RORY HANSEN

Wanted: Income tax information for Internet-based businesses in Canada

I am looking for books, eBooks, or websites.

If you know of any good ones, please let me know! Revenue from my websites is getting to the point where I’d better cover my bases before the Gov’t comes after me.  : )

My goal is to send as much targetted traffic to my Firefox + Google Toolbar website as I can, while keeping the cost per visitor as low as possible. That way, the margins I’m making through Firefox conversions are as large as possible. So, along with Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing, I’ve also signed up for MSN AdCenter, in an attempt to buy as much cheap traffic as I can get my hand on.

This is what I’m thinking. If I raise my PPC cost, my ads will appear higher in search results. This will generally send more traffic to my site which should also raise the number of Firefox conversions I get per day. But, on the flipside, I’ll also be paying more for all of this traffic, reducing the profit I’m making. As well, this significantly raises the possibility that I’ll actually LOSE money some days, on occasions when my conversion ratio drops.

So my decision up to this point is to pay just enough so that my ads appear 3rd or 4th or 5th on the search results. Yes, clicks on my ads are much lower when they are positioned like this, but I’m also paying much less per click than if I were to appear 1st or 2nd. So, to squeeze as many clicks as I can while keeping costs pretty low, I’ve had to sign up for other PPC programs. First there was Yahoo! Search Marketing (where I got a $50 credit), then Google Adwords (where I got another credit), and finally, today, signed up for MSN AdCenter (but unfortunately, could not find any promo codes that would work for Canadians). PPC costs seem pretty low when I signed up with my first campaign (between $0.05 and 0.08 per click) at least when compared to Yahoo! Internet Marketing, but we’ll see if the program generates much traffic.

One thing I realize I need to do, is set up specialized landing pages for each of these campaigns so that I can better gauge how I’m doing. Right now, since all the PPC traffic is being directed to the same page, I know that I’m profitting from my PPC participation, but I cannot see if I’m doing better with one program (say, Yahoo! Internet Marketing) when compared to another (like Google Adwords).

Anyway, we’ll leave that for another night.

Just a quick update on my Firefox + Yahoo! Marketting experiment.

When I first started using Yahoo! Marketting 10 days ago, I was only getting a few Mozilla Firefox conversions per day. Adding the revenue from those referrals up, we were looking at just a couple dollars per day– maybe more if I was having a good day.

Now, Yahoo! Marketting is sending about 100 visitors per day my way, at about a dime a visitor. Plus, some of my pages have started to get listed in the various search engines, leading to another 50 or so visitors per day from natural search placement. Total, about 150 page views per day.

With that traffic, I’m getting nearly 1000% more signups than when I first set up the website. Even with the Yahoo! Marketting costs, my figures show that I reap more from those visitors than it costs to get them to my site in the first place. So, although my $50 credit from Yahoo! Marketting is going to expire soon, I’m going to continue with the service.

Wanna start making some money through Firefox referrals on your own homepage? Click on the Google Adsense referral image on the top-right corner of the page. Not only will it take you to the Adsense sign-up page to get started, but you’ll also be helping me earn a few extra bucks through the referral to their service.

A few days ago I saw an offer on Red Flag Deals offering a $50 credit to sign up for Yahoo! Search Marketing, so I decided to take the bait and see how it compared to Google Adwords. The only condition to the deal was that I had to deposit a minimum of $5 to get the account going, but I figured that it was well worth it, since I’d be getting basically $50 for free.

I’ve been using the credit towards advertising my Firefox / Google Toolbar conversion site, using keywords like “download firefox” and “free firefox” and, so far, I’m pretty happy with the results. The ads are currently bringing in between 10 and 15 visitors per day, with about 20% to 25% of those visitors eventually downloading Mozilla Firefox from Google. With those types of click-thru counts, the $50 credit should last more than a month, at which time I should have enough data gathered to see if I’d actually be making money by continuing to pay for the service.

So far it looks like it would be worth it, as over the course of 3 days, I’ve used up approximately $3 of my credit, but have seen increases in Firefox conversions by nearly 300%. Overall, my daily Google Adsense revenue has increased to between $5 and $6 per day from about $2 per day, largely due to the Firefox conversions, so I’m pretty excited about that, too.

There’s been so much buzz about Tim Collin’s book Good To Great lately that I ended up buying a copy from Amazon.com to see what all of the fuss was about. To qualify for free shipping, I needed another book to pad my purchase cost, so, after reading some random book reviews, I chose Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne.

I’m only a couple chapters into Blue Ocean Strategy, so I don’t have the familiarity with the book yet to describe in detail what it’s about. But, the tagline on the book cover does give some insight into what is discussed in the book. It reads: ”How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant.”

One interesting company highlighted in the book is Casella Wines, makers of the [yellow tail] wine brand. The book describes how Casella Wines found uncontested market space by focusing on three areas that traditional wine companies couldn’t. By creating wines that were easy to drink, easy to select in-store, and that were fun and adventurous to drink, Casella Wines could distinguish its [yellow tail] brand from other wines, both luxury and budget, and actually create a new wine market appealing to existing wine drinkers as well as ready-to-drink cocktail and beer drinkers.

I found this Blue Ocean example to be especially interesting because I drink [yellow tail] wine. Looking back to when I first started to drink wine, I realize that I was a perfect match for the market that Casella Wines was targetting. I was largely a beer and liquor drinker that wanted to drink wine for it’s added sophistication factor, but found it a difficult transition to make due to the more “refined” taste of wine. At the same time, I recall my attempts to purchase wine at the nearby liquor store to be frought with confusion and embarassment, as there were so many kinds of wine and brands available.

For some reason, I gravitated to [yellow tail], and specifically the [yellow tail] shiraz. I guess the “look” of the bottle agreed with me. The label was bright and simple and I sensed that the wine was targetted at a younger audience like myself, as the bottle was missing the stuffiness that I sensed more experienced wine drinkers expected.

I also enjoyed the taste of the wine compared to other red wines that I had sampled during those first few months. I could actually take a large sip without wincing afterwards. And even better, I drank a second glass, not because I wanted to force myself to get used to the taste, but because I enjoyed the taste. I had found my perfect wine.

Shortly thereafter, I actually felt the buzz around [yellow tail] pick up. Acquaintences would mention [yellow tail] in casual conversation, TV shows like The Shopping Bags would recommend the wine, and all the while I felt that I was a trend-setter because I was drinking the wine before all of this buzz began. But, after reading about Casella Wines in Blue Ocean Strategy, I realize that I was just one of the early conversion successes of a great marketting move by Casella Wines rather than a trend-setter.

Although I’m finding Blue Ocean Strategy to be pretty dry read at this point of the book, I’m forcing myself to continue trucking along. That said, the tidbit about Casella Wines has definitely raised my interest in the book and the topic of Blue Oceans as I now have a personal experience with one example of a successful Blue Ocean product, the [yellow tail] brand.

I started work at TELUS over 10 months ago, and since that time, I’ve barely written a stitch of Ruby, let alone learn anything more about Ruby on Rails. My TextDrive account is no longer active and the experimental websites I launched while actively learning Ruby on Rails have been shut down. Essentially, I’ve lost all connection and interest in RoR and the RoR community.

For that reason, I’m renaming my blog from “Rory on Rails” to simply, “Rory Hansen”, as I don’t foresee myself writing about Rails anytime in the near future. Who knows– maybe somewhere down the line, I’ll regain interest in RoR, but right now, my mind and my time are focused elsewhere.

At work, I program almost exclusively in ASP.NET and C#. For the type of development I do, ASP.NET is fine. I appreciate the power of the framework and, given my experience with it now, I can get new webapps up and running quickly and easily. Do I like ASP.NET? Actually, yes I do.

Outside of work, I’m constantly trying to better myself through learning new skills and improving existing abilities. As my buddy Jeff would say, I’m just trying to ”raise my NPV.” Whether it be by reading great business books like Blue Ocean Strategy or Good To Great, or by practicing my networking skills at various conferences around town, I’m consciously trying to improve myself, thus raising my “market value,” so that when I’m ready to find a great new job somewhere, I’ve positioned myself as best as I can to actually get that job.

So, with all of that said, future posts on my blog will be about many of my current interests, such as learning how to play the acoustic guitar, improving my communication and networking skills, making change happen in business, and futher developing my leadership abilities.

Stay tuned!

Rory

Here’s a business idea: Create a website that makes it easy for people to create and study using flashcards.

How could this website be profitable? Everyone can create flashcards for free for their own use. If they like, they can then “share” these flashcards with the public, so that others can benefit from their hardwork. But, as incentive to create quality flashcards and share those cards, others would have to pay to access them.

For example, Sam creates a deck of flashcards for his Biology 101 course. He chooses to share them with the public. Karen, who is in the same course at the same university as Sam wants to study using flashcards but doesn’t know Sam nor have the time to create her own deck. So she pays $2 to use Sam’s deck. The website keeps 50% of all payments and rewards Sam with the other 50%.

Throughout university, I’ve often found using flashcards useful for studying, but buying the flashcards from the store and creating them takes so much time that it becomes difficult to justify expending the energy to do so. If I had the chance to buy pre-made, university course-specific flashcards online, I actually might have!

The key idea is that these flashcards would be specifically catered to courses at various universities by students in those courses. This makes them so much more valuable then generic, pre-made flashcards that you can buy in stores, as they would test the exact types of information that you’d need for your course.

They could also be used for years to come, as courses usually change very little over even a number of years. This creates a passive income stream for the flashcard creators.

The website would be totally Web 2.0 centric, with the ability to “tag” flashcards with topics, relevant courses, etc. AJAX could be used to shuffle through the deck while studying. Separate stylesheets would need to be created so that the flashcards could be viewed online or printed for offline use.

The only difficult part would be the actual creation of the cards. Version 1.0 would probably only support text and HTML markup, but later releases would also have to support images (uploading and placement), formulas for physics and math, and perhaps even doodling using your mouse as a pen tool.

Lemme know if you are interested in making this happen!

The Interactive Brokers Group is sponsoring a competition for university students that pits them against each other in designing some sort of automated trading platform. I haven’t had time to read indepth what exactly they’re expecting contestants to produce, but from what I’ve read so far, they want you to use their API to make stock market trades using an algorithm that you design. It sounds intriguing and I’ll probably be submitting a request to be apart of the competition.

From the IB competition website:

Trades must be generated by computer algorithms. Students will compete using the same Interactive Brokers’ Trader Workstation Application Program Interface (API) that professional traders use to create automated trading solutions. A multitude of programming languages including Java, C++, C, and Visual Basic may be utilized with our API. Student algorithms may trade US stocks, options, futures, Forex, or bonds as often as their programs require over the contest period.

My solution will probably be coded in either Java or C#, assuming that C# applications are supported. Although I don’t have all that much practical experience with trading and the various markets that are available to me, I see this competition as a chance to learn about well-known trading methodologies and patterns.

If you are interested in reading more about this competition, head over to the competition website.

I’ve been successfully using both Chitika eMiniMalls and Google Adsense banner ads on many of my websites for the last few months. So far, revenue from the Chitika eMiniMalls have exceeded my expectations, as I regularly earn double what my Adsense earns daily.

If you’re interested in signing up for the Chitika affiliate program, feel free to use this referral link. I’ll earn 10% of whatever you earn over your first 12 months on the program. As well, you yourself will earn 10% of the earnings that anyone you refer earns.

BornGeek has a tutorial for making your own Firefox toolbar. I’m thinking of creating a toolbar specifically for my lyrics website, so I’ll take a closer look at this later tonight.

But, I’ve yet to find any good tutorials for making an Internet Explorer toolbar. Do you know of one?