Harrison Gervirtz, Teen Entrepreneur

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.

As you all know I have been working on my new project Webdesigndev.com quite a lot. Since launching it I have been working on some cool ways to monetize the site.

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.

Some off you knew I had booked a short trip away, others didn’t. My trip to Iceland was great fun and I will definitely be visiting Iceland again soon!

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.