line.

The same goes with many other niches; health, fashion, automotive, etc. If you are sitting still in an ever changing business environment, a new trend will come up and your site will be left in the dust.

2. Competition Changes

Remember the old way we used to obtain music? Going to the store, shopping the aisles, finding the right genre, looking at shrink wrapped packages (On a side note, why do they have to make CD’s so hard to open? I wonder if a music exec has ever had to open one. I doubt it, else they’d realize how dumb that packaging is.), opening up the CD and popping it in to our CD players or portable Discman’s.

All of a sudden, out of nowhere, comes iTunes and revolutionizes how we listen to music. Now we can buy individual songs or entire albums with the click of a button. Music executives didn’t believe in iTunes or digital delivery, now they’re crying foul and wondering why they’re not selling any more CD’s.

The same can be applied to your website. Things could be going along just fine, then all of a sudden a new competitor arises. You can do one of two things: Prepare your business to tackle the opponent or sit there like a lame duck and blame others when thinss start to go wrong. I suggest the first option.

3. Google Changes

Google is a business baromter of sorts. They claim that the good stuff shows up first and the bad stuff is not displayed at all. Many web business live and die by the rankings given to them by Google.

If you currently just have one site for one product, then you’d better be prepared for a rocky road ahead. Google’s algorithm changes occasionally and if you are not prepared to take the hit, then you’ll be in trouble when changes head your way.

Google search rankings mean everything to some businesses, and unless you’re really good at obtaining one of the top spots, you’ll have to rely on luck and little else to make money online. Prepare yourself, make good websiteS and have a solid business plan to make you money for the long run

4. Stuff Happens

Another reason to have more than one income plan is that, in all honesty, things happen out there that are beyond your control. For example, if you had a site that was somehow making money selling Enron gear, the day they went out of business you too would have been out of business. If you sell health products and the FDA changes stance on them, you’d better be prepared to take a hit.

5. More is Better

If you’ve manage to stay out of trouble, either through luck or preparation, you should diversify your net portfolio because in all honesty, we’re in this for the money. More income streams = more earning potential. More earning potential = more money in the long run.

Prepare yourself, make GOOD QUALITY websites about your niche products, and stick to your guns. Always grow and learn in order to position yourself ahead of your competitors.

Being a new blogger, I have been trying several different tools in order to drive traffic to this website.  Since starting this blog, traffic has been constantly increasing and I will start adding more income streams to this site as more and more people are coming to it!

One too that I use in order to track my metrics is Alexa.  Alexa is “The Web Information Company” and they analyze traffic to all websites and present the traffic in a stock-style line chart. These charts are very helpful, especially because you can compare the performance of different websites to spot trends.  This is helpful especially when considering the purchase of advertising space!

I was a bit surprised when I ran this comparative test between Entrecard and Blogrush.  For those not yet familiar with Blogrush, it is a service similar to Entrecard where you as a blogger place a widget on your site and people use the widget to click through other sites and from other sites to yours.  In principle, Blogrush was pretty cool but I think that it was rushed to launch before the product was tweaked for the blogger’s benefit.  John Reese, the man behind Blogrush is a marketing guy so he created a lot of buzz for Blogrush.  I belive he over promised and under delivered.

As you see on the following 3 chards, Entrecard is outpacing Blogrush in just about every stat.

Reach

Reach is defined as the “percentage of all Internet users who visit a given site. So, for example, if a site like yahoo.com has a reach of 28%, this means that of all global Internet users measured by Alexa, 28% of them visit yahoo.com”.  On the graph below, Entrecard is on pace to pass Blogrush any day now.  That means that more people will be visiting Entrecard than will be visiting Blogrush.

Rank

Alexa defines Rank as the “geometric mean of these two quantities [reach and pageviews] averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users). The three-month change is determined by comparing the site’s current rank with its rank from three months ago”.  What this means is that they take the number of visitors and they take the number of pages that each visitor views.  They find the average and call it “rank”.  Only 2.5 weeks after launch, Entrecard has already passed Blogrush in rank meaning that more people are viewing more pages from Entrecard than from Blogrush.

Pageviews

Pageviews is the simplest of the definitions; pageviews are the “number of pages viewed by Alexa Toolbar users”.  Users who use the Alexa toolbar go to websites and it measures how many pages each users views.  On this category, I think you’ll be surprised by the results.

Check that out!  Entrecard is kicking Blogrush where it hurts!

In summation, Entrecard is doing a fantastic job for bloggers.  They are sending bloggers a lot of traffic, they are providing very cheap (Free!) exposure to bloggers in the form of advertisements on other websites, and they are doing well at promoting themselves while doing all those things for others.  Blogrush, on the other hand, was a premature system that doesn’t really benefit bloggers but it does benefit Blogrush as they use a certain portion of links to make money.  The difference between the two is simple: Blogrush was created for profit and Entrecard seems to have been created as a real useful tool for bloggers.  I’m not sure yet how Entrecard will make money, but for now I’m very satisfied with the service.

If you don’t yet have an Entrecard account, you are missing out on a potentially nice amount of traffic!  Go get one and drop it here on this site!

Last week I wrote about Entrecard, a new social website that I joined in order to increase traffic to this website.  Since joining Entrecard, I must say that I am impressed with its ability to drive traffic to websites.  I have seen the this site’s traffic jump up drastically since I joined.

I think that Entrecard can do the same for you, and that’s why I am starting the very first contest for this website!

Up for grabs will  be at least 100 credits to Entrecard so that you can advertise your site on several other websites.  Advertising starts at just 2 credits, so with 100 credits you can put your site on as many as 50 websites!

Here are the rules:

1. Sign up to my RSS Feed through the email signup form at the top of the page.
2. Validate your subscription by following FeedBurner’s instructions
3. Leave a comment on this post saying that you signed up using the same email that you signed up for the feed.

BONUS CONTEST

If you want to win 500 or more credits to Entrecard, post a link to this post on your blog and make sure to have the anchor text “Make Money Online” pointing to this website.

A winner will be drawn at random by the end of next  week for both contests and the winners will be mentioned on my front page with a link to your own site!

Gyutae Park, creator and blogger at Winning the Web is proving to be quite good at what he does. With a blog just a few weeks older than this blog, he has managed to obtain some main stream exposure and is helping others to get exposure as well.

With a little bit of viral marketing, he has coined a new term: “Blog Hopping“. Park says that this idea of Blog Hopping is a virtual parallel to pub crawling in that you get a lot of people together at one place in order to hang out socially. Park says that it will be a great way to “discover new blogs and ideas, network with bloggers, and help one another out.”

By participating in the blog hop, visitors will read posts, leave comments and hopefully become regular readers of the featured blogs. There’s even a chance for blogs to be featured and to bring in more traffic to their own sites.
I think that Gyutae is doing a great job with Winning the Web; his recent contest to win a “ReviewMe” by John Chow has brought the spotlight on his young blog but he has proven to be up to the task.

If you haven’t done so already, head on over to Winning the Web and give it a read!