Author: Alok Soni
Fear of Failure or Success
I just read this article by finch wherein he discussed about the fears the affiliate may have. He discussed about the fear of failure and fear of success. Not sure what really fear of success means as I believe everyone would like to be successful but I can easily understand fear of failure as it is one of the major stumbling block to my own growth as an entrepreneur/affiliate marketer. One of the issue he mentioned which is responsible for this fear is perfectionism. Now I am not a perfectionism by any means but I don’t want to bring something in open until I am satisfied that it is really good (like our $5 design service). But after reading that article, I am thinking what will I lose if I just start releasing the stuff I have in mind without thinking too much whether it is really good enough or not. Some of the ideas I have are really crazy and I wouldn’t even discuss them with someone who is close to me thinking what they will think of me. If I just sit on them and expect to work upon them whenever I can get some free time then I think it will take me many more years so what I am planning now is to get the ideas out in open, register a domain and then just put something out there. One of my ideas was to create an open playground kind of thing wherein anybody who is interested to collaborate with me can come down to my office and start working on it but now I am thinking to extend that idea a little (or maybe more). So here are the ideas on which I want to start working sooner and will be updating this post once I have something more done related to that idea. I understand some of the ideas may not be feasible due to various constraints but then what does it cost to dream up something.
1) Domain Alerts – A google alerts kind of service for stuff related to domains.
2) Domain Prices Comparator
3) Simple Ads – The simplest way to monetize a site. No account bans, no manual reviews, heck no need to signup also.
4) Software/Web Tools powered by crowdfunding
5) Attack of the Clones (Will disclose later)
What to do with all the ideas I have in my mind ?
I have been an ardent reader for most of my life and would tend to read anything and everything I come across including cheap novels, brochures, hoardings, textbooks(except my own as that were supposed to be mugged up to get good marks in exam and I found it much easier to do that just before the exams and even then I just used to remember the diagrams as I could write long stories on my own based on the diagrams). Due to so much reading I will be getting an idea every now and then but there are 2 problems I face when thinking of getting them implemented. One is most of them would be existing in some form or other and it kills the drive to do it just for the sake of doing something new. And the other is figuring out how to make money out of it. Maybe I should not think of trying to do something new but rather do something which is proven and is already making money. One of that ideas is building gaming guides which I have started thinking more about lately due to one of our sites getting couple thousand visitors daily. My company has been building a site for Rage of Bahmut, which is a card trading game and has been among top games on android play store for quite some time now and recently they also crossed 3+ million users. I already knew that there was a market for dedicated game play guides but it was the first experience I had with building a site and then getting good traffic to it and I started thinking more on the line of having a proper,dedicated team to build more sites/guides and update the current one as currently it is not as good as I want it to be. Moreover I came across another company which does this thing full-time and they are even part of a big book publishing house. I was under the impression that clickbank was ideal place to sell this stuff but it seems it is more mainstream than I thought and companies are selling gaming guides directly on their websites. So now I am just trying to figure out more such games and hopefully will be building out more such sites.
Concentrating on multiple things or a single thing ?
I have been into internet related businesses (web development, internet/affiliate marketing, niche websites, graphic designs etc.) for quite some time now and have had few successes here and there but nothing major yet. One of the issue I feel is having too much on my plate to eat. I wonder if it would have been better if I had concentrated on a single thing and make sure it succeeded rather than trying my hands on different things. Also being a technology oriented guy I love to solve technical issues without bothering much about business aspects and which is hampering the business growth which I was expecting. I had set some goals for myself but it looks like it would take some more time to achieve them. But now I am thinking hard if I should just leave the experimentation part aside and concentrate on few/one thing which I know works even if it means not doing what I love. Lately it seems the internet/affiliate marketing field is getting tougher and people are planning to concentrate more on working upon something concrete/long-lasting and stuff they love rather than just making money mostly by arbitraging. But this luxury is a kind of rare where you have made enough money and don’t have to worry about it for next few years. I don’t know what I will be doing myself once I reach that stage but till then I think it is internet, internet, internet.
Paid Traffic vs Free Traffic
When I started my journey towards making money online, the emphasis was on building niche sites but as my adsense account was banned due to the reasons known best to Google only , I stopped concentrating on it for time being and started searching for better methods (Though I have again started working on this model and have created a site targetting the new song chammak challo and will later on convert this site to a movie review site). The reason I started with niche sites was that it looked more kind of passive income and the investment is also low but the results are supposed to long lasting if you can get a site ranked in Google. The stories of people making anywhere from $1000 to $30000 per month due to sites created few years back was very tempting. But I think I was kind of late into the party since Google had just started its fight onto the MFA brigade and EMD’s were losing its sheen as they weren’t getting the boost they used to get ( I cannot verify this though since I haven’t built much EMD’s myself yet). Then I came across Barman when I was searching for so called Guru Product. Even though I had ordered the supposedly free CD which was mailed for only the cost of S&H nothing was there in that except statements about how this Guru was making so much and how much we can also make. I was glad that I found the barman’s blog as I had ordered the Guru product for the first month trial and promptly cancelled it after reading the reviews there. Thereafter I started founding more people like David who were kind of more into Paid Affiliate Marketing. So now this is where the question raised in this post title comes into picture. Given a chance what would be a better way to make money online. I cannot concretely answer the question yet since I am not making much with any of this methods but I can clearly see both have a strength & weakness. I will update this post later on once I have more experience with both the methods.
An Update
It’s been a long time since I have written anything on my blog. Frankly I was never the kind of one who can talk much about himself or other things around me like few others do in such a copious matter and being silently working on my laptop for most of the day make sure that my vocal cords aren’t exercised much.
Anyway after sitting on fence for a long time deliberating on whether I should start with paid affiliate marketing or not I had taken a jump few months back and have already got my feet wet. At the moment I am working with convert2media and peerfly but I have also been approved to most of the top networks listed here. Now I have to only ramp up my campaigns and reach some good profit level asap as it has been a long time I have been stuck in the same range.
Btw I have decided to blog daily and hopefully I will be able to keep up the pace.
As the New Year Approaches
As the current year is coming to its end, the time for New Year Resolutions is nearing. But I am in no mood to wait for making some resolutions. As my life is taking new turn everyday, I think I shouldn’t let the time fly in hope of doing things at a perfect time and make some resolutions. I wouldn’t like to call them resolutions but kind of targets I wish to achieve in next year.
- Learn a Language Every Year. Starting from first, it will be Telugu and later on I am going to cover Tamil, Assamese and other languages.
- The order volume for our Header Design Service should be around 50-100 in a day from the current 1-5 in a day. We generally charge around $5 for each header but they aren’t some cheap quality stuff thrown in few minutes. We exquisitely craft the header depending upon the user inputs and also provide upto 5 revisions with no question asked policy.
- I have around 16 members working in my company at the moment. I would like to increase the strength to around 30 members and make sure each member is generating atleast $1000 per month for the company. I personally would like to make around $1000 profit per day around this time of the year next year. For this to happen , I would be starting making around $100 per day in January.
- As my previous partnership haven’t worked out properly , I would like to get a new partner who can/will understand me and have faith on my business model. Though the time is coming sooner when the cheques rolling in will be able to convince all the skeptics that I am on a correct path.
- Revenuewise I would like my company to be around $10000 – $30000 per month total revenue. Part of it will be from project works and professional services rendered such as Cheap Script Installation Service and rest of them from Internet and Affiliate Marketing.
Now the question is how I am going to achieve my goal. Let me breakdown the blueprint I have in my mind.
1) Start heavily creating niche sites. I am aiming around 100 sites in a month. As there are around 25 working days so my HI Blogging Team would need to create 4 sites in a day. Assuming each niche site contains around 10 articles (of 500 words each) at minimum it would mean 40 articles in total. Now a single person should be able to write around 10 articles working 7 hours so I would need 4 members dedicated for this task. Btw I am thinking of selling around 25 sites out of the 100 created few months down the road so that I have some cashflow which is definitely needed to make sure I am not burning cash too much. I think it would be easy to sell each of them for $50. Btw there are lots of different ways to monetise a niche site and I would be trying almost every method so that I don’t rely on a single source of revenue. Few of the monetisation method from the top of my head are
- Adsense
- Chitika
- Amazon
- Clickbank
- Ebay
- Adbrite
- Commission Junction
2) Finally start with Paid Affiliate Marketing. I have been planning for a long time for starting with paid affiliate marketing but couldn’t start. I intend to start dabbling into PPC/PPV ie paid traffic acquisition method and monetise the site with CPA/CPS offers.
I will be updating this post till the new year to create a good roadmap for myself.
An Update
It has been a long time I have updated my blog. I was pretty busy with day-to-day stuff as my company have now grown to over 12 members and I am looking to soon reach around 20 member strong. But the growth in members isn’t exactly translating into higher revenues because the team hasn’t become productive as a whole. We have been doing some good business on vworker.com and now fiverr.com but it is still a far cry from my target of $10k per month of income out of which $5k is supposed to be from projects and $5k from blogging and affiliate marketing. Also even though I want to totally stop working on coding/development/designing projects myself but somehow or other I have to work on it. But once I am back from the Chardham Yatra, I would stop working on projects and will concentrate on affiliate marketing and blogging full time. On an other note, this month marks something which I will remember for my whole life. I cannot/don’t want to talk much about it but just want to say to all the girls in the world, a belief in your better half (Even if he was wrong before and he could be wrong now) is much better for your relationship.
I am going to start with Affiliate Marketing
After thinking about whether to jump into aff/ppc business for a long time now, I have decided to get my feet wet and start with this industry. I read the affiliate newbie guide which was recommended by http://www.ppc.bz (I don’t know who recommended them though). I am actually pretty skeptic and don’t generally believe what is written on a website so easily but the ppc.bz guy seems to be genuine in his messages.
So I am just going to update this post with how I am doing with Affiliate Marketing.
What I will be working on in Year 2010
I have been running a very small start up based in vizag (Vishakapatnam) and we mainly dabble into web development. It has been growing steadily but still not as fast I want it to be. There are also some other few projects which I am interested to pursue but I am not able to due to Lack of Time and also due to absence of a companion who can take the headache out of running day-to-day company affairs. Frankly I don’t like wasting my time on mundane stuff like bidding on projects on freelancing sites or asking my team for the project status. I think I can delegate that stuff to one of my team member and I can start concentrating on purely doing stuff which will directly impact the company growth (Though bidding on projects is essential to get projects but it eats lot of my time just on the bidding phase. Moreover I generally prefer doing projects on Rentacoder & Odesk but I still bid on other sites just to increase our exposure. I want to minimize my time on bidding on projects and rather do some constructive things.)
As my dream of creating adsense niches has been shattered , I have to figure out another way to generate money through online businesses. So I will be concentrating on Affiliate Marketing and most probably I will go ahead with creating Amazon & Ebay niches. Apart from it I would also concentrate on developing my other virtual real estate empire which may not give any returns in the short-term but which can be really big in long term. I am listing few of my ideas on which I will be working on in coming months in 2010.
A site about anything related to Money and its various avatars like credit cards,debit cards,savings accounts,loans etc.
As it becomes more and more easy to run something using wordpress and its themes/plugins combo, it is quite natural for us to keep track of things possible in wordpress as is is our most preferred CMS.
My small effort to increase the numbers of idiots in this world.
A natural extension to the earlier site. Kinda showcase for the opengarage team and also to attract would be idiots by luring them through the promise of mini/main projects.
To Be Continued….(As I get more idiotic ideas in my mind).
Is this the Life you want to live..
This is an excerpt from the book “Tears of The Mystic Rose” which can be found at
“the whole education system is criminal and against the innocent child
who has no choice but to follow whatever is thrust upon him
from the very frst day in nursery
the whole education is geared to training the mind
towards competition and aggression and jealousy and judgement
this fact is simple and of clear understanding
as no parent wants their beloved child to be behind others
everyone wants their child to come frst…be the best…always ahead
it is impossible that everyone can come frst in class
this mathematical principle would defeat even poor albert einstein
only one child can come frst…second…then third
which child wants to be third class…any takers
which child is congratulated for coming in last
any child with a dumb aptitude just to memorise stupid dates and numbers
and meaningless bits of knowledge comes frst in class
education just tests memory and not intelligence in any way
the subjects taught are all meaningless to the poor child
but teachers are serious and parents pressurising to do well in school
the innocent child has no choice
just cramming their innocent minds with garbage and rubbish
they are there to carry the dustbins of our past glory…or gory for that matter
the poor child is taught about
alexander the great…genghis khan…tamurlane…ivan the terrible…hitler
great battles and world wars…destruction and destruction
what is so great about alexander the great
just his egoistic conquering insanity
murderer termed the great conqueror
history
the stupidities of our past remembered with pride
geography
the reasons for the division of our one earth into separate nations
biology
all about everything except ourselves and our place in nature
chemistry
all about everything but what to do with chemical hormones of fear or anger
mathematics
where one plus one is two but never fits into our real world of counting
language
all is talk and talk and the language of silence is no means of communication
the whole education is upside down geared for the average masses
all subjects and syllabus and exams to exactly ft millions of different children
from different social economic cultural religious backgrounds
into one single exam pattern with no variation
all children carbon copies like a plastic factory churning out toys
each with the same barbie doll smile…exactly the same
we are simply creating robots for a controlled environment
comfortable and easy to manage in our conditioned society
all people must fit into one mentally acceptable social group
no wonder this human race is confused
fragmented and divided against itself…and always at war with itself
no child loves himself…no child accepts himself…no child can be himself
no child loves himself
and silently and deeply knows they are being crushed
by the education system to cram and struggle against their nature
to do well and be rewarded with meaningless degrees for employment
every child is conditioned that they are stupid and need to be educated
they know nothing…that they are not fit the way they are
they do not deserve reward without struggle and effort
divided from childhood they learn hate and learn politics of the smile
they hate themselves for failing to satisfy their eager and loving parents
teachers elders society and nations
they learn to hate their parents and elders for forcing them against their
nature and learn to smile jimmy carter smiles
all smiles all around…just keep smiling hurting inside…it pays to smile
no child accepts themselves as they are
how can they when they are rejected by all around…for stupid meaningless
reasons which appear to be serious and important by retarded grownups
do not cry be a man…live for society…live for another…sacrifice yourself
go to war and fight for your nation
no child can be himself
become this or become that…become this powerful president
or that famous doctor or that important government dignitary
or anything else will do…but do not become just yourself
the very first lesson in life…the only few worth unlearning
love yourself…accept yourself…be yourself
love yourself
by not loving yourself the small silent and fragile energy
is divided and fragmented from within and a cancer grows rapidly unseen
do not love others…just learn to love yourself first
one who loves himself understands the value of love from within
self love is the way to inner health and growth of self knowing
this love grows and blossoms through seven pillars of inner light
love nourishes and soon spreads on it own accord to others
accept yourself
what a stupid boring world we would live in if all humans were exactly same
learn acceptance of yourself just the way you are
existence has given birth to you and accepts you unconditionally
you are breathing and alive with its aliveness…a miracle in itself
each and every individual in unique and irreplaceable in this vast cosmos
the very beauty of you remains its unique signature
be yourself
you can try and pretend as much as this society demands of you
to be someone else and to live the life of the impossible imposter
there is only one way and that is being yourself
whatsoever you are just relax at ease and be yourself
just out of being yourself a tremendous grace and beauty
will be released and will radiate all around you
love yourself…accept yourself…be yourself
these qualities will create for the first time
an individual whose inner fame is undividable
a great pool of energy will gather and surround you
with this an inner trust will arise from within you”.