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How did I earn...
Profile: Ron Sim - Chairman of OSIM International Ltd
May 7, 2008 | Posted by InvestorBlogger | Be the first to leave a comment
You can see them everywhere… They look scary… But they are popular and expensive. What are they?
Massage Chairs of course. This ad is running on Taiwan’s site advertising a chair for Mother’s Day, though it is quite pricey. Since this video is not available on YouTube, I find the video is a little choppy. You can watch a three-minute interview with the chairman of Osim, Ron Sim who worked his way up from selling noodles on the street to a company with nearly $400 million dollars in annual revenue which sells healthy-lifestyle products all over the world.
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“Sim is my surname, and the O is actually the globe.” — Ron Sim
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I can’t embed the video, but it’s worth watching.
For more about the company, read the brief introduction on CNN. And there’s an excellent article on StoneForest that describes his success story, his origins and challenges. His motivation to succeed transcends hunger, failure, hard circumstances, and much more!
Success online and offline - or how to earn an extra $10K!
April 30, 2008 | Posted by InvestorBlogger | Be the first to leave a comment
Welcome, Readers!
If you’ve never visited this blog before, why not come on in! Today’s post is all about the landmark that I just reached!
$10,059 (US$)
But before that you can read about this blog, and some of the great posts here. Or you can try out one of these two great ways to keep up with what’s happening:
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For more interesting articles on running a business, making money, operating your blog, , and so on…, subscribe to the RSS feed or email newsletter. There’s a lot more in the Random Walk to Wealth on InvestorBlogger dot com.
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Subscribe to the top 20 money making feeds download. Just download it and upload it to your favorite RSS reader (Google Reader, BlogLines, etc. all work!) I’ve just updated the feeds with several new blogs that are worth reading. At the very least, check it out! After all, it’s free!
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Reaching a Milestone!
As it’s just published, I was reading through the numbers again for income for InvestorBlogger and I was surprised to learn that I have already surpassed the $10,000 mark for earnings. While that mightn’t seem like a great deal for others, it is a big deal for me, even though I just squeaked past!
Much of the success of reaching this milestone lies around some ideas that I drew up in January using my own experiences, and a desire to escape from the rat race of working 50 hour weeks! These have included creating, directing and supplementing a variety of income sources to create an average of an extra US$500 per month over the last twenty months. Naturally, this is a gross income, hosting costs, pc costs, and a lot more taxes need to be deducted from this amount!
Do set a goal!
Truth is: I never set a goal or a timeframe to earn that much because when I started out in 2006, there weren’t many make money blogs. I quickly set some goals in this post for the following year. I forgot about this post for a long time, but a quick gander will tell you that I haven’t managed to reach the financial aspect or the time scale. Never mind: I did reach 42% of the amount during that time.
Never give up!
In the past twenty months since I started this, I have had some really lousy months, and some spectacular months. In fact, in January, all my chickens came home to roost and I exceeded by a fraction my monthly target (reaching a little over 104% of the target)! But success isn’t about what happened then, and failure isn’t about what happened in July (when I barely scraped by at about 24%). Success is what happens when you focus on your business and execute (even poorly). Because when you try to execute, you build up usable data on your performance, and you can tweak or revise as you need.
Building Income Takes Time
Another thing that I realized when I was doing this is that the success that I’ve been experiencing over the last few months in this drive to build a profitable set of income streams, that success was founded on what I was doing a long time ago.
When I got married, my wife and I had almost nothing. We spent most of our savings on our wedding, and we had no clear plan about how we were going to buy a house, build a life or anything. In 1995, it seemed that all we did was earn the money, then spend it.
Soon after the wedding, I realized that we were about to repeat the mistakes that my parents and many others had made: that is, living hand to mouth. So I knuckled down and we began to save our money, budget more effectively and learn about running a business.
Taking Action
The worst thing in the world must be failing to take action: when you know something is right and you fail to take action. The next worst is failing to follow through on your initial actions. And the next worst must be failing to learn from your actions and their consequences.
To be an entrepreneur, you have to be willing to take risks. Many times, these risks involve capital (or your cash!), sometimes they involve business decision (such as what products to stock or not to stock), or who to hire.
Recently, I was chatting about starting a business with a friend in the UK, and I recognised the same thinking patterns that I used to have. “Oh, to start in business, you have to have a marketing plan and a business plan, … and this plan… and that plan…”
Yet no amount of plans can replace the fact that you have to take action. Simply planning everything cannot substitute for the lack of taking concrete action. Planning, in many cases, becomes a way to avoid taking any action because you’re still “thinking about it”, “putting things together”, “researching the market”… Whatever. Perhaps you’re hindered by other concerns: a typical one is fear.
Don’t be afraid
For a few years, I was involved with a teaching journal. I remember after the first issue came out, I was all excited. It cost quite a lot to print, but the edition came back looking good! I was thrilled by the book: knowing that something I had conceived, designed and worked on bore fruit. The contributions were excellent and the journal was well received by everyone.
I set up my commerce site, and waited for the orders to flood in. And waited, and waited. I’m still waiting… Turns out that, if there was a market for my journal, I hadn’t found it! So the books are still sitting around waiting to be sold. I’m proud that I was able to pull something together that had a lot of potential; I’m thrilled to have had the opportunity to work with great people on this magazine; and I’m disappointed that I didn’t work hard enough to get sales.
Sometimes though taking a chance will incur negative feedback. In fact, someone wrote to me, when things were bad in both this business and in my offline business: “I don’t think it would be good for your future career” to continue when we faced real problems. Such words of ‘encouragement’ are sometimes hard to bear.
But you have to bear these, and move on. Remember that’s what business is about after all: taking action. You need to make that first step and that second step and that third step and so on.
Develop a thick skin
And that’s what you need… a thick skin but a good pair of ears. Why? Because if you want to be a success, you will get a lot of criticism (both positive and negative) as I have. While many business people really pour their heart into their business, sometimes the criticisms can seem unjustified as the customers or competitors or outsiders don’t appreciate all the extra time and effort you put into your products and services. But, for that you can hardly blame them: they don’t know. A thick skin and a broad smile are therefore two of your best weapons!
You’ll also need a great pair of ears: ears to hear and sift through the criticisms for things that you will get in order to find the gems that can help turn your business into a crown jewel.
I haven’t so far ‘discovered’ my other qualities that I have needed over the years, I doubtless will add them in future posts.
How do you entrepreneurs deal with constructive (and otherwise…) criticism? What do you do with the things customers tell you?
What advertising works on this blog?
April 21, 2008 | Posted by InvestorBlogger | Read these 2 comments
I’ve been updating my own advertising blocks recently with a variety of different means. I’d like to present a short summary of my impressions of what advertising works or doesn’t (this is third party advertising not advertising sold directly through my own page).
Here are some notes. I’ve accorded each a status out of five points to help you consider if you should try them on your website:
* works poorly or doesn’t work
** works but unsatisfactory
*** works satisfactorily
**** works well but have some reservations
***** works very well and is recommended.
1. Google Ads.
Setting Google to display images instead of text ads is improving my clickthroughs. I’m displaying three ad boxes on the columns on auto-rotation. It’s improving from running traditional google ads. Even if no-one clicks, it’s a little more eye candy. I’ve still to decide whether Adsense will be a permanent feature on this blog or not. Image Ads are saving their skin at the moment… but… So it’s still generating income, much to my surprise.
Status: Works OK. (***)
2. Real Traffic Exchange
Real Traffic Exchange is producing some nice clicks but my own ads aren’t converting at all. So I’ve got to tweak them. I haven’t decided to keep them permanently yet. Also, updates are very slow if you make any changes to the text. Very SLOW.
Status: Works. (***)
3. TopSpots
TopSpots isn’t an expensive way to advertise on my blog, and I’ve seen several new purchases this month. I had a fake transaction that showed up that wasn’t paid for, so I quickly removed that. I would also like a thinner widget as it is a little wide for this theme.
Status: Works well. (****)
4. TTZ Media Ads
The TTZ Media ads are causing a bit of a headache, not displaying properly at times, but things seem fine right now. Generally, they’re not producing any clickthroughs in the sidebar at the moment. I think they’ll perform better in the post or between posts.
Status: Oh, well. (**)
5. TLA - Sell Ads for Traffic
I’ve recently had two new advertisers show up on the right sidebar. If you’d like a special offer to buy advertising here or sell your own advertising, check out Text Link Ads. This generates a fair amount of the monthly income from this blog. But it’s not without risks and penalties.
Status: Works fine but some hesitancy to recommend this due to the nature of the advertising. (****)
6. SocialSpark and PayPerPost
Blog Sponsorship: I’ve added the Blog Sponsorship at the bottom and on the first visit. The service is provided by SocialSpark. I’m only running it to see what would happen, if it adds to the blog or detracts from it.
(***) Status: seems okay, but only from a lack of information.
Other than that, I’m not currently doing any advertising for either of these due to limitations on my blogs’ presentation and ranking and segmentation. You can read more about this in other posts. Search for Payperpost articles. There’re lots.
Status: (****) - I do have serious reservations about this kind of advertising, but it works.
7. NetAudioAds
Earlier this month I removed the NetAudioAds software from the blog, after being strung along for months by their always coming notice. Though my account is still active, I have all but given up hope that this will turn into a viable long term income source.
Status: Works but unsatisfactory due to lack of real ads to show. (**)
8. Voxant
TheNewsRoom is a video based website that provides feeds that can be shared and can earn money for your blogs. The videos I found present a number of problems: the new code is difficult to place in posts, I find; the videos aren’t current to begin with; the videos get removed (leaving ugly big gaps in your older blog posts); and payout rates are well… poor to say the least.
Status (*) I’ve not added this to any posts of late. I would remove them from older posts but I can’t find them.
9. Affiliates: Dreamhost vs. BlueHost
Although this blog has been hosted by Dreamhost for as long as it’s been online (and I love them, they’re great MOST OF THE TIME!), their affiliate program has not worked for me at all. I’ve had thousands of clickthroughs and not a single sign up in more than two years. So I’ve switched one of the text links to BlueHost to compare the results. The difference: I can track exactly where links come from to see what performs and what doesn’t.
Status: Works but not effectively (**)… Let’s hope that it gets a three-star, soon.
10. Amazon: Still successful.
I’ve been selling books on Amazon for quite some time now, and I’m still surprised to see anything sell there, but they do. Since January 2007, I’ve sold over $379 and earned a whopping commission of about $15. So affiliate marketing does work. But I don’t know how.
Status: (****) - definitely needs more work to make this profitable. But if you can sell $300, $3,000 shouldn’t be so hard, right?
I’ve also tried AdToll which is still active, but not being used here right now; Adbrite which was a waste of time; PayU2Blog (which don’t do customer service well, and bloggers who advertise for clients are as much customers because they provide the adspace); and a whole bunch of others that I can’t remember.
I’m always heartened by doing a post like this as it reminds me what I have been able to do with such knowledge as I have. Do check through the sites I’ve linked to (affiliate codes are included for most). Let me know how’re your money making efforts going with these vendors? Let me know.
This post has already been updated.
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TopSpots
