Learn How to Make Money on the Internet

That’s when the question drops in that do you want to make easy money online? If the answer is yes then there is one warning: By nature all humans are greedy, if you cannot control your greed you will still make money but will never make easy money. This is different than making extra money, as I’ve already talked about how you can earn extra money in my previous articles. However, it’s only different when you look at it from the perspective I want you to, which is the money-maker’s perspective.

I can see the words coming out of your other ear. What I was trying to say was that you can never make money to your maximum capability if you’re resting. When you’re greedy, your greed want let you take work easy and hence you will make more money but it will not be easy.

Keep reading the rest of this entry...

It’s been a while since I last posted. Well, life has been pretty busy with me for the last few months. I’ve been preparing for my cambridge examinations and the SAT Reasoning Test; studies aren’t easy in the last year of school. Plus, there are some project you just can’t overlook.

I’ve been replying to mails as soon as I get time, I’m sorry if I can’t get back to all of them. I have also composed a few articles for beginners who want to make money on the internet, since my previous articles are quite out-dated by now.

I’ll be publishing the articles very soon and I’ll also be completing the series on making money online in pakistan. I know it’s been a while and I didn’t do the follow-ups to it, but you can expect to get some more specific information on how to make money if you’re a Pakistani.

The most important news (and probably the reason behind this post) is: I’ve been interview by Smash Magazine. Smash Magazine is a youth magazine in Pakistan and they have interviewed me for being among the Youngest Pakistani Bloggers. It’s a 2-page interview under the title: Youngest Pakistani Blogger. If you’re a Pakistani, get a hold on the magazine; you’ll get to know me better and gain few tips from me.

As soon as I get time, I will post up scanned pages from the magazine for those of you who just want to check it out. Till then, bless me with your comments.

Many times I have repeated in my blog posts about how important it is to select a good niche (preferably) or mass market topic for your blog. It can in many situation determine whether a blog is going to make money or not.

Choosing the wrong topic for blogging will only waste your time, money and effort and if you’re lucky it might pay off in the end. In case you don’t know, below are the definitions:

A niche market is a focused, targetable portion of a market.

A mass market is an unsegmented market with a mass appeal.

In case you did not understand, here is an example:

If I start a blog about cell phones, then I will be targeting a mass market because it will involve all the categories of cell phones that are present in the market today. It is, as one can tell, very general in it’s audience. I will have apple fan boys, nokia fan boys and many others visiting my blog.

While this may seem as a very lucrative opportunity, of having such a big audience visiting your blog, it is an extremely difficult project to pull off, if not impossible. Your competition span will simply roll out from other technology bloggers like you, to big media blogs run by companies having multi-million dollar budgets.

Alternatively, if I start a blog about nokia 5800 xpressmusic, then I will be targeting a much narrower audience. That is, all the people will only be interested in things concerning the nokia 5800 xpressmusic, it’s features, it’s applications, etc.

So, you get the point. It’s much easier and safer to start off with a niche market. It will not only provide you the ease of sticking to a topic and then blogging about it, but it will also save you from the hassle of competing with the big dogs. Trust me, when I say “hassle of competing with the big dogs”, I really mean it. You keep competing with them and end up nowhere.

It does not always have to mean that you need to blog about something you’re passionate, although it helps a lot. If you feel a niche market is not crowded and is profitable, tap into it. Do some research, develop some interest into the topic, and make a niche blog around it.

Once you have the blog ready, start publishing some informational and unique articles. Remember, providing value is the key to making money on the internet. So whatever you do, make sure you’re providing value to the blog’s visitors.

Personally, I have used many different ways of picking a topic for blogging. Firstly, it is passion. I have a passion for basketball, and so I started a website for basketball fans. This is the most ideal type because:

1. You love what you do
2. You don’t need to work as hard for understanding complexities of the topic at hand
3. You’ll work excessively without losing interest

Another important thing to remember is that, the biggest role-player in the ‘make money online’ process is patience. Being impatient can literally cost you thousands of dollars of potential earnings due to immature decisions made.

Secondly, I look for a hot market. Internet marketers are always promoting new products and when a lot of them are promoting the same product, it means that the product converts well and pays off. That’s a hint I pick up and start promoting that product.

The key here is to jump into the bandwagon in the early stage. This whole scenario can be seen on the diagram on the right called the product life cycle (PLC).

This is a product model used in business studies to find the behavior of products in a specific market. Despite the fact that I love making analogies, this applies well to the internet market quite well.

In this case, you should always keep an eye open to any new product on the buzz. The ideal strategy is to catch it in the introduction phase. Work on it through out the growth phase and keep making money while you’re at it and stop near the maturity. Considering that you work hard and don’t have invincible competitors, you can usually make a lot of money with this strategy. At least, I’ve used it and it works.

I agree that the PLC is bookish, but the actual PLC for every product will differ. Some will have a very prolonged growth phase, some will never reach maturity, while the majority will have a very steep decline phase.

It is important to understand the nature of the products that we promote on the internet. Fads, trends and fashions come and go on the internet like a pop song. Majority of the products you’ll promote would have a very high maturity point, sales will break records and then all of a sudden it will disappear into thin air with a nose dive in the decline phase.

The ability to foresee can prove very helpful. For example, the people companies who predicted the growth in the weigh loss market 10 years ago have made millions of dollars in the market. Now, it is at the stage of maturity which will stay prolonged till the obesity problems of the internet population aren’t solved. I hope you can sense the irony in that statement.

However, entering the market at this point will be more or less of a time waste because you cannot compete with the companies who have a very strong stand in the market and they will be having a capital advantage over you because of the profits they’ve made in the past.

Know that every hobby might not pay off as well as others. There could be some topics which could get you a lot of visitors, but it becomes hard to make money off that traffic. So do some research to look for whether you can make money with the topic or not. Mostly people would throw in unrelated ads at such websites, but it would be better to funnel the traffic to some other related website to make money.

So there you are with two methods of choosing topics for blogging. I use them myself and know that they make money. If you’re a starter, go with the first one. Once you’re a little acquainted with blogging, go hit the second one. Get to work and look for some good topics to blog about and you’ll be making money in no time.

I’m back people and as I mentioned before, I would post on whether the facebook boycott went successful or at least according to what was planned. The main aim behind the boycott was the removal of those offensive pages, which went successful.

Other than that, the boycott was to come from a whole community rather than separated individuals. I’m not sure whether facebook was banned in other muslim countries or not but a big chunk of the muslim community took the initiative of not using facebook that day.

The biggest part of those who boycotted were pakistani muslims. The problem is that there isn’t really a way to check what happened to facebook in those 10 days (from 20th May to 30th May). Any inferences made from analytics programs like Alexa would be inaccurate.

However, considering that alexa is yet the only better check which can give us something on the least. As compared to compete or other open analytics programs. So, considering whatever proportion of muslims that use Alexa, below is the analysis.

Alexa has a small user base as compared to the general internet population which would make the results extremely biased to the activities of that little ‘population’ of alexa toolbar users. When measuring things on a large scale, we do take random samples however this isn’t random either.

Most alexa users are avid internet users, people who are web 2.0 enthusiasts or webmasters and bloggers. If assumed that this is true, then we can directly deduce that there are much (much) more webmasters and technology enthusiasts in the world west (or east) of developing countries like Pakistan and other muslim countries.

Below is the demographic taken directly from alexa showing the distribution of it’s users over countries:

Hence, considering the data provided by alexa we cannot make a very justifiable conclusion. However, just for the sake of curiosity, we’ll put the data to use. So here it is:

• 0.9% of facebook’s users are pakistanis
• Facebook has over 400 million users *
• Therefore, there are 3.6 million pakistani facebook users (taking the minimum of total facebook users)
• 50% of facebook users login everyday (1.8 million users in pakistan’s case) *
• 1.8 million logins a day multiplied by 10 days, 18 million logins (the boycott lasted 10 days)
• Average pageviews per person on facebook are 13.46 (13.46 x 18 million = 242.28 million) **
• Assumed eCPM $1 (no data available on this)
• Therefore, $1 x 242,280,000 x 0.001 = $242,280

* = Source: Facebook statistics

** = Source: Alexa’s page about facebook

eCPM = Cost per a thousand impressions

So, according to the assumptions made and the available data, my approximate of the loss is near 0.24 million dollars for 10 days. Now, we’ll see whether this actually had a difference making impact on facebook overall.

Facebook’s revenue in 2008 was around $300 million, the most recent official data we have available would be of 2009. Facebook made around $550 million in 2009. So, we’ll take this figure into further calculation of the data. In this case:

• $550,000,000 in 365 days
• Average revenue of 10 days = (550000000 x 10 /365 = $15,068,493)
• Pakistan’s share of the revenue (242280 / 15068493 x 100 = 1.6%)

There you are, Pakistan has approximately 1.6% share of facebook’s revenue overall and resulted in a direct loss of $242,280 during the boycott according to our estimates. Please note, this is not the total loss that facebook beard during the boycott and only the loss resulting from the Pakistani boycott not other Muslim countries.

I’m uncertain as to how many other countries implemented a boycott on facebook nation-wide and how many Muslims voluntarily joined the boycott. I’m sure, the overall figure would be more than the double of this because at least a million other Muslims world-wide joined in the boycott and the eCPM in the western countries is much higher thus contributing to a bigger loss.

The following are the main variables which can alter the data if the assumptions made are invalid:

• eCPM: I assumed that the only revenue facebook has is that it get’s paid per a thousand impressions from it’s advertisers. They are also be operating a pay-per-click system, but we cannot be sure of the data for that, which is why I used the eCPM. Plus, I’ve assumed an eCPM of $1 which seems quite relevant to Pakistan’s case.
• Number of users: I’m 100% sure that the number of users does not include the facebook mobile users (which represents 25% of facebook’s users). This would of course add to the total amount calculated, however, no data is available on that.

That’s it, if you’re a Pakistani, now you can be a little sure that those days you spent without facebook were of some good. Resulting from the loss (or otherwise) facebook decided to take off the offensive pages.

All is good now, facebook has been open in Pakistan for almost 2 weeks now and I’ve been using it ever since it opened. I just hope that facebook continues to co-operate with all portions of it’s user population and respects the interests of all.

I would love to hear to hear your comments on this, and please bear in mind that these figures are an approximate as well as an estimate. Any constructive criticism is most welcome and please consider to share this with your friends.

I could have just said, my traffic doubled since last year but putting in the figures makes it sound much more cool. I’ll let the figures below do the talking:

I’m far beyond the league I was in last year. My traffic is up 103.17% since then. My last year visits were 73444 and this year they’re 151267, big jump eh? The pageviews are 215,214 which is also quite big since last year.

But as you can see, my traffic has started to soar towards the end of the blogging year. So, I can only imagine what my next year would be with this kind of traffic.

Even though my blog traffic is double since last year, but I’m ashamed of myself. My main aim was to write consistently, traffic usually follows. But, I haven’t been so consistent.

Last year (2008-2009) I wrote 112 articles which was almost 1 article every 3 days. However, this year I only wrote 44 articles! That is like 1 article every 8 days!

I have to be less of a procrastinator and more of a writer I suppose. The fall in the comments is consequential to the lack of posts I suppose. Almost 800 new comments this year, love you guys! I know if I would have posted more you would have commented more.

My top 3 traffic referrers were:

1. StumbleUpon
2. Google Images (Woah!)
3. Entrecard

Not really much of a change since last year. But one thing I’m happy about is my direct traffic has doubled, tripled, quadrupled. Nuff emphasis?

Direct traffic is visiting a website directly by it’s web address (for the noobs). My direct traffic last year was around 5000 visitors whereas it is 30000 visitors this year. This would definitely be the offline marketing that I’ve been doing more since last year. I used to be a little quiet about my website in my offline life, just to not sound geek-ish in front of friends 2 years ago.

Turned out, it actually makes you more cooler than the person next to you. Actually, why wouldn’t you be cooler than the person next to you when you’re ranking number 1 on youngestblogger.com. *applauses*

My only aim for my next blogging year is to be a more consistent writer on the blog. I’ve been less personal in the past, but trust me, I’ll be treating this as a very personal blog soon as I get a little free. Moreover, if this traffic trend continues to next year (I wish), somebody’s going to be making some good money.

Now on a side note, I’m half done with my examinations. Thanks to God and all my well-wishers, they’ve been going fine so far. I haven’t been studying as much as I did for my O levels but hopefully I’ll be doing fine on 12th August (my result day).

I’m through 6 papers and left with 4 more. Friday marks the end of my examinations with three papers in a single day. Weird, I know. Wish me luck because it doesn’t only mark the end of my examinations but it also marks the start of my holidays and…

Holidays = Free time

Free time = Time for blogging

Time for blogging = More work

More work equals to, you know where I’m going. *ka ching*

As you might be knowing that today we, the facebook muslim community have arranged an organized protest / boycott of facebook for not removing pages that we find offensive. This move has been taken on the page ‘Everybody draw Muhammad (S.A.W) on 20th May’.

This page was reported as abuse classified under hate speech on the first sight by almost any practicing Muslim who has respect for Islam, including me. We have been reporting this page since 2 weeks to be removed from facebook.

Despite thousands of reports from Muslims and even some non-Muslims who believed that this was hate speech against Islam, facebook took no action on this matter. That is when we, the facebook Muslim community decided to boycott facebook on 20th May to show our strength and our disapproval of the highly offensive act of facebook by not removing those pages.

I am very grateful to the government of Pakistan and the high court who took this a step forward. Instead of us facebook users reminding each other to not use facebook on 20th May. The lahore high court decided to pass a ban on facebook following this incident till the date of 31st May pending action from facebook regarding all of those pages.

All internet service providers in Pakistan were notified on this and day before yesterday, facebook was completely blocked by all ISPs. This is the email I received from my ISP:

Dear Valued Customer,

Micronet has blocked access to www.facebook.com
in compliance with orders of Lahore High Court passed today.
Facebook has been holding a competition to draw caricatures
of the Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) and has not removed the
objectionable hate materials despite thousands of emails
from Pakistani facebook community.

This access would remain block till 31 May 2010 or further
orders by the Lahore High Court.

Best Regards

I hold high gratitude for the high court for taking this step. Muslims have been representing a high proportion of the internet users since it’s very start contributing to almost more than 45% of facebook’s users. We are definitely a majority and we cannot have our interests and beliefs insulted like that.

Muslims have been contributing to the internet in all forms (me and my blog is an example) and we are a main reason why facebook is making a lot of money. Losing all the Muslim users means losing approximately 45% of your revenue (considering the average revenue per facebook user.

Moreover, facebook is a large business corporation. Any rational business would create about even the slightest change in their revenues while 45% is big enough to bring it down from the peak to the bottom.

I will prove this when I write another post about this in a few days where I will show the loss of facebook’s internet users and possibly revenue generation for them. It will definitely teach facebook a big lesson.

Where this started?

This is the first thing that I researched when I took a notice of this highly offensive page and the event.

A cartoonist, molly norris, did not like the censorship given to a scene in an episode of south park which depicted Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). She believed that this provided a wrong image to the people of USA.

She decided to give birth to the idea of this day be as a call to freedom of speech and protest against the censorship that was given. This led to the facebook page being created and the whole thing going viral.

It was further ignited from a you-tube video by a user by the name of ‘thunderf00t’. This user posted a video by the name of ‘Islam Fail’. This was deemed as extremely offensive by all of the muslim community on youtube. The responses were obvious to be harsh. Then this user went on to support 20th May as a ‘Everybody draw Muhammad (S.A.W) day’. (Nauzubillah)

This originated the whole thing and has resulted in a complete ban on youtube in Pakistan as well as that video had also been reported as offensive on no subsequent action was taken on that matter.

I have also removed the link to my blog’s fan page on facebook. I wouldn’t want to use facebook again until face-book takes some kind of an action on this matter, because if we use facebook, we want our interests to be protected.

I was much busy with my studies, but this is a post that I just had to put on the blog because I couldn’t really keep this inside. This is a thing that everyone should know, whether they’re a Muslim or a non-Muslim.

If you’re a christian, Jew, Hindu or even an atheist. Think about this with an open mind and think for yourself whether or not this is a massacre on the name of humanity. Better classified as ‘genocide’ by many. If highly offending the believers of a religion and insulting it is classified as ‘freedom of speech’ by the big internet websites, then we refuse to ever use them again.