Make money with iphone apps store : Great oppurtunity for Indian Techies

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.

Topics: Entrepreneurship, Make Money

Email This

Get paid to read sms at paisa4sms

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.

Topics: Make Money, Mobile

Email This

Link out to get Traffic !!

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.

Topics: Entrepreneurship, Internet, Make Money, SEO

Email This

Strategies that we use to get more traffic

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.

Topics: Entrepreneurship, Internet, Make Money, SEO, Tips and Tricks, Tools

Email This

Get your idea funded, WITHOUT a business plan :)

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.

Topics: Entrepreneurship, Make Money, News, VC

Email This

Million Dollar Earning through Adsense??

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.

Jasos 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.

Topics: Entrepreneurship, Google Adsense, Make Money

Email This

Give yourself a hike

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.

Topics: Entrepreneurship, Internet, Make Money

Email This

How Google Became the No 1 Search engine

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.

Topics: Entrepreneurship, Internet, Make Money

Email This

It is different this time

Long long time ago (i.e in 2000) there were many websites that spent a lot of money for getting users. They planned to monetize the users through advertisement. However that plan did not work out and most of them had to close shop.In the process they lost a lot of money. I am sure you have heard this famous story about the dotcom bubble and bust.

Why am I writing about a 8 year old story? Because it seems like the story is being replayed again. There are many starry eyed (including me) kids trying to create websites that will make money from advertisement. And many pundits do not take us or our business seriously because they think if it did not work in 2000 and hence it will not work this time. They are WRONG. This time it is different. It is different because

We are not creating websites to earn from advertisements. We are creating the websites to solve real life requirements of our users. Advertisement is just a side story and not the story.

In 2000, the only guys who were advertiseing on the internet were other websites. This time it is the brick and mortar companies that are selling their stuff on the internet. We have realized that internet is just an enabler and not an end in itself.

The advertisement revenue for 9 months of 2007 has reached more than $15 billion.

People are buying real stuff on the internet on amazon and ebay

I believe that monetization through advertisement is a perfectly good business plan to have. So stop listening to the experts who think they know everything. and start working on your idea and on getting users to your website.

P.S: If you have an India centric website, that you monetize through advertisement then please leave a comment below. I will like to write about you.
If are new to entrepreneurship then you may want to read about how to select an idea and how you can start your business without leaving your job.

Topics: Entrepreneurship, Internet, Make Money

Email This

You must market your blog

Why do I need to Market my blog?
This is the most frequently asked question that I have heard from blogger freinds who blog as a hobby and do not intend to earn money. As a matter of fact many of them find it beneath them to market their blog. So I will like to address that issue first.

It is your duty to the Internet Community
There are two types of people creating content on the internet. People who are creating content for easy money and people who are doing so because it is their passion. The second class of bloggers may monetize their site but money is never their primary motivation for blogging. IMHO the quality of the content created by the second class is better than the quality of the content created by people who create content simply to make money.

Unfortunately the passionate bloggers do not want to market their blog. And the quick maney bloggers have a huge incentive to do everything to get more and more people to read their blogs. Net result of it is that the normal reader is bombarded with inferior quality content while the better quality content remain hidden from him.

If you want to prevent this deterioaration of quality of content on the internet, then you must actively try to make your blog accessible to as many people as possible and try to bring other good quality blogs to the front.

Topics: Blogs, Make Money, SEO

Email This

Money making ideas for Geeks

If you are a proud geek with some free time then you are going to love this post. Here is a list of websites that pay you for what you love doing i.e coding.

The best one among the lot is topcoder. It has weekly contests for designing, testing and coding. Go here to see the active contests. The prize money ranges from 500$ to 1400$ for one component. You read that right, you can indeed make 20,000 Rs upto 60,000 rupees writing one complete programme. The only problem is that most of the projects are in .net or java. Topcoder provides a rating to each member depending upon how many times you win in competitions among other criteria. If you can get some really good rank then who knows even google may come searching for you

The other type of sites are freelancing sites. These sites allow companies in need of programmers to post their projects. As a programmer you can select projects that you like and then bid for them. If you are selected then you can get paid for developing the programme. http://www.getacoder.com/  ,  http://www.project4hire.com   and https://www.getafreelancer.com/ are some of the freelancing sites.

disclaimer: I have not used any of the sites except topcoder myelf.

Topics: Entrepreneurship, Make Money

Email This