Category — Make Money

Came across this really useful post about earning more money through referrals. This is one of the best posts about blog earnings along with my post about 25 factors that impact your adsense earning.

Coming to referral income, have you observed the way most of the successful online products gets launched. Take the launch of Membershipmastermind as a case study. It does not matter which MMO blogger you have subscribed to. Everyone has sent at least one post writing about the virtues of the programme. The programme may be good, I am not contesting that. But there is a lot to learn in the way it is being sold.

It is difficult to believe someone when he says I have come up with this great training programme but you need to pay 750$ to subscribe. But the credibility factor increases when a third person says Yaro has come up with this awesome course. You will be stupid not to enroll for as little as 750$. It becomes even more irresistible when 4-5 top bloggers that I have subscribed to and take daily advice from recommend the product.

The question is if you are planning to use referral products, you need to build up your own echo chamber. You need those 3-4 guys who will say binaryday has come up with this great programme that you will be stupid not to enroll.

Who is there in your echo chamber? Let me know in the comments if you shall like to be part of my echo chamber.

Seems like Adsense has made the entry criteria tougher thereby making it really difficult for new bloggers to get into adsense for first 6-8 months. While a number of adsense alternatives are available, none of them cater to the Indian population. This list of advertising networks that focus on Indian audience has been created to solve that issue.

1. Admagnet is one one of the only 2 Indian networks that I have used. While I had a really good experience with them, there site is silent about terms and conditions. I shall contact them to get more details if people are interested
2. DGM India is the other advertising network that I have used on my website with good result. DGM India is a CPA advertising network. However they have the best websites as their client and hence conversion is not that difficult. For example I used to run the affiliate programme of Shine and Monster on mywalkin.com through DGM.
3. Komli.com seems to be the most high profile indian advertising network having got fundings from multipleVCs. They deal in CPM/CPC and CPA ads.
4. Tyroo is the best option for beginners as it does not have any size restriction. Tyroo offers CPC advertisements. Minimum payout is Rs 2,500.00 only
5. AdsforIndia needs at least 500 pageviews per day and minimum of 75% users from India
6. Social Media Exchange was previously known as Axill India. They provide CPM and CPA advertisements offers. They do NOT have any minimum traffic requirement. Moreover they accept sites in languages other than English as well.

Hope this list is useful to some of you and let me know if I have missed out any India centric network from the list.

I have been using adsense to monetize all my websites for more than 7 years now. However I am getting a sense that while adsense is the perfect solution while starting a blog/ website, it is not so good for an established blog/website. That is the reason why 1 of the steps in my latest roadmap to blogging success was to think beyond adsense. My view just got a little more confirmed with this post from Ajith where he talks about blog income pattern with age and asks the question, why don’t the probloggers use adsense?

Here are some issues that makes me increasingly uncomfortable about adsense

1. Bad dreams about getting banned from adsense keep me awake at night. I am kidding but Google is known to react in extreme manner to any violation of their guidelines. If I have to depend upon a single source for my online income, I shall like it to be more moderate and consultative.
2. I can make no planning based on adsense income: To make matters worse, adsense income is extremely volatile. With the same traffic, same CTR, the final income tends to vary in a wide range. I can safely leave my day job and work online fulltime, only if someone guaranteed that the income will atleast continue to be at this level.
3. Adsense performs extremely poor with regular visitors and social media traffic: I have got 2 sets of websites. The first set are websites that are created for long term value and to solve some problem. They have what you call quality content and get a lot of repeat visitors. While the second set are more of seo experiments/ projects and get their traffic from search engine but have crappy content. Guess what? I earn more money on my crappy websites from adsense. Unless I change my plan to create more crappy content, I better get a good alternative to adsense.
4. Everyone and their cat uses adsense: While google has made the acceptance process more stringent now, they were allowing everyone and their cats to use adsense. That has sort of created an impression in the minds of the users that any website using adsense must be unprofessional.
5. Adsense treats everyone as equal: I love democracy but only for forming governments. Unfortunately adsense uses the principles of democracy for websites as well. A car blog by the CEO of Toyota and my random ramblings about second hand cars will attract the same revenue per click.

What is your take? Do you need to move away from adsense as well?

The IT revolution with all its plus and minus has been a wonderful journey for India. It has created jobs, given us hope and more importantly a confidence that we can compete with the best in the world. The IT revolution seems to be slowing down due to several reasons including a backlash against outsourcing in the developing countries in the wake of the global recession.

I have been studying the pagerank profile, alexa rank, overall ranking and earning details of Indian bloggers with a lot of interest over the last few months. Based on these studies and my interactions with emerging bloggers like Pavan, Ajay, Abhishek, Nihar, Tarun and Harsh I am becoming more and more confident that blogging as a profession and business will create even more opportunity than what IT has done for India in the last few years.

I am aware that, it is quite a big statement to make and I do not expect you to accept my words at face value. Hence in the paragraphs that follows, I shall be putting forth my logic for coming to the consclusion above. This is going to be a rather longish post. Hope you have some time on your hand to go through it completely.

1. Large pool of english speaking population: Actually blogging requires English writing skill and we have an even larger pool of English writing population as students from Tier-II, Tier-III cities are perfectly ok writers while they struggle in the spoken english department.
2. 24 X 7 development cycle: In software development working on 24 X 7 time schedule was a choice. Companies embraced the idea to decrease the time to market. However in the online world 24 X 7 is a necessity.
3. Blogging needs zero capital investment: What was great about IT business was the low capital requirement compared to traditional manufacturing businesses. This allowed the entrepreneurial middle class professionals to set up IT companies. Blogging does not need any capital what so ever. That has allowed students and IT profeesional in India to create blogs and earn money from it.
4. Large pool of engineers ready to work for a lower salary: The recession is only going to increase that number. Aspects like Search engine optimization, analytics etc are predominntly logical tasks that can be carried out by Indian engineering students with a lot of ease.
5. Blogging will generate oppurtunity for students of other streams as well: Job creation in IT was restricted to engineers alone. Blogging by its very nature will provide a great opportunity to students of other streams like arts, designing etc.
6. Blogging is independent of cultural bias: In the early years of IT revolution, Indian companies had to fight the negeative bias of their clients about the quality standard of Indian companies. Luckily in the world of blogs, each post is judged by its own merit alone.
7. Blogging does not need no Visa: I do not need to be in the USA to blog about US. If your blog is good, no government will stop its citizens from reading your blog, clicking on your advertisement or buying products from you.

Challenges for Blogging becoming the next IT

1. Our habit of getting paid at the end of the month: We are accustomed to working in an office and getting paid at the end of every month for the work we have put in. Unfortunately blogging does not work that way. I had to put in close to 6 months of blogging before I started to make any money.
2. Our reluctance to learn marketing: Blogging is not about writing great content alone. To be a successful blogger, you need to promote those posts, convince others to link to you and convert the readers into subscribers. I see a distinct reluctance amongst Indian bloggers to take up these other aspects of blogging.

These are tips that help you increase your earning without any increase in traffic or without having to make a new post.

1. Optimize your adsense blocks right now. Proper optimization of adsense blocks can increase your earnings by as much as 100%
2. If your site is already optimized, change the font/color of the ad blocks. Works like magic to fight off ad-blindedness
3. Replace that default site search feature with adsense for search. There is nothing better than google for search and it increases your earnings
4. Make use of several advertisement products. Start using in-text advertisement, paid review etc. On Binaryday Infolinks now earns as much as adsense. I am so sad I was not using them for all these days
5. Replace the last adsense block with an affiliate link. Unlike adsense, affiliate links may not earn on a daily basis. But on the days they do, you will get a good return
6. Start selling some private advertisement on your website. The great thing about direct sales is you do not have to pay any commission to anyone else.
7. Create another blog with some high paying niche like make money online, automobiles, legal or medicine. Advertise the blog on your main blog. I have been amazed by the results. You will be amazed as well

Let me know your experience on this topic.

If you have been blogging for sometime and especially if you have been reading some seo blogs, then I am sure that you have heard of the term “Long Tail”. Before I proceed with this post, I will let you on one secret. I can almost guarantee that you can take your blog to at least 1000$ per month by followin the advice listed on this one post alone. Hence even if this is the only post of mine that you are going to read, so be it. But read it very very carefully.

This is going to be a long post. I shall be discussing the following topics in it.

1. What gives me so much confidence that my advice can be used to easily take any blog to 1000$ pm earning
2. What is long tail of search
3. Why is it easy to succeed by targetting the long tail?
4. The steps to succeeding with the long tail
   • Setting up the blog
   • Identifying long tail keywords
   • Writing a post targetted to long tail keywords
   • Monetizing the long tail
   • A strategy that will increase your chances of success
5. Improving the performance of the blog post

What gives me so much confidence that my advice can be used to easily take any blog to 1000$ pm earning

I have talked about many seo topics and monetization tricks previously. However I doubt if I have ever sounded as confident as this blog post. It is quite simple though. I am confident because I have done it myself. If you have been reading my blog for sometime, then I am sure that you must have been irritated by my posts about Ron Pratte, Intel core 2 duo and dual core, Catherine Gomez Boxxy, How to format USB drives etc. The fact all those posts as well as my recent posts about Abraham Biggs Suicide Video, Melissa Huckaby and IPL 2009 are all part of my experimentation of getting traffic by taking advantage of the long tail of search. And I have been successful at it beyond my imagination to say the least.

So what exactly is the long tail of search

Many of you must have heard of the 80-20 principle. It basically says that 20% of your customers/product bring in 80% of your sales. 80-20 is the basic rinciple that every large organization runs on. You see if I am a large book store then I need to concentrate on 20% of the titles that bring in 80% of my sales.

The concept of long tail was made popular by Chris Anderson in an article in the Wired magazine. The basic premise is quite simple. The remaining 80% will be good enough for you if your cost of production is low. I will not get into theoretical detail as this is not a post about long tail but rather about how to attract traffic to your blog using this strategy of targetting the long tail.

Why is it easy to succeed by targetting the long tail?

The basic premise of this strategy is quite simple. If I have a new blog, I will find it very difficult to compete with more established blogs for a given keyword. Think of a new blog trying to compete with Digital Inspiration on a technology related blog. It does not matter how great a post you have about twitter, Amit’s post about he forgetting his twitter password will outrank you on Google in all probability. So what do I do?

There are 2 types of blog posts that you can write to take advantage of the long tail.

1. A detailed post about a very specific topic that target search terms with 3 or more keywords. So since I can not compete with existing websites on the keyword virus, usb or virus usb I write a blog post titled how to remove virus from usb and  Everything you may need to know about how to fix errors in USB Flash drives and how to Format USB Flash. Those long titles are there to target search terms that are 3 or 4 words long.
2. A post about a topic that established websites have not already written about: Google gets to see around 30% of search terms for the first time on a given day. Many of those are search terms that have become popular only recently. Typically these are news items. However do not write about news items that are going to get coverage from big websites. Rather focus on smaller issues like Melissa Huckaby and  Princess Kemeria Abajobir Abajifar that are going to have a decent amount of interest and not mch competition.

The steps to succeeding with the long tail

The idea of this blog post is not to tell you that you can succeed by focusing on the long tail. Rather I am going to reveal my secret of getting traffic and money by focusing on long tail. I strongly believe that all the steps that I list down below are essential for succeeding with the long tail strategy.

Timing is the most important aspect of success: We shall be removing competition from established websites and blogs by using this strategy. However keep in mind that you still have to compete with 1000s of other blogs for your success. That makes it quite important that you are amongst the first few guys to write about a topic, especially if you are targetting the hot words for your traffic.

Setting up the blog: When I say timing is important, it is not the time of you publishing the post. Since we shall be focusing on Google to get much of this traffic, it is actually the time when Google finally indexes your blog posts. A well designed wordpress theme with some essential plugins like sitemap plugin, all-in-seo plugin will normally do the trick. However to get the maximum benefit your theme must take care of many other issues including avoiding duplicate content issue, ensuring good internal linking etc. Do not worry if you are not too good at SEO. I am working on a wordpress theme that will take care of all these issues. But it will be available to the members of my how to make money with blogging ecourse. The course is absolutely free. So go ahead and signup with your email id alone.

Identifying long tail keywords

I think this is the single most important trick to succeeding with the long tail strategy is to find out keywords that have decent amount of traffic and not much competition. The simplest way to do this is to monitor google trends. Just go through that page and you will find 100 keywords that you can blog about. You can even target country specific google trend pages. However if you read that last line carefully, you will realize that I said Google trends is the simplest method and not the only method. Some other tricks that I use to find hot keywords includes analyzing submissions to social sites like digg, propeller, indianpad etc and Predicting what keywords will go hot on google trends in 2-3 days hence by going through event calendars like movie schedule, movie releases, valentines day, bloggers’ meet etc. Keywords identified by above methods are not targetted by many other sites. Hence you may use the above tricks to find superior result.

Another method to find long tail keywords is to use google adwords keyword tool. Let us say you want to do a post about seo. Enter the keyword in this tool and it will throw up a large number of terms related to seo. Depending on the level of competition for the keyword, you may choose a particular topic to create your blog post.

Find out low competition terms: It is not enough to identify terms that will have a lot of searches. You need to identify terms on which there is comparatively less competition to worry about. And the number of search results is not an indication of competition. Rather use the methods suggested by me to find out the level of competion for a keyword.

Writing a post targetted to long tail keywords: Ranking on Google is decided based on 2 types of factors off-page factor and on-page factor. Off-page factors include backlinks to your blog, age of your blog etc. While on-page factors include stuff that is on your page like keyword usage, formatting of your post etc. If you have a comparatively new blog you will have a disadvantage in the off-page factor. Hence it becomes extremely important that you make the most of the on-page seo factors. I have covered this topic in depth in my post titled The best way to use keywords on blog post for maximum impact.

Some exclusive tips to increase chances of success dramatically

1. It is difficult to get links to a blog targetting long-tail keywords. Start your blog on some other topic like make money online or technology, get good number of links and then migrate to long tail keywords.
2. Alternatively you may mix these posts with some other linkable topics like I do.
3. Read my Beginners guide to building free backlinks to get free backlinks
4. Hire me as a consultant to kick start your blog. On a serious note I am ready to work on other blogs on a revenue sharing basis.
5. Avoid the issue of duplicate content by all cost. Never user ctrl+c and ctrl+v. Read others’ posts and then rewrite them in your own english. Do not reproduce the entire post
6. Make use of images on your posts.

Finally become a member of my how to make money with blogging ecourse. The course is absolutely free. So go ahead and signup with your email id alone. Trust me I shall be revealing at least 3 more secret tips about how to find super hot long tail keywords in the ecourse.

If you found this blog post then please help me reach more people with a digg/ stumble/ twit or link from your blog

I had recently written about most viewed video on youtube. Related research shows that there is a massive demand for free bollywood movies onine. There are many websites that allow users to download free bollywood movies. There is also no dearth of websites to watch online bollywood movies. I have been trying to figure out a feasible business model for starting a website where users can watch free movies. I am not able to find much content related to the legal aspects of the topic. If any of you happen to have any experience in the topic, then please drop me a mail.

Also do you know if working on a seo project for a website which may be illegal is legal or not. My previous posts about romantic hindi songs and romantic hindi movie may get me a project from a site about bollywood hindi movies. I am not sure if it is legal though. What should I do?

Having a good product is necessary for a company to be successful. However will only a great product make a company successful? What happens if noone has ever heard of its products? So if you have a great product. People already know about the product and they are queueing up infront of stores to buy your products. Do you need to do anything else? Yes. Collect money from them. Without this last step, you will have a great charity, not a business.

It is so much easier to agree on the obvious when you are talking about something you are not involved. Now take the logic from the above paragraph and apply to what you are doing i.e blogging. The content that you are producing is the product. You need good content. But ONLY good content will take you nowhere. People need to know about your content. Think SEO/SMM. Finally you need to be able to collect money from them, which takes us to monetization.

Summary: To make a living blogging, you need to

1. Create great content
2. Promote the content so that people know about it.
3. Finally monetize the traffic so that eyeballs are converted into bank balance.

I shall be writing a number of post related to how to convert great content into bank balance in the next few posts. I hope you have already signed up for my feed already.

To understand the concept, read my earlier post about blogger’s dilemma

Optimizing adsense positions has really worked wonders for binaryday, pushing the eCPM to more than 10$. Primarily, I used optimization tips provided by Google. Here are some of the important adsense optimization tips that have worked for me. However do not just read these tips. Loginto your adsense account and start making the changes. All these changes can be effected in less than 15 minutes and you shall be surprised by the result.

The first adunit shows the ads with the highest revenue per click ads. Make sure that it is the ad unit with the highest Clcik-Through-Rate as well. Use of CSS can make it difficult to know what is the first ad unit. Visit the page from your browser and do a view source. Scroll down the html code. The first block of adsense that you see is your first ad unit. Use custom channels to check that it is the one with the highest CTR.

Size matters. Google’s data says wider ad units outperform the narrow ones. What do you use?

Do you still use wordpress built in search box on your blog. Stop throwing away serious money and start usings an adsense for search box.

Site targetted ads increase the competition for your advertisement place and there by increase your earnings. Modify the default message to convert more advertisers into site-targetted advertisers for your site.

The corner of the ad uniit makes a difference. Increase your earnings by using rounded corners for your ad units.

Go Borderless
Place your adsense unit below the header of your posts and directly below the border. Removing the border between content and adsense unit can result in an increase in CTR of as much as 300%. Binaryday uses this trick to the letter

Match your ads to the content
In May 2005 google published the secret to dogbreedinfo doubling its income to more than $650 a day. The simple tip that doubled the earning was use unobtrusive advertisements. It is not like for nothing that all adsense Guru suggest this as the first tip.

Way back in January 2006, Google published this simple but effective optimization tip for blogs. To get the best results from adsense, you should choose the right ad format for your blog and then place it at a place, where people will see it. Also make sure to use section targetting to get ads targetted to the specific post.

How to make money online is one of the few topics that will never go out of fashion. Top bloggers are making millions of dollars. More than enough has been written about the topic of how to make money online, some good ones and mostly lot of crap. I will not try to reinvent the wheel, rather I shall be sumarizing some of the best articles on the topic.

Many beginners think of blogging as the only way to make money online. However that is not the case with 50% people using other methods to make money. You can make money by Website Design,Selling ebooks,Software Development etc. Pick a method that is compatible with your skill sets

In this post, I have concentrated heavily on how to make money from blogging, simply because this research was done by me for myself, to start making money from binaryday. To summarize all the articles that I have read about how to make money online from your blog, I can say that the most popular methods are 1. adsense 2. other advertisement networks and 3. affiliate marketing

Getting the best out of adsense: Adsense continues to be the most popular method for monetizing blogs. However the golden word with adsense is optimization. It is possible to increase the income from the same blog by 6 folds through proper optimization. To get better income from adsense, always use bigger formats, choose the color scheme that blends with your blog and place the advertisements blocks in locations that are more prominent.

To be continued as my research gets completed.

I am sure you are aware of bloggers in the USA who make more than a million dollar from adsense. Well noone from India has got that sort of success. However many people like you and me are making a really good earning by using adsense on their blogs.

Some of these bloggers post their earnings report online. I know few of them personally. So I just thought that I will create a list of people who have managed to earn more than 200$ per month from their blog.

Any post about indian bloggers can not be complete without talking about Amit agarwal of Digital Inspiration. Amit earns in 6 figure USD i.e more than 50 lakh rupees a year from blogging alone.

Next in line is Madhur Kapoor of whoismadhur.com. This october he made more than 500$ from his blog. Unlike Amit, Madhur blogs along with a regular job. Hence that number looks quite impressive to me. You can see Madhur’s earnings report as a proof.

Nihar from Niharsworld also made more than 500$. See Nihar’s earnings report. Techbangalore also seems to be making 500$ a month. Virgintech made 200$. It is not a earnings report like earlier proofs. You will have to read the entire post to locate the line where he mentions about making 200$ a month from the blog. I personally know a couple of bloggers at least who earn more than 400$ a month.

What is the point of this post?

Quite simple. Blogging and adsense presents a unique oppurtunity to India. In a world where a software engineer in good companies makes 400$ a month, people are making that much by spending 1-2 hours a day on blogging. I am surprised that many more people are not starting to write blogs. I hope that this blog post will increase the awareness about blogging as a highly profitable hobby.

If anyone wants to start blogging and needs some help, feel free to contact me. I shall help you with all the knowledge that I have accumulated over a period of time.

I am not sure if Techies in India have realized the oppurtunity that the iphone store presents to us. I think this is one ares that is begging to be dominated by us. Surprisingly I have not seen much enthusiasm about the same in the Indian blogosphere.

Think about it. The apps store has sold apps worth more than 30 million $ in 1 month alone. Even after taking apple’s cut from this the developers have made 21 million $ or 80 crore rupees in 1 month!!!! source

Why do I say this domain is begging to be dominated by us? Because of the long tail phenomenon. The top 10 apps accounted for only 9 million or just 30% of the total.

It means that there are lot of apps that made small amount of money. What is one strength that is required to win a fragmented market like this?? It is the ability to be the low cost producer. Which country has that capacity in abundance?? That is the logic for my conclusion that the iphone apps market shall be completely dominated by Indian techies.

Only if we wake up to the oppurtunity fast enough. The window of oppurtunity remains open till the apps market gets its dominant player.

Getting paid for reading advertisements was one of the favorite ideas with the VCs in the web1.0 era. Seems like those ideas are coming back into fashion. However this time in the mobile advertisement sphere.

After mGinger, now we have paisa4sms that promises to pay you 20 paisa for each sms that you recieve. More importantly they claim to pay you 5 Rupees for each person that joins your network.

So if you have a good network of friends or if you have a popular blog then you can easily monetize the same with paisa4sms.

All of us know that incoming link can bring a lot of traffic. However has it ever occured to you that outgoing links can bring substantial traffic?

I had written a post about release of wordpress 2.5. I started getting an unusually high number of visitors on that post. (Unusual by the standard of this blog ) Most of the traffic was coming from the trackback link on the wordpress blog.

To test the theory I wrote another article about yahoo microsoft story with several links to techcrunch articles. The post has got more than 100 visiors from trackback alone.

So always make sure to link to the sources from which you are picking facts and ideas for your post. It is the right thing to do and additionally it will help you get some additional traffic as well.

It has been more than 3 years since we started mywalkin. With more than 24,000 feedburner subscribers and more than 1,00,000 unique visitors a month, it has been a reasonable success. I had never bothered to understand how we managed to get those users. However recently I did some analysis as I want to use the learnings from mywalkin, to get more traffic for binaryday.

If you are starting a new website or blog, then you have basically 3 different options to get traffic. Direct advertisement, Search engine Optimization and creating a word-of-mouth buzz.

Direct advertisement has the advantage of providing immediate results. If you spend X amount of money then you will get Y number of traffic. If the concept needs some initial userbase to start working like some digg like concept or forum or social network, then this is a must. However direct advertisement makes your website grow in an arithmatic progression. i.e if your advertisement budget allows you to get 200 users per month, then the growth of your site will look like 200,400,600, 800 and so on. CPC and CPM advertisement methods shall fall under this category.

Search engine Optimization looks like the most talked about method. If you are not in a highly competitive domain then it is not very difficult to rank high for target terms. It does need some initial investment both time and money. However once the work is over, much less investment is required for maintaining the position. On the downside, you will be completely at the mercy of all mighty google. It takes some time to take effect. While getting to the top 10 may be possible, moving up from there becomes a really big challenge. So with search engine optimization the traffic graph will look something like 0,0,0,50,70,100,170,300,300,300.

Word of Mouth This is perhaps one of the most important and most difficult strategy to use. And this is what differentates between a good site and a great site. For this strategy to work, you shall need to make your customers to talk about you. You can do that through quality and innovative features. However if you manage to achieve this, then this is effectivly a zero cost method of getting traffic. The importance of this method is that it makes your traffic increase in a geometric progression. assuming you manage to convince 10% of your visitors to talk about your product, your traffic numbers will look like 100,110,121,133,146,161,177,195,214 i.e the traffic will double in 8 months.

Have you ever felt that you have a killer idea, but you are not able to work on it due to lack of funding. And you think that writing business plans is not worth your time. Well here is a good news. You do NOT need a business plan to get funded.

Y Combinator is now accepting applications for the summer 2008 funding cycle. Here is what they say about their way of evaluating investment ideas.

How do we choose who to fund? The people in your group are what matter most to us. We look for brains, motivation, and a sense of design. Experience is helpful but not critical.

Your idea is important too, but mainly as evidence that you can have good ideas. Most successful startups change their idea substantially.

The best part comes towards the end.
We don’t expect you to have a formal business plan yet. All you have to do is fill out our application.

To know why I am so excited about this, look at the past companies they have funded.
Reddit, Loopt, ClickFacts, TextPayMe, Snipshot, Inkling, Flagr, Wufoo, YouOS, LikeBetter, Thinkature, JamGlue, Shoutfit, Scribd, Weebly, Virtualmin, Buxfer, Octopart, Heysan, Justin.TV, I’m In Like With You, SocialMoth, Xobni, Versionate, Adpinion, Anywhere.FM, Fuzzwich, Bountii, Auctomatic, Disqus, Draftmix, Webmynd, RescueTime, Reble, Heroku, Tipjoy, AddHer, and 8AWeek. It can not get better than this.

The first step of any journey is the belief that you can reach the destination. Is it possible to earn a million dollar from adsense alone? Well to put that number into perspective a million dollar is what an average software professional in the US earns in more than 10 years. So when I suggested that we can earn that much money in one year simply by running a couple of blogs, none of my partners believed me.I wrote this post primarily to convince my partners that there is serious money that can be made through adsense. Hope it will convince some of my readers about the possibility of earning a million dollar through adsense as well.

So here is the proof.

Markus Frind runs a free online dating site called plentyOfFish.com and he rocked the Internet world when he posted a photo of his latest Google AdSense check for nearly $1 million CAD. You can see it for yourself here

The following is an image of a 1 month cheque for 1.2 Lakh dollars from adsense to the author of shoemoney.com.

Jason Calacanis was making more than $4,000 a day with adsense. He sold Weblogs Inc to AOL for $25 million dollars.

There are even more bloggers who have made more than a million dollar a year from their blogs.

I hope I have made my point. is it possible to make a million dollar from your blog? Hell yes. Is it easy to make a million dollar from your blog? Hell No.

A million dollar is a lot of money. It is not like anyone can start a blog, make some posts, put some adsense units and make a million dollar. Life is not that easy. (I wish it were though). A lot more dedication and descipline is required for that. I am definitely trying to reach there. I shall be posting about every step I take and every progress I make on this blog. If you will like to learn from my experience then go ahead and subscribe to my feed today.

Imagine your boss telling you, you will get a 200$ or 10,000 Rupees per month increament after 6 months if you work for 2 more hours everyday. The best part is you get to choose the work you want to do in these 2 hours. Will you say no?? Then you will be surprised to know that everyday this deal is being offered to you and you keep saying no !!!

Here is a list of things you can do to accept that offer

Trust me earning money through these options are easier than you think. However make sure that you are ready to work for those 2 extra hours everyday. If you are interested in blogging but do not want to handle the problem of marketing it, then please leave a comment with your contact details. We will like to talk to you.

Google is perhaps the most inspiring story for most of us davids trying to take on the Goliaths. There is a lot that I have learnt from the rise of Google. Thought of sharing some of those points with you.

Most of us believe that Google became the no1 search engine because of its superior algorithm. Google did not win because of its superior technology. I know you will not take my word for it. So watch this video. This is a presentation by Seth Godin to the employees of Google. And he tells them that Google did not win because of its algorithm. A study in early 2000 found that users could not distinguish between results of yahoo and that of google, without the branding.

Then how did Google become the no 1 Search engine. I will say there are 2 important points that made google win and those 2 points apply to every startup trying to become the next Google.

Take the less obvious and more risky path
Google won because it concentrated on a solution that was not considered important by the established players. When Google started working on search, search was not hot. Email and instant messengers were the hot themes of that season. Consider this, till February 2004 Yahoo did not have a search engine of its own. Yahoo search was powered by Google search engine. and till end of January 2005, microsoft search was powered by yahoo search. This meant that Google had close to 10 years to develop its product, perfect it and get users addicted to it before yahoo and microsoft started to compete with it. Actually microsoft and yahoo helped google make a better search engine by using it on their search page. Just imagine what would have happened if microsoft had thrown its best engineers onto search way back in 1998. May be google would have won but there is a very good chance that it would not have.

As a startup the most risky project is the most obvious and least risky one. Because if it is obvious that there is money to make in a particular domain, then all the big guys will be already there. I will rather work on idea that will be a winner 2 years down the line so that when the big guys realize its importance, I will have a headstart to support myself.

Make it easy for your users to spread the word
If Google’s search was not significantly better than yahoo (They were powered by the same engine actually), then why did more people use Google? Let us say you are a first time internet user trying to find some material for your project and you do not know either yahoo or google. What do you do? You call up one of your more geeky freind and ask him for help. He tells you that you can easily find the information with the help of a search engine. You ask him which search engine. What will he say? Let us say he likes yahoo and so he suggests yahoo. You go to yahoo.com. There are too many other things on the page apart from search. You being a new user, get completely lost. You call up your freind and start bugging him with 100 questions. So what does he do when another person calls him with the same doubt? He suggests google. Because on google’s page, what the user needs to do is obvious.

So make it as easy as possible for your users to spread word about you. Put a email this link. ask him to input the bare minimum information necessary to send out the message. (The email id of his freind) Asking him to fill in 10 fields while he is doing a favor to you is too much. Pre fill the body of the mail, with a description of your website. An occasional thank you mail may not be out of the order either. I am yet to start doing the thank you piece though

These 2 points apply to most of the startups that have made it big. Think facebook, youtube, del.ic.ious or flickr. When they started, the domain was not hot. They went ahead and made it hot. What are you doing? Starting another social network?? Do yourself a favor and give it a second thought.