Growing Your Ongoing Income
BDSteam.com is where we discuss our experience with systems and techniques for generating ongoing income. Notice we very carefully did not use the word "Business". More and more we have come to realize that when we say "business" we really mean ongoing income. It's been the cause of lots of confusion. We like building our websites, and the income is nice. We have no interest in the commonly touted features of business such as 80 hour weeks, employees, leverage, risk, etc. The truly wonderful thing about the times we live in are that none of that seem necessary.
Online business development is an exciting area in which to be active. We especially like the way online sales systems free us from the high overhead of a retail presence. The fact is, many of our websites would not be profitable if we had to rent space for them and/or staff them with retail hours. With online sales systems these costs are much lower and much more flexible. This site will show you the basis for our approach to online marketing.
Our very first website was a content site for mobile home repair . We first published it in 1998 and it grew over time until it now has over 100 pages of articles about how to repair your manufactured home. Unfortunately, all that old html, and our simplistic ideas about how best to organize a home repair website made it very hard to renovate the site. We finally bit the bullet and ported it to a WordPress platform. We managed to hang on to our rankings by keeping the old pages live but with a 301 redirect to send spiders to the new pages. Over time the old pages should drop off of the indexes and we can remove them from the site.
Visitors who arrive at our collectibles sites usually have two questions in mind:
American Glass Museum is a hub for glass collectors of all kinds where we try to provide answers to these two questions. The museum is a hub which shows examples of many kinds of antique glass using photos from our own collections. It also has links to Ebay auctions for those same items. In this way visitors can make sure they know what they have and then follow auctions to see what the items are worth.
We have started a more ambitious effort to help visitors identify their collectibles and determine their value at our Antique Shop. Our Antique Shop is set up on a powerful shopping cart system because it supports linked tags. With linked tags we can create a system where a visitor who own an unknown collectible can enter some words which describe it (red, glass, vase) and only be shown items which have all these tags. Once they have narrowed their search to similar objects they will see other tags used on those similar items that will help with the identification. Proper identification and use of the right keywords is essential for achieving top dollar when selling.
- Print on Demand is the term used for systems that have the content of a book stored online but a physical copy isn't produced until a sale is made. It is now possible for an author to publish his own work without any upfront costs. He can also control the title, the cover art, the content, the sales venue(s), the advertising and the marketing. If you are a writer, the opportunity for success has never been this good. We have plans for producing our own books, videos, PDF's and other documents for sale directly to our readers.
- The concept of a royalty free stock photo site built on a collection of "long tail" picture domains has not worked out like we hoped. The world seems to be awash in photos given cheap and easy to use digital cameras. I suspect the number of potential paying customers for stock photos is going down along with the rest of the print media world. Individual professionals will be able to create profitable niches, but the kind of sites we planned clearly did not work.
- The same technological advances that have impacted the stock photography business are also at work in the video business. With a $200 dollar video camera and inexpensive video editing software, anyone can learn to produce educational videos on long tail topics of interest. Our mobile home repair site has had a text only page on mobile home construction which has been very popular. We can tell from the questions readers send us that a mobile home video showing how the plumbing, electrical and other systems are assembled would be very helpful for readers.
- Profiting from collectibles is a niche we are learning more about. We have collected a variety of glassware, furniture, porcelain, folk art and other things over the years. Some of them have appreciated, but many have not. Ebay made it obvious that many collectibles which had been considered rare were not. Changing interests among buyers also caused some popular collectibles to loose their shine. Ebay used to be the place to sell collectibles but their fees are high and they make it clear small sellers of collectibles are not the kind of sellers they are interested in. We are building websites from which to sell our own collectibles. By using our knowledge and product descriptions we find we can generate extra income from ads and links to other sites. Hopefully, that will make up some or all of the losses from declines in value.
Online business development is an exciting area in which to be active. We especially like the way online sales systems free us from the high overhead of a retail presence. The fact is, many of our websites would not be profitable if we had to rent space for them and/or staff them with retail hours. With online sales systems these costs are much lower and much more flexible. This site will show you the basis for our approach to online marketing.
Our very first website was a content site for mobile home repair . We first published it in 1998 and it grew over time until it now has over 100 pages of articles about how to repair your manufactured home. Unfortunately, all that old html, and our simplistic ideas about how best to organize a home repair website made it very hard to renovate the site. We finally bit the bullet and ported it to a WordPress platform. We managed to hang on to our rankings by keeping the old pages live but with a 301 redirect to send spiders to the new pages. Over time the old pages should drop off of the indexes and we can remove them from the site.
Visitors who arrive at our collectibles sites usually have two questions in mind:
- What is this thing I have?
- What is is worth?
American Glass Museum is a hub for glass collectors of all kinds where we try to provide answers to these two questions. The museum is a hub which shows examples of many kinds of antique glass using photos from our own collections. It also has links to Ebay auctions for those same items. In this way visitors can make sure they know what they have and then follow auctions to see what the items are worth.
We have started a more ambitious effort to help visitors identify their collectibles and determine their value at our Antique Shop. Our Antique Shop is set up on a powerful shopping cart system because it supports linked tags. With linked tags we can create a system where a visitor who own an unknown collectible can enter some words which describe it (red, glass, vase) and only be shown items which have all these tags. Once they have narrowed their search to similar objects they will see other tags used on those similar items that will help with the identification. Proper identification and use of the right keywords is essential for achieving top dollar when selling.
