A while back I wrote about how helpful outsourcing can be to growing your business and that it can save you a lot of money in the long run. It makes sense to let other people do the tasks that are not your primary concern or that you don’t have the necessary skills to do properly.

In that post I promised to check out oDesk and give my opinion. I haven’t used the site yet but I have taken a look at what they have to offer and can definitely say that it would be a worthwhile consideration if you are looking to outsource some of your business functions.

What I really like about oDesk is that you can place a job or project on the site for free! Which means that there is no risk of you paying and then not finding anyone decent to do the job. They do, however, charge a 10 % commision on the exchange between you and the provider.

Another thing that I quite like is that you have a choice between paying hourly for the work or paying a once off fee, agreed upon at the start, on completion of the project.

If you are thinking of doing some outsourcing, go check them out and let me know what you think!

The first thing that I need to say is that making money is not everything. Not all of us start blogs or websites with the goal of making money as our priority. With that having been said, if you are planning to make money with your website or blog, do you know exactly how you are going to do it? In other words, do you have a plan in terms of what revenue models you are going to use? It’s also good to have an overall plan as i have mentioned before in an earlier post.

The purpose of this post is to try to help you decide how to best monetize your blog or any other website. There are a number of different revenue models available and it’s not all about advertising. Advertising is a without a doubt a great way to make money with your site but it’s not always the most efficient way.

Advertsing-Supported Revenue Model

This model is your basic advertising model in which your website will display an number of banner ads, text ads, google adwords etc. You, being the publisher will be able to decide what kind of ads are displayed, from whom, as well as the sizes of the ads. This type of revenue models is all about getting as many page views as possible so as to get as many clickthroughs on your ads as possible.

Advertising-Subscription Mixed Revenue Model

This model takes advertsing a step further in that you are now creating a second revenue stream through charging a subscription fee for a particular service or product that is received by the customer on a regular basis. As an exampe, many sites charge a monthly fee for access to certain private sections of the site. Now when you combine this with advertising on your site, you are using your site much more optimally.

Fee-for-Transaction Revenue Model

This model is great when your website provides a product or processes transactions on the user’s behalf. There is no need for any advertising to be placed on your website and very often it’s better not to have advertising because it sends a certain message to your customer. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t place ads on your site at all, it’s perfectly acceptable to have a few ads on your site. I’m simply saying that sometimes the impression given to the customer regarding the quality of your service or product, which you are charging for, can be influenced by having “unrelated” advertising all over your site.

Fee-for-Service Revenue Model

This is the final model that I am going to mention, but is by no means the final one available, you can successfully combine all these models and you can come up with new ones too. In this model you charge the customer based on the service that you provide, you could be a consultant or you could be a web designer, it doesn’t matter. Having a blog is a great way to promote yourself or your service and very often no advertising is required to successfully make a profit. However, there is nothing wrong with supplementing you revenue with an additional advertising revenue stream.

The last thing I would like to say is that what I have described above is merely a guideline to help you to be able to plan. I wouldn’t dream of suggesting that you should limit yourself to the above models, all I intended to do was to help you to become aware of the fact that there are many more ways of making money than simply placing banner ads on your website.

I hop that this information was helpful. Please feel free to give your comments or opinions, I love to hear from my readers!

Companies take out insurance policies to protect themselves against fires, theft and acts of God. They make sure that their employees are well looked after and try to keep employee retention high.  When you consider all the effort undertaken to protect these important assets of the company, then the question must be asked… “Why don’t companies look after their reputation?”

If you think your building or your employees are important to your business, then you are correct. A financial or natural disaster can really affect a company negatively, but it is very possible to recover from these, however, a reputational disaster is almost impossible to recover from. There is plenty of evidence to support this and many companies have been ruined due to bad reputation management.  The purpose of this post is to help business owners to understand that money is not everything and that sometimes it is more important to make sure that the reputation of the company remains intact even if it means that you have to go above and beyond what is expected from the customer.

By making sure that your image and reputation are intact and that your company is actually investing in the improvement of its image you can make sure your company is on track to success. Yes, I did say investing… I said investing because it will require effort, time and sometimes money to build your reputation. A good reputation does not guarantee financial success but there is no reported incidence of a good reputation having a negative effect on a company.

You need to make sure that everything you do and say does not harm your reputation because a single bad move can ruin the image of your organization, built up over years and years. A fantastic innovation by an interent marketing company called Quirk is called BrandsEye which is sophisticated software which tracks your online reputation and how your brand is perceived on the internet. If you want to monitor your online reputation then I highly recommend checking out BrandsEye.

I hope that this information is useful to you and that you found it interesting. If you have any opinions or would like to comment, please feel free to do so.

I have been using Google analytics for my websites for over two years and I have to say that it has been an extremely useful tool.  It is enormously powerful in that you are able to view just about any statistic you can think of, regarding your site.

You may ask why you need to make use of a service like Google Analytics. Well, the simple answer is you don’t have to use it, but I would highly recommend using it if you are serious about being successful in your business venture.  You can always achieve better results, in any business activity when you are able to receive feedback.  Now, in a bricks and mortar environment, if you wanted feedback from clients you would need to send them a survey or give them a call, but for us in the online world this process can be vastly simplified through tracking your website.  

If you are able to see how many people are viewing your website and for how long, as well as from what countries, you can serve your customers better. You can identify problems or weak spots on your website and then fix them.  Imagine that you sell apples on your site and that you are tracking your visitors. You notice that many people reach the checkout page and then do not complete the sale.  Obviously this is a problem because something is stopping them from completing the sale, you then need to look at improving or streaming your checkout page to make it easier for customers to buy your apples. Now, if you weren’t tracking your visitors and analyzing the data, you would never have know that there was a problem with the checkout page and you would have continued losing valuable business!

That small example above is the essence of the argument for using website tracking software.  I recommend Google Analytics because it is extremely comprehensive and it is free, plus it can be integrated with a Google Adwords campaign. If you would like to recommend a different website or give a give your opinion, please feel free to leave a comment.

(Images from Google Analytics)

If you’re thinking of starting your own business but lack the skills to do the design, programming or anything else you might need, you may want to think of outsourcing. I have come across some really great websites which I have used to great effect.

ScriptLance is an excellent example of an IT Outsourcing website where you can find just about any skill that you need. What’s great about this website is that you get relevent experts to bid on your specific project and then you can choose who you think has the best skills to complete your project. It’s a great website to use if you are on a budget.

Elance is another example of a very good outsourcing website, it covers a quite a bit more than just IT, you can have business cards designed, pamphlets and most other design elements you might need. This site caters more for individuals with a greater budget and more specific requirements.

Well, those are just two examples of the types of websites out there. If you know of any other great sites out there and would like to reccommend them, just let me know or add a comment below.