OK Folks, another great interview for you.

If you have not already heard of Harrison Gervirtz then I am sure you will be hearing a lot more about Harrison soon.

CHECK OUT THE INTERVIEW HERE:
Interview with Amazing young entrepreneur Harrison Gervirtz

Some fantastic advice - like:

What advice would you give to a Teen Entrepreneur starting their first make money website?

Don’t hire your friends. I have friends ask me for ways to make money & jobs all the time. I don’t like to get my friends involved because it usually ends bad. When I just started out online I would get friends involved & they usually just wasted my time and money

and

For someone new to Affiliate Marketing (a publisher) - who wished to become a successful affiliate, is there anything in particular that you would suggest that they do not do?

Some beginner affiliates tend to go in over their head when they start out. They do this by spending to much time on little things and not just launching the campaign! A Quick Do-Not-Do Tip would be to not spend to much putting emphasis on just one part of a campaign. Make sure you focus on all the aspects of a campaign: The Offer, Your Landing Page, Ads, Keywords, Bids, Negative Keywords, CTR, Conversion Rates, & Tracking/Analytics.

Interview with Amazing young entrepreneur Harrison Gervirtz

Visit Harrison’s blog at http://www.cpashare.com where he shares his unique and entertaining insight into Internet marketing.

Showing Different Affiliate Programs in Different Catagorys

Back in 2006 I was running a tutorial website on Webdesigndev.com and was using Google Adsense to monetize the website but ended up getting banned because back then the quality of traffic I had didn’t meet Google’s standard. I decided that I want to promote affiliate products to earn money. The issue I had was the fact that the site content varied a lot from Photoshop to Dreamweaver, if I want to promote a affiliate product on the site I would have to show the same product site wide. This wasn’t a issue before when I was using Google Adsense because it shows different adverts depending on what the page was about. Instead of this, if someone could type in Google "How to build a website in Dreamweaver" they read the tutorial and then see a affiliate advert at the bottom promoting a membership site for learning photoshop, so that on all Dreamweaver tutorials I wasn’t able to monetize the traffic in the actually blog posts if I didn’t manually add adverts to each one.

Researching for a way around this I found Template Tags/in category which allows you to post a bit of code to show different adverts in different category’s.

So if you take the category number, for Dreamweaver the category number is 6 and copy the code bellow and you need to paste it in your Single.php file where you want to show the advert.

<?php if ( in_category('6') ): ?></p> <p> // Some category specific PHP/HTML here</p> <p><?php endif; ?><br />

You can see the exact code I used to do this bellow.

<?php if ( in_category('4') ): ?><br /> <span class="red_normal"><strong>New! </strong></span><strong><a href="http://webdesignd.lpnow.hop.clickbank.net/" target="_blank">Photoshop Video Tutorials</a> - You Are About To Discover The Fastest Way To Master The Basics Of Adobe Photoshop (With Just 2 Hours Of Instantly Viewable Video Tutorials).</strong><br /> <?php endif; ?><br />

If I was to post this code in my Single.php file then it will show the text "New! Dreamweaver Interactive Video Tutorials - Discover Everything You Need To Know To Build Your Website Step By Step From Start To Finish With This Dreamweaver Tutorial." above the content of the post. You can see a example of this here…

This now means I can monetize not just the Photoshop traffic but the Dreamweaver and Flash traffic to.

I hope this helps, this should definitely help anyone with a website with a wide audience like gadget blogs, you will be able to show different gadget products in different categories.

What can a volcanic island being torn apart from 78 earthquakes a week, surrounded by cold violent water, with little or no natural resources except geothermal heat offer the tourist or the entrepreneur? Surprisingly, more than you can imagine. Iceland has something to teach us all.

How can you get a financial return from the cold, choppy waters of the North Atlantic? Get a boat and charge tourists $200 to get wet, get sick and maybe see a whale.

How can you get a financial return on food when most fruits and vegetables are imported? Make puffin a speciality and fish a staple. And, of course, charge $100 for a meal.

How do you get a financial return on a lava field that cannot support vegetation or housing? Easy, hire a bulldozer and make a track for quad and dirt bikes and charge $200 per hour to use it.

How do you get a financial return on the glaciers that cover nearly half the country? Another easy solution: allow tourists to snowmobile over them and charge each person $500.

How do you get people to pay this? Smile and give them the best service that they could ever hope for.

7 things that Iceland taught me about being a better entrepreneur:

- The ability to speak more than one language. Widening your audience increases your marketability.

- Putting the customer’s needs above time issues. An hour making a customer happy can encourage great word of mouth. Don’t make a customer unhappy bad publicity travels a lot faster than good publicity.

- Greeting everyone with a smile and then greeting every request (no matter how many) with a smile. Answer your emails promptly and offer more information and help than is expected. That extra attention is the way a smile can be generated across the internet.

- Every effort is taken to make sure that problems are resolved ensuring the customers satisfaction and therefore keeping the sale. So what if it takes longer and you have to give extra. If the customer is paying than you are the one making money.

- The ability to find a financial solution to every situation. There will always be times when you struggle, but remember successful people treat obstacles as learning experiences and opportunities to look in different directions./

- Widen your focus. If you sell domains why not sell hosting and web design. If the products you sell are similar enough you can tap into your existing market base.

- The Icelandic people are proud of who they are and where they come from. They love their country and want you – the tourist or businessman – to love it too. They pride themselves on the academic standards that everyone achieves and the creative way people are encouraged to express themselves. In Iceland the worse thing you can be is like another person. When developing your website learn from these people and be proud of what you sell, be creative in your approach and above all else be unique.

Day 1 – Arrival, Tourist Board and Booked Trips, Caruso

Our stay began with a really slow bus ride to our 1930’s Hotel. The Hotel Borg is staffed with very attentive and conscientious people who each speak at least 7 languages.

Day 2 – Whale Watching, Afternoon Shopping, Café du Paris, The Real Italian Food Restaurant

To start our trip of adventures we decided to go out into the North Atlantic ocean to see wales, dolphins and puffins.

Day 3 – Halleif tour guide: 8 glaciers, snowmobiled over one, golden falls, oldest parliament, 9:00 -6:30 Caruso’s again

On Saturday we decided to to hire a tour guide to show us around Iceland, this is the car he turned up in!

We were heading to a glacier around a 3 hour drive away, on route we stopped and saw the oldest parliament buildings in the world. When driving there, there was almost nothing but lava rocks and mountains.When we returned to the car there was a dog walking around, it appears that for the first hour the driver had his dog in a cage in the boot. Being a dog lover we invited the dog to come sit with us for the whole day!

When we arrived at the Glacier we got kitted up and started making our way to the top of it on our Snowmobiles, I managed to get up to 57 k/hour which was very fast for the conditions. Here is a picture of me when we got to the top of the Glacier

Here is a picture of me on my Snowmobile, rock on!

On the way back we stopped for lunch and to see Golden Falls:

Day 4 – Hot Water Spring 1 ½ Hour Hike Straight Up, Quad Bikes, Great Restaurant

In the morning we had planned a 1 ½ hour hike straight up in to the mountains, when we got to there we found a hot water spring which we could go in and bathe. We spent around a hour in it as it was hotter than having a bath! It was great!

On the way back I was speaking to the driver about how we had a few hours to spare and what did he recommend. He suggested quad-biking, which sounded fun to me. He rang up his friends to organise this trip for us and we where taken  privately around mountains and lava rock on some fast quad bikes. I managed to get 82k/h on my quad bike on the way back which I was very impressed with. The friend I was with didn’t drive so fast so I didn’t get to do as much as I wanted but our guide said I could go off and do some jumps and just said “Be Careful”, this is something they would definitely not of been allowed in the UK or America due to safety.

Here is a picture of at half way:

Day 5 – Departure, Blue Lagoon

We decided that we would relax before our flight back to the UK, we decided to go to a spa which beats all other spa’s! Guests enjoy bathing and relaxing in Blue Lagoon geothermal seawater, known for its positive effects on the skin. A visit to the spa promotes harmony between body, mind and spirit, and enables one to soak away the stresses of modern life. The spa’s guests rekindle their relationship with nature, soak up the scenic beauty and enjoy breathing the clean, fresh air.

Tomorrow I will be doing a write up on 7 things that Iceland taught me about being a better entrepreneur.

Just come across this great article by Paul Graham called Start up Ideas We’d Like to Fund - well worth a read I suggest, especially for those of us interested in using New Technology for Older Ideas.

Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund presents 30 ideas that they think is cool - I have to say one or two surprised me, but then when I read Paul’s reasoning, it did make perfect sense.

For example:

Auctions.

Online auctions have more potential than most people currently realize. Auctions seem boring now because EBay is doing a bad job, but is still powerful enough that they have a de facto monopoly. Result: stagnation. But I suspect EBay could now be attacked on its home territory, and that this territory would, in the hands of a successful invader, turn out to be more valuable than it currently appears. As with dating, however, a startup that wants to do this has to expend more effort on their strategy for cracking the monopoly than on how their auction site will work.

AND

Dating.

Current dating sites are not the last word. Better ones will appear. But anyone who wants to start a dating start up has to answer two questions: in addition to the usual question about how you’re going to approach dating differently, you have to answer the even more important question of how to overcome the huge chicken and egg problem every dating site faces. A site like Reddit is interesting when there are only 20 users. But no one wants to use a dating site with only 20 users—which of course becomes a self-perpetuating problem. So if you want to do a dating startup, don’t focus on the novel take on dating that you’re going to offer. That’s the easy half. Focus on novel ways to get around the chicken and egg problem.

They also include an old favourite of mine - Better video chat.

Skype and Tokbox are just the beginning. There’s going to be a lot of evolution in this area, especially on mobile devices.

Talking of mobile devices I did find a link to http://www.heysan.com on their website. Apparently, Heysan! is a mobile web based service that lets you use your MSN, AIM, ICQ, Yahoo and GTalk accounts in your mobile phone - for free! It doesn’t matter where in the world you are, what network or phone model you use, their patent pending technology works no matter what.

The theory is good, I like it, but a challenge for me was that I could not see any obvious way to sign-up / join (but hey, maybe I did not look hard enough) - I can see how I am supposed to sign-in to MSN etc, but really I did not fancy just offering up my username and password just like that, especially when it was not even on a secure page.

Also the link to their Blog says, coming soon and it still says © Copyright 2007 heysan! inc. (surely it would have been updated to 2008 by now?

So I am guessing this is one of the Start-ups that Y Combinator are still in process of funding? Getting launched?

According to their home page - Y Combinator is a new kind of venture firm specializing in funding early stage startups. We help startups through what is for many the hardest step, from idea to company.

We invest mostly in software and web services. And because we are ourselves technology people, we prefer groups with a lot of technical depth. We care more about how smart you are than how old you are, and more about the quality of your ideas than whether you have a formal business plan.

I have just been reading a very interesting essay at PaulGraham.com - all about start-ups

Find the essay here: http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html

I liked the point made in the opening paragraph in particular:

You need three things to create a successful startup:

1) To start with good people,

2) To make something customers actually want,

and

3) To spend as little money as possible.

Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed.

Paul also mentions an “Animal Test” - made me laugh, but I can see it would work

and another interesting point about startups - which I had never thought about was this:

One advantage startups have over established companies is that there are no discrimination laws about starting businesses. For example, I would be reluctant to start a startup with a woman who had small children, or was likely to have them soon. But you’re not allowed to ask prospective employees if they plan to have kids soon. Believe it or not, under current US law, you’re not even allowed to discriminate on the basis of intelligence. Whereas when you’re starting a company, you can discriminate on any basis you want about who you start it with.

Note: You cannot discriminate in whom you employ - but you can pick and choose who you will include as “partners” in your startup

Go have a read at http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html

I had the pleasure of seeing Cameron present at Yanik Silvers Underground 4 in LA - and he did it all without a PowerPoint! Very impressive and inspiring.

Catch the interview here: Cameron Johnson - The BIG YOUNG ENTREPRENEUR INTERVIEW

Enjoy the Interview - my Fav quote of Camerons has to be:

“True prosperity isn’t something you take from the world: it’s something you share with the world.”-Cameron Johnson, You Call the Shots

Cameron also give a great reply to this question:

What is the best advice you have ever been given?

The best piece of advice is to Put Yourself Out There. It sounds simple because it is. Literally go do something and take the first step. Don’t question yourself or make excuses, just get started. Start small, focus on doing good for others, and the rest will follow. Know your competition better than they know themselves and pay attention to every detail and every dollar.

Cameron is right - it does sound SIMPLE, but then why are so many of us so reluctant to get started?

Whatever you have been putting off / not taking action on - DO IT NOW!

1. You Are Too Lazy
   If I had a dollar for every time I have heard someone say that they want to create a blog and make money from it, I could probably treat myself to a world-wide jet setting holiday. It is vogue to start blogging and everyone is jumping in head first because they see the monthly income reports of the probloggers and think ‘This would be way easier than work’.
   Most new bloggers are under the impression that making money from blogging is collecting sand at the beach, and when they find out that it requires hard work, a lot of hours and creative thinking, they stop blogging and go back to work. Blogging is just like any business, you have to provide a service, build a network, and convert your customers. But most people wont do this because they are lazy.
2. You Give Up To Easily
   Isn’t this just what you were talking about? Isn’t giving up the same as being lazy? Not really. These bloggers understand that to make their blog a success they need to put in the hard yards. They need to push the pencil and burn the midnight oil, and that is exactly what they have been doing. For the last month they have been writing quality posts, commenting 10 new blogs a day, submitting their posts to social networking websites, promoting their blog like a mad man. Now one month later they are burnt out, have 15 subscribers, 50 uniques visitors a day and ready to give up.
   You see, these are the bloggers that tried so hard but in the end their lack of results started to get to them, and they thought that if they hadn’t had success yet, they probably never would. They let their circumstances dictate their attitude.
   
   
3. Your Content Is Rubbish
   You know the ones I am talking about. These bloggers come wearing many different outfits.
   There is the:
   • Regurgitating Blogger - who justs rewrites what everyone else is talking about
   • Depressing Blogger - who is always failing and never looks at the positives
   • The’ I Failed English’ Blogger - No offense but do you even spell check your posts?
   • The ‘Hand In Every Basket’ Blogger - Do I need to explain?
   • The Criticizer - who is always bagging the latest products and probloggers

   I think you get the idea. Visitors want to be informed, inspired or entertained, if your content doesn’t fit into these extremely broad categories, there is a good chance you blog will be struggling to survive within 6 months.

4. You Don’t Network Property
   Networking is vital if you want to be successful as a blogger. If you are not networking you are basically just going to get search engine traffic - and in the first few months this will be very sparse.
   Set yourself networking goals if you have too. Goals like:
   • Comment 5 new blogs a each day
   • Spend 30 minutes each day posting in forums
   • Write at least one guest post a month
   • Learn how to correctly use social networking website

   A lot of bloggers fail simply because they do not understand how to network properly.

5. You Never Start Blogging
   Maybe the pictures you had of a successful blog with people complimenting you on your efforts was all just in your head. A lot of people will never succeed in blogging only because they never started. People will always make excuses for why now isn’t the right time for them, or why they could never retire from blogging.
   They sad thing is, maybe they could have. Maybe they could make enough money from blogging to retire from. But they will never know.

So do you have what it takes to become a problogger that is able to live off the income their blog generates?

• Are you willing to put in the effort required?
• Will you choose never give up?
• Are you prepared to commit only publishing quality content?
• Are You ready to network like crazy? (The smart way of course)
• And if you haven’t started already - then are you prepared to start?

If you can answer ‘yes’ to all of these, then I have no doubt that you have what it takes to be a problogger.
Success is 1 percent talent and 99% hard work!
————————
This is a guest post written by Tom Sinfield over at StandOutBlogger.com who runs a blog that focuses on training, inspiring and encouraging bloggers to stand out from the crowd and start making money.

Just a quick update to confirm that the Darren Rowse Interview is now online. As is to be expected, Darren excels himself in this Interview

Thank you Darren - one of the really great things about running a website like RetireAt21.com is getting the chance to interview personal hero’s like Darren.

One thing I really like about Darren is how he explains everything so well - hence the success of http://www.problogger.net

This is a his reply to: What are your top tips for writing a successful blog post?

• Start with a need that your readers have
• Help them overcome the need
• Share how you have done it yourself
• Give examples of how others have done it
• Ask readers to share their own experience on the topic

Spot on advice !!

Darren Rowse Interview

The breakdancing sensation will promote the bank’s products aimed at teenagers.

He will take part in TV adverts, his face will appear on five debit cards and he will also design another.

George, 14, said: “It’s absolutely mint. I hope NatWest have enough cards — for all the girls, especially.”

His first ad is likely to include the famous Singing In The Rain routine that won him Britain’s Got Talent.

A source said: “George has been given a lump sum by NatWest which is already enough to change his life.

“If it all works out it will be worth more than £1million. He is also in talks with fashion labels. Things look great.”

Richard Taylor, NatWest brand director, said: “George is incredibly popular among the 11 to 18-year-olds.”

George, of Warrington, Cheshire, will perform at December’s Royal Variety Performance.

Last year’s winner, opera singer Paul Potts, is having a film made about his life by Paramount Pictures.

Source: The Sun

Could you imagine how much money George could have by the time he is 21? What would you do if you recieved a £1 million deal like George did?