How long have you been trying to make money online?

0-3 months (27%)
3-6 months (14%)
6-12 months (13%)
1-2 years (13%)
over 2 years (33%)
Total Votes: 175

I found it very interesting that 1/3 of the people reading my blog have been trying to make money online for over 2 years. I would have expected that number to be lower. It wasn’t too surprising at all that over half (54%) of you have been trying to make money online for less than a year. However, I did expect that number to be slightly higher.

The results of this poll show to me that the audience of this blog is split pretty evenly between beginners, intermediate and advanced level Internet marketers.

What do you think of these results?

PS. My friend Daniel at Daily Blog Tips, created a similar poll with a different question. Go check out his poll by clicking here. I am interested in the results of both of our polls.

What is your favorite way to learn new things?

Here are the full results of the poll:

Video (36%)
Doing it myself (30%)
Online Articles (15%)
Ebook (11%)
Audio (3%)
Other (4%)

Video Wins BIGTIME!

I was surprised by the results. I expected the results to be a bit more even, because I personally prefer to learn via audio. I love to grab mp3s, put them on my ipod, and learn that way. It’s a real convenient way for me to learn, without being tied down to a computer or TV. However, most of you preferred video learning to any other type of online learning.

I am definitely going to start using video more in my business. I joined Web Video University to learn more about producing quality videos. It’s a four week course and so far it looks pretty cool. I will do a full review when I get through all the lessons. You can click here to check out Web Video University for yourself.

Besides video being such a big winner, I was also surprised that “doing it yourself” got so many votes. I learn by doing also, but I was surprised by how many people chose that over the other methods.

Anyway, the bottom line is that if you are doing any online training (especially in the Internet marketing niche) you should definitely provide online video training to your customers.

Take our latest poll below and let us know!

PS. I will talk about the results of our last poll pretty soon…

Please let me know by taking the poll below!

How much money do you want to make online every month?

Please, take the poll below and let us know:

How old are you?
Under 18: 16 votes (15%)
18-24: 50 votes (46%)
25-34: 19 votes (18%)
35-49: 19 votes (18%)
Over 49: 4 votes (4%)

Total Votes: 108

The results are about what I expected and very similar to the results you get when using the Microsoft demographics tool and type in “make money online” as the search term. In fact here are the results you get from it:

Under 18: (9.82%)
18-24: (33.93%)
25-34: (28.57%)
35-49: (22.77%)
Over 49: (4.91%)

It’s not surprising that most of you reading this blog are under the age of 34 because, quite frankly, people my age and older are much less likely to have the time or desire to make a living online. Also, the younger you are the more likely you are to be on the Internet and to be net savvy. These are important points to remember when you are marketing online.

Be sure to do the demographic research in your niche first. Never assume anything. There are going to be some niches with older demographics. However, in general you will find a younger crowd online. This is VERY important to remember if you want to make BIG money online.

I know what demographic tools say about this industry, but I was just curious…

How old are you?

Are you older than me, younger, the same age?

Take the poll below and let me know!

Take the poll below and let me know what you are interested in:

How Much Money Would You Be Willing To Sell Your Blog For?

48 of you answered the poll and here are the interesting results:

1-10,000 dollars (23%)
10,001-20,000 dollars (2%)
20,001-30,000 dollars (19%)
30,001-40,000 dollars (4%)
40,001-50,000 dollars (0%)
Over 50,000 dollars (38%)
I Would Never Sell It (15%)

The most popular option was 50,000 dollars or more. I have to be honest with you, from a pure business standpoint most blogs aren’t worth over 50,000 dollars. In fact, most are worth under 15,000 dollars. Over half of you (53%) said you would either sell your blog for over 50,000 or not sell it at all. Wow! I think that just shows how personal blogs are and how attached we as bloggers are to our blogs. I was a bit surprised by the 15% of you who said you would never sell your blog… never??? If someone gave you a million dollars you wouldn’t sell it?

Does anything from the poll results surprise you?

There’s more than one way to publish an ezine, and I’ve seen several of them before. Here are some of the common ones, and I’d like to hear from you.

1. Text-only: This is the one I use for my blog summary newsletter. They’re easy to make and don’t cause any real trouble with spam filters unless you’re using words like ‘Viagra’. The down side is that they’re not terribly fancy. By the way, if you do publish a scam online pharmacy newsletter, please leave the URL so I can avoid it.


2. HTML: This is the type sent by the big companies. Pretty pictures and formatting, but can cause trouble with spam filters and image blocking. You can really go to town with one of these, and would be worth it if you could get it through.


3. Summaries with link lists: I’ve seen a lot of this format lately, and used it when I’ve had articles too big or picture-loaded to send in straight text. The ezines are on a web page, and the emailings are a list of hyperlinks going to the pages there. They may include some opening text and I’ve even seen some come with tables of contents and pictures.


4. Summaries with a link: Similar to the one above, but the newsletter is all at the same link. So only one is included with the emailing.


5. List-only: You don’t publish an ezine. You just collected a list from a product you’ve sold, and periodically send out solo ads to it.


6. Something else: You don’t care about the conventions and do something completely different. If this is you, I encourage you to comment and tell me what it is because I like originality.

Don’t be shy. Tell me what your favorite ezine format is and why.

He wanted me to get back to him with a price, so I had to do some pricing research. I have to say that I was a bit disappointed with the prices that blogs normally sell for. From doing research, it seemed like fair market value for the blog would be somewhere between 12,000 and 30,000. When I looked at my current plans and made a realistic estimate at next years profits from this blog I came up with a higher number than 12,000-30,000. So, I went ahead and asked for a price that was over 30,000 dollars. I don’t want to give specific numbers in case someone else offers to buy my blog in the future. Also, the number I gave was higher than the number I would have taken.

I personally just couldn’t see selling this blog for it’s fair market value, because of the plans that I have for it. If he had made an offer at the upper end of it’s fair market value, I would have seriously considered it. I am glad he didn’t make an offer that was in my “I don’t know” range. He made it quite easy to turn down the offer.

The price I ultimately asked for was pretty close to the numbers being discussed in the sale of the Blog Herald. The potential buyer let me know that on average he was buying similar blogs to mine for under 10,000 dollars. He actually, gave me an exact number, but I don’t want to reveal it.

That’s when I changed from selling mood to buying mood!

I mean if I could buy a bunch of blogs with similar content and traffic to mine for under 10,000 dollars each… I am pretty sure I could make my money back in no time and have a nice network of blogs for fairly cheap. Alternatively, I could buy other people’s blogs, monetize them better and then flip them. That’s actually a business I would really enjoy.

Needless to say I have not sold my blog. However, the conversations I had with the potential buyer did help me to think more about what I need to do with this blog to make it more remarkable.

So, after going through this whole process, I am REALLY interested in knowing…

What would you be willing to sell your blog for?

Take the poll below and/or leave a comment to let me know.

What web 2.0 site has given you the most free traffic?

MySpace (35%)
Stumbleupon (35%)
Squidoo (10%)
other (10%)
Digg (5%)
Del.icio.us (5%)
Netscape (0%)

Total votes: 20

I was a little surprised by the results. I expected more votes for Netscape and less votes for MySpace. I am not surprised at all by Stumbelupon being one of the two top sites voted on. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised, since one of my sites was getting really good traffic from MySpace before I ever signed up for a MySpace account.

Tomorrow I will have a new poll for you and I will be revealing a little bit about the offer someone made this past week to buy my blog. I will also share whether I took it or not…

Recently, I put up a poll asking for input on what type of weekly tip you would be interested in. I am going to talk more about what I am going to do as result of the poll. Here are the final results of the poll:

What topic would you like me to do a weekly tip on?

• Blog Traffic: 36% (9)
• Blogging: 28% (7)
• Affiliate Marketing: 20% (5)
• Website Traffic: 16% (4)

Total Votes : 25

Which Google Adsense advertising placement annoys you the most?

Here are the results:

• At the Top of an Article: 50% (34)
• In the Middle of an Article: 25% (17)
• At the End of an Article: 0% (0)
• At the Top of the Site: 4% (3)
• In the Navigation Bar: 4% (3)
• Don’t care: 16% (11)

Total Votes : 68

I am not sure how this is going to affect my Google Adsense placement.

Personally, I find it most annoying when ads are in the middle of an article, because I have to pause and stop reading in the middle of an article.

Ads at the top of articles make me the most money, so it’s hard to move them. In fact, this poll showed that Adsense placement that makes the most money is also the placement people find the most annoying. Adsense placement that makes the least amount of money is also the least annoying.

So all website owners are faced with the problem of making money vs. annoying our visitors. That kind of makes sense, since nobody really wants to see advertising.

What do you think of the results?

We are having a disagreement on the placement of advertising on blogs and websites.

As I stated in the comments, the thing that annoys me the most are ads that are placed in the middle of an article. Vexation from peevelog likes the ads in the middle of articles. Gary from Blog the Internet hates ads at the top of articles. I have run across some people who hate ALL ads.

That’s one of the problems with advertising in general. Nobody really wants to look at a lot of it, we all have our limits and preferences regarding how advertising is handled, but without it how do businesses make money?

From my personal testing, ads at the top of articles pay me the most money. This is why I currently place ads in the top of my posts using the java script I developed a while back.

So what do you think? Does it matter to you where the ads are placed?

Go vote on my new poll.

Should I add more writers to this blog?

• yes: 73% (8)
• no: 18% (2)
• don’t care: 9% (1)

Total Votes : 11

It looks like most of you are in favor of adding more writers to this blog. I have been thinking about doing this ever since I came up with the blog. I think group blogs are generally easier to get traffic to and obviously make it easier to produce quality content.

I will have to think of how best to handle this. In the mean time, If you are interested in writing on this blog then feel free to contact me.

I have contemplated adding writers to this blog ever since I started it. I was wondering what you thought. Please, let me know by voting.

Now for my previous poll results:

If I start doing interviews on this blog, what would you like to learn about MOST from the Interviews?

• Traffic Building: 33% (3)
• Internet Marketing: 0% (0)
• Blogging: 22% (2)
• Website Conversion: 0% (0)
• Affiliate Marketing: 11% (1)
• Running a Business: 11% (1)
• E-mail Marketing: 0% (0)
• Website Monetization: 0% (0)
• Web Design: 0% (0)
• Joint Ventures: 11% (1)
• Making Big Money Online: 11% (1)
• Copywriting: 0% (0)
• Other: 0% (0)

Total Votes : 9

If I start doing interviews on this blog, I want to know what you would like to learn MOST from the Interviews?

1. Traffic Building
2. Internet Marketing
3. Blogging
4. Website Conversion
5. Affiliate Marketing
6. Running a Business
7. E-mail Marketing
8. Website Monetization
9. Web Design
10. Joint Ventures
11. Making Big Money Online
12. Copywriting
13. Other

Go vote and/or let me know your thoughts (especially if you choose other)...

And thanks again for participating in my previous polls!