If we see history, we often notice that most king’s  come back to capture their lost empires the second time before they die, and seeing recent events it makes me think that it might also be true for the internet, as today the internet is no less than a medieval battlefield. By referring to Kings and Emperors I wanted to make you understand that they considered power, reputation and authority as much more valuable than wealth, which is what makes them similar to internet entrepreneurs today.

Whenever I hear about a successful internet firm being taken over by a larger firm, I kind of feel sad for the founders, though most founder’s would be happy about the huge profits they’ve made, I’m sure many of them will feel the pain of loosing control of the company they built with sweat, blood and hard work, and I’ve seen many such entrepreneurs who repent years later for giving up their first business.

The main reason for this is that good ideas come only once, and great ideas come only to 1 in a million, and those of them who give up such great ideas for short term benefits will surely repent later on, I bet atleast some of you have heard about Roy Raymond, the then infamous founder of Victoria’s Secret, if you haven’t heard of him then don’t be surprised as nobody does. This guy got this great idea which was worth billions of dollars, but he decided to sell it for just $4 million. He repented doing so as just a few years later Victoria’s Secret was earning over $300 million a year, and Raymond lost two of his other startup’s and finally ended up bankrupt jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.

Now lets get back on topic, just a week ago their was huge buzz all over the internet about TechCrunch founder announcing his resignation on the first day of TechCrunch Disrupt, and as expected it was the clash of interests between his editorial values and ethics and that of Aol, and so far TechCrunch has never hesitated in criticizing Aol or its management for any reason, but now I suppose that the Aol management has had enough and Michael being a regular employee at the moment, couldn’t help but quit.

Yesterday, after almost a week the former TechCrunch editor made a small and simple comeback, with a blog named Uncruched, at the moment the blog has just one post titled ‘Here I Am’ but with no text, but even after that it’s received 100s of comments. What he plans to do with this is not quite clear, but seeing the name and style it seems like a direct attack on Aol and even on TechCrunch.

There were certain reasons why Michael Arrington was an important asset even after buying TechCrunch, and this was because in the past six years Michael Arrington has successfully uncovered various secrets of the silicon valley, and TechCrunch’s revenue sources are not really what they seem, TechCrunch earns a lot more by endorsing other firms and internet services than normal advertising, and many of these are against the ethics of blogging and journalism. Now that he is successfully out of TechCrunch, there is no one to keep an eye on what he does and where he does it, so his new blog, Uncrunched may turn out to be the next Wikileaks for the silicon valley.

Whatever I mentioned above might not be true, but at the moment Aol would surely feel insecure as Michael still has a very loyal support from colleagues and former employees. I’m watching Aol and Yahoo quite closely these days

Again do subscribe to our feed in order to receive constant updates about the latest happenings around the world, and if you want to add something here or tell us about any news please use our contact form.

A year ago Digg and Reddit weren’t worth a competition as Digg was many times bigger than Reddit back then, but within a year things have changed drastically altering the entire competition.

Digg was doing great in the first two quarters of 2010 and had constant growth when it came to traffic and page views and the entire social web had great expectations from Digg’s ambitious version 4, which they claimed would improve discovery and sharing of content. Everything went on great initially, but Digg lacked behind when it came to proper application testing.

Digg version 4 was a huge failure, and Kevin Rose failed to test and review before launching it, which resulted mass disappointment among their users for whom the next best place was Reddit. I believe that Digg failed at the application testing process, even when they released the beta version there were plenty of complaints, suggestions and issues from their users and from critics for which they turned a blind eye. You can see the number of negative comments on their blog post announcing the launch here.

How was Reddit to benefit?

I think thats pretty clear, as Reddit was the next best destination for sharing and discovering new content, though it has had no change in interface since it was launched in 2005 which was regarded as a primitive design and often considered as no threat to Digg, some even hated Reddit at one point claiming that they had entirely copied Digg’s idea.

When Digg version 4 took off, most users hated the concept of removing the upcoming page, the bury button and making ‘My news’ the default user page, which again reduced traffic to those sites which pop on the front page and biggest issue was the reserving of the front page for a few selected publishers, which was reported by Digg top user GenPanda and even we reported it in one of our previous posts. All of this contributed to a huge decline in Digg traffic and Alexa reported that Digg’s traffic plummeted 33% within a weeks time.

Reddit did all it could to benefit from this and when it noticed the tremendous rise they started welcoming their users with ‘Reddit 101 for new users’. To add to this many Digg users started off an online revolt against the company and I feel this was fueled by bloggers and webmasters who felt they were cheated due to Digg’s policy of favoritism, all of them started submitting images and small posts onto Digg with titles against Kevin Rose and Digg itself, many of these stories received 100s of Diggs, though Digg moderators tried to stop them, they didn’t want to go too far ahead.

Recently I saw an IMA (I am a) thread on Reddit which criticized Digg, it also received more than 200 comments, if you can take some time to go through all those comments you’ll realize that most of them were former Digg users who had revolted against Digg, many of them claiming that Reddit was a better place to hang out.

The main reason behind the fall of Digg

Most people claimed that the New Digg had some extra love for sites such as BBC, Techcrunch, CollegeHumor and Wired which is why they revolted against it, other than a few minor issues with the features and the back end of the site, but according to me the entire issue was started off by internet marketers and bloggers rather than common Digg users themselves.

First of all, the old Digg’s algorithm valued the number of Diggs and comments a story gets to determine its rankings and a story could stay in the upcoming section for upto 2 days, and today your story will move out of the upcoming section within 12 to 18 hours of time, moreover other than just Digg’s and comments the new Digg algorithm has many more factors regarding from where the votes actually come from and the sources of traffic for a particular story.

If your an active social media user you’ll know that marketers use the method of social media swapping, that is exchanging of votes on various social networking sites in order to gain popularity, most marketers either do it on their own or they outsource it and undoubtedly Digg was a marketer dominated community, most of the popular stories in the old Digg came about in a similar fashion and maybe thats what Kevin Rose wanted to end.

On top of that Digg made a few changes such as making the ‘My news’ page as default which resulted in the drop of traffic for front page stories, all of which made marketers unhappy and resulted in the fall of Digg.

Well I’m sure all of you disagree with me arguing that less than 1% of Digg constituted of internet marketers and they cannot make the difference, but its a well known fact that 90% of the popular stories on Digg are submitted by 10% of the users and often the Digger’s dominate the front page, so undoubtedly they are the ones who have all the power. Take LTgenpanda for example, he was the one who exposed the Digg’s policy of favoritism, he was a top 100 Digger and his story was popular on Digg and Reddit.

The current status of the two sites

Now most people claimed that Reddit has gained a lot from Digg’s failure, well yes it has, but now I also feel that Reddit has overtook Digg when it comes to traffic. I have few of my own evidences which I feel even you would have noticed if you’ve promoted your sites on both the platforms.

I have been promoting my new site Farrrt.com quite a lot lately and in these stats are of one single day and both are for the same post I had made and Digg had received special attention which took me till the top of the upcoming page, but no matter what it still stood lesser than the other sites.

If you can notice I’ve received a total of 2 points made of 29 upvotes and 27 down votes and on Reddit not going into the minus section means your content was good, and on that particular day I had touched 9 points, so you can see the amount of potential reddit has for traffic.

And although Digg has got double the votes and even after I made it to the top of the upcoming page I didn’t receive more than 10% of the traffic I received from Reddit.

These two screenshots are taken from Compete.com, and I don’t seriously think Compete and Alexa provide accurate measurements, but for big and high traffic sites I’m sure both can be pretty close to the actual, so this I suppose can be enough evidence that Reddit gets more traffic than Digg, on top of that Digg’s traffic is on the fall since the past four months.

Like all of my other posts, this too is based on experiments and experiences, so I’m sure I was right on this one and seriously encourage you to talk it out if you have anything in the comments section below, also do subscribe to our feed and also follow us on Twitter.

This is pretty old news, I had heard about this 6 months ago, but sadly I failed to see this closely, it was just a week ago that my partner came up with this idea while we were working on our content development plan. Bankaholic, was a pretty interesting blog, with a catchy name, design and sticky content and like most other blogs all its content came from its sole writer and owner Johns Wu, but today the blog gets millions of hits, has got more than 20 full time writers and its 23 year old founder considered himself retired.

Ofcourse he just had to retire now, as he got an extremely sweet deal from Bankrate which offered him $12.5 million upfront and $2.5 million over two years, and he went on to make history as the owner of the most highly valued blog on the internet. In 2006 Johns Wu started a stock market and personal finance blog and according to our analysis he got most of his traffic from SEO.

While he started this blog he was still in college and like most teenagers had been struck by the idea of internet business, though science was his strength he decided to go with a stock market blog, which I bet made all the difference. This is a case study on the factors which contributed to the high valuation of this blog,

Content : the key asset

The value of any blog can be judged by the quality of its content, and if it succeeds in providing sticky and catchy content it would surely have a good sale price as quality information has always got its own price tag, even if a particular site fails to get in traffic.

John’s site provides great quality content from the beginning, and at the time of sale it had over 600 posts of the same, which is actually one of the key reasons. Seeing his first few posts I feel he combined quality content, with entertaining articles with a few posts that actually sell.

I also feel that their was heavy keyword research taking place behind all of his first few posts, for example take a look at this post, he has stuffed keywords such as APY, CD rates etc and he has dominated search results for that particular keyword, many blogs which do this will look extremely spammy, but he has made it look creative and of great quality.

Traffic : SEO & SEM

Johns already knew a lot about the internet and internet marketing, although this is just my simple assumption as till now his influence in social media is extremely low for an internet celebrity. I’ve also mentioned in a few of my previous posts that blogs which started off during the period of 2006 to 2008 experienced high growth rates due to heavy growth in internet usage and low search competition, that also was the time when Google’s search results got pretty mature.

As I’ve mentioned above, most of his earlier posts were highly keyword researched and during those times Google provided high search rankings for all quality posts all of which surely got him high traffic.

In an interview with SeoBook he has also claimed to have launched many Adwords campaigns in the beginning, which I think was a great idea. You can grow your blog heavily if you target the right keywords, the Adwords competition was extremely low back then, but still he has done what people were extremely skeptical about.

Very soon he ranked pretty high for high traffic keywords which was again a reason for such high valuations. Bankrate knew that it was next to impossible to rank for such keywords in today’s search market, so they decided to go as far as possible to get this blog.

Monetization : earnings potential

Bankrate surely expects good returns for such a huge investment, as expected they had expected more than just returns and profit by this investment. Bankaholic’s high rankings in search results is surely a great asset, and its content too was no less. But something tough to find out about the site was their initial monetization strategy.

The site got upto 200,000 visitors, so a combination of CPM, CPC and performance based advertisements would have resulted in great income. I’m sure Johns earned a solid passive income even during his first few days of blogging, but Bankrate cannot wait for years to reap back their earnings, as these monetization methods will hardly earn a six figure yearly income.

So far Bankrate has been using the same methods, and I also think they are selling sponsored reviews and promoting various finance related affiliate programs which are surely high paying. I wouldn’t be surprised if their revenues have tripled than the time when Johns used to run the site. But Bankrate already has a lot of financial sites which earn them heap loads of advertising and affiliate revenue, so I have a feeling that they are on the verge of launching a digital product to thoroughly monetize Bankaholic.

Finance niches are meant for success

A few niches on the internet are just made for success, even if my blog got 3 times the traffic Bankaholic did I surely wouldn’t even sell for even half that price. I few niches like finance, stock market, healthcare and education are extremely profitable, your adsense earnings will be comparatively higher, affiliate programs have high payouts and in the end the valuation of ones blog is always high.

This is infact an ugly truth about the internet, I am a strong advocate for the wealth and potential of the internet, but I must agree that all this isn’t divided equally as even today the geography, locality and niche of a blog have a lot of influence.

So in 2006 at the time when the competition for all niches remained low, Johns was lucky enough to chose the lucrative personal finance niche, soon the CPC rates for this niche was sky high resulting in a huge valuation for his site, so his success was partially due to luck.

On to our readers

This is surely one great example of what dedicated blogging can bring in, though Johns Wu had partial luck he had worked pretty hard on his site in the beginning. This case study is purely based on research and assumptions and cannot be back with any proof, but I bet all of you can use the above methods to build a successful internet business.

We’re sure to write more on this topic in the future, so to keep up do subscribe to our feed and also follow me on Twitter.

Classified sites are a fantastic business resource, but sadly most people make the most traditional use of it. Craigslist was once a site that could sell anything and everything posted on it, but as it grew it became increasingly saturated. For a common internet surfer a classified site is a traditional advertisement site filled with deals on various categories, but if your an internet marketer you’ll have to see a great profitable business opportunities in those listings.

Thats what happens in my case, I often surf through classified listings in my newspaper as well as online and try to find something interesting which could turn out to be a money maker, most of the time its just a way me and my partner pass time by discussing various opportunities, but right now if we are serious about it and ready to spend time on it we’ll sure have our hands on a small fortune, that is what one has to look in for a classified listing.

Today the internet is flooded with such sites and quiet often you’ll find the same advertisements and offers in all of them, so right now I find it hard to seek legitimate and worthwhile offers in most of those sites.

As my blog got popular I keep receiving mails very often from new websites and entrepreneurs, I usually reply to all but wouldn’t care to endorse them until it was very special. The site I’ll be endorsing here is a classified site, currently targeting the Indian audience and my main aim is to educate you about the ways you can profit from this site when your buying and when your selling.

Introducing the Indian classified site

Sahipasand is one such free classified site which mainly concentrates on the Indian niche, it segregates adverts on the basis of region first and categories later. Like Craigslist its a free service and allows anyone to post an advert for free. Its a lot cleaner than Craigslist and its less spammy and saturated thanks to effective moderation.

The site has its roots from a Norwegian media company, Schibsted Classified Media which runs few of the webs most popular websites. Right now this site has got about 44000 active advertisements, which means its already well established itself in its niche and because its young our opportunities on this site are pretty high.

The reason I’ve had special attraction towards this site is that the offers here are just great and I’m sure you’ll find many interesting products below market price, which can save you s lot of money and in my case I can just take advantage of it and create a full fledge business. So that is what we’ll be concentrating on over here.

What can you do with this?

If you are an Indian this site is of plenty of use to you, for any casual surfer this can be a source for great personal goods at extremely low prices and if your looking for a big toy you can also get an extremely reasonable real estate deal as now that is what the site is flooded with.

In case your looking to sell some of your old house-old goods their cannot be a better place as almost all of them who have advertised here have claimed to have received a tremendous response. The price may not be up to what you’ve expected but it can surely raise the money you were looking for.

This site has got countless resources, so the things I’ve listed above are very less so I think you can see what its got by examining the site yourself.

What I’d do with this site?

If your not an Indian, which includes most of our audience or if your in search of a simple money making opportunity this site can do a lot of help to you as well. Firstly the site has got a huge traffic, whereas its advertiser strength is low, well moderated and of good quality so almost any new advert posted on this site can provide great exposure.

As many of you might be aware India is home to many goods and services which come at extremely cheap prices than the rest of the world, and you’ll surely find many of those on this site, now you can take advantage of this price difference and easily earn a few bucks into your pockets, or you can also go ahead and make bulk orders and set yourself a huge business opportunity.

For example, take a look at this brand new bar chair which would be about 42 bucks in terms of dollars, whereas the lowest price for such a chair in Amazon would be twice this. This is just an example, in reality there are many such deals out their which would make up profitable opportunities.

Just like Craigslist, even Sahipasand has an option to search for potential buyers, and my one search resulted in many people looking for real estate deals, consumer electronics and a lot more and all of them also have the amount of money they are willing to spend listed in their advert. Using this you can act as a broker and earn a few bucks for sure.

An opportunity for job seekers and service providers

Sahipasand has got one of the best resources for those of you looking for a good job, I don’t think its the best place to look out for a high level job, but for small and medium sized jobs their is truly no better place.

If your an employer, this is surely the best place to showcase your requirements, your sure to get in a hell lot of response and all you have to do filter them out. The volume of job listings are comparatively lower than other job boards and classifieds, but still they are of good quality.

I bet many of my readers are freelancers, and this site can surely be one of the best places to promote your service, not because of high audience, but because of low competition, currently their are thousands of freelancers, most of them who are in the internet marketing niche getting handful of projects from this site.

On to our readers

Sahipasand is still a young and and growing site, but already many of its users are reaping huge benefits from it, as an internet marketer you must be using a site before it gets popular in order to make the maximum use of it.

I’m always in search of new sites of this sort so to keep up please do follow me on Twitter and also subscribe to our blog feed.

I really hope all of you know who Justin Bieber is, if not your not worth reading this post, to get a bit deeper this kid was born just 2 years before me in London and like any other jobless teenager he had an interest in music, he didn’t go to any classes like most people do and was mostly a self taught musician which was actually something which made him different and creative.

After mastering himself with this wasteful art his mother decided to record his singing and post it on Youtube for his family and friends to see, so basically they had no idea about the power of social media.

While he and his mother kept doing so they found an increase in viewership, I bet they always had people other than his family and friends watching, so they decided in the beginning of 2008 to make their videos look more professional and by now they already had a loyal audience. They got over 10 million views with just pure word-of-mouth promotion which can be called ‘The snowball effect”.

One of the many of watched his videos were Scooter Braun and Usher Raymond, both of who are famous celebrity managers, they immediately took charge of him and turned his hobby into a professional full time business, and by the end of 2008 he was also signed for Raymond Braun Media Group which released his debut “One Time”.

All of this was more than enough to launch an artist’s career, but getting to this level is not easy for anyone, but little Bieber got this overnight, I bet he himself hasn’t realized the reason behind it other than his talent, as their are currently many kids out there who sing better than him. This is not a celebrity blog, so more than Bieber’s success story we’ll be concentrating on how social media played a major role in it.

The beginning : Power of Youtube

In 2008, two years after Google took-over Youtube, it was at its highest state, I always believe that 2007 – 08 were the best times to start a Youtube business as at that time their traffic was on a constant rise and the competition was extremely low than compared to today, so quiet often almost every upload received tons of views and if it was good, no one could stop the video from going viral.

I believe in this because many of the successful Youtube channels such as RayWilliamJohnson, Smosh and JakeValeFilms rose to popularity during these two years. Youtube videos faced the ‘snowball effect’ much faster and easier back then, so I bet Justin Bieber’s word-of-mouth campaign started out with bloggers and webmasters embedding his videos onto their sites.

Soon his videos got branded well enough and started to attain loyal subscribers, which was the backbone of his long term success and Youtube often shows unpredictable results once you touch this level.

I believe Justin looked forward to monetize his asset on Youtube by signing up to their partner program, which I highly appreciate as unlike other artists of that time who considered running advertisements as a bleak to their brand image, Bieber was successfully leveraging good income allowing him to reinvest and improve his videos and at the same time meet with his expenses.

Youtube is a great step towards brand promotion and one could easily leverage his influence and audience there to other networks and purposes, I believe Justin Bieber built his initial Twitter following with the help of the same, and many big channels on Youtube have contact and advertise links through which they receive proposals for various business deals.

The next step : Get social, create a buzz

I strongly believe that popularity cannot be based upon the number of people who know something or someone, but its based on the number of times they speak and discuss about that something or someone. By now millions of net surfers knew who Justin Bieber was, but they hardly spoke or discussed about him.

This was solved by getting him to be more social, the first way would be to constantly interact with fans on Youtube, Facebook and Twitter, I’m sure he would have outsourced this real soon. This helped boost discussion about him and because he outsourced it I’m sure the same was done in a massive scale, which added on to the previous ‘snowball effect’.

Many celebrity management and social media firms help build fame triggering fake discussions and massive social media upscale which involves creating fake controversies in ones name only to promote his / her brand, this method is tough and can be learnt only via experience and is popularly called ‘The naked fanatics’.

Again because Justin Bieber monetized at an early stage he was able to invest on these methods which are sure to cost thousands of dollars.

A big leap : Partnerships and Joint ventures

Every economic activity depends on a few others in order to be successful and at times one small partnership is all it takes, that is why I mentioned to always remain open for business deals in all your social media profiles. This may lead to a possible takeover, advertiser, sale or many a times a partnership / joint venture.

Justin Bieber soon came into the limelight of a few entrepreneurs in the music industry, many of them were smalltime, but soon enough he had a big deal from Scooter Braun which was basically a game-changer for him.

He got a huge contract which turned his small time internet show to a huge mainstream business. Many times even I myself receive many offers for joint ventures and business opportunities on this blog, most of them have helped me to a certain level, but you must watch out for scams a few times.

Rise to mainstream fame

As soon as he signed the contract with Raymond Braun Media Group he immediately launched his album which was efficiently promoted by RBMG, moreover his online bases were improved and well developed at the hands of professionals hired by RBMG, they promoted Justin Bieber and his talent in mainstream media with the help of publicists and made sure he gets all the mainstream fame.

The Music company did take a share of his earnings to cover up their expenses and to earn a considerable amount for their services but all of Justin Bieber’s launch depended on them.

His highly influential social media bases helped him leverage mainstream publications which brought him more fame and influence over the community. Like any other professional singer Justin Bieber started having his own concerts organized by his manager which again added to his ever growing fame.

These concerts were organized by his managers, and they generated millions of dollars from that and when Justin was singing for someone else he would charge upto $300,000 for it. Other than this his managers, RBMG got him a lot of sponsorships and endorsement deals which again brought him good revenues.

Being controversial

I’ve written about being controversial in many of my case studies and in all of them I’ve recommended my readers to be controversial in order to get your name out there. Justin Bieber may not have got into controversies for the sake of fame, but even then his name spread across the world due to his small controversies.

I believe that one must not be afraid of doing things differently, even if he fails at it I’m sure their will be some sort of positive outcome from it, that is what bring controversial is all about.

In today’s social media one can gain fame by going against the odds, lying and being daring enough, and Justin Bieber being 14 became a pop sensation which itself was something daring and against the odds, I feel that Bieber got maximum benefits from the fact that he was just a teenager.

On to our readers

This post was meant to be a case study on how an artist can get fame with the help of social media, but this can be for anyone else in any profession, Justin Bieber is actually one fine example of social media success and I hope all of you have realized that after reading this post.

No matter what he is today, his career began on the internet and I’m sure many more singers will use this medium to get world wide fame. All this while I considered singing a non-economic and wasteful activity, but I must say I was very much wrong although I would never dare venture out to such a business.

Many things in this post cannot be backed by proof, but I’m sure this was somewhat similar to the methods used by Justin Bieber in promoting himself, to keep up with future posts of this sort please do subscribe to our feed and also follow us on Twitter.

Until recently I actively promoted my list of social media and internet marketing services on my blog and if sales were concerned I got more than I expected, but the only issue I had was that I wasn’t able to provide quality service. Firstly, most of the projects I got were outsourced and because I’m a student I was never able to answer mails quickly and respond to customers and my overall project management was poor.

I made good money during the previous 4 months, but everyday I encountered a new problem and quiet often it resulted in permanent damage to my and my blog’s reputation. I think this was something which everyone face if they are alone and they keep such businesses as a part time business.

After my partner completed his exams he actively joined me, and we did find it successful atlast, but we knew that as we moved ahead for our higher classes we would never be able to do such stuff, so we started concentrating on things we thought would provide us with passive income and we started a highly viral humor site, after that we thought that this was the right time to stop all our services.

We did continue with a few permanent clients and projects which were doing well by outsourcing and we still are earning from that, but we stopped all our short term projects and those with plenty of complications.

So I guess thats enough of my story and now this is a post on how to get few freelance projects and jobs online which I guess is the dream job for many of you here, most people try their best in freelancing and loose hope really fast, but let me tell you that the best guide you can find is experience. In this post I would like to deal with promoting and marketing your services rather than improving your quality and service so all those are upto you.

Networking

My first clients were either my friends or the friends of my friends, I had successfully made a huge list of friends on Facebook and Twitter all of who are internet marketers or rather potential customers.

So as soon as I got started the first thing I did was to pitch them all with a mail briefly describing all of the services I had to offer and tried to create huge buzz in my network on Facebook by uploading all my banners and posting links of my services.

This tactic worked miracles, 100s of people started replying to my mails and commenting on my links and statuses, though almost all were just wishing me luck, but thats a great step as the main idea here was to make sure your friend network knew about this and on the very same people came up to me to negotiate a deal which converted into a sale 2 to 3 days later.

As all of them were in the internet marketing niche I knew that they would somehow result in a few dollars worth sales and I was very much right, another thing which boosted this was my reseller program and affiliate program which brought in a lot of friends who were interested in earning money and even if they didn’t ask for an incentive I made sure I atleast sent them a gift as their should be no money involved in friendship.

Job boards

Many big time freelancers use big job boards like Elance, GetAfreelancer and Odesk, there are hundreds of those out there and I first believed that these job boards could be my main source of income, but I was really wrong as these job boards are completely saturated and you’ll need to pass a lot of tests and get some titles in order to be recognized.

For newbie the only way to win projects is to make 600 bids and try to be the lowest bidder and maybe you could win one of the projects from those who are low on budget.

I tried my best for a week and left it as I knew it wouldn’t work for me, as most people who find success from these directories are big firms who have individual sales executives working full time on these sites which we cannot afford so this method resulted in zero sales and I didn’t even get a small hint of income.

But recently I realized what I was doing wrong while chatting with a few experienced freelancers, the best advice they give to newbies is to target medium and small sized job boards.

The main problem for us with big ones such as Elance are that their is too much competition and quiet often you see more than 100 bids on a project, but if you work hard on new job boards such as Project4Hire and Net4ManPower your sure to find huge conversion rates.

Paid advertising

I wouldn’t advice you to follow this step until you have a good set of permanent clients and a steady flow of income as this is just for reinvestment of income. These methods work really well and can even transform your part time job into your full time business, but on the internet it depends on your planning rather than your investment.

I’ve tried 2 different forms of paid advertising, though I didn’t earn much from them I did learn a lot from both of them, my first campaign was the traditional Google Adwords campaign, I used a coupon as well as my own funds adding sufficient funds for a one month campaign. My campaign provided minimal success and I got nothing more than just traffic.

This was basically because of my lack of targeting and the rich keywords I had targeted had low bids which showed very less, so basically my traffic wasn’t that targeted.

After a few weeks I heard about Warrior Forum’s Special Offers section which showed paid listings and I saw many of its members minting good money, so I got a War room membership for $40 and again spent $70 for the approval of my thread, I did get all my investment in return, but I can’t exactly call it profitable as the returns were slow and quiet low. You can have a look at this thread here.

Build a referral / reseller network

One thing which I did perfectly well was building a reseller network, firstly my huge existing network often referred their friends to my services and as I’ve mentioned above I used to compliment them with pricey rewards, but that wasn’t very professional and I couldn’t have hoped for consistent income from that.

To solve this I used a method which was highly used by big SEO firms, that is giving reseller rights to interested internet marketers, we would allow them to sell our services in their own names and price they preferred and all they had to do is to fill up a form after they’ve made a sale and unlike most SEO firms I did not charge a single penny as deposit which gained attention of a lot of small internet marketer friends of mine.

Using this method I had the risk of misuse as people would sign up for a reseller account and get our existing services at a lower rate, but we made sure we had plenty of information which would guarantee us that the applicant was legitimate, moreover we never provided discounts if a reseller wanted our services for his own web properties.

I had a separate page in my services page which promoted this offer effectively and moreover I wrote a post on this as well, I sent a mail to all my internet marketer friends and I did get 6 to 7 from their side. Later I went to a section of Digital Forums which deals with affiliate programs and I bought a sponsored thread their for just $5 and posted about the program I had to offer and very soon I had a heap full of mails many of which went unanswered, but I had all the sales resources I need. You can see the thread here.

Offline methods

I often believed online services like mine would work only on the internet, but I was in quiet of a surprise to see many people earning huge amounts from traditional web design services by marketing them offline. Let me remind you such methods work only in countries such as India and a few other Eastern countries.

My friend Nicholas Francis is one such freelancer (college dropout) who is minting money doing services for local businesses here in Bangalore. His main strategy is networking and later on he shuffles through newspaper classifieds and finds firms whom he think would require his services, he admits that it takes 100 phone calls to get a particular client, but soon enough he had heap full of work.

This is really complicated, but fruitful most people ask you to personally meet them, you may need to sign an agreement if its a big project your handling and soon enough you may also incorporate your services as part of a firm, which is where the internet stands as an advantage, me and my partners have earned huge amounts of money without paying any tax.

On to our readers

This was basically a post on my experience in this field and I’m sure many of you have had similar stories, I believe that providing such services allows you to earn a better income than blogging, all you need is a bit of hard work and time which I couldn’t provide resulting in bad customer satisfaction.

I’m sure to write more on this topic so to keep up please do subscribe to our feed and also follow us on Twitter, if you have any questions or suggestions please write to me here.

From the beginning of mankind its been common to take advantage or have fun at other’s mis-fortunes and failures, and surely that would continue forever especially with the advent of the internet.

I’m sure you wouldn’t have missed videos of bloopers and funny accidents online as today the front page of most social media sites are filled with such content rather than serious news, as today people look for entertainment even in serious news.

It happens that someone using a camera records something by accident and posts it online and later on this video is sent across 100s of blogs. Its sad that most of these blogs put up content which are copied from others and less than half of them are original and exclusive content.

Some old folks once told me that success in life depends on how you use your failures for getting success, but I believe that success depends on how you take advantage of other’s failures, and this is exactly what this niche is about. It can be tough to find original content on such as in our current perfect world its rare to find something silly to laugh about.

Truly speaking, content is not at all a problem as all the others in this niche use videos and images posted elsewhere, usually from sites such as Youtube and put up a watermark on them claiming its theirs and they even add a small comment below their content.

Once their was a popular video named as the craziest cry ever which got really popular on Youtube which made it to the front page of digg, but after that 4 to 5 other blogs made it to the front page by just embedding the same video. So content is not at all big problem as even the big blogs can’t put up copyrights as those videos were either copied or user submitted.

My entrance into this niche

This blog of mine was a widely acclaimed success, I’ve received a lot of fame and money through it, but my idea about the internet is to establish an internet business which will surely not be possible with this blog, so I did venture out into different fields, and even the flash gaming niche, but mostly failed at all of them.

As a social media swapper I get links from all across the web for votes and quiet often those are the links which are about to go viral on StumbleUpon or onto the front page of Digg, so usually I know the latest trends a few hours before they happen.

A few months back I constantly kept noticing many of such submissions from new blogs which got huge traffic which I could never have got and a few other blogs which changed their niche into the ‘odds/bizarre’ niche after realizing the hidden traffic in it. Thats when I thought of this as a unique idea and discussed about it with my partner.

Unlike my previous ventures I was much more confident about this one, as now I had a huge social media network which was enough to take any article into the front page of Digg. So then I started to concentrate on the design and the content, for the design and other graphics such as watermarks and video intros I spent a huge amount, but made sure I had the best.

The content was not something I directly embedded from Youtube, though they were copied I made sure I had them on my own server as I could easily brand them with my own name. So downloading, editing and then uploading all of the initial content was a lot of work and proved to be very time consuming as I lost almost 2 weeks in it, but atlast we made it through and that was the beginning on farrrt.com

My plan was to promote all of that content using my social media swapping network and then monetize it with the help of Google Adsense and so far I’ve reached all my goals.

My success so far….

I was delayed by almost two weeks on technical and design issues, but so far I’ve achieved all my goals on time, the traffic has been so good that Hostgator was forced to suspend my site for a day.

I firstly bought in a huge set of keywords by adding loads of content and made an image and a video sitemap, which started giving me good traffic within just a week, but my main idea was social media, and by using my huge network I go in huge number of Diggs, likes, Facebook shares and retweets all of which boosted my traffic.

The content itself was really viral, so as soon as I got this initial traffic I had automatically triggered the so called snowball effect which rarely happens with Dumb Little Blogger. A snowboard effect is when your site gets on-going social media promotion from your existing audience taking your blog to an all new level with frequent intervals and without much effort from yourside.

A lucrative program for partners

Our progress, content development and traffic from now on will depend on our community, but for ongoing and sustainable source of unique content we have decided to make a partners program which pays people to write for us, create videos, infographics and promises huge opportunities for those who are planning to launch their own internet shows.

This will catch up a lot into our pockets if I promote it in full fledge, I already have 6 authors and one wannabe content producer and quiet soon we’ll surely have a huge team working for mutual benefits.

This works really well most of the times for all sorts of businesses as people are much more motivated to work for such incentives rather than a normal monthly salary.

Till now our authors haven’t received much profits from their posts all due to the lack of time we’ve had in promoting their posts, but they all are pretty confident about our traffic. Learn more about our partners program

On to our readers

I’d say we’ve got into the right niche at the right time and we’ve done a lot of things which makes us unique, and we have also succeeded in generating huge traffic in a small span of time.

The main idea behind this post was to inform about the rise of this niche which is already forming into many other different sub-niches such as Facebook fails and Twitter fails. The people who entered this niche one year ago have had a great time and I’m sure that even today this niche is extremely profitable.

I’ll surely post more updates about my new venture so to stay tuned please subscribe to our feed and also follow us on Twitter.

The most controversial website of the year, or maybe the decade Wikileaks is undoubtedly worth a case study, the story of how its highly controversial founder started it and how and from where he gets his offensive content and how his site gained world wide popularity, like most other case studies on this blog we don’t have any proof or evidence to prove this, as this is just an assumption on how famous internet businesses could have started.

Wikileaks started off in 2006 with a group of unknown internet activists, out of which only its spokesperson Julian Assange is known till now. Starting such a site is not that easy, its almost 10 times as tough as running it.

Firstly the content is not something you find all across the net, every piece of information on Wikileaks is unique and took a lot of research, this maybe easy for us bloggers who create one such article each week, but they released 10s of thousands of articles each month.

The initial content

So the first issue they had was the content, they would atleast need about 1000 articles to get the very first visitor, and as I mentioned above this content takes a lot of research, they have to contact people, find images and videos, hack into different systems and finally come up with a story that matters.

Moreover this had to be done a thousand times keeping security, society and the law in their minds, and however good your at it you cannot escape each and everytime, and maybe thats the reason why the other founders of Wikileaks haven’t yet revealed themselves.

But I’m damn sure that all of them had a clear idea of what they were doing and knew the net, technology and their niche extremely well.

This would have seemed very tough for you and me, but not for Julian Assange and his friends, Assange himself was a constant traveler, he had traveled across half a dozen countries before he was even 14, many of which had a controversial background, he was arrested for hacking when he was 14.

So he knew a hell lot about the codes he was writing and a lot about his niche as he had witnessed the different social injustices in many countries, more than what he saw it was the connections he left behind which helped him come up with the first few articles, and again Wikileaks has 9 Julian Assange’s and I bet almost all of them had a similar background.

Oh well!! when you know so much about something its easy to come up with a few articles on the topic, but these guys used their technical and social resources to get most of their information.

The first few visitors

Wikileaks was a unique site with very appealing and viral content, the only thing that would take to make it popular was a single press release, I single trigger would make it go extremely viral, but that didn’t happen for some reason.

Wikileaks had been active from 2006, but it gained mainstream fame only by the end of 2009. A few people had mistook that the site was born only in 2009, which even I wasn’t sure about.

The site did have traffic all this while, but that was very much lesser than its actual potential, sites like these can go viral from the very next day, seems to me that the Wikileak’s guys were technically very advanced, but lacked the marketing skills, moreover even I felt that Wikileaks isn’t promoting itself actively, either they are new to it or they are purposely avoiding it.

Funding : their first source of funding

Even when Wikileaks got started they had a hell lot of expenses, but they were funded by a few rich Chinese businessmen and powerful journalists most of who have not yet been identified.

Surely those funds won’t last for 4 years no matter how you control your expenses, I’m sure they encountered plenty of financial issues from day one, but they were all curbed due to their high profile friends and donors.

So for three years they ran without revenues which I hate about internet firms these days, and in the beginning of 2010 they started asking for donations from users, which worked out really well as they were running their business like an NGO. Less than 1% of their readers actually donated, but most of them who did gave huge donations.

I always had a feeling that Wikileaks was a website which could run on a low budget, and I bet many of you thought the same, but unfortunately their expenses could near any small mainstream news network.

They have claimed to have a 9 member advisory board and upto 20 others to support them in technical and data management jobs, surely this wouldn’t consume a lot of money, but I’m damn sure that 29 is not all they have, its just impossible to run such a site and publish so much content without a bit of external hands.

They do have 900 contributors, but this contributor section is filled with mediocre people like you and me, who can just write, edit and copy and not research and find information, so these guys are in their chatroom were they find and talk people who have come with the news, but that is not what scientific journalism is about.

I believe Wikileaks has got its main sources doing field work in controversial places such as Iraq and Afghanistan, field work meaning insider information, spying and even hacking, most of them are locals in their respective countries, surely this wouldn’t come cheap, thats the main reason why they keep getting into so much of financial issues even when their are millions flowing in as donations each month.

Online and private donations is the only source of revenue and their is no other source which could be useful, they cannot monetize themselves with advertisements as their content is illegal and against the rules of many countries, neither can they sell premium news like any other news agency as the main idea behind this is freedom of speech.

Explanation of the scientific journalism

Honestly speaking I had no idea on what this was until recently when it got popular, and I bet most of you guys too have no idea on this as even Wikipedia didn’t give me the accurate answer.

The term was introduced by Assange himself, and it spreadt like wildfire after that, he did not tell more than a sentence in a media coverage, but that got extremely popular and all media entities started to right about it. So most of the meanings for the term was created by the various media channels.

But I’m sure that Wikileaks has given birth to a new journalism, no matter what the description others say, I’d say that scientific journalism is fetching information and news while going against terms, rules and violations, yes it is illegal journalism.

Today most journalists cover news which they are allowed to see, which are shown by the government and they make and they can’t make any effort to go beyond that.

This is what Wikileaks is different as they find news through hack attacks, spying, stealing and even bribing at times, they have a huge chatroom or I can say forum where people who want to report news come up to and then the scientific journalism takes place to learn the truth, the false and the whole story.

The main driving force behind Wikileaks is the community and thats actually their main source for information, but they use the community to report news, whereas the story is created by them, maybe thats why they burn so much cash, they are in need of man-power and technical resources.

Rise to mainstream fame – Takeoff stage

Wikileaks got really popular, though it took time they were running really well, but even though everybody knew about them, nobody spoke about them, this is a marketing defect which is seen in many companies worldwide.

Slowly they got viral on social media which was surely going to make it to big online publications such as Mashable and Techcrunch and maybe that is when they finally decided to market themselves and a press release would have been the first plan, press releases for such sites go extremely viral and would have surely caught the attention of publications such as The New York Times, and one endorsement there would surely trigger a chain.

After this their fame didn’t stop, they kept making controversial releases and they made sure they are well promoted, more than that they made sure that all their reports had enough elements to make them entertaining and controversial and thats what matters for a business entering into this stage.

When they reached this they were all over the news world-wide and what drove them more further was the various politicians and celebrities making both positive and negative comments on them, no matter what the Federal Government said Wikileaks kept growing its loyal followership.

This huge followership surely helped them build a community of donors and the long awaited revenue, but they must have been cautious of not doing anything against the law as during this time most of the world’s governments were against them.

On to our readers

Wikileaks was surely a grand success, let me rephrase that, Wikileaks will surely be a grand success, the site had and still has a lot of potential, but sadly its not being used to the limit. In this post my main aim was to deliver the business and marketing end of the Wikileaks saga and I’m sure I did my best, as I’ve mentioned in the beginning all the information here is through assumptions backed by thorough research, but surely I cannot provide you with the evidence to back this.

To keep up with the future posts of such sort do follow us on Twitter and also subscribe to our feed, and yes do send us news and anything about this topic using our contact form.

I had promised more videos in the future and I bet you’ll love this one, of course like the previous time the voice quality is low, but I’m sure you’ll love the content. This was something I had posted a long time ago, but that post had a lot of negative feedback, but recently Newsweek wrote about this and I thought that this would be the right time to break the issue again.

This video basically concentrates on the previous dot com bubble, why it happened and a few things similar which are occurring now and also tells about why I consider Twitter a failure.

As usual your feedback is very essential, I know the quality of this video is low, but please do bare with me for a few more days as I’m still learning this. We urge you to subscribe to our Youtube channel and also to follow us on Twitter in order to keep up with future videos.

A week ago Ask.com, which was one of the top contenders in the search battle announced that it gave up and wanted to shut down its search business. The company which had magnificent power and market share in the 90s couldn’t quiet move up with the innovations and fast changes by company’s like Google. Like most other search engines ask.com could not have been satisfied with the small revenues as it had a huge expectations from the public which had invested billions in it.

During the 90s they held stood second in the search market after Alta-Vista and in 1999 they had a highly successful IPO like most internet firms during the dot-com boom, but they were hit bad in the dot-com burst and were in deep financial strain by 2005 and were acquired by InteractiveCorp which expected to compete with Google and capture the highly profitable search market.

Even after being secure under the arms of IAC it was never able to regain its former glory, the company returned to profitability and posted huge growth year after year, even the previous year it reported revenues of over $275 million, but the competition from Google could not be withstood, moreover it seems that Ask made most of its revenues from its other subsidaries and Q n A, but its search business witnessed a steady decline.

Google’s monopoly over the internet

Firstly, monopoly is a term used for those entities or acts of a few entities which have influence on a majority of the market, or one individual which controls one entire market. This was considered an act of social evil during the the World War 2 when socialism was popular, it was at that time when many governments around the world started nationalizing these firms to avoid exploitation of the public, but later on most of them failed to check on corruption which lead to the break down of this idea.

Though I’m not a supporter of such socialistic ideals, if I ever think about the internet the first thing I get in my mind is Google, I wouldn’t be worried if it was just a top company in the industry, but Google today can make and break the internet industry. Right now if any internet firm gets banned from Google it may consider itself a failure then and there. Almost all internet businesses depend on Google today, there fate completely depends on what the ‘big G’ wants them to be.

All of us know about the good will its been maintaining all these years, but still it never feels secure to have one single entity control the fate of millions. I have heard many stories about webmasters without any fault getting their sites banned overnight, usually for those who have gone against Google. This was for normal small time publishers, but other big search engines have found their lives to be miserable trying to compete with Google.

Did China do the right thing?

China is known all over the world for its repressive policies, and from the time Google set its foot on China it has been facing a lot of troubles from its government, it all started with the blocking of Youtube and then many issues with censoring of Google’s search result, in the end it all looked as though China themself didn’t want Google to stay. There was widespread anger against the Chinese government, their own citizens were against this.

People thought that this would hit China’s foreign investment, but China was actually the winner as its local search engine Baidu largely benefited by this and its profit almost doubled after Google left.

The Chinese government may be repressive, but they are the smartest you can find, whatever they do it always helps their economy and citizens of Mainland China. Though I hate their repressive policy, I’m happy that atleast one country noticed this monopoly over the internet. It shouldn’t have been so repressive, just a few regulations would have helped.

The need for regulations

China did take a very extreme step, but in today’s world (I mean internet) their has to be something to regulate this, basically there has to be a service which takes care of banning and unbanning sites from search engines, which has to do the same for all search engines. The idea behind this is that Google must not have complete authority.

It would be much better to have laws against banning sites without reason which gives small and medium sized web publishers a chance and a feeling of security. Its really surprising to see that there is no such law yet as the internet is one of the shakers in most economies and most of that push comes from the income of small internet businesses.

On to our readers

I really don’t think that Google will be unfair to us, but its always better to be safe in order to protect our precious home based money earners. I seriously believe that this industry is meant to grow by many times in the next few years, so I hope leaders realize this and impose a few restrictions to curb the power of a few big players in the industry.

In the past few posts we have reported some of the most unknown, shocking and surprising issues in our niche, so to keep up do subscribe to our feed and also follow us on Twitter.