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I don’t believe that we have seen the worst of this financial crisis yet. No matter whether the bailout bill finally passes or not, this country is in for some tough times. There will definitely be job losses and the housing market will continue to go down.

What does this mean for your business?

First of all, if you don’t have an internet business yet, why not start one in your spare time? This way, you will have a jump start on a new business, just in case you lose your job. I think this is definitely worth thinking about.

If you already make a living online, then this is the time to make sure that you are diversified. Don’t put all your eggs into one basket. The online world is not immune to what is happening in the economy. There will definitely be changes coming.

Some niches and business models will be more affected than others. You or I can guess at which ones might do better, but it’s hard to be sure. That’s why it’s important to have multiple sources of income, or at least be in multiple markets. If all your income is coming from one place now, start thinking about how else you can make money.

I believe that as more people lose their jobs, more people will be trying to replace their income by attempting to make money online. This could be an opportunity if you are selling products to help these people. On the other hand, this could also cause more competition in the “make money online” area.

If you are an AdSense publisher, then your results will probably vary by niche. Yes, I’m sure Google and AdSense will still be around for a long time. But the particular advertisers that are advertising on your blog might go out of business or just cut back on their advertising. But others might do more online advertising, finding that to be more cost-effective than advertising offline.

As people start trying to save money, they will be spending less. There are some things that people always spend money on, and other things that will be vulnerable. I’m not in the gambling niche at all, but I think gambling and other forms of escapism will grow larger as times get tougher. People will want to forget their troubles.

Also, luxury items might not do badly, if rich people continue to spend. After all, it is mostly the poor and middle class that will be really hurting in a financial downturn.

If you create information products, think about what kind of information people will need in tough times. If you guess correctly, you might do really well.

I think your guess is as good as mine, as to what will happen and how best to continue to profit in your internet business. I really think you should start thinking about it, though. And it won’t hurt to experiment with new things.

What are your thoughts?

- Pat Doyle

Photo by jelene

When people tell you to “be yourself”, what does that mean?

Everyone has multiple aspects of their personality that they show depending on the situation. For example, you might be a very different person at work, with close friends, or with your family.

It is definitely important to be yourself online. People want to connect to a real person, not some fake figurehead. So go ahead and show your personality. But give some thought to which aspects of your personality you want to emphasize.

I got to thinking about this lately as I became active on Twitter. This is definitely a place where you need to let your personality shine through.

One thing I started to notice was people’s profiles. You can have a custom background, and people are putting this to interesting use.

Lately many people are starting to follow a trend of putting a rectangle similar to a business card in their background - see Darren Rowse’s profile for an example.

Contrast Darren’s profile to my profile background, which is an image that I chose just because I love the colors. I thought about putting one of those “business cards” in my background, but then I thought, no, the background I have expresses my personality just fine right now.

At the other extreme, some people have a twitter background that is so busy that you just want to click away before your eyes start hurting too bad! I would not recommend that approach.

It’s funny that as I was thinking about this whole “showing your personality” thing this week, I came across Lee McIntyre’s post, What Does Your Homepage Say About You? He recently changed the theme on his blog. It used to be more brightly-colored and unique to Lee. Now he has a theme that is similar to what I have seen other top internet marketers using.

Lee states that he wants to project a more businesslike image to prospective business contacts. Here is a quote from his post:

Who am I talking about? Well the list of different types of people looking at this blog as a way of ‘measuring’ my business is endless.

Customers, JV partners, potential employees, accountants, government agencies, prospects, suppliers, banks, merchant account provider, and so on.

All these people look at my homepage and what they see and feel feeds into their decision about whether or not they want to continue talking business.

At first, I disagreed with Lee, thinking that it is more important to stand out and be unique than to project a businesslike image.

But now I’m not so sure. The more I think about it, the more validity I see in Lee’s decision. His business revolves around selling information about internet business. If people want to buy information on this topic, they want to buy from someone who is successful. And certainly a more “corporate” image connotes success.

I think it is important to combine the two things - a successful image and your own personality. They are both important in our business.

I might even change my own blog’s theme to project more of an image of success in the future. And who knows, I may even change my lovely twitter background.

In any case, I’m going to continue to show my personality in an appropriate way. Personality is a critical aspect of marketing online.

What do you think? What image or personality do you project online?

- Pat Doyle

Photo by hypertypos

I really have not done much forum marketing so far. Forum marketing is where you promote yourself and/or your products by posting in forums.

You don’t spam the forums by posting blatantly promotional material. Instead, you just contribute helpfully to the forum, and put a discreet link to your blog, email signup, product page or whatever, in your forum signature. People will appreciate your helpful posts, and will check out the link in your signature.

That’s the idea, anyway. I’m sure there is a lot more to it, and some people swear by it.

I heard about a free teleseminar on forum marketing taking place next week (September 15 - 19), so I signed up for it. It is something I could use more information on. Even if you are not available when the classes are being given, they will send registered class members the audio and transcript of each class. You do have to give them your email address to register (of course).

One of the marketers I admire, Lee McIntyre, will be giving the presentation on Monday. The others are Dennis Becker, Willie Crawford, the Rhodes Brothers, and Rob Toth.

By the way, I just started following Willie Crawford on Twitter. Wow, is he busy! I wish I had his energy. He’s a very experienced marketer, so I guess he has a lot of time for all that activity because his basic business probably runs itself by now. He tweeted that he has almost 9,000 posts on the Warrior Forum.

Forum marketing could be useful for niche marketing too. A lot of niches have their own forums. It’s a good place to find people who are interested in the topic.

Here’s the link to register for the teleseminar.

Do you do forum marketing? Does it work for you?

- Pat Doyle

I’m reposting this today to help Dr. Mani’s Heart Kids Tweet-a-Thon:

Please support the kids if you can…

- Pat Doyle

As I mentioned in my recent post on Twitter, I don’t really like being known as “Pat B. Doyle”. I much prefer just “Pat Doyle”. But when I went to purchase my domain name, patdoyle.com was taken. So I decided to brand myself as Pat B. Doyle instead.

It has always bothered me a little, though, and a couple of months ago, I noticed that patdoyle.org was available. I purchased it, thinking that using .org was better than having to stick with the “b” in my domain name.

Checked Into Buying Patdoyle.com

At the same time, I checked again for patdoyle.com, and to my surprise, it was almost ready to expire! I decided to try to get it - then I would have not only my preferred name, but it would be the .com version.

I hope that writing about what I went through to get this domain might help you to avoid some of the pitfalls I ran into.

I am really a newbie when it comes to buying domains that are already owned by someone. It’s not really something I have educated myself on. As you will see, from all the stumbling around I did before I got my domain.

Backordered Domain at GoDaddy

I backordered the domain at GoDaddy.com. They listed an option where you could backorder the domain and they would try to grab it as soon as it becomes available. I thought that was a good idea, although I was not really sure of the details of how they were going to do this.

Domain Expired and Went Up for Auction

So, I waited for the name to expire, which it did. Then, after a waiting period, it went up for auction at tdnam.com. Since I had backordered the domain at GoDaddy, they made the initial bid of $10 for me at tdnam.com. So I guess that’s what I got for the $18.99 that I paid to GoDaddy to do the backorder.

But who knows, they might have had to do more if the domain had not gone to tdnam.com.

I have bought pre-owned domains at tdnam.com before, but I had only purchased “closeouts”, which are domains that no one has bid on. These closeouts can be purchased for $15 ($5 for purchasing the domain and $10 to register it).

One of my big mistakes was not really understanding how the domain auctions worked at tdnam.com. I still don’t fully understand it.

So, I had a bid for $10, which was the starting bid. No one else bid against me right away. Then I had to wait a number of days until the auction ended. I checked it every day, and it was still at $10 and I was the high bidder. They said they would send you an email if someone outbid you.

Unfortunately, I forgot that I would not be at home on the morning when the auction ended, to check on it. In fact, I got so busy, that I forgot to check on it at all that morning.

Lost the Auction!

I checked in the afternoon, and I had been outbid - someone got it for $50! I was so disappointed.

I should have put in a higher bid, like for $200, which I was willing to pay. But I didn’t want to pay $200 when I could get it for $10. I wish they would have had a system like eBay does, where you can put in your maximum bid, but it will just bid the smaller amount for you, unless someone outbids you. I looked for something like this on tdnam, but did not see it. This is where my ignorance really hurt me. If any of you know more about this, please leave a comment with the information so we can all learn from it! Update: See end of post for more info on this.

Checked On the Winner

I checked Whois to see who bought the domain. I use DomainTools to check Whois. They have a lot of other nice tools that I use. I saw that it had been purchased by someone in the Netherlands who owns over 4,000 other domains. And his name was not Pat Doyle!

So I figured he bought it to sell. The actual domain just went to a parked page at GoDaddy. There was no link for purchasing it, so I gave up. I thought if I contacted him, he would know I really wanted it and would jack up the price. I resigned myself to using patdoyle.org instead.

Decided to Purchase from Auction Winner

Last weekend I was getting ready to start transferring this blog over to patdoyle.org, when I decided to check on patdoyle.com one more time.

This time, the domain was parked at Sedo.com, and there was a link saying “this domain is available for purchase”, or something like that. So I followed that link and it was for sale for $1,000.

I could not afford $1,000 right now, but the minimum bid was $200, so I bid $200. Later that day, I got an email that the owner had counter-offered at $700. Still too much, so I bid $250 and sent a message that this was my final bid. I truly could not afford more at this time, since I had just made some other major purchases and my bank account was pretty low.

I got a message back that my bid was accepted! So now I am just waiting for everything to be completed, and I will own patdoyle.com! I am very happy now.

Sedo will take care of all the details. I paid into Sedo’s escrow account, and they will work with both of us to get the transfer done.

Lessons Learned

I guess what this person has done is another way to make money online. Purchase domains that others have bid on, and then sell them to that person for 5 times what you paid for it. Of course, it is risky because I may have decided not to buy it at all, and maybe no other Pat Doyle would have come by for a while to purchase it.

I’m not upset that I paid this guy 5 times what he paid. He won the auction legitimately. And I am just glad to get my domain at a reasonable price.

Still, I hope you can learn from my experience, and maybe do a better job of bidding on your domain. Or maybe I should have contacted the original owner before it expired. What do you think?

Anyway, once I get the domain patdoyle.com into my own hands, I will start the process of transferring this blog over there. It could take a while to get everything done. And don’t worry, I will let you know when it happens.

Update: I wrote this post last Sunday, and now (Tuesday evening), I have the domain patdoyle.com in my account!

As I said, if you have some domain buying tips, please leave them in the comments. I would love to hear how others have gone about it.

Update: Received Email from GoDaddy

Update from GoDaddy/Tdnam:

Today (9/12) I received an email from Alon at Office of the President, GoDaddy, which said, in part:

I recently came across your blog post about purchasing PATDOYLE.COM.

In it, you mentioned wanting a proxy bidding system so you could enter the maximum you’d like to bid while not actually bidding that amount in the auction. I wanted to let you know that the TDNAM auction system does, in fact, offer this service as a default. Note the following wording posted in the Bid area:

“Enter the maximum bid you are willing to place on this domain name. Our Proxy Bidding Service automatically raises your bid by $5 anytime you’re outbid by someone else — up to your maximum bid amount.”

I apologize if you weren’t aware of this option while bidding in the original auction. Of course, it’s good to know that you did eventually get the domain name because it’s clear that it means a lot to you.

I hope this information proves helpful to you if you participate in any TDNAM auctions in the future.

Note that GoDaddy owns TDNAM; that is why they sent this email. So I’m happy to know that it is possible to enter a maximum bid at tdnam.com.

I don’t know how I missed this - I did look around for it. But hopefully this will help others who might want to bid on domains there. I might just have occasion to bid for a domain at tdnam again too - you never know.

I appreciate that Alon took the time to send me this email.

- Pat Doyle