Month: July 2009

Build A Niche Store – Way To Earn Money Online

I have recently purchased a Guide which explains about making money online through EPN (Ebay Partner Network) and it is named as thenumber1waytomakemoneyonline. Now I have yet to make any money through EPN but having read about how easy it can be making money through it I think I should give it a try. I will post here my results with making money through EPN.  There is a contest going on at a site which basically is kind of a guide for building niche stores using the BANS script. The site owner is going to give away a niche site which is build as per the N1WAY and you can read more about the contest here

WordPress Mega Site Manager – Desktop Tool to Manage wordpress sites

As my number of sites built on top of wordpress is increasing , I find it tough to manage them. I was wondering if there are any solutions which will allow me to manage the sites from a single place. If there aren’t any such thing available then I would like to create such a software which will allow to update the themes,plugins and do other general wordpress related task remotely.

Auto Content Services – Opengarage Idea – $3000 pm potential

As more and more people come to know about making money through niche blogs or sites, the need for quality content will increase. As such I think we should concentrate on providing such services. AMA already provides a way to post your content on multiple blogs through XML-RPC but I think it can be taken one step forward by providing the content itself. Actually it is kind of reverse AMA. AMA expects you to write your own content and then allows you to publish your article across various blogs which has joined it to get some free content.  But here we will be providing contents which will be posted on the blogs of the blog owner.  I know of 1 such service and they are charging around $67 monthly access fee and $1.50 per 200-300 word article.  I do not know how many articles a person working full-time can write so I am just assuming some figures our of thin air.  Let us suppose a writer writes around 10 articles per day and it mean he can generate something around $15 per day. He works 20 days in a month and it means $300 per month per writer. The monthly access fee is $67 out of which let us assume $30 is paid as commission to affiliates. It means a writer should be able to generate something around $330 per month of revenue.  Now there are two ways to hire the writers. One is having them work directly under you and other is letting any freelancer apply for being a writer.  In the latter method we need to incorporate some kind of rating within the system so that the blog owners can rate a writer and let good writer increase their prices. The latter is also somewhat scalable in nature and even if the company pockets only the monthly access fee ($30) it translates to $3000 per month in case only 100 people signup. Not bad for such a simple site.  So this is on my todo list and would like to finish up such a site as soon as possible.

Website Idea – Domain | Page Rank | Whois | Traffic | Performance | Misc

Lately as I have been increasing my online empire I have felt a need to maintain the status of various domains I have like the Pagerank, the traffic, the renewal date and so on.  There must already be something like this available online but anyhow the idea of creating something like this itself is attractive and we are going to create a site for providing a good detail about the domains you hold. This can be a good start for the Opengarage idea I am having.

What is it with Placement Agencies

For the last few months I have been looking to expand my team and having a not-so-good experience with vacancy advertisement in newspapers , I started calling up various placement agencies in Vizag.  Now the business model of placement agencies revolves around 2 modes. A placement agency either charges the candidates ( Ranging from a fixed fee to 100% of 1 month salary) or the company ( around 8% of yearly CTC).  Now few of the companies which I called for said that they charges candidates and they started sending the candidates after calling them for 3-4 days. The quality of candidates landing into my office for interview wasn’t good and the hiring exercise seemed futile at that moment.  So I started calling companies which presumably charges companies and I asked them to send the T&C. Apparently when I told them that I was looking for content writers in the 5k pm range and ME in 8-12k range , they weren’t very interested. On further enquiry I came to know that they are only interested in providing candidates for post which earns at least 15k per month.  Knowing that the market is kind of slump right now, I was wondering how do the average candidates ( The ones who have completed the BA,MA,BSc,BCOM,MCOM etc. degrees which are for people who has not got the chance to do a BTech,BE,MBA) lands up a job.  What is the mode of job searching they prefer the most (Newspapers,Placement Agencieis,Online Job Portals,Friends etc).  Anyhow since I don’t want to search for candidates on online job portal and I am in no mood to advertise in newspapers and since the local companies are not helping much, I think I should start a free for all simple job directory for Vizag City.  The companies who needs candidates can post their requirements and the job seekers can look for the openings. I am not sure how I am going to promote it to candidates. ( It is easy to promote it to companies since Justdial would be the best way to list it there).  I think wordpress should be enough for such a simple job directory but in case it doesn’t then I will try some real job portal script.

Various Methods of Making Money Online

make_money_with_google

There are many methods to make money online.  People can make money by selling products on sites such as ebay or they can make money by providing services (Like what we do). We provide services related to website designing and the bulk of our work comes through outsourcing marketplace sites such as rentacoder,odesk,elance,limeexchange etc. Affiliate Marketing is also very famous method to make money online. Generally you will be selling products/services on behalf of others and you will get commission for it.  The affiliates can be paid for actual sales or for just providing leads to the advertiser.  For last few months I am trying to understand more about affiliate marketing and I will actively start with it once I have some extra cash lying around with me.

I will be updating this post with more detailed description soon.

Simple Project Mgmt. using Tadalist

Tadalist is good for managing simple to-do list but it can be used to make a simple makeshift Project Mgmt. Tool which is what I am going to use till I find a proper way to manage the projects which we are handling.

Since tadalist provides a RSS feed for the todo entries, we can use that to create a flash widget which gets the inputs from that data and create a simple widget which displays stuff like project name, amount, deadline & client email.  As there aren’t multiple fields available in the todo list we need to cram all the details into the single item field. The different data can be separated with a | which will enable us to extract the relevant data from a single field. I will be updating this post as we proceed further with creating a Flash Widget.

A Little about Myself

Hi. My name is Alok Soni and I welcome you to my personal blog. I have been running a very small company ( Harmony Infotech) since July 2007 and we provide services related to Internet Website Designing. We generally gets projects from freelance marketplace sites such as rentacoder,odesk,limeexchange,elance etc.  After working for varied clients designing ebook covers, mini-sites, flash banners,headers etc. I was wondering if this is what I hope to do for rest of my life. I have always dreamt of running a company which deals with something related to computers but didn’t quite know what it would be exactly. After finishing my 12th I planned to start a company for making software products but I wasn’t bold enough to pursue that path. Due to family pressures I joined an Engg. College and finished my B.E. (Comp.Sci.) in 2003 and not knowing what to do, I started doing some research online.  During that period I believe I read some articles about Free/Open Wireless Community Networks (Freifunk being one of them) and I dreamt of doing something similar in India. The next few years were wasted on just deciding what to do exactly apart from reading a great deal of stuff on internet and doing some freelancing projects on side. But being more of a creative kind of creature rather than a process oriented kind I never believed that freelancing is the way forward as I just don’t like doing same stuff day-in day-out. I have always wanted to learn about things, make new things, try new things and as such wasn’t very sure what exactly I want to do in life. Come 2007 June, my cousin told me about the franchisee being available for Justdial company as they had expanded their operations to around 40 cities. Till that time I didn’t knew about justdial even though I used to read lots of stuff/news online and it was kind of surprising to know that India had its own Local Search Company. It seems justdial was quite popular in metros but they didn’t /don’t advertised much and moreover they didn’t seemed to be covered much (if at all) by computer magazines as I used to read Digit,Chip & PC-Quest quite regularly. But my cousin had used Justdial Service lots of time during his BBM degree in bangalore and he somehow convinced me to go for it as he was quite impressed with the service.  I wasn’t very keen at beginning but once I visited Justdial Hyderabad office and saw how it really worked, I instantly felt in love with the company. The way the IROs were handling the ever incoming calls and the sheer volume of calls being handled was enough to convince me that Justdial has quietly built a very strong business and I agreed to become their franchisee for Vizag and Vijayawada.  But I didn’t had any experience running a company let alone in two places at the same time and it didn’t quite work very well so I had to close down operations in Vijayawada and just concentrate on Vizag. Even though I have become more experienced now but still I have lots of things to learn.  Apart from handling the Justdial Franchisee I also run a small website designing firm as mentioned at the starting.  But lately I am trying to move into Internet Marketing and Making Money Online field and this blog is mainly to chronicle my journey into this fields. I hope you will learn something worthwhile from my blog and I invite all of you who still are unsure about making money online to join me and my online friends. Being honest myself, I generally prefer company of honest people and surprisingly there are quite a few of them . Even though they may not know me personally I would like to thank Griz,Vic, Court,Mark,Lissie,RT and quite a few others who have been instrumental to make me believe into this whole making money online business.