A friend of mine, who is a brilliant Generation Y marketer, Elysa Rice (her website is GenPink.com) turned me on to a blogger/author by the name of Chris Brogan (his website is ChrisBrogan.com). His blog has some extremely interesting articles including a recent blog post on the called “Charge for the Right Things.” This is of particular interest as we figure out how exactly to make money from our TV Show The Naked Truth Show (TheNakedTruthShow.com). Chris talks about the value of offering free content but charging high prices for ads and gave two example of companies that are doing just that successfully.

The first being GigaOm, let me interject for a moment that every site I hear about in a blog that I find interesting I now check with Compete.com because I want to see how well they are really doing. Compete.com allows me to see how many unique visitors (my metric of choice) these sites really have had over the past year. I enjoy thoroughly checking out the fact myself. In this case GigaOm checked out for me because in the month of March 2010 they had about 720,000 visitors. That is sufficient in my opinion to be considered successful enough to mimic.

The second one he suggested is Huffington Post. Based on Compete.com’s data, they had about 8.5 million unique visitors. That is surely enough visitors to be considered successful. What is difficult to tell, for me at least, is how many of those visitors click on the ads and the actual data that they use to measure their own success.

So am I 100% sure that free content with high priced ads will work, no. I am 100% sure that I personally hate paying for content, absolutely.

If it works for people who are able to do more testing and analytics than I can, I surely think it is worth a try.

I am not a very analytical person by nature. Out of the four behavioral types, Controller, Analyzer, Promoter, Supporter, I am a Controller, Promoter. That means that I am:

• High energy
• Enjoyable to be around
• Creative imagination
• Initiates relationships
• Motivating
• Competitive spirit
• Goal oriented

On the Promoter side… and

• Task accomplisher
• Bottom-line results
• Self-motivated
• Forward looking
• Fast decision-maker
• Initiates activities
• Disciplined

On the Controller side…

I am not naturally:

• Defines, clarifies
• Concerned with accuracy
• Gathers needed data/information
• Tests data
• Rigor

Those are some qualities of an Analyzer. About a year ago I started doing leadership trainings with www.Millennium3Education.com (by the way I STRONGLY believe in leadership and developmental trainings, there is nothing more important you can invest in than yourself). It became quite clear to me during one of the leadership trainings that rigor was seriously lacking in my life. In fact, many of the qualities of an Analyzer were lacking, and that in many ways they account for a lot of the trouble I was having accomplishing my goals.

So, a little less than a year ago I began working on developing my analytical side (with the other three at the same time, though I have a natural inclination towards the other three making them easier for me). I would now say that I am mediocre at analysis, on a scale of 1 to 10 I would put myself at 5.5. That is worlds ahead of where I was at a 1 less than a year ago.

Because I love to grow and hate being idle in any area of my life, I decided to do something that stretches my boundaries on the growth of my analytical side. I purchased and have begun reading and implementing the ideas and actionable steps outlined in the book Web Analytics 2.0 by Avinash Kaushik. His blog Occam’s Razor can be found here.

My desire to read Web Analytics 2.0 stems really from the fact that I, as well as many people far smarter and more educated than myself, believe that the web is where everything is headed and that I can create something truly wonderful for myself, my businesses and the world, entire via the internet. Nice. But the web has become a complicated place, maybe it always was and I just didn’t know how complicated it was. I want to educate myself as much as I can so that I can succeed to my fullest desire and potential.

Really, what an exciting adventure on this wonderful new frontier. I’ll keep you posted.

When my mom was getting her website designed a year and a half ago she payed over $1000 for it. I didn’t have $1000 to spend on a website design. I have used Odesk in the past to outsource my marketing (it didn’t work very well at all) and I use GetFriday.com for a virtual assistant.

The problem with Get Friday is their turnover rate for assistants. I have been with them for about a year now and I am on my fourth assistant. There are variations in the quality of types of work that they are the best at. The good thing about them though is that there is a knowledge transfer between assistants when they change over and I don’t have to manage that. What I found really worked with them is to give very clear details for what I want done. If I don’t give them clear details I won’t get what I want from them at all. The downside of that though is that when I have gone into such depths to explain my ideas to them, I might as well have done it myself.

Lesson: Better, more efficient and clearer directions get me what I want with high quality.

The upside to GetFriday is that the assistants are always good natured, good people. For my birthday I got two voicemails from them, one with my assistant playing the guitar for me and the other a woman singing Happy Birthday especially to me. Not to mention a birthday e-card. Most of my friends didn’t go that far. They really care and they come up with great ideas for my business on their own. They aim to please and there are 3 levels of supervisors that check in to make sure I am satisfied with my experience with them. They understand customer service to a level that I have never seen from an American company.

Lesson: Good people who care about my company work.

Odesk is a different story. I happened to like them far less, my experience may change if I chose to use them again. Don’t get me wrong, nothing bad happened and I didn’t leave with a bad taste in my mouth, but I was just unimpressed.

Lesson: Things that don’t impress me are not worth wasting my time on.

I hope that this blog provides some benefit to you, the reader, who perhaps would like to be an entrepreneur and adventurer. But to warn you this blog will be full of trial and error, but hopefully you will be able to be spared my mistakes and take my successes and make them your own.

Let me introduce myself. My name is Elizabeth Stewart, I’m 24 years old about to graduate from UT Dallas with a degree in international business. I have currently been to 9 different countries, Poland, France, England, Canada, Belize, Guatemala, Mexico, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic. In a month I will add South Korea and China to that list (I’ll share how all of that goes down). I speak 3 languages, English, French and Polish and for fun I teach Salsa dancing.

About a year ago I started to seriously consider what it is that I want to do with my life, seeing as the end of my current college stay is nearing rapidly. I had seen a ton of other students graduate who hadn’t started even thinking about what they were going to do after graduation until about a month before. The majority ended up with no job, and the rest doing something they really didn’t enjoy just so they had a job at all. Right about that time, my friend Jason Levi gave me a gift. This gift guided my life in a way that was unexpected but quite welcome. He gave me the book, “The 4 Hour Work Week” by a guy named Tim Ferriss. Absolutely brilliant book. It took me about 2 days to get through the whole thing and go “WTF I want to do that too!”

Thus the entrepreneurial bug bit me and I was hooked on what was called “lifestyle design” every since. I have since come to find that there are quite a few people who are becoming experts in this and I will share with you my findings as I find them.

My first attempt at a business was quite ridiculous, to be frank. I attempted to sell extremely expensive rock fountains that cost anywhere from $100 to $400 wholesale using a yahoo store. Ya, totally ridiculous. To make any kind of decent profit from doing this I had to mark up these rock fountains to prices that I would never pay for them and the yahoo store was sorely inadequate for the job of selling much of anything.

But what it did give me was experience, which was very valuable. I spent a couple of months tossing over in my head what I would then sell. If I were reselling a product my margin would be smaller than if I had my own product, but what could I make to sell. At the time, I was teaching Salsa dance classes 6 days a week to help pay for putting myself through school and I was getting so sick of it. There are only so many times you can teach a basic step before it becomes sickeningly boring. Don’t get me wrong my students are awesome, which (other than the money) was the only worthwhile thing about it.

So my boyfriend/dance partner and I decided that is what we would sell. We had taught thousands of people how to dance and had come up with a method that effectively got absolute beginners to the performance level in less than a year with only one class a week. Thus Salsa Dance Underground was born, we would see online Salsa classes.

However, it is important here to note that too much good advice is a bad thing. When I became enraptured with the idea of my own, primarily online business I started reading and watching all I could on the subject. But there is TONS of information and a lot of it is telling you to do completely different things.

It was really freaking hard to figure out what I needed to actually do. So Salsa Dance Underground started off as a blog. One of my Salsa dance students, Tushar, offered to help get my dream and passion off the ground and together we found a template for WordPress that looked like it would work…Ya sure it worked in bringing people to it, but it didn’t work in selling anything. We got some great comments and helped out a bunch of people, but it was a black hole financially.

Lesson: Trial and error works as long as you don’t invest too much money into it. We did the first version on the WAY cheap and it forced me to be a jack of all trades, allowing me to learn every part of the business. Now, I understand way more about business than I would have if I had a ton of money to start it up.