My Blogs, Warts and All

I have this view on blogging, which my mate thinks is rather sad. He thinks everything is sad anyway. My posts are largely unedited. I don’t write a post and give it to someone to cast a ‘fresh eye’ on it. This is what I think, when you ask people to proof-read your blogs before you publish they don’t only spot the mistakes they also want to express their opinions on what you have written and more often than not they sway yours and the blog is no longer original. Probably better written but the originality is lost. My blog is my personal diary, though published for the whole world to see but it’s still my personal thing. It’s not a corporate or some other organisation’s blog, It’s moi. I want readers to connect with me on a personal level. I would like to meet a regular reader of my blog for the first time one day and make him feel he had known me since the day he started reading my blog. That is why I publish my posts, warts and all. It’s better to have a wysiwyg reputation. (What you see is what you get).
Unlike other types of publications I think the most authentic blogs should be the ones in their raw state.
Mind you, I don’t have the same opinion about other publications. A novel, be it fiction or fact, has to be properly edited before it is published because it’s not really about the writer. It’s more about the characters, storyline, plot and stuff. I think it actually bothers on criminal negligence to publish a textbook containing errors that could easily have been verified. (Lord help us if that was a medical text-book.) Almost the same argument goes for news journals and other regular publications. My blog on the other hand is what it is, my blog. I’d rather be corrected by someone from Australia who leaves a comment on my blog than have a proof-reader correct me always before I publish only to fall far below expectation when I finally meet readers of my blogs in person. My writings have to reflect my personality.
Hey, that’s just my opinion you may have a different one. It’s just that I have this habit of being right all the time.
Having said that I go to great lengths to carefully go over what I’ve written a million times to verify my facts, check my spellings and grammatical constructions before I publish. So whatever error you come across in my blog, that’s me.
I read about this lady who started writing a blog with a pseudonym until her writing skills improved and she started using he real name to blog. That’s what I’m talking about. (I’m not using a pseudonym though). She taught herself to write through blogging. Sometimes an embarrassing criticism from an unknown reader could be more effective than a gentle advice from a proof-reader pal.
Note however, that the most important factor to consider about blogging is to put the readers of the blog first.

Internet Marketing Basics

So you wanna be an Internet millionaire? My first advice to you is this, do not let the failure stories you hear discourage you. In another article of mine, I stated that Affiliate-marketing could be very lucrative if you work out a way of getting free traffic or you make more money than it costs you to get traffic, that’s what you call a good ROI(Return on Investments).
Let us cover a few basic steps about making money online: To make money online you need an online presence, a website. Creating a website has never been easier. It even gets easier with a blog. Oh, I’m sure you all know what a blog is.
I bet some of you are already going, “definitely not blogging!” Yes, I’m also aware of the scary statistics, over a hundred and twenty thousand blogs created everyday, millions of posts per day. You start to wonder, who is ever going to see my blog?
I have discovered that one of the reasons it’s sometimes difficult to make an impact is that we are always looking at the negative not the positive. Let me give some interesting statistics about blogging:
1.) Less than half of the blogs in blogosphere are written in English so that greatly reduces your competition among English speakers.
2.) Out of the 120,000 blogs created everyday, about 3,000 to 7,000 are known as spam blogs or splogs and shouldn’t be reckoned with.
3.) Also, in blogging, consistency matters a lot. A significant number of bloggers don’t update their blogs regularly. You can always do a random check and you’ll find out that very few bloggers update their blogs regularly. If you are serious about blogging as a gateway to your business that fact should give you an edge if you update your blog regularly. Remember what they said about search engine spiders? They love fresh content. Oh yes, it ain’t gonna be easy. I don’t remembered telling anyone I’ve found the easiest way to making money online. I keep saying that making money online could be both interesting and rewarding but it is not supposed to be a ‘get-rich-quick’ venture.
Ways to make your presence known easily in the blogosphere include, 1.) making comments on other people’s blogs. Not just comments like, “Great blog” or “Nice One” but relevant comments that will make the writer of the blog know that you actually read his post. Another factor to take into consideration is to only leave comments on blogs, which already have their “no follow” tags switched off. These blogs allow the web spiders to follow your comments back to your own blog.
2.) Make use of social bookmarking website like www.digg.com and www.propeller.com to attract traffic. Another very good one is “stumble upon.”
Please remember to register your blog with technorati, which is believed to be the number one blog directory site in the world.
3.) Finally, do not forget to submit articles to leading article submission sites.
Consistency is the name of the game. If you are consistent and diligent you will pull the traffic to your blog, which you can always redirect to your main site. I believe that it’s a downhill journey from there.

My Internet Marketing Mission

I wasn’t a little shocked when I asked a friend to read my blog and he came back to tell me that he didn’t understand what I was all about. A little intro to my friend, he makes money on the Internet and he is too busy to blog. End of intro.

I had to explain to him that my blog was not exactly for people like him, he already makes money on the Internet. I am writing for people who would love to start making some money on the Internet but don’t even know how to look for the necessary information to begin with. It’s a jungle out there and a lot of people are afraid of suffering from ‘information-overload.’ There’s so much information out there and you don’t even know where to start from. Here is where to start.

If you are an experienced Internet entrepreneur like my friend and you find the information on my blog too elementary please don’t walk away. Drop a line, let’s know where we can find you and possibly learn a few things from you.

I’m writing in these days of ‘credit-crunch’ when a lot of people are losing their jobs just as fuel and other basic utilities are getting more and more expensive. Some families are facing foreclosures, known as repossession in the United Kingdom. A lot of people would like to know what to do to earn a little extra income.

If you consider other businesses that people do on the side to supplement their incomes, making money online has a lot of advantages over these other businesses.

Property for instance, to invest in property you need to have a good credit rating and some money for deposit before you can buy a property. Please don’t even talk about those so called ‘no money down deals’. I used to be a conveyancer and I know all about them. This blog is not the forum to talk about them.
On the other hand, setting up an Internet business requires very little capital and has nothing to do with your credit score. Besides, it’s a lot of fun. I could go on and on about other businesses.

Internet business is it and this is the place to start because I’m assuming everybody who’s reading this blog knows nothing about Internet marketing. I have read other blogs written on ‘Internet marketing, affiliate marketing and stuff. Really nice blogs and well written too. The problem however, is that the writers assume the readers already have an ongoing Internet marketing business.

I’m assuming you don’t have an Internet business going, you’re looking for how to start one and you’ve come to read my blog, Welcome. I’ll source for the information you need and bring it here for you.

When I explained all that to my friend he nodded in agreement. Did I really have to go into all that explanation? No wonder he sometimes comes across as thick.

Selling Ring-Tones

I once dabbled into selling ring-tones online, gospel ring tones. My ring-tones were actually customised. I recorded some popular Christian hymns and choruses individually, converted them into mp3 formats, sent them by e-mail to a ring-tone company that converted them into monophonic and polyphonic ring tones, which were e-mailed back to me. I uploaded these tones on the website, set up the procedure to download them and started marketing. I bought a banner space on a Christian radio website and, voila! I started getting traffic within a few days! I actually succeeded in selling a number of tones before the advert campaign ran out.
The first noticeable problem was that of ‘non-deliverable tones’. Some of the subscribers would purchase up to five or six ring tones and only one or two would be delivered to their phones, and I only got paid for the ones delivered. I called the ring- tone company about it and, trust them, they put the blame on the subscribers. The second problem was not completely unrelated to the first one. I reckoned my ROI was not good at all. It was in the negative integer actually.
I then devised a solution to the problem, I would not reduce my advertisement expenditure but I would have some more affiliate links on the site. It was close to Christmas 2005 so I decided to include affiliate links to sites selling Christmas presents. I also started a PPC (Pay Per Clip) campaign with Overture and I guess the traffic really trooped in because the site crashed! Oh yes, it did. I reckon it was because I did not increase the bandwidth after adding those extra affiliate links and the site could not cope with the extra traffic coming from the PPC campaign. I was really disappointed and gave up completely when I should have rebuilt the site with extra bandwidth.
One lesson I learnt, which would always stay with me is that Affiliate-marketing is good business if you sort out your ROI, that is, if you are making more money than it is costing you to get traffic.
One last word about selling ring-tones online. It’s probably not such a good idea anymore. I invested quite a bit on making customised monophonic and polyphonic ring tones but hey, what happened shortly afterwards? Phones that could play real tunes started becoming popular and right now if you’re not using a Nokia 3310 or some other archaic handset you probably won’t even know what a monophonic ring tone sounds like. Most of the latest handsets in the market now support real tunes and there are ways of getting real-tunes without paying a dime. Especially with some of these phones that come with voice recorders. Apart from that most Networks also offer real-tunes for sale to their subscribers.
So if you are thinking of joining a ring-tone affiliate programme please consider what has been said above.

My Next Big Idea

I am going to share with you another mistake I made while trying to set up an Internet-Marketing venture. Like I said earlier, I’m going to talk about what I’ve done in the past and the lessons I learnt from those acts. I can tell you the ideas that could work and the ones that are not likely to work based on my past experience.
I believe there are millions of people out there like me who would like to know what works with Internet-Marketing and what does not. If I’m doing something and its working I’ll let you know and even demonstrate to you how it’s working and if it’s not working you’ll be the first to know.
My next big idea was about the London Underground Network, popularly known as ‘the tube’. I actually went as far building a website for this idea. The website was called, www.thetubetest.co.uk, I believe I registered the domain name sometime in 2003. Like the name implied, the website was a test of your knowledge of the underground network. Questions were randomly generated from a database of questions and the idea was that whoever answered all the questions generated at a particular time correctly qualified for a raffle draw to win a travel card. I did not appear to have learnt any lessons from my past experience. Again, I wanted some kind of endorsement from Transport for London (TFL), the organisation in charge of the London Underground network. My flatmate then, who was working with the Underground, saw the website and thought it was a wonderful idea. This encouraged me further to seek approval from TFL. Needless to say I never got it and due to no fault of the respected organisation. Heaven knows the number of individuals and organisations seeking some kind of sponsorship or approval from them on a daily basis.
The good thing that emerged from that was this, there was a point when I started preparing myself for receiving approval from TFL and I started making calls to Internet advertising companies to ask them if they would be interested in sourcing advertisements for a site that had the backing of TFL. When I called the third company the gentleman who picked the phone, after hearing me out, said to me, ‘I think what you need is an affiliate programme.’ This was December 2004 and that was the first time I would ever hear about affiliate programmes! When I had my other big idea about dating disasters, I didn’t know about affiliate programmes. I only knew that if enough people visited a particular site, advertisers could be interested in advertising on that site and everything would fit in, somehow.
I would conclude this post by saying that the lesson I learnt was that whatever you want to do don’t give up. Even if you do not actually succeed in it you might make a wonderful discovery along the way that could give you a new lease of life.

My First Big Idea

Back in ’99 I had this big idea and here’s how it started, when I was younger I used to be very imaginative and sometimes these imaginations would become short stories, which I would sometimes write down. I went to a supermarket one day and saw this girl whom I really fancied driving away in a very expensive car, my imagination started running riot and a short story developed from there.
The summary of the short story was that the lead character in the story also fancied a girl who was driving a nice car. This character knew where the girl shopped regularly and stalked her for a few days until he devised a plan to get her attention. The plan was to deflate one of her tyres then hang around until she showed up. As soon as she noticed that she had a flat tyre this character would appear from his hiding place and help her change her tyres. Wicked!
Unfortunately for my character, while deflating the tyre on the day he chose some other shoppers noticed him, called the Police and he was arrested. Yeah, you can imagine what the girl he fancied thought of him as he was being led away by the Police.
No, the moral of the story is not important but an Internet business idea developed from it and I promptly registered a domain name, which I never used until it expired. The idea was really simple, invite people to submit true life stories about their unusual dating experiences, the disastrous ones and the ones that were not so disastrous. The object would have been to create fun. Humour would have been the primary focus.
I think I went about it the wrong way however, I was looking for celebrity endorsement. I was hoping to get a celebrity to submit a story and boost the popularity of the site. Needless to say I did not get any celebrity endorsement and I thought that without that I couldn’t get a head start.
Like I mentioned in my earlier post, Google was still at its infancy then and I didn’t know that all I had to do was submit the site to the search engines. I had never heard about Search Engine Optimization and PPC campaigns.
I’m not saying that my idea would have been the next big thing on the Internet but that I never even went beyond registering the domain name. I was banking on getting a celebrity to endorse the site. I was looking for instant traffic the wrong way. If you are lucky enough to get a celebrity endorse your site, please go for it but if not there are so may other ways of marketing your site. Besides, the fact that a celebrity endorses your site is no guarantee that you will receive constant and consistent traffic.
I will tell you about my next big idea in my next blog and why that failed too.

Let's Get Serious

I guess I made it through the night. LOL

Have you ever wanted to work from the comfort of your home or move closer to a relative but cannot do so because of your work? How about the school runs? How more inconvenient could it be when you have to juggle between so many things at once simply because of that monster of a job you’ve got? A lot of you dream about being able to work from your homes or the ability to take your work wherever you go. This is your opportunity, join my team and it’s free to do that. I don’t want to over-emphasise the fact that there is no application form to complete or joining fee to pay. I guess that’s obvious. The word ‘free’ is being abused on the Internet everyday. Pardon me, did I say, ‘my team’ the other time? I prefer to see it as ‘the team’. This is not a ‘One man show’.

Let me whet your appetite with some facts about making money on the Internet. The writers of the One Minute Millionaire, Mark Victor Hansen and Robert Allen believe that there are only four major ways of becoming a millionaire. The four areas are, Investments, Real Estate, business and yes, Internet. To buttress their point, in the Sunday Times Rich List of 2008, twenty five Internet (Multi) Millionaires made the list. The minimum requirement to make the list is a net worth of at least £80 Million.
Two of the richest fifty people in the whole world made their money from the Internet. I’m sure you know who the two are, the google brothers. (They are not biological brothers but that’s what I like to call them).

Out of the four listed in their book would you agree with me that the one that requires the least start-up capital is the Internet? I read of so many people who have spent so much money buying books and attending seminars and courses that have yielded no results. If you are one of these people and you want to share your experiences because you don’t want others to go through what you have gone through then join the team.

Even if all you want is to be able to pay your mortgage and other bills from a little income earned from the Internet, believe me, this is very possible.

I’m also going to tell you some of the mistakes I’ve made in the past so that you can avoid them and I’ll be letting you into every secret I have discovered in my research into making money on the Internet. You will not believe how much free stuff is available on the Internet and where you can get them from.

I have developed a genuine off-line marketing technique and I’m going to try it out if it doesn’t work you’ll be the first to know.

How to join the team? Read my blogs, drop your comments and if you’re really interested I will invite you to write on my blog space.

The Snap!

I have been fiddling with making money on the Internet since 1999. To that I’m sure some people will say, ‘only that recently?’ I need to add however, that I’m yet to make a considerable amount not because there’s no money to be made on the Internet but because that thing just never ‘snapped’ in me until now. I once went for an Internet Marketing seminar featuring the likes of Ewan Chia and Patrick Chan, (know them?) Anyway, I met a gentleman at the seminar who told me that he had also been fiddling around the Internet for years without making any money until something ‘snapped’ in him and he made about £24,000:00 (Twenty four thousand Pounds) in about a week or something of that sort. That was December 2006. I didn’t experience that snap until this morning on my way to the Post Office.

My name is Kunle, pronounced as spelt. Okay, let me see if I can help you further although I’m no linguist. I believe for English speakers, its pronounced KOON – LAY, or QUN-LAY and this is going to be my first blog on how to make money on the Internet.

Sorry, did I make that sound like I was an expert Internet entrepreneur? Please don’t get me wrong. Like most bloggers, I’m just an ordinary fellow who is documenting his foray into the rather cumbersome and sometime frustrating, but, I must add, interesting, endeavour of making money Online.

Back in 1999 when Google was just about a year old and not publicly quoted, long before video became a standard feature on the Internet I had an idea for a website that would have generated content by itself and probably, note that I said probably, earned me truckloads of money by now. So why did I not pursue this idea? It had not snapped. Yes, that’s it. Whatever snapped in me this morning had not snapped and I abandoned the idea.

Is there a similar website on the Internet today doing what I could have started about nine years ago? Not to my knowledge.

In my next blog, I will probably, note again that I said probably, share with you the idea I had back then. It’s impossible to register the copyright to a business idea so you are more than welcome to run with it. On the contrary, you might immediately dismiss the possibility of the idea ever catching on. So maybe I was only following my instincts by not wasting my time pursuing the idea.

It snapped this morning and the interesting idea of forming a team hit me. If it really hasn’t and this is just a passing phase you probably will not see any further postings from me but as long as I continue posting blogs it probably has.

Finally, does your computer underline the word blogs as well? I think it’s time we included the words, blogs, bloggers, blogging and all other associated words into the English dictionary.

See ya!