You may have seen this formula for success on the Internet thousands of times, but it does not mean it is no longer true. The steps to making money on the internet are:

1. Search for a group of people who need something and are willing to pay for it.
2. Create a website offering this product.
3. Show your page to that group of people.

You may have seen it many other ways, but it is always the same. Find your niche, create your page and get traffic to it. And I am not just talking about creating eBooks to sell. A product can be a page of information (eg membership page), or a blog, etc.

The point is that if you follow all these steps, success must come. No questions about it.

The problems come when we do not focus on any of the steps, or when we try to do everything at once, or when we start to go on reverse instead of going forward. If you start creating a site to sell a product that you think will work well but you have not checked if there is a potential market for it, you may start  to bite your fingers.

One of the dangers of being involved in our community “internet marketers” is that trees sometimes make us lose sight of the forest. For example, you have not spoken of anything other than Web 2.0, Twitter, Facebook, etc.. and it seems that 2.0 is the most important for our business. Well, you have to put things in perspective.

For my 2.0 marketing techniques they are very important, and so I have the blog you’re reading my Twitter account, Facebook, etc.. I enjoy being in contact with you and I use it to promote my products, but also to receive feedback and know what you my fans and friends think.

But there is one very important thing that should not be overlooked: I ALREADY HAVE A PRODUCT! (or several:))

My blog and pages that you know are about internet marketing  niche the same niche that you belong too as do all my readers and followers in Twitter. So web 2.0 is the tools I used.

But the first step will be always identify your niche market BEFORE you start advertising.

What do you mean ? That should not create a Twitter profile?

NO! I’m not saying that. Just the opposite. If you are an entrepreneur / a very good idea is to do setup a Twitter profile now and become part of our community, “Mark-twittered. But you must approach it with different eyes. If you don’t already have a product, our community is going to help you “learn” not to promote. Thanks to the good people you meet around here, you will be able to question and the answer you kindly.

For example, if you created a new page to sell “custom shirts, you can ask the community to see what they think about the design, sales letter, etc.. But you will not get any sales in the community. Unless you are marketing your products …

Which brings me to one of the most common errors: start with the niche of “make money online”. It is normal, you begin to follow the marketing gurus, and it is natural to start selling such products. But what a mistake! More complicated is the niche that exists! As I said many times: find another niche in which you can apply all the techniques you learn in this one! You will do much better.

But as always, this is my particular view on the matter. What do you think? Leave a comment below. Thank you!

Interesting reading. Especially for those of us who have been making a living in cities that are shown with numbered dots.

North America’s High-Tech Economy: The Geography of Knowledge-Based Industries ranks the top high-tech centers in the U.S., Canada and Mexico in their ability to grow and sustain thriving high-tech industries.

The top 25 markets are listed on the left, showing the 2007 and 2003 rankings. An interactive map of the metros is directly below and scroll down for a full listing of all 393 high-tech centers ranked.

http://www.milkeninstitute.org/nahightech/nahightech.taf?rankyear=2007

Computer forensics has always fascinated me, and occasionally when computer forensics comes up in the news, they focus on basic stuff like inspecting some one’s Internet Explorer cache to see what they have been visiting on the Internet. A case came up like that locally here – a husband was accused of drowning his wife in the bath tub, and they found his browser history full of links to adult-cheater web sites. This provided evidence that he had an apparent motive to kill his wife.

I suspect that such a candidate would need to have a mastery of a lot of wide ranging technical areas, including:

Knowledge of popular, and niche, encryption software (which hides evidence)
Knowledge of all of the common email clients
Knowledge of all of the common web mail clients
Ability to undelete files and to recovery hard drives that have erased but possibly intact evidence on them
Knowledge of hacking techniques for networks (itself an enormous subject)

This would be a huge undertaking for someone to study, even if they had a great technical background already.

I think that in real life, most forensic jobs in the IT area use reformed “black hat” hackers with criminal backgrounds who already really, really understand the culture and the tools.I tend to think that a regular degreed professional wouldn’t really know many aspects of the culture without immersion in hacker society for awhile.

Then there’s the area of application:

Criminal investigations
Financial investigations (insider trading, etc)
National security
Network security for corporations and institutions

From a business point of view, I’m wondering what constitutes ‘your online presence’? There’s your own site (personal and business), Linkedin, Facebook, posting on related forums, Twitter, YouTube, ‘news flashes’ – newspaper or online, etc.

How far do you go and what information do you provide?

I’ve seen successful business’s that disclose virtually nothing personal while others have names, pictures, video, their Linkedin or Facebook stuff, etc.

It seems that some want to be found or heard while others either don’t have the need or want to be “personally” identified.

I’m wondering what our readers here are doing and why. Also have you gotten any measurable results from your efforts?

I was reviewing my connections and noticed that some people “embellish” more than others.

Case in point was a listing for “Sr. .NET Developer” for our catchall MS guy. He did all the misc tasks like baby sitting our daily builds, some networking, a bit of programming and put up a basic website using DotNetNuke. Nothing that I would assign that title to but there it is.

“Sr” describes his age better than his experience, while the “.Net Dev” part I’m sure came from installing and setting up DNN. What gets me is that several jobs later; he’s now an “IT Director”. All I can say is WOW? I know this guy and while he’s good, apparently talk and BS carry you further than actual experience or know how because he’s not that good.

So how much do you embellish? After all a resume is more about advertising than a biography and as long as it’s not an outright lie, who can dispute it?

Yes, I’m rethinking what my resume says. Not looking to BS but to enhance my experience.

Before you allocate time and funds in marketing, be sure to take the time to research your market.

Terrific source for marketing info, from the ‘big boys’ themselves, the AMA!

They have a free registraion/membership that will give you access to great news info — not sports & weather, but subjects you select & narrow down to your specific needs!

I received my first email today, with The DMA Guidelines for Ethical Business Practice and a few other good links.

Go ses the ‘toolkit’ with tons of free & cheap marketing templates: ROI, Press Kit materials, and ‘bloilerplate’ templates like business plan outlines — tons more!

I downloaded 13 templates last night for $1.99!

Go visit, I think you’ll like it! I may even sign up for the real AMA membership, even tho it is about $130 per year, seems to be a valuable service.

Basic info, easily explained from entrepreneur magazine as well, I don’t love the magazine, but every once & awhile I find the site has little gems like this one — they are focusing on marketing plans all June, so check it out now while it is still there.

People are mostly satisfied with their online accomplishments but sense there is something more they could be doing to improve their website’s marketing potential. It’s probably a small thing or two they could do and it’s been nagging at you for weeks but with the chaos of other distractions, they just haven’t found the time to do them. Here are three things they can do quickly to increase the search engine marketing potential of your website.

Sign up for social media. Get involved with colleagues and communities found at Linked In, Flickr, MySpace or some other such social network. It only takes a few minutes to sign-up and establish an account.
Provide more contact and address information. There are two primary places contact information. The first is the obvious contact us page and the second is in the footer section found on most sites.

Perform a gentle audit of the website. This should be done at least four times a year. Go through the site and make notes of all the little things that require changing. You are most likely looking for minor alterations, not a full scale redevelopment.

Copywriting and link exchange is also very important actually. This is the what I always did to improve my sites or blogs to getting better and better. If you focus on it that become really easy to do. If you dont know just find out this info from google or any search engines. Trust me it will help you a lot.

This is a list of the top 100 software companies in the world.

Now I am researching a theory that would be valuable if I am right.
So I am trying to prove it wrong to be sure.

Basically it is that it is necessary for a software company to have someone who understands programming as the CEO or someone very close to him.

I thought I found one – Autodesk – that fit this but I remembered something I once read about the company culture that accounts for its success.
I’ll give the details some other time its very interesting.

If you know of any of these companies (100 Percent or close to that revenue from software) that doesn’t have these conditions please mention it.

It’s interesting looking at a list of the biggest software companies of the 1980’s and the only ones left are Oracle and Microsoft which were run for many years by Larry Ellison and Bill Gates who were both programmers.
The others all went off the track at one time or another and ever since Bill Gates has left the Management of Microsoft in the hands of a sales guy Microsoft seems to have trouble staying on track lately.

Bill Gates was amazingly technical. He understood Variants, and COM objects, and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date functions. He didn’t meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn’t bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual, programmer.

Watching non-programmers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf.

“It’s ok! I have great advisors standing on the shore telling me what to do!” they say, and then fall off the board, again and again. The standard cry of the MBA who believes that management is a generic function. Is Ballmer going to be another John Sculley, who nearly drove Apple into extinction because the board of directors thought that selling Pepsi was good preparation for running a computer company? The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don’t understand. source