The web is the fastest way to make real millions online if truly you are the first to run an online portal for your city, state, school or country. Portals are a way for people within your city, state, country or school to access local information, jobs, advertisements, upcoming events, news and stories locally. It is a great way to give your local community a virtual presence online. People currently use the web to locate virtually everything they want from business to relationships. Does your community, city, state, or country have a portal that handles the  daily online need of its people?

If no, your chance of making it big as a web entrepreneur is almost certain as you will be an eye and a hub for all businesses and activities in your community.

Starting an online portal is very easy; you don’t need to be a tech expert to start one. Portals are built with advanced content management technics making the addition of pages, updating and deleting of pages as easy as an email account. The administrative access makes all pages editable on the fly.

How do Portals Earn Revenue?

Online advertisement is the number one income generating source for online businesses. It has been so simplified that within 24hours, you can have thousands of adverts running on your portal. You start earning the very moment the adverts are on your site. You earn an income for every page opened (impressions) and also for every click on any of the ads on your site. Also your portal is a medium for you to Sell products and also promote other business activities. Every business requires people and a portal gives the owner the leverage of having a large crowd to sell to. Most protals are used for major marketing campaigns by some companies. When a company discover that lots of people in its host community uses a particular portal daily for networking, accessing products, viewing adverts and also getting updates like news and major local stories, they will have to promote their product using that portal.

How Do These Revenues Sum Up?

You earn about N5 for every click on an advert listed on your site and another N50 for every 1000 impressions on your site. By page impression we mean that every time somebody opens a page on your website, you get one impression. Assuming a visitor to your site came through the home page and later went over to view your contact page that will be 2 page impressions. Active websites can give over 20 - 50 page impression per user daily. For a better insight into the earning potential, let use an illustration:

Lets assume that you have about 1,000 regular visitors on your site daily and they click on an average of 3 ads daily (Note, you must not give incentive to encourage people clicking on these ads), this means a single visitor will be giving you an average monthly click of about 90 and your 1,000 daily visitor should give you over 90,000 clicks. 90,000 clicks should give you revenue of 90,000 x 5 = N450,000 monthly.

Also you get paid per 1,000 impressions. For every page open, you get one impression. Assuming you also have 1,000 daily visitors to your portal and each visitor opens or browse an average of 10pages daily, that means you will be having 10,000 page impression daily. Within a month, your total page impression will be 300,000 pages. 300,000 impressions should give you a revenue of 300,000 x 50/1000 = N15,000. We get an average page impression of over 50,000pages.

Your responsibility as a portal administrator is to keep the portal updated to encourage more traffic. Our local city portal gets about 50,000 page impressions daily from just about 5,000 regular visitors. See the portal’s Google Ad report below:



From the Google Adsense campaign run on our site, we generate over $150 daily and sometimes we get about $500 when traffic is very high.

From the snapshot above, we have a total page impression of 72,449. This represents the total number of pages opened or viewed by our visitors for the day. This number (72,449) can be generated by less than 1,000 users if the portal has dating and job classifieds. We also have about 772 clicks which is about 1% of the total page impression. From my study of our daily report, I discovered that every 100page impression generates 1 click. The total revenue generated this day is $124.84.

NOTE:
The per click or page impression revenue is not fixed, sometimes it gets very high and some other times low. There are days you are paid $1 per click and some other days less than $0.04.

An active portal can give daily page impression of over 1,000,000 daily. The emphasis is not on the amount made daily but the sure revenue you make daily.

How to Get Adverts

It is very easy to get adverts for your portal. We have tested both Google and Yahoo Adsense and they are most efficient. Google is ahead of Yahoo when it comes to advertisements. They have more than 10,000,000 adverts running to supply your portal daily. They put up adverts on your site and every revenue made from it is shared between your portal and the ad vendor (Google or Yahoo!). These adverts are filtered according to your site content.

It is FREE to signup for Google or Yahoo advertising programs for publishers or web owners. These advertising programs are a revenue sharing partnership program where these big ads vendors gets the adverts from companies around the world and showcase them through partners’ websites. These advertising programs are regarded as ADSENSE.

How to Start up your own Portal

The Razor portal is the cheapest and most advanced for small local portals. They come with FREE installation, online management training and one year technical support. The features of the Razor portal are outstanding. The Razor portal enables all your visitors to be part of the daily update of the portal making it very alive.

This site www.sapeleonline.com is a prototype of the Local Razor Portal.

In the US, more than 10million new dot.com start ups are registered every year. This is because business ideas are usually tested online before proceeding to add the brick-n-mortar structure. In the under developed countries, we jump into businesses without testing it first. Starting a business under the brick-and-mortar structure is quite expensive and if it doesn't succeed, it could be very devastating.

Testing your business model online could cost you less than N30,000 and you could use that to test the market response to your product and also that could help you restructure and remodel the business.

Note: more than 90% of every new start-ups don't succeed, which means you will need to try about an 100 models to get 10 successful business model. Stay ahead in the food chain by becoming a provider rather than a consumer of toxic wastes on the internet.

Saw this article on the Daily Independent News paper today and I felt I should share it with us:

As I was contemplating on what to write this week, I received notification of a cheque from Google of my earnings from their programme "Google Adsense." Immediately, a thought struck me, why not share the success stories of entrepreneurs who have been boosting their monthly income by displaying Google Adsense adverts on their websites, blogs, forums, etc.

I have written about two articles on how to generate income from Google Adsense, but as a refresher to my readers, let me explain again briefly before sharing with you case studies of entrepreneurs who are using the program to generate continous income to their business.

Google Adsense is one of the advertising avenues Google offers. Adsense are third-party ads that sit on your site. The program is free for you to use and make money each time someone clicks on an ad on your site.

It can be display tactically on your site without distracting prospects visiting your website. A good example of how to get prospects to focus on your content and still make money from Adsense is my site www.megabucksteam.com. The Google ads are placed at the bottom of my sales copy, and it still generates over $200 in few weeks. Below are case studies of entrepreneurs who are earning more income partnering with Google.

Case Study1
HomeTips.com started out in a backyard clubhouse. Seeking a quiet, woodsy spot for writing home improvement books, author Don Vandervort converted the bottom floor of his sons' two-story tree house into a small office. He launched HomeTips.com from that office in 1997, essentially as an online portfolio to promote his books.

Until about three years ago, HomeTips' main source of revenue came from writing, publishing, and licensing books and content to other companies, such as Sunset Books and Microsoft.

Though his book and content business was thriving, the website's meager revenue came from online sales of guides and reports. According to Vandervort, "It was an interesting way for us to stay in touch with our visitors' needs, but a money-losing proposition." In 2003, Vandervort heard about the Google AdSense program and thought it might be helpful for creating incremental revenue that could work for HomeTips.

He started by testing AdSense on a few pages. During the first week, he remembers that AdSense revenue paid for coffee; the second week, it paid for lunches. The model clearly worked, so he began expanding the program across the entire site. Now AdSense revenue pays for all salaries, overhead, and business development.

Case Study2
Univision Online owns and operates the most visited Spanish-language Internet destination in the U.S. Each day, users visit Univision.com nearly 850,000 times, accessing everything from the latest entertainment and sports news to classified ads and reader forums.

Maximizing revenue from its site is one of Univision's chief goals. With these goals in mind, Univision began investigating contextual advertising more fully and changed ad vendors, implementing Google AdSense for Search and AdSense for Content in June 2005.

In terms of revenue, the Univision team immediately saw positive results. Gauging the success of AdSense a year later, Univision has seen AdSense for search revenues grow by 160 percent. Revenue from both Google AdSense for Search and AdSense for Content increased by 103 percent. It produces revenue without requiring an internal sales staff, providing a way to fill ad space at lower fixed costs and letting smaller advertisers benefit from the broad reach of Univision Online.

Case Study3
TeAch-nology offers services and resources designed to support educators who want to effectively incorporate technology into their classrooms. At TeAch-nology.com, educators can find best practices information, as well as a variety of free classroom materials and support tools.

A seasoned team, including pre-K to K-12 grade teachers, professors of higher education, leading educational consultants, small business consultants and experienced web designers, maintains TeAch-nology.com. There's no charge for accessing many of the resources found on TeAch-nology.com. Educators who want more in-depth content and resources can purchase memberships for a modest annual fee.

Founder Paul McKee explains that he can offer the site as a free service due to advertising campaigns and sponsorships. In terms of revenue, McKee notes that AdSense ads outperform other forms of contextual advertising by 8 to 9 times. He notes that he's "extremely satisfied" with AdSense, which now accounts for 50 percent of company revenue. Equally important, McKee says that filling his ad space through AdSense frees up efforts to sell memberships, another key source of revenue. "We don't have a full-time ad sales team," McKee observes. "AdSense takes care of itself, allowing us to focus on running our business."

There are several case studies which for lack of space cannot be included. You can send mail to megabucksacademy@getresponse.com with the subject "Mail More Google Case Sudies."

You too can be a case study tomorrow, if only you will take the first step today.