CONFIDENT !!! and Achieving Effective Inventory Management

IUBA-INDIA :-Inventory Analysis gives you actionable information about your inventory investment. You can understand consumption, turns, returns, and material movements, in units or cash, in averages or spreads. You can analyze any aspect of your inventory by vendor, material, material group, warehouse, region, status, or any other perspective you choose. Find out how any measurement compares to last year, how it’s trending over time, and so on.
* How much lead time is there between the request for stock and the required date for the stock and how has this changed over time?
Opportunities for improvements analyze vendor and product performance and use the profiles to foster strategic supplier relationships. Of course, no function operates in isolation. An enterprise-wide implementation of our Performance Applications lets you see causes and effects across functions. You can investigate billing accuracy between inventory and accounts payable, perform vendor analysis in conjunction with procurement, and carry out demand planning and ensure order fulfillment with sales shipping. This strategic enterprise-wide analysis lets your organization manage with confidence.

Inventory organizations must balance meeting customer demand with maintaining an optimum stock level and contributing to internal cash flow. It’s crucial that the company understand internal inventory activities and how they affect other functional areas to keep customers happy and maximize inventory efficiencies.

IUBA-INDIA’s Six key areas of analysis answer 450-plus critical business questions, using more than 70 key performance indicators (KPIs) and over 40 reports. Real-time interaction with the reports and the 16-Dimensions lets you manipulate the information and drive deeper analysis. You (Company) gain an in-depth understanding of your past and current stock level and movement that lets you: • Ensure stock is meeting the demands of internal (MRO and manufacturing) and external customers.
• Manage the cost of owning inventory.
• Review stock levels.
• Identify opportunities to optimize inventory levels.
• Improve operational performance.

STOCK OVERVIEW AND VALUATION ANALYSIS
What stock are we carrying, where is it, and what is it worth?
Understand your current inventory investment and how it is distributed.
• What has been our average corporate investment in stock this period, last period, and over the last year?
• How many units of inventory are we holding by specific material groups? And which warehouses, plants, locations?
• How many days of inventory do we have in each warehouse, and has t amount been meeting demand in each region?
• Are excess inventory reservations prevalent in specific warehouses or material segments?
• How much lead time is there between the request for stock and the required date for the stock and how has this changed over time?
Sample KPIs
• Reserved quantities and values
• Withdrawn quantities and values
• Confirmed quantities and values

MATERIAL MOVEMENT ACTIVITY ANALYSIS
Analyze stock movement in and out of inventory and within the organization,and understand how goods receipts, issues, and transfers relate to stock levels, shortages, and processes.
• How many movements have been processed this period compared to last a how do they break out into goods receipts and issues?
• What is the number and value of goods receipt of inventory processed material from a specific vendor to a specific warehouse?
• What proportion of inventory was received into unrestricted inventory, quity control, and other restricted statuses over the last quarter?
• What is the average number of goods issues processed this period across organization and in specific warehouses?
• What materials were issued, how many issues were related to each material, and from which shipping points?
• What types of issues have been processed, and what proportion of materials
have been issues to order fulfillment, consignment, and scrap?
• How many receipts have been processed by employees this period?
Sample KPIs
• Movement quantities
• Movement values

DEMAND ANALYSIS
Determine whether stock levels and fluctuations are letting your company meet customer demand.
• How many goods issues were processed this period versus last to manufacturing, how many to maintenance, repair, and operations, and how many fulfill sales orders?
• What specific material segments were issued and how did this compare stock levels across the company?
• What were the maximum and minimum levels of inventory reached acrose warehouses and are these fluctuations within predefined limits?
• How have forecasts for specific items changed over time and do they compare
to the demand for those materials?
Sample KPIs
• Forecast period value • Seasonal forecast index values
• Corrected forecast values • Forecast usage quantity
• For materials experiencing the most stock outs, what were the related zero stock counts and zero stock days?
• Moving average usage
• Required usage
• How much lead time is there between the request for stock and the required date for the stock and how has this changed over time?
• Reserved quantities and values
• Withdrawn quantities and values
• Confirmed quantities and values

MATERIAL RESERVATIONS ANALYSIS
Avoid unnecessary excess stock and shape inventory policy on reserved stock. Understand how reservations for internal or external customers impact stock levels and ability to meet demand.
• How effectively has confirmed stock met the requirements for a specific material this period as compared to last?
• How do your warehouses rank in terms of meeting requests for inventory full, and are some warehouses consistently underperforming?
• What percentage of confirmed reserved stock was not withdrawn from inventory, resulting in unnecessary excess stock?
• Are there any warehouses or storage locations that are performing outside
corporate standards for physical count accuracy?
• Are shortages consistently occurring within specific materials groups or materials,
or are these shortages anomalies?
Sample KPIs
• Book and physical stock level count
• Book and physical stock group currency value
• Actual stock level and group currency value
• Relative stock accuracy percentage

PHYSICAL INVENTORY ANALYSIS
Find out whether what you have in inventory is what you think you have.
• How accurate have our physical counts in units been across the organization this period and is our percent accuracy improving?
• How large have our shortages or overages been on average and where have they occurred?
• Did any warehouses experience zero stock levels this period and, if so, how
often and how many days for specific materials?
• How many “stock outs” occurred across the organization, and did specific
warehouses and materials have more stock outs than others?
• For materials experiencing the most stock outs, what were the related zero
stock counts and zero stock days?
Sample KPIs
• Transaction counts by customer
• Average transaction values by customer
• Number of units issued by customer
• Overusage quantity
• Moving average usage
• Required usage

INVENTORY FORECAST ANALYSIS
Improve your ability to forecast stock levels through an understanding of the effectiveness of your past forecasting.
• How close was this period’s inventory forecast to actual results?
• How accurate have forecasts been for “A” class materials in a spec warehouse?
• How do materials compare within an ABC analysis? Where are my “A” class materials being handled and how often are they turning?
• How much of my inventory is available for distribution, how much is in consignment, and how much is restricted stock?
• What is the velocity of our inventory—are certain materials fast-moving, slow-moving, or dead?
• What percentage of restricted stock was drawn from inventory over the last year?
Sample KPIs
• Average stock level and value • Overstock quantity
• Minimum and maximum stock levels • Days of inventory
• Inventory turns • Required quantity
• Stock level coverage • Moving average
• Inventory stock outs levels/usage
• Zero stock days

STRENGTHEN ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT
Using IUBA-INDIA Inventory Analysis, you can analyze operational effectiveness to ensure that the inventory function is contributing to overall corporate performance and stakeholder value. Evaluate current processes and identify trends and our Performance Applications quickly turn your corporate data into an information asset to answer your key business questions. By packaging best-practices business requirements, Our Performance Applications create a rich, business analysis environment for all levels in your organization.

INVENTORY SCENARIO: STOCK REDUCTION
Suppose that part of your corporate strategic plan is to reduce costs without impacting customer satisfaction. In the inventory function, cost reduction could result from reducing stock days of high-impact or high-cost items without increasing stock outs. Our Inventory Analysis helps you determine how to do this. To find out which group of inventory items has the greatest impact on costs, you view all of your ‘A’ class inventory items and rank them by average stock value for the last year. Choosing a group of the highest stock value materials, you rank them by average overstock quantity amount for the last 12 months. Of these overstocked, high-impact materials, the ones with the largest average overstock value and the lowest inventory turns are potential candidates for optimization. But first it’s important to determine why these materials are overstocked—either you are incorrectly forecasting usage or actual usage is dropping. Increasing coverage days and falling usage rates indicate that, in fact, usage quantity is falling. our Performance Applications have shown that reducing the coverage days for overstocked, high-value products whose usage quantity is falling will significantly lower costs without increasing stock outs or impacting customer satisfaction.

FULL SOLUTION—ONE VENDOR
To build Inventory Analysis, IUBA-INDIA drawn on years of expertise as the market-leading provider of fully integrated business intelligence solutions. IUBA-INDIA is the only vendor in the market to offer an end-to-end solution that gives everyone from executives to production managers fast, insightful, appropriate answers to critical business questions. The global coverage and world-class professional services, support, and training offered through IUBA-INDIA give you a single point of contact focused on your success. When you combine these advantages with the rich business content of our Performance Applications, you get a powerful business solution designed to give you that competitive edge.

Achieving Effective Inventory ManagementBased on our most recent research and the most up-to-date "best practices," the new approach of Achieving Effective Inventory Management provides a complete guide for managing a large and often troublesome asset. This will help you achieve the goal of effective inventory management: "to meet or exceed customers' expectations of product availability with the amount of each item that will maximize your organization's net profits or minimize its costs."
· Maintaining accurate on-hand quantities.
· Stores / Warehouse and stockroom organization.
· Benefits of various material storage methods.
· What to do when you run out of warehouse space.
· The benefits of bar coding and other technologies.
· Developing your approved stock list for each warehouse.
· Differences between stock for sale and MRO (maintenance, repairs, and operations) inventory.
· Defining "good," "bad," and "ugly" inventory.
· Simple methods to calculate your projected inventory investment and potential inventory turnover.
· Why you need to rank your stocked products three ways: based on number of transactions, cost of goods sold, and profitability.
· Metrics to determine the performance of your investment in stock inventory.
· Accurately capturing historic usage of stocked items.
· Properly stocking items with sporadic usage.
· Determining the proper time period for forecasting demand.
· How to properly capture demand in a distribution center environment.
· Adjusting usage for unusual activity that will not reoccur.
· How trends, promotions, the environment, and other factors can affect a forecast.
· How to obtain, analyze, and apply collaborative information from customers, salespeople, and other sources.
· Determining how much of a new item to stock and developing a new item questionnaire.
· Dealing with "fashion" items that will only be marketed for a limited time.
· Finding the best forecast formula for different patterns of usage.
· How to easily identify items with seasonal usage patterns.
· Maintaining accurate projected lead times.
· Identifying the individual elements of a projected lead time.
· Why long lead times are better than inconsistent lead times.
· Determining the right amount of safety stock to maintain for each item.
· Determining the best size replenishment order.
· Utilizing residual inventory analysis and early warning reports to fine-tune replenishment parameters.
· When economic order quantities are appropriate and developing the best economic order quantity model.
· When to push inventory turnover with "order up to replenishment."
· How to effectively increase or decrease the size of a replenishment order to meet vendor or transportation requirements.
· Where Just-in-Time replenishment is best utilized.
· Evaluating price break opportunities.
· Liquidating excess inventory.
· Developing and maintaining an effective replenishment program.
· Distribution Requirements Planning (projecting needs over an extended period of time).
· A comprehensive guide to physical inventory and cycle counting.
· How to develop a "policies and procedures" manual for your inventory-related operations.
· Implementing and maintaining a program to achieve the goal of effective inventory management.

Please visit our other Web/Blogs address to get full information.

Given the opportunity, I would be pleased to meet with you and discuss, how I might be able to promote the growth of the company.
I am looking forward to receiving a possible reply form your side.

Thanking you,
Sincerely,

Gopal Krishnan Iyer.
Functional Consultant.(IUBA-INDIA)
+91-9313487754, 9871386379, Tele-Fax-0120-4133279.
E_mail:- iubagzb@airtelbroadband.in, iubagzb@gmail.com,
My Skype-ID. - " iubagzb1 "

Note:- [ Skype is free on-line Phone or Conference room for call / speak / Chat- anyware(all world) ]
How Bloggers Make Money Online without Blogging

Some of the comments on the launch post of this poll revealed some of the ways people are making money online from sources other than blogging. They include:

• Website Design
• Flipping (selling) Websites
• Selling ebooks
• Youtube Partnership program
• Freelance writing, graphic design
• Teaching and Consulting
• Owning other types of websites (directories, forums etc)
• Business Documentation site
• Developing web applications
• Online Surveys
• Paid to Click Sites
• Selling Products and Merchandise
• Affiliate Marketing
• Writing on User Generated Content (Revenue Sharing) Sites
• Make Online Games
• Online Store - Selling Products
• eBay
• Selling Art
• Business Referrals
• Market Research
• Software Development
• Working as a Transcriptionist
• Membership Sites
• Generating Sales for Off-line Business from Websites

Lots of good ideas there and a nice reminder that there’s plenty to explore outside of blogging.

My own list of online money making sources that are not directly blogging include running a forum (advertising revenue), newsletter lists (affiliate marketing and some advertising), consulting (limited), selling a course, job boards, working at b5media (very part time)… and that’s about all I can think of.

Which are the best and most effective ways to make a profit on your blog or independent news site?

Prompted by Make Money off Your Blog, a recent editorial article from The Washington Post contributor Mike Peed, I would like to share my discoveries and recommendations on how to make money with online content while keeping interruptive ads (banners, pop-ups, flashy ads, etc.) off your site.

On February 1, 2005, as promised, I turned off the rest of the banners and sponsor promo boxes appearing on my mini-network, as current revenues no longer rely on traditional, in-your-face, interruptive promotional messages. As the road to successful online ad promotion is indeed another one.

But these are unique, effective revenue channels you might want to consider to boost the sustainability and profit potential of your micro-publishing enterprise. If used right, these channels help any serious online publisher move her news site from a part-time passion into a serious, competitive business.

You can't do it overnight, but with enough nose, patience and dedication you can make good content pay back for itself and then some.

1) Google AdSense

AdSense is by far the best, most rewarding monetization resource for blogs, news sites and small, content-rich information sites. Google offers AdSense, a service that lets independent publishers, bloggers and news site owners to publish text-based, context-relevant ads next to the content on their sites. This is done automatically without you, the publisher, having to worry about anything else except putting small-sized code inside each of your Web pages.

For every click on Google AdSense contextual ads, the publishing sites receives credit for a small amount of money, while Google keeps an undisclosed amount of the total advertising share. Though many lament lack of relevance for the ads and little return for the increased info clutter on their pages — many silent publishers — probably the ones who consciously make less noise about this, are making serious money with this program.

What few understand, is that to make AdSense work for you ($$),it involves strategic work. Just placing the code on your pages isn't enough. The focus of your site, the way the content is organized, the way web pages are coded, the titles you use and the color and position you select for placing your AdSense ads on your Web pages all make a difference to the results you get. Significant.

What is important is that different rules apply to different types of pages and content. So no set of rules equally apply to all sites. The key is for the publisher to keep questioning the integration of contextual, text-based ads by doing systematic, ongoing testing, experimentation and optimization. For a focused blogger, this can mean from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per month. For a dedicated publisher covering high-paying information areas, it is possible to get into the 5-digit range without any major investments and with a relatively short time-to-market. I am not talking about a blogger in the traditional sense, but rather to focused and very professional independent information resources like SearchEngineWatch.com or Paidcontent.org, for example.

AdSense offers also the opportunity to monetize site searches while providing a powerful, lightning-fast search engine for your own site at no extra cost. By providing search-relevant ads on your site's search results pages. Google AdSense adds another great opportunity to monetize premium service and access with relevant text-based information about products and services.

Too bad Google AdSense doesn't let you select your contextual advertisers from its inventory.

Here some great examples of AdSense at work.

Alternative solutions to AdSense: Chitika, Kanoodle, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Yahoo! Publisher Network (in beta).

2) Blogads

Blogads is an effective solution for taking control of your advertisers and comparing your profit share with your online ad agency. As the name clearly implies, Blogads is an advertising service for blogs. When the service first came out, As I mentioned that Blogads offers a great opportunity for small, independent publishers, blogs and news sites to sell their ad space in a direct and useful way. Blogads keeps 20 percent of your net revenue and sends you the rest by Paypal or check as soon as you reach a predetermined amount.

For your advertisers Blogads provides a great bonus in terms of speed and simplicity: "Ordering an ad takes just two or three minutes. Submit your image and/or text ad. Define its duration. Pay with Paypal's secure forms. You are done. After the blogger approves the ad, return to tweak and optimize clickthroughs, renew or order on new blogs."

In the case of Blogads the publisher has control over which ads to accept and which ones to reject.

Alternative services:

Crispads is an advertising network focused on blogs. Crispads allows publishers to place ads in blog entries so that they're included in their RSS/ATOM feeds to generate revenues for syndicated content.

grokAds - an advertising clearinghouse for both buyers and sellers which works with any type of site. Offers quick and easy advertising to a specific market.

Tagword - Much like Blogads, Tagword also lets you to select which kinds of ads you want to sell to your site visitors as well as setting the prices you want to charge. Add the code provided to your selected web pages and you are selling text ads on your site! Users can create their text ads directly and submit them in minutes. Purchased ads appear on your site as soon as you're ready.

or

Create your own Text-based Ads service

TextAds is an open source text ad management system for web sites using PHP. It's been deployed with content management systems like PostNuke and should work with any PHP-based website.

The Idya AdSystem is a text ad management solution for web sites. It supports keyword-driven text-ads and PayPal payments. Installing takes a few minutes. Simply upload it to your site, use the installer to install it, and your site is ready to show text ads. You can check the entire list of its features. The AdSystem uses PHP 4 and MySQL, though it port to other DBMSs. The AdSystem has been undergoing re-engineering for version 2, however, it looks like the site is at a standstill and hasn't been updated since 2003.

3) Amazon Associates

The Amazon Associates program lets independent online publishers with the opportunity to promote any product in Amazon's inventory as affiliate agents. All it takes is adding a small, identifying code to the links that take your site's visitors to a specific Amazon product page (books, DVDs, electronics, etc.). If the visitors who clicked on your link buy an item even if it's not the item you point to — you earn a small commission.

Though the amount of return with the Amazon Associates program is small, nonetheless, it is another way to get income without adding clutter or not-relevant disruptive information to your valuable content. References to relevant books add to the user experience as it helps those who want to search for more information on a topic to see immediate and hand-picked recommendations.

As a matter of fact, it is possible to earn as much as 10 percent per sale as an Amazon Associate.

4) Text Links

Text links are controversial for some purists, but for those seeking a way to monetize content without adding clutter and intrusive ads — it is an interesting opportunity to explore further. Text links are an emerging advertising market that brokers small, text-only links, which often don't need prominent placement (the payback is not on the clicks) on your site pages.

What the advertisers want is a link presence on your site to gain extra "authority" (like the Google PageRank indicator) in an artificial way. This is why you may have noticed many of these text links being placed at the bottom of content pages or in other non-premium positions. The goal is to increase a site's value in search engines. The good thing is that as this market grows, the independent publisher has more and more options from which to select. Also, the publisher can approve and accept text links that are complementary and relevant to the site's content.

Though many text links point to second-rate services and products (online casinos, poker, Viagra, etc.) — this marketplace is growing and becoming more visible, therefore more advertisers of mainstream products and tools are popping up in numbers. Since you are the one accepting such advertising contracts, the selection of what you display is up to you.

To play this game, it is helpful to have a Google PageRank of 4 or more. (Here is an article where you can find out how to measure Google PageRank). For those having a PR value of 6, 7 or more, there is great opportunity for serious monetization. As an indicator, five or six text ads can easily bring in a few hundred dollars every month on a PR 6 site/blog.

A Google generated list of companies brokering text link ads: http://tinyurl.com/66pc4

The example above: FaganFinder
(check the bottom of the home page to see what I mean)

Other online text link agencies: LinkAdage Auctions - Offers blog owners the chance to sell text links on their site at market value through a private online auction.

See also: Will Plain-Text Ads Continue to Rule? (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

5) Premium Content Sponsorships

Selling sponsored space is another option for the independent publisher. While this was associated with prominent flashy banner ads, this is changing and expanding in many ways. In my view, the successful strategy is to use selected and relevant sponsors to introduce, give access or extend the value offered by premium content.

A relevant product or service can sponsor a news channel or RSS feed. Sponsors can also sponsor a rich section of additional related content to a standard article. Having a resourceful bibliography or annotated resources section in your next ebook or mini-guide is also fertile ground to effectively showcase relevant sponsors.

X-events, podcasts, live and recorded web conferences, online interviews are great unobtrusive and relevant sponsorship opportunities.

See also: New Online Advertising Strategies: No More Interruptive Ads

6) Related Reports

Another opportunity should see more in the near future is affiliate marketing of related research reports. For sites that cover specific industry or niche topics, this is an opportunity to play an effective marketing role for research clearinghouses and large publishers of intelligence reports, analyst insider briefings, white papers and research findings.

These types of reports usually carry a higher price tag than normal ebooks and physical publications. The reason for the high price tag is because their content is focused on specific industries and topics, and it has information that's hard to find elsewhere.

The technology that makes this possible is available from 21Publish (the blog hosting provider) in partnership with Market Research.

7) Affiliate Sales

A good monetization channel for select products and services is affiliate sales. This approach involves signing up to become an affiliate reseller of specific products.

As long as the affiliate products do not affect the publisher's credibility and provide pointers to useful, high-value products that the publisher fully endorses, affiliate sales are a rewarding monetization channel.

The commissions received for these sales vary depending on the product and the original vendor sales and marketing strategy. LinkShare and Commission Junction are two of the largest affiliate program brokers. Check out their catalogs to get a good idea of what products and commissions are available.

If you write and publish your own e-books and other premium content publications, you may want to consider using an affiliate sales program to give your products greater reach and exposure.

My preferred provider for this is Share-It!, which offers full payment and an ecommerce infrastructure to online publishers while integrating a customizable affiliate program. You can set the commission and the products that you want your affiliates to manage. Share-It! automatically takes care of payments and accountability of the transactions; it sends updates and timely sales reports both to you and to your registered resellers. The system even automatically creates content pages that the reseller can link to from her own site.

8) Online Guides and E-Books

Self-published books, e-books, mini-guides, tutorials and other types of premium content generate a respectable source of income for those with relevant and useful content to share. Focused guides and reference publications in niche areas are a growing demand from qualified customers, especially when these products can be easily pre-evaluated in some form.

For bloggers, news sites and small independent publishers' ebooks and online guides should make a natural monetization channel. Much of the content written for a site is easy to re-edit and re-purpose for commercial use. Reviewing editors, topic-specific bloggers can use their writing talent to put together the best content they have on a specific topic.

Selling ebooks requires good online marketing skills, lots of exposure, visibility and honest testimonials from satisfied buyers. A little army of affiliate resellers can go a long way in helping your ebook get extra exposure and visibility. Plus partnering/bundling your product with those who are already the best in your class helps get more copies out the door.

9) Bookstore Distribution and POD Publishing

You can also increase profitability and exposure of your e-books by using a company like Lightning Source, which can distribute your digital content on Amazon bookshelves while allowing you to offer printed versions of your masterpieces using POD technology (print on-demand).

See also: Turn your weblog into a book

Self-publishing with Lulu.com

Trafford Publishing

10) Merchandising

Selling your branded t-shirt or baseball cap makes sense when your publishing project has a strong brand, a powerful message or an issue that it stands behind.

Why would people shell out USD $20 or more to buy a branded t-shirt promoting a web site? If a bold tagline spells out a strong message or slogan about something of which many are passionate, readers want to support the cause by wearing them.

I think this works effectively where a) the personal brand is good enough to create a desire in readers to "stand" for it (few bloggers or news sites have this kind of charisma, but I people like Joi Ito or Howard Rheingold most likely can command some of this), or b) the author or blog / site stands for something clearly identifiable. It may be an overarching mission or a number of changing issues that make effective marketing themes for such products.

CafePress offers an extensive catalog of shorts, caps, calendars, mugs with over 80 customizable merchandise products waiting for your logo and tagline to be printed on them. CafePress provides the raw merchandise that you can customize by uploading your artwork and interactively adjusting it on through its online command center.

While CafePress charges a base cost for the material (e.g.: USD $13.99 INR Rs.650/-base price for T-shirts), you can price your branded merchandise however you like and CafePress dutifully manages the transaction, payment, shipment and your monthly payments for your hard-earned commissions. In the process CafePress, also creates a full web-based shopping center that can be customized to match your Web site's design.

11) Collections, Anthologies, Compilations and Curated Content on CD-ROM

Thanks to CafePress and similar services, independent online publishers also have the opportunity to deliver vast amounts of content such as aggregated anthologies of articles, reports, audio and video files, or research collections on CD-ROM. All with complete infrastructure support for the mastering, duplication, labeling and shipping of these.

Again, the publisher pays a wholesale cost for the production of each CD-ROM ordered and the profit comes from the markup that the publisher decides on for each item sold. CafePress clears payments from customers, prints the CD, packages it and ships it to your customer. It sets aside your profit margin and cuts a check for you at the end of the month.

The publisher base price is USD $4.99 INR Rs. 200/- per CD (excluding shipping). You can mark up the price as much as you want and CafePress collects payments and sends your profit margin to you.

More info: CafePress Data CD

12) Paid Assignment

While many find this very controversial, more companies are using bloggers and independent sites to talk about, promote or cover specific products and issues. The Marqui program, in which I've participated, is a good example. But there are other ways to go about it. A person can go to a company and become its official online blogger. A person can take specific assignments for prominent sites and work for them, with or without credit, covering specific issues.

The important thing here is to be clear and upfront about it. People are inflexible about this because they're afraid that the people they trusted and read without question before may now write articles because they are paid for it.

From my point of view, I say the following:

a) question your sources, no matter how good they are and how fanatical you are about them.

b) take that ham away from your eyes: there is no objectivity, outside of the transparency of the reporter, blogger or news reporter. Everyone is influenced in one way or another. You don't need to take money from a customer to be influenced. What about all those journalists and bloggers who routinely receive free evaluations of gadgets and software that everyone else has to pay for? Doesn't that influence them? Invitations to press dinners? Product launches? Come on.

What counts, and what I think readers value the most, is being upfront, transparent and credible. Assuming you have been, like everyone else, "exposed" to cover certain issues rather than others — what matters is how "transparent" you are about revealing your driving motives, interests and goals while writing on that topic. Can you be influenced while remaining true to your opinions? I believe you can.

Taking money per se is not a disreputable act, neither is getting paid to write about a certain topic: isn't this what newspapers command their editors to do?

What the critics of paid assignments have underestimated is the large demand out there for this. If the paid writers are transparent, accountable and professional with their assignment, then this is as legitimate as any other activity.

I guess you only need to decide if you are in it for the art or the part.

Marqui paid USD $800 INR Rs. 3650/- to the bloggers who did the assignment. Each one was required to write four articles a month that at least mentions and links to Marqui.

13) Donations

If you support a cause that goes beyond the mere reporting of news in your areas of interest, why not consider asking your readers for support?

People like to take a stand for the people whom they think can make a difference, so why not use this strategy to finance some of your effective communication campaigns? PayPal Donations, Amazon's Honor System and BitPass all offer a simple way to add a snippet of code to your site to make it easy for people to donate.

Depending on the system adopted, you may opt to receive money in euros, U.S. dollars, Japanese yen, pounds sterling and other currencies.

If all of the above fails:

a) Join a publishing network
If you are just starting up with your blog or small news site — and need either more traffic, exposure or experience before you feel you can do any of the above on your own — then joining a group blog may work for you.

Metafilter, Chris Pirillo's Lockergnome Channels, Blogcritics, WikiNews, Blogit or any of these group blogs, if not at my own MasterNewMedia, MasterViews and Kolabora.com, where I am always looking for additional contributors.

Working in a group blog can ease the pressure of having to post on a daily basis, gives you greater exposure in less time and exposes you and your ideas to an existing community of interested readers and other writers.

In some cases, like at Weblogs Inc., Creative Weblogging, Squidoo and elsewhere, contributing bloggers are also paid a share of the advertising revenue their blog generates.

Another great alternative is to look into the creation of local news sites and Get Local News has a smart idea ready to be picked up.

b) Blog your best without worrying about making money in any direct way. Money comes as a consequence of your extra exposure and visibility. Blogging creates extra income by allowing you to enter in close contact with relevant people in your areas of interest, and by facilitating exchange and contact with prospective customers through your online presence.

Simply blogging with no strings attached increases your credibility and authority in the field and earns you extra income when you are called to give advice. Having a blog to showcase your ability to review, explore or analyze issues and products is the best way to market yourself and to provide a living showcase of your talents and abilities.

Listen:
Making Money - session from Bloggercon III
Doc Searls leads the Making Money session at Bloggercon III. Audio from IT Conversations. [runtime: 01:24:31, 38.7Mb, recorded 2004-11-06]

True Voice: The Business of Blogging
Session hosted by Stowe Boyd at the Blog Business Summit in Seattle on January 24, 2005, with Robert Scoble and Get Real contributor Greg Narian.

Read:
Make Money off Your Blog
The Washington Post - January 30,
All of the above are non-exclusive strategies that can be used in parallel with other activities to create multiple income streams for bloggers, news sites and other content-focused online resources.

A few guiding principles have stood out from my own experience in the search for creating multiple income streams for an independent online publisher, blogger or small news site:

• Relevance, Value
  People want to see relevant information. Related to the main subject. If they like what they find, what better opportunity to give them more of what they want? Make your readers kings and queens at your site! The products and services a publisher selects should fit the editorial line of the blog/site as much as possible; this ensures a true continuum between articles and promotional messages.
• Complementary
  The additional ad or sponsorship information has to bring in value to the overall content. Selling prestigious and prominent content space for money without considering the relevance of the sponsoring firm to the sponsored content is a wasted opportunity for both sides. Given that no one enjoys being distracted by brand x or product z when trying to find something unrelated — why not leverage this natural and reasonable defense mechanism and match sponsors to relevant events and content spaces? Why not allow sponsors to provide extra value to the content/event offered by providing access/integration to premium-quality complementary resources?
• Visual unobtrusiveness - Non-interruptiveness
  Sponsorships, text-based ads, promotional messages don't have to scream for visual attention. If they complement and enrich what is already out there, they only need to be properly and intelligently juxtaposed, formatted and legible, scannable and printable, just like any other content on their hosting page. A site's web developer should have full control over the layout and positioning of these items by using CSS.
• Publisher Control
  The publisher must be king (or queen)
  This is what I think. It is the publisher and not the advertising agency or some obscure algorithm that should control which ads show up on my web pages. It should be the publisher who takes the role of information director in full; not just in respect to what is written, but also about what is promoted. Separation of editorial and marketing offices is not an advantage in the type of new-media universe I envision.

  Services like Blogads and the text-link clearinghouses facilitate this by allowing publishers to maintain full control of who are going to be their advertisers.

  Google AdSense provides some control of which ads are displayed by letting publishers filter out up to 200 advertisers that may not complement their content. Ideally, as I have advocated, a publisher should be able to select from a large inventory of relevant and complementary advertisers in the ads he wants to carry.

• Endorsement
  A publisher should also in some way endorse the products she advertises as a way to provide value to her readers with such "recommendations." I have repeatedly refused to be a well-paid affiliate reseller or advertiser for products that I didn't believe in, while many times I have offered my space for free to companies and products which I thought deserved my readers' attention (proof is available, if needed). A sense of personal ethics and editorial coherence is all it takes.

Which monetization strategy to use?

Diversify income streams
Don't bet all your money on one horse and think like a coffee shop where money is made with many small transactions across a good variety of (generally low-cost) related offerings.

What I am learning is that you can make money by creating and cultivating multiple, small, income streams. Relying on one big source of income is always dangerous. If that resource disappears, so does your ability to survive.
Photo credit: Elliott Scott
What are other blog / site monetization ideas that small publishers can utilize to make their passion a full-time job?

ChartGizmo is a free tool that lets you create chart online. With a free signup, you can start creating charts of any type (Pie, Bar, Line, Ring, 3D Pie, 3D Bar, 3D Line): just select the chart type, provide a title, select the size, choose the background color and whether to provide a legend or not, and add your items. When your chart is ready, you can easily save it locally or embed it anywhere. Free.
http://chartgizmo.com/

Color Schemer is a free online service that enables users to get a color scheme out of any JPG or PNG image. After you upload an image, the software will automatically analyze it and provide you with the list of colors that appear in that image, with their relative HEX color code. The application is free to use without any registration.
http://www.atalasoft.com/31apps/ColorSchemeGenerator/default.aspx

Picfont is a web based app that you can use to easily add text on any picture. Just upload a picture from your PC or URL, input the canvas size and background color, and start adding text to it. You can modify the text-size, color, find and even position and, when done, you can download the final image in JPG format. Free.
http://picfont.com/

VTubeTools is a set of online video applications that allow you to download YouTube videos or embed them in custom players. To create a custom player, provide the video ID, customize the settings (player size, color, border, quality and loop settings), click OK, and the HTML embedding code will be shown to you. Else, if you just want to download a video, paste its URL into the box and get the FLV file (works also with other video sharing sites). Free.
http://www.vtubetools.com/

Increase Online Ad Revenue: Professional Web Publisher Guide To Online Ad Optimization

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