After spending over a month in Kuala Lumpur, I feel I’ve distilled down some of the key ingredients needed to build a portfolio of profitable Internet businesses. This is essentially a blueprint of how to create a mini business incubator.

Here’s the recipe:

1) a few really smart people (including at least one excellent programmer)

2) develop simple ideas

• product ideas are more likely to succeed than Web 2.0 social media/community
• information products and software are best
• work on a few projects
• share learning and assets across projects

3) agile software development

• build projects which can be built within one weekend to 3 months max - the planning stage might be longer, new products are always in the pipeline

4) understand the market

• find a need and fill it, rather than building a product and trying to generate a need - appeal to a specific customer avatar with each product

5) use the psychology of sales

• scarcity, social proof, commitment and consistency, etc. - all from Robert Cialdini (see attached), done properly no salesforce is needed, all sales occur through the Web

6) engineer a strong product launch

• use the techniques outline in the product launch formula 2.0 by Jeff Walker - the root of which comes from Cialdini

7) implement business automation

• automate customer service - for example see the snippets feature of fogbuz

Here are a few more tips:

Repurpose technologies

• Build technologies that can be used across your businesses. For example, a custom shopping cart platform might be useful for all your businesses. Build it once and repurpose it. Often times you’ll find synergies between your existing technologies and the new products you develop.

Focus on niches

• Pick a few niches and focus on developing a basket of products for each niche, this makes it easy to upsell products to existing customers. This strategy will allow you to monetize visitors better than the competition

Yesterday I uploaded v1.0 of my Digg like site for Internet marketing. It’s called Marketing Squeeze. I do hope you’ll stop by to participate. The site highlights worthwhile content of the Internet marketing world. There’s a ton of content on the Net, but what should you bother reading? MarketingSqueeze will help you identify what Internet marketing content is worth your time.

MarketingSqueeze is based on the Pligg opensource CMS system. Pligg allows folks to create Digg like news sites. I thought this would be easy, but since Pligg is still in beta, it’s a bear to use for any non-programmer. I want to thank Ray from Moonrank for fixing an error that had me stumped. Ray’s company does awesome custom work for Pligg. Check them out for your project.

Is MarketingSqueeze like Sphinn?

Well, sorta. Sphinn focuses more on the mainstream Internet marketing world while MarketingSqeeze will weigh more towards the gurus.

Checkout MarketingSqueeze!

I spent this past weekend in Singapore. It was awesome! Many people seem to think the place is boring, but I disagree. Saturday was full of adventures. By early Sunday morning I was finally losing steam.

It must have been around 4:30am when I found a 24 hour PC gaming center. I tried some games, but I’m not a gamer, so I was just getting kicked from the games by other users. I snapped a few pics of the place before I was told by the management to stop. Notice the guys passed out in front of their machines.

Please enter your name and email address if you would like to be placed on the list to have your Google Adwords account setup with the Adwords Profit Guard.

This is an email I recieved from Mike Reining, the Co-founder of MindValley and the brain behind the Adwords Profit Guard. These results sound a bit over the top, so I figured I would just paste in his message rather than try to explain it myself.

Mike discusses the optimization results he was able to obtain by applying the Adwords Profit Guard to one of the online commuities MindValley powers, TheAmericanMonk.com.

TheAmericanMonk.com Optimization Results:

1) Identified 87 Ad Groups with ads that are ready to be optimized in under 1 minute (out of 216 Ad Groups)

2) 39 Ad Group bids were optimized out of 432 in 2 minutes flat - identified total annual savings of $15,184

3) 20 keywords were optimized in under 2 minutes - identified annual savings of $694.22

4) Identified 25 non-performing domains and 218 under-performing domains in the content network - when blocked total annual savings equal $ 18462.88

This is actual HARD data on one of our live accounts that we have been having up and running. The average AdWords spent for this account is about $9,000 per month or $108,000 per year. This tool just found $34,340 in BAD spending that we will be saving or about 30%.

Wow, I am personally quite blown away by the power of this.

Mike

This video is from an internal MindValley employee training session in which Mike Reining explains how the Adwords Profit Guard was successfully applied to the Google Adwords account for The AmericanMonk.com. It’s a good intro to the Adwords Profit Guard and its creator.

Apologies about the video quality. I’m still figuring out the best way to encode and upload videos. In this case I tried Youtube. I’m not very pleased since you really can’t see what Mike writes on the whiteboard. Oh well, it will make a nice post when I figure out the optimal way to make video available.

Optimizing your keyword bids in Google Adwords has never been this easy. One-click optimization is a wondrous thing. See the video below.

The Ad Group Optimization module of the Adwords Profit Guard optimizes bids you’ve set at the Ad Group level. See the video below.

There’s a ton of traffic in the Google Content Network, but so much of it is garbage. What to do? Here is the answer…

You really should be using all the keyword match type options for one word and two word keyword strings. The Adwords Profit Guard makes doing that a snap. See the video below.