8 Years Later… Is Sabahan.com Dead?

Whoa…! Has it been 8 years since my last post already? LOL

Thankfully I am still alive and kicking. I haven’t lost interest in making money online, in fact I am still at it.

However, for the longest time, I felt I could not utilised this blog to its fullest potential. I even contemplated on just letting the domain name expires, how dare I!

So rather than trying to churn out posts just for the sake of writing, I stopped posting and concentrated on working behind the scene.

I’ve tried many things from apps/software development and marketing, did normal affiliate program things, created blogs that scrapped content from other sources, back when everyone was doing it (I know right), created online shops, wrote and sold my own ebook, graphic design freelancing (for the first time ever I have worked for other people lol) and so on.

Some worked great, same failed miserably. Trend changes so fast online, inability to adapt fast could put one at a massive disadvantage or being left behind. Those experiences could make good subjects in my future blog posts.

So moving forward, how would one go about making money online in 2018? That is something that I will talk more in my future posts. Facebook marketing, email marketing, marketing funnel, creating your own products etc are some of the areas I plan to focus on. Exciting stuff indeed!

Yep! I am going to resurrect Sabahan.com from the dead! Will I be able to summon the motivation to write and keep Sabahan.com going? Well, I guess we will just have wait see, won’t we?

If you are reading this, please leave a comment and tell me whether you are a new visitor or an original fan of Sabahan.com (I hope you like the new design, refreshed for 2018 and beyond). I would love to welcome you back and thank you for reading!

PS: I’ve just manually moved around 1800 pending comments since 20 Sept 2012 to trash, 20 at a time. I think around 99.8% are spams. I feel light and fresh now lol.

My First Post Since That Last Post Over Two Years Ago!

Hello people! I felt like writing something here after the rather long silence.

I am still around but I’ve been doing my own stuff. Blogging is just an avenue for me to share my experiences or thoughts about the online marketing scene. So I’ll update the blog when I have something to share.

By the way, I am now getting involved with Android app development, nothing fancy, just getting my feet wet. I might write about it in the future.

I wonder how many subscribers this blog have now. If you still visit this blog, I thank you for your support.

In the mean time, as you can tell, I have not been very active in the blogosphere for a while and might have some catch up to do. I was wondering which marketing blogs are you reading right now to get your fix on SEO, Internet marketing and making money online news. Feel free share them in the comments.

Are there new marketing blogs (Malaysian own especially) people should be aware of?

Blogging Again After A Year Hiatus…

It’s funny that my last post was written exactly a year ago on 9 April 2009 and here I am again.

I am still alive and kicking, just doing things in the background while I took the time out from blogging. As some of you know, this is what I do for a living, i.e. work online (not so much of a full time blogger by the way) so I’ll always be around.

For sure there are lots of new developments in the blogosphere for me to catch up to but let’s do this one thing at a time shall we 😉

While I was away, people kept coming to this blog. Nothing changes much in term of number of visitors although it’s not as busy as when I was active writing obviously. 

One thing I would like to mention is the passive income generated by this blog. There have been several purchases made for the products I promoted in my posts and advertising income from direct ad order as well as AdSense. While the amount is nothing to shout about, neither I am complaining since I don’t even have to lift a finger to earn them.

If you would like to sell advertising directly from your blog, check out the script that I use to sell banner ads from Oio Publisher. It’s not free but I think it’s one of the best investments you could ever make for your blog if you want to take control of your ads inventory.

During the time the blog was dormant, AdSense has generated USD621 from Sabahan.com alone. Yes it’s not much I know but that’s roughly the amount I am making from AdSense monthly from all my websites combined including Sabahan.com. It’s a passive income and that’s what makes it interesting to me.

I am currently concentrating on my software development side of my online business and will be releasing two new versions of my software soon.

Anyway as you may now I am an affiliate marketer and always try to find a way to do affiliate marketing more effectively. Recently I was contacted by Richard Adams, the owner of WPSplitTester.com who came up with a product to help people like us to make more money from our websites… without getting any more visitors.

I am going to do my own review of his product soon but for now if you are interested to learn more just read on the following article by Richard.

Affiliate Marketers: Are You Leaving Money On The Table?

If you wanted to boil affiliate marketing down to it’s simplest, you are essentially trying to attract traffic to your website and then send them through to an affiliate program where if they buy anything, you make money.

It sounds simple enough. Set up a niche site or blog about mp3 players for example, plaster it with adverts from Commission Junction or Amazon and cross your fingers that you’ll make money.

Some sites work, others don’t but over time if you keep on building your profits slowly rise.

But the problem with this process is best described as "missed opportunity".

You see, you will often find that one affiliate program converts better than another, even for the same product. Send 100 visitors to each one and it’s very likely that you will make considerably more money from one than the other. Strange but true.

Taking it another step, if you do some testing you will also normally find that some of the adverts on your website get far more clicks than others. And that adverts in certain places on your website get more clicks than adverts in other areas of your website.

So if you could find which affiliate program converts best, which advert converts best and where to place that advert on your website for best results, then got rid of everything that *didn’t* work so well, as I’m sure you can imagine you’re likely to significantly increase your affiliate marketing profits.

And remember that you don’t have to write any more content, build loads more links or spend your life trying to build up visitor numbers.

All this extra money is simply as a result of some smart testing to reveal how best to monetize your affiliate sites. Surely this is leverage at it’s best.

By now I’m sure you can see the potential of this method and are wondering how best to actually go about the testing phase.

There are two ways to go about it. The first way is to simply make manual changes to your websites and see how the results change. However not only is this not exactly scientific, but it also takes quite a bit of time and effort to constantly move adverts around, keep an eye on clickthrough rates of adverts, affiliate profits and so on.

However there is also a tool which you can use which will do most of this for you. It will make all the necessary changes to your website and track the results. Let the script do all the "heavy lifting" and you can just pull out the top-performers from the statistics area of the tool and make the necessary changes to maximize your profits.

If you’d like to learn more about the tool that I mentioned that automates 95% of the process for you, saving you time and hassle, while helping you to increase your income, click here and get a free report.

How I Made Extra Money during the Current Economic Uncertainty

If you’ve been trying to learn how to make money online, I am sure you’ve came across claims like making money on the Internet is easy, you can become a millionaire overnight using a “fully-automated” or “turn-key” system. All you have to do is sit back and wait for the money to roll in.

But if it’s that easy why hasn’t everyone become an Internet millionaire by now?

Good for me that I started with no money at all so I couldn’t afford to buy every marketing product that claimed to have the answer to the secrets of Internet riches. I had to and still exercise good judgment and common sense when it comes to spending money on how to make money products.

At the same time, I knew there were many real people and those that running websites that became popular enough that their owners have quit their day job. I always wondered how they did it, how they got started and what they were doing differently that made them successful while others failed.

Once in a while, a product came along that really captured my attention. While money was still an issue, I strongly felt that using it as an excuse not to buy the product would mean that my curiosity on how some people become successful would remain unanswered.

Don’t get me wrong though as I doubt an ebook that has all the answers to the secrets of Internet riches exist. For me, an ebook is good if it doesn’t just dish out theories but proven ideas about specific ways of making money online.

I needed to treat what I do like a real business.  That means I needed to invest money in order to make more money. That seems obvious now but many newbies fail to see that including me when I first got started. And there’s nothing better than investing money in a good marketing education.

Spending money on improving your knowledge is one of the best investments you can do as you try to make money online. Your readiness  to invest in yourself shows whether you are really serious about becoming successful.

OK, let’s get straight to the point. If you want to learn how to make money from pay per click, the product that I am going to recommend is a must have. But…

• If you are unwilling to risk losing some money in return for the opportunity to make even more than you can stop reading now.
• If you want an easy way to make money, this product is not for you.
• If you want to become a millionaire over night, this product is not for you.
• If you want a fully automated or turnkey system, this product is not for you.

Anyway, this is what I’ve made from just ONE website in the first week of January (in USD) a few weeks after I implemented the methods. I made fantasy becomes reality because I took action, I didn’t just learn but I put what I’ve learned into practice.

Click image to enlarge

I used the extra money to indulge myself in my other newly found passion and got myself a Canon EOS 50D DLSR camera. Then I flew to Singapore for a couple of days for some shopping.

I am not telling you this to boast. I am just trying to show you the possibilities. Personally, I still need to work harder before I can say I’ve achieved my target, which is to make USD10,000 profit consistently monthly.

Can I guarantee that you’ll make money after reading this guide? I don’t know because I don’t know you. But what I can say for sure is that the methods really work for me.

The creator, Jeremy Palmer is using this exact technique (his personal way of making money online) that has made him millions of dollars in affiliate revenues annually.

Want to learn more? Check out The Black Ink Project

PS: Check out the bonuses. Jeremy is giving away PPC Classroom for free. I own this course too and paid USD500 for it when it was first released, serious…

Sabahan.com’s Partners Page Removed & Some Updates

It has almost been two months since my last post. If you are wondering if I am still around to update Sabahan.com, yes I am very much here, still alive and kicking 😉

For the past few years I’ve been spreading myself thin working on too many projects at once. I ended up taking more than I could handle and in the end, it became harder to achieve what really matters to me.

One of my business goals for 2009 is of course to continue working on where I left off in 2008. But this year, my plan is not only to work hard but to play harder. Instead of working longer hours, I aim for less than 5 hours a day of quality work. I plan to do a lot more travelling and spend more time on my hobbies as well as exercising more.

Quality work means, concentrated, uninterrupted (no checking emails, no  reading blog or forum posts, no checking Facebook, no instant messaging and so on) where I focus all my attention to start and work on a particular projects.

What makes this idea different from others is that the work will be unscheduled. Instead of scheduling the exact time period when I should start and finish a project, I work whenever I have 30 minutes or longer to spare.  I’ll always focus on starting instead of finishing.

That means I could be working anywhere and anytime such as when waiting to catch a bus or a plane, or when I am about to go out for a movie and then start working for 30 minutes right there and then.

The idea came to me after reading a book by Neil A Fiore titled The Now Habit,
which has helped me to be more productive. I realise that this probably doesn’t make much sense to you right now so I’ll write more about it in my coming post.

Another update that I’d like to let you know is that I’ll be removing Sabahan.com’s Partners Page. The page was running as it should for while until a few spammers decided to use it to promote unrelated links irresponsibly. Without a constant monitoring, the page has become nothing more than a place for spammers to add their spam links as you can see below.

I’d like to thanks those who have properly participated in the link exchange plan but I have no choice but to take the page down due to the abuse by some spammers.

How Two Underground Affiliates Generate $109,151 In 30 Days From Just One Clickbank Product

I was trying to come up with an attention grabbing headline and thought the headline for the sales copy for Commission Blueprint would do the trick.

Commission Blueprint is a training guide for anyone wanting to make real money from Clickbank or any kind of digital product using AdWords. It consists of a series of instructional videos and written guides in PDF format.

I purchased the guide recently and I have to say that it’s one of the best purchases I’ve made as far as making money online guide is concern. While I am aware that the topic has been the subject of discussion for countless guides and ebooks out there, this little guide is a bit different.

The main content is presented in a video format and for me, consuming the content is like attending a one on one training session with the author. I just have to sit back, watch and listen as the author unveiled the exact steps he did to make an insane amount of money with Clickbank.

If you are trying to make money online using pay per click, here are several things that you may have to consider if the products you are promoting do not bring the expected return.

1. Instead of promoting physical product such as books, try promoting ebooks or audiobooks.
2. Instead of trying to promote audio CDs, try to promote online music service.
3. Similarly, downloadable software will convert better than boxed software

It has been showed that digital products such as ebooks, downloadable software, MP3s and so on convert better because they offer instant gratification to the customers. They are relatively cheaper compare to their physical counterparts and can be delivered directly via the Internet.

From the affiliate point of view, selling digital products offers higher profit margins and therefore you can afford to spend more with your pay per click (PPC) campaigns.

While Commission Blueprint focuses on Clickbank products, you could easily adapt the formula to any other affiliate networks and still make good money from it. 

This guide is not perfect for everyone. Beginners will likely face a rather steep learning curve ahead but it’s not impossible for them to master all the necessary skills as long as they put an effort to it.

The author goes through several crucial subjects rather briefly which I think is important for everyone to understand them fully. The discussion on Google Quality Score for example is rather brief and without the full understanding of this subject, it could cost you in the end.

Secondly, some keywords selected in the example are too general. The readers should be aware that selecting general keywords to start a campaign with may bring tons of traffic but this can put a hole in their pocket faster than they can top up their credit card.

That said, the guide touches almost everything you need to know about how to make money from Clickbank or any other digital products via pay per click search engines.  All you have to do next is continue to educate yourself by further reading all the relevant topics online.

One of the most useful pieces of information that I’ve picked up after I went through the videos is that it made me rethink how I research, launch and manage my PPC campaigns. All the other ebooks that I’ve read recommended me to work systematically but they stop short of sharing their exact system when it comes managing the business.

Commission Blueprint does not stop there, for instance, it recommends you to stop your campaign if

• You’ve reached your budget and no sales were made
• If overall conversion rate is less than 0.025 after getting over 500 clicks
• If after getting over 500 clicks, you’ve spent more than 4 times what you made in sales.

 

You have a reason to hang in there before you ditch a campaign if it’s in the borderline. For example

• You wait about a week (or at least 500 clicks) to “settle” the campaign down
• Your overall conversion rate is over 0.025
• If you’ve spent less than 4 times your sales
• Keep optimizing and get at least another 250-500 clicks

 

After weeding out the bad campaigns and you find a winner, you should

• Scale the campaign (something that people don’t do enough of)
• Constant tweaking to increase profitability
• First 30 days, tweak the campaign for every 2 to 3 days
• Second 30 days, tweak the campaign once a week
• After 60 days, you may tweak the campaign only monthly

If you are new to the game, these might not make much sense to you right now. But  I am telling you those points provided a crucial guidelines for anyone doing PPC marketing on how to arrive at a correct decision in order to move forward.

But of course you can adjust them according to your own needs.

Finally if you are a veteran pay per click marketer, you may discover some gems here and there, if not, the training provides a refresher on things that you may have forgot to do or stopped paying attention to.

How does the training affect me so far?

I started spending around US100 per day for one of my campaigns as an experiment. That doesn’t worry me much as long as I know I’ll not only breakeven but will make a tidy profit after adapting what I’ve learned from the training.

If you’ve been wondering what other successful PPC affiliates know that you don’t, well this training will help you understand the secret to their success. Read more about Comission Blueprint here.

Marketing, SEO & Blogging Related Blogs That I Read

The number of blogs that I subscribe to changes all the time as new ones being added and old ones are removed as I continue to discover better ones that serve my needs better.

Undoubtedly, there are many other excellent blogs that I have not included in my list. That said, I’m trying to minimize the number of blog that I subscribe to, to the bare minimum.  IMHO, there’s no point in subscribing to hundreds and hundreds of blog feeds if the end result is information overload.

Besides, I just don’t have the time to keep up with all of them anyway. While it’s important to read blogs to keep yourself informed of the latest happenings and developments, it’s more important to practice what you’ve read.

Now here are some of the blogs that I’ve been a subscriber for a while.

Google AdSense

• Inside AdSense
  There’s no better place to keep track with the latest development with AdSense than from the official AdSense blog

• JenSense
  Here’s another good source for independent opinions and news for contextual advertising such as AdSense and YPM, although, it appears that this blog has not been updated for a while.

AdWords

• Inside AdWords
  Google’s official blog for news, information and tips on AdWords. If you are spending money on Google AdWords, this blog is one that you can’t afford to ignore.

Affiliate Programs

• Affiliate Blog By Shawn Collins
  I’ve been reading articles written by Shawn since late 1999. In addition to the normal affiliate marketing industry news, Shawn gives away some useful tips and guides to help people make money from affiliate marketing.

• CPA Affiliates
  Another good source for tips and techniques in affiliate marketing. Then again, this blog has not been updated since late August.

• DerekBeau.com
  This is actually one of the better affiliate marketing blogs out there but it appears it’s going through a hiatus since on Nov 13 2007.

• ZacJohnson.com
  If you want to learn how a super affiliate makes money from PPC & affiliate marketing this is the blog for you. For starters, check out how Zac made over US800K in profit in 4 months.

• Reve News
  Contributed by several authors who discuss about online advertising, CPA, SEO and affiliate marketing.

• Super Affiliate Mindset
  Amit Metha is the super affiliate behind this blog. What I like the most about his blog is the practical advice he shares that you can use in your own marketing effort. He often talks about how you need to change your mindset first in order to move closer to you goals. Sadly, moving forward, Amit decided to write fewer posts in order to set aside more of his time to helping PPC Classroom 2.0 students.

Blogging

• Problogger.net
  Almost everything you need to know about blogging and making money from your blog.

• The Blog Herald
  Blog news, features, interviews, podcasts and the whole enchilada

Google News

• Google Blogoscoped
  One of the best sites that covers everything Google as well as other Internet news.

• Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google & SEO
  Google related development, news & insights straight from the horse’s mouth

Internet Marketing

• Besting AdWords
  The short posts help me scan through the content quickly and find news that really matters. While you won’t find the blog breaking new ground anytime soon, I find it quite insightful to read the writer’s personal experience on certain issues.

• Dosh Dosh
  Articles about marketing on the Internet and social media. Good blog, but be prepared to read some long articles.

• JohnChow.com
  I read JC to keep me motivated about making money from blogging.

• MindValley Labs
  Besides Internet marketing tips and tricks, this blog is also a good place to find some AdWords tactics. Sabahan.com was mentioned in one of their posts once

• ShoeMoney
  This is a good site to get you inspired. You’ll also find some killer marketing ideas sprinkled throughout the blogs.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

• Search Engine Land
  Latest news and development in search marketing and search engines

• Search Engine Roundtable
  The pulse of the search marketing community.

• Search Engine Watch Blog
  News and development in the SEO industry

• SEO BlackHat
  SEO news, tricks from the other side of the coin.

• SEO Book
  This blog offers marketing tips, search analysis an others.

I subscribe to several other blogs besides those above but for the time being this list should keep you busy for a while.

How to Monetize Your Blog & Make Money

I planned to write a series of articles based on a formula that in my humble opinion sums up the “secret” of success for any blog. The formula is

Blog Success = Truckloads of Traffic + Good Monetization Technique + Good User Experience

Now when it comes to blogging, I must say that I am not a full time blogger and admittedly, there are other full timers who might have put the formula into practice, whether intentionally or not, and make tons of money out of it.

JohnChow.com comes to mind when we talk about this, the guy who made USD34,350.93 from his blog in October alone.
Well, it goes to show the sky is the limit when it comes to making money from your blog.

In general, this formula works regardless of whether you are trying to make money from blogging, affiliate programs, AdSense, eBay or whatever.

Some of you may recall that a couple of month back I wrote the first article of the series titled “Traffic to your Blog – A Recipe For Success.” A follow up to the first article is long overdue and I think it’s about time for the next one in the series. The second factor that I’d like to talk about is “Good Monetization Technique”.

If you have been blogging for sometime, you may already know that there are many ways to monetize your blog. From AdSense to promoting affiliate programs, and from writing paid reviews to selling direct advertising on your blog, the choices are endless.

Rather than listing all the monetization options available under the sun, I’ll try to discuss how to best monetize your blog in general.
The first question you need to ask yourself is that do you really want to make money from your blog? Perhaps you just want to share you opinion and making money is just a secondary goal.
Or perhaps commercializing your blog will compromise your integrity as an independent blog writer and if that’s the case, then this article is not for you.

The reason I ask is that there has to be a compromise between the quality of your content and how far you are willing to sacrifice user’s experience by having advertising in your blog.

The best way to make money from your own blog would depend on your blog’s niche and the type of visitors it attracts. If I can make money from AdSense, it doesn’t mean that you too will make lots of money from AdSense, although the chances are, you probably will because it’s the most popular way to make money from blogging.

Similarly, if you can make money from paid reviews, I don’t think I can make as much from this blog because I doubt I can churn out paid reviews as fast to generate as much income as you. Not to mention the Google penalty I’m trying to avoid for writing paid reviews in my blog.

So What Works Best For You?

The trick is to test to see what works best for you in your situation. If you run a finance blog, an ad that offers tax software might appeal to your readers.
Similarly, if you blog about making money on the Internet, your readers might response to ads related to how to make money online.

Now let’s look into several monetizing options in more detail.

Contextual Advertising

Content sites are best monetized with contextual advertising programs such as Google AdSense which is easily the most popular ways for bloggers to monetize they blog.
The ads are targeted and easily integrated with your content.

That said; do not assume right away that AdSense is the best monetization option for you. If your blogs belong in a popular niche such as entertainment or technology it would work great but if you blog about some obscure topics such as Qubit Field Theory, you would probably end up getting lots of Public Service Ads which doesn’t pay you anything when clicked.

In addition, you may want to try other ad network such as Chitika, Yahoo Publisher Network and others.

Like everything else, you need the traffic in order to make money from contextual advertising. It won’t make you rich overnight but it’s a good option to start with.

CPM Advertising

CPM advertising is ad programs which pay you for the each ad displayed on your blog. This option is best for blogs or sites that aren’t attracting enough targeted advertisers or the readers are less likely to click on your ads.

CPM (cost per thousands impressions) may pay you around $2 for 1000 impressions for instance but typically the pay out is rather low these days.

The downside of this is advertising option is that you really need a lot of traffic to generate a reasonable amount of income. Once you past the minimum traffic threshold, everything should be rather straight forward.

Direct Ad Sales

Direct ad sales is a great way to monetize your blog since there’s no middleman to take some of your profits. You can set you own ad rates and have more control over the advertising and payment options as it increases the amount and type of ads you can sell and let you specify when and how you get paid.

The main disadvantage is that since it’s up to you to find advertisers, you could end up with many unsold inventory especially when you are just starting out.

In addition, you’ll also open yourself to potential disputes as some buyers might ask for a refund. It’s therefore important to make your terms clear to potential advertisers before they sign up so that any future dispute can be resolved amicably.

If you are planning to offer direct ad sales from your blog, I suggest you check out the advertising script from OIOpublisher that help you manage and control your own ad sales easily. I am currently using this script to manage the direct ad sales in this blog.

Promoting Affiliate Programs

Once you get to know your readers closer, you might want to move into promoting affiliate programs. Unlike, AdSense, promoting an affiliate program require more than just plastering banner ads in your blog.

You can potentially make more money from affiliate program but since it requires some action from the readers in addition to a simple click, the conversion rate could be a lower.

I’ve written several articles regarding affiliate program in this blog which you may want to check out

• Affiliate Program Tutorial – Mastering the Basics
• Affiliate Marketing – 5 Tips for Success
• Affiliate Marketing 101 – Almost Everything You Need to Know to Get Started Making Money with Affiliate Program
• How to Select Suitable Products to Sell On Your Blog
• How to Make Money from Affiliate Programs With Your Blog

Conclusion

It takes time and some effort to make money from your blog. The most important thing is to never give up and continue to focus on the areas of your strength.

Do not put all your eggs in one basket, diversify your income stream as much as possible.
When one method fails to work, at least you have five other sources that are making you money.

How’s Your AdSense Income So Far This Month?

In October last year I reported about a 30 percent drop in my AdSense income from the previous month.

I figured that might had to do with Google pushing out yet another PageRank update where most websites reported downgrades to their PageRank scores including Sabahan.com.

Interestingly though, the opposite has been true for me this time around where my AdSense income has been higher than the previous months.

The usual suspect for this trend is the increase in advertisers demand which improve the quality of the ad inventory, which in turn affect the cost per click and cost per thousands impressions of the ads that appear on my websites.

This is my AdSense income from 1st to 26th September.

This is my AdSense income so far for the month of October. About $82 higher than the previous month so far.

In addition, as my websites attract more visitors, my ad impressions increase. As the number of good quality advertiser increases, their ads attract more click through which resulted in a higher AdSense income.

All in all it’s important to create a good quality content which will not only attract readers but good quality advertisers in the long run.

True, everyone is talking about the impending recession; but I guess the Internet is one place where the effect won’t hit you as hard if you know which variables to play with.

One of the biggest things that affect my Internet income is the exchange rate between the Malaysian Ringgit to the US dollars. Since I get paid in US dollars, I favour a weaker Ringgit over the US dollars. It’s a pretty exciting times for people who get paid in US dollars.

The drops in Malaysian Ringgits coupled with the increase in my AdSense income means I’ll be earning more in the coming months.

On the other hand, it hurts if some of your expenses are conducted in US Dollars. For instance, my AdWords expenses have been increasing but luckily for everything else – particularly my offline expenses – I pay in Malaysian Ringgit because I live in Malaysia.

How’s your AdSense income for the month of October?

By The Way… I’m Still Here

It happens once in a while, a period when this blog seems to switch into a hibernation mode where updates are like the rain that never comes during a dry spell.

I had received several emails and comments from my readers wondering if I’m still around to update this blog – the answer is yes I am still alive. Sorry if I’ve kept you waiting guys.

One of them came up with several guesses as to why the lack of posting and allow me answer those lingering questions

1. Gaman is giving this post high priority, tribute to Gobala (could be Gobala giving him big sum of money :p )

Well it just happens that it was the last post before the blog went temporarily quiet. Good for Gobala for the extra exposure 😉

2. Gaman is testing this page, can give big traffics or income return (i’m no SEO expert)

Not really, although the AdSense income has never dropped during those period.

3. Gaman is doing a couple of projects, testing this – the new millionaires – strategIES.

I am doing several projects but they are not directly related to the book.

4. Gaman is out of town, NO INTERNET CONNECTON.

In a way it’s true. I’ve been travelling a lot for the past few weeks so I have to admit that once the momentum is broken, it’s hard for me to pick up the pace and get into the blogging mindset.

As I’ve mentioned in my previous post I rather not write anything for the sake of writing. If I am not in the correct frame of mind, I am not motivated enough to write and this will affect the quality of the post.

5. Gaman is in jail or under ISA Detention (although impossible – kakaka !)

Nah… I am not a political blogger.

6. Gaman is giving up this blog and leave it to be expired (unless this blog gives return more than USD100 monthly )

I won’t let this blog drift off into Internet oblivion. It’s the only place where I share my personal experience making money online. I’ll be doing a disservice to my readers if I were to let that happen. Oh btw, yes this blog earns around that much monthly, which is not much unfortunately but that’s not the reason I blog or rather not blog.

7. Gaman is getting married and still in honeymoon for 40 days 40 nights (hey that’s Elvis Presley lah), if true then don’t forget to drink Kopi Tongkat Ali lah hehe.

May be I’ll have a 40 nights honeymoon when I get married

8. Now it’s mystery, and wait for the next post by Gaman

Now it’s no longer a mystery :). I just hope that you don’t take the lack of updates as a sign that I am abandoning this whole money making on the Internet thingy.

I’ve been doing this for a living since the late 90s and I can’t imagine not doing what I am doing now. Just that, I am not a full time blogger so thing can be rather quiet at times.

If you are blogging, keep building your momentum up. If you are learning to make money online, keep learning and keep your passion alive. You and you alone can make the difference if you’ll be successful or not.

Now, I’ve also received the following question from a reader via email recently.

I knew you good with blogging and so on. I really want to know on how your leverage your daily task as internet marketer. Im sure sometime we need to outsource our tasks and maybe you also can write a review about any forum you’re actively involved. I want to know a lot but maybe next issue

I have one full time assistant to help me in the daily maintenance of several websites as well as locating suitable products to promote using the pay per click search engines.

If I can do the programming, web designing, content writing, I’ll do them myself, but sometimes it’s more efficient to outsource some tasks via websites such as RentACoder.com and Elance.com

As for the forums, I used to be active in Sitepoint.com forum; sometimes I visited the DigitalPoint.com forum. For the local ones, I visited WebmasterMalaysia.com.

But that was before, these days we are managing our own general forum which has little to do with Internet marketing. It’s a rather crazy but fun forum where the members write in Sabahan Malay and English .

Ok.. I guess that’s about it for this update. I’ll write more again soon.

Gobala Krishnan – The New Millionaires – A Review

I imagine anyone who wants to learn about making money on the Internet and wonders if it’s possible to do it for a living would have their interest peaked to find a book addressing this subject.

If you don’t know this already, Gobala Krishnan – one of the most prolific Malaysian Internet marketers – has released his first paperback book with a fascinating title: The New Millionaires: Work From Home Make Money Online Live Like a Millionaire.

The book should be available in book stores near you as you are reading this.

I got a complimentary copy from Gobala a couple of days ago and I initially flipped through it to see if there are new nuggets to pick up. This book is written by someone who has been there and done it, so of course I did expect to find something interesting.

While reading the first few chapters, I found myself scribbling down on sticky notes marking interesting paragraphs and then continued scribbling in my notepad. By the time I was finished, I had several pages filled with points that I wanted to pay attention to.

Making money on the Internet is a vast subject and your imagination is the only limit as to how you want to make money online. The book explains not only the How part but the

• Why (why should you do it)
• When (part-time of full time)
• What (what to do and what to avoid)
• Who (success stories of Malaysian Internet marketers)

The Who part fills about half of the book. It’s a compilation of interviews with 12 Malaysian Internet marketers making money from various methods from eBay and dropshipping to the well known Google AdSense and affiliate programs.

What’s so valuable about this chapter is that, people are sharing their own experiences giving you some insights into things behind the scene. You’ll find valuable tips and tricks as well as pitfalls to avoid.

Be warned though, the variety of business ideas may overwhelm you especially if you are just testing the water. Most newbies make the mistake by thinking that they probably have to learn everything in this chapter in order to become successful.

As explained by Gobala in the book, the problem starts when someone starts researching into hundreds of different ways of making money online. First they read about eBay and they dream of becoming an eBay powerseller, then they came across this thing called blogging, and they want to become a successful blogger making tons of money from it. They spend all their time learning but still fail because they never really put what they’ve learned into practice.

There’s one element that must absolutely present if you want to make money on the Internet – that is to identify things that you are passionate about and these are things that should be the foundation of your online business. As they said, find your passion and the money will follow.

In any online endeavour, often times it begins with you making no money or little if any for a while and it would seem like throwing the towel is the only sensible option. Passion is what will keep you going during those trying times and this book talks about this early to help you start off on the right path.

That said, you’ll also have to be realistic in that your business idea has to be feasible. No matter how passionate you are about it, there’s little point selling ice to the Eskimos for instance!

I find the discussion about How to grow exponentially on page 186 really inspiring. While they are not entirely new to me, they’ve definitely reminded me to pay attention to those things that I’ve been tossing in the back seat.

This includes things like not to put off the creation of new products, realise that residual income won’t last forever without constant “nudging” from you to keep things rolling and focus on things that bring the most return.

The book touches on other subjects including how Gobala made RM31,500 selling a 12 page ebook (an insightful chapter I must add), how exactly he makes money online, an introduction to keyword research, email marketing, understanding resell rights and so on.

While most people can draw something useful from this book, I’d have to be realistic here, reading this book alone won’t change your life unless you are able to extract useful ideas and apply them in your own online business endeavours. In a nutshell – you have to take action!

If I were to start a new online venture here’s what I’d do:

• Discover whatever I am passionate about at the moment
• Create a website, a product or a service
• Drive targeted traffic and continue to improve on the website, product or service
• Only then I’ll try to make money from it.
• I’ll focus on this particular venture before I move on to the next business idea.

You can read more about Gobala’s book here

How I Make Over USD500 Monthly from MaxBounty

This is a follow up to my previous post regarding the PayPal funds withdrawals with Public Bank Visa Card.

My intention for writing that post was of course to try to discuss if there’s a way to remove the daily withdrawal limit imposed to Malaysian PayPal users. A reply from PayPal clearly states that the limit cannot be lifted for the time being.

But there’s one question that was asked repeatedly in the comments as people are curious how I made that money. I don’t blame them for asking, in fact, I think it’s a good post to share with my readers.

Personally though, I don’t think making around USD500 monthly from one affiliate network is a big deal, that is, if you compare that to what other super affiliates are making in this case from MaxBounty. However, what so good about this income stream for me is that it’s generated almost passively.

I spent nothing on pay-per-click marketing or any other form of advertising to attract targeted traffic that convert those MaxBounty offers. Most of the traffic comes from the organic search engine results – Google in particular. Every commission generated is basically pure profit for me.

I am going to reveal the website where I made the money from and how I made it. The income is generated mostly from one of my oldest websites at AbsolutelyFreebies.com. That website was created in 1997 but the domain name was only purchased in 1999. It offers free stuff, trial offers, sweepstakes, free samples and other pay per lead offers.

I guess I should point out that in addition to MaxBounty, I am also making money from other affiliate networks at AbsolutelyFreebies.com such as from CJ.com, COPEAC, ModernClick.com, AzoogleAds, ValueClick.com, BulletAds, ClickBooth, among others and of course from Google AdSense too. By the way, MaxBounty is not my biggest money maker at AbsolutelyFreebies.com.

This is the amount I am making from MaxBounty for the past several months. Not much, things add up though.

I guess the next question in almost everyone’s mind reading this is that, exactly, how do I make money from AbsolutelyFreebies.com in an auto-pilot mode? There are several factors but none has anything to do with the idea of just build it and they will come.

It’s crucial to identify your goals when you build a website and everything you do must contribute towards achieving those goals. Here are several reasons why the website is profitable.

First Page Rankings In Google for Several Competitive Keywords

All pages in AbsolutelyFreebies.com are fully optimized for the organic search engine. Obviously I don’t claim I know everything there is when it comes to getting high rankings in Google given the fact that their ranking algorithm changes almost on the daily basis.

I don’t devote my waking time trying to reverse engineer the search engines. It’s a futile attempt to “uncover” their secret via such method because what you find out today could well be outdated tomorrow. Just leave this to those SEO experts who are doing this for a living. You job is to create good content for your visitors and offer them better experience while browsing your website.

That said, I know enough SEO techniques to help me create pages that are likely to rank high in Google or Yahoo. Let me give you some examples. At the time of this writing, several pages in AbsolutelyFreebies.com are ranked highly for the following keywords

"Freebies" (yes that one word keyword) – currently AbsolutelyFreebies.com is ranked in the top ten in Google US organic search result (it used to be in the top three). In case you don’t know about this, the Google search results are tailored to your geographical location – there’s no such thing as Google global search result at Google.com.

The top ten search result for a particular keywords produced in Malaysia is often different from that of other countries even though you are searching through Google.com.

To find out the results that you would see as if you were located in a certain country, just append the following code in your search string where “gl” stands for geographic location. It can be set to “UK”, “US”, “CA” and so on.

gl=US

For example to see the organic and paid search results in the US for the keyword “freebies” you would type

http://www.google.com/search?q=freebies&gl=US

Instead of typing this manually though, I am using the Google Global Firefox Extension to perform this task

Alternatively, searching through Google country specific domain such as Google.com.my may show you results that are more relevant to you locally because the results comes from servers hosted in the area.

AbsolutelyFreebies.com is not in the top ten for the keyword “freebies” in Malaysia though which is good because Google is clever enough to know that I am trying to target the US traffic and not the Malaysian traffic.

Another thing to keep in mind is that if you enable personalization, the search engines will look at your search history and other preferences and tailor the results specifically for you.

Here are some more keywords:

Wedding sweepstakes – currently number five in the Google US organic search results.

Get free money – currently number two in Google US organic search result. I used to be number one for the phrase “free money”, sadly it had slipped to number 15

There are several other competitive keywords and phrases that the websites are ranked highly for. This ensures continuous arrival of highly targeted visitors to the websie. The only constant in Google is change so those high rankings won’t stay there forever. The good news is, if a keyword ranking drops, another might take its place.

If you are interested, here’s an article I wrote previously to give newbies an introduction to onpage SEO. Here’s another article about linking and off page factors that may affect your rankings.

Put Your Visitors First & Make Money Second

On the Internet, the saying “follow your passion and the money will follow” should be everyone’s mantra. When I first created the website, it made little money if any at all but that didn’t stop me from burning the midnight oil working till the wee hours.

Building the site was a joy and not a chore, and it was satisfying to find my visitors actually interacting with the content. Then the money followed, which was not much but it was fun to have when you were a poor student. That was in 1997, today I have someone to help me update the website.

I am aware that the website is far from perfect. While most of the content consists of affiliate links, I find that people do no really bother as long as you give them what they want. There are tons of non affiliate links sprinkled all over the site to ensure a balance content.

Visitors arriving from the organic search engines have a different mindset. Depending on the keywords,  they can be highly motivated and when “lured” with the word free, it could do wonders to your conversion rates.

Update Your Content Frequently

My assistant updates the website almost daily with new offers. This will not only encourage visitors to return to see what’s new, many SEO experts believe that Google favours sites with fresh content too.

I admit that, if you search further you may stumble upon some expired offers and links on the site but that’s how things are on the Internet. As long as you are aware of this and replace expire links as soon as you can, then it’s not a big deal. That said offering fresh content doesn’t necessarily mean better ranking in the SERP but it tells the Google crawler that your site is worth check out often.

Little has changed in term of site design and navigation since the site was created. It’s still text heavy instead of graphically intensive as it has always been. The navigation is simple enough to help visitors find their way around easily.

Diversify Your Revenue Streams

While AbsolutelyFreebies.com has been making me some money since its early days I don’t depend on it as my main source of income.

It’s important to diversify your online income and as they said do not put all your eggs in one basket. I chuckled when I read someone wrote in a blog post that said I am probably making money doing “phantom blogging” whatever that means 😉

My latest posts here at Sabahan.com often give little clue as to how I make money online besides blogging, I suppose only my regular readers know what I do.

Besides promoting pay per lead programs from websites such as AbsolutelyFreebies.com, as some of you know I am also a part time blogger, an Internet marketer doing Pay Per Click marketing selling my own products as well as other people products and service.

In addition, I’ve started experimenting with direct advertising, starting at Sabahan.com. And who can ignore making money from AdSense – one of the easiest ways to make money online if you do it right. That said, there are still tons of things I’d have to do before I consider myself really successful.

Should You Start A Freebie Site Now?

Now I am sure some of you may wonder if you should drop everything and start a freebie site to make money. If you ask me, my answer is no.

Unless you have a highly motivated team behind you and you have money to spend on advertising, I doubt any individual could create a freebie website today that can be profitable solely from the organic search traffic. The competition in this niche is getting tougher by the day and you have to be really creative if you want to stand out from the crowd.

I am actually lucky that I’ve started early because a website age is one of the most important factors used to rank it in the search engines. That’s one reason why my website enjoys good ranking almost naturally.

That’s said, it’s not just the age of the domain that matters, but how long the website “talks” about a specific niche. The logic is simple, if you have been active in a certain niche for a while, you are probably into this for the long term and not one of the fly by night websites and this tells Google that your website is trustworthy and it will award you with some good rankings accordingly.

So there you have it. I hope the question how I make money from MaxBounty has been answered.