And boy is it a joy. The last step before I could receive real cash from Google, is that they need to verify that I actually exist in sunny Singapore at the address I used when I signed up for my Google Mail aka account eons ago. Today they did just that, and what a day it’s been for me.

One day after my 21st birthday, I passed the CMFAS (Module 5) examinations, and I am one step away from getting money from Google after receiving the mail below!

Of course, I blanked out the voucher code.

All I have to do now, is await a postcard from Google, and I could collect the money from my Google adsense account!

For a first timer making money off the Internet, this is extremely exciting for me. It also validates the hard work that I’ve put in to my various websites, and I must say it is immensely satisfying.

Thank You, Uncle G!

In case you are wonder what’s with the two big arrows, it’s a jQuery slider that allows you to go through all my work. If you would like to see it for yourself, click on “Portfolio” at the top of this page.

My New Wishlist

Okay, back to non-techy stuff! I have been doing some market research recently, mostly due to the fact that I am moving away from home into hall/private residence @ NUS. I’ve realised there are a couple of items that I am still lacking to make my living-away-from-home experience a great one.

Now that I already have an awesome sound system that I am planning to move in together with me, I still lack the following:

• A Gaming Laptop (Screen should at least support 1920 x 1080 resolution
• A good phone that last me for a few years (My last proper phone was before I entered the army.)
• A compact digital camera

Looks like the money made from designing sites for the past 3 months can be put to some good use (:

Let me know if you have good deals for the above 3 items!

Singapore Fashion and Style Community / Fashers /

Chun Rui Screenshot

SEO Strategy

I am currently ranked 6th out of 30,200,000 results on Google for the term “Football Manager Blog”, and I will continue to use the same SEO strategy for fashers.com

If I could rank for “Singapore Fashion” well with the same strategy, I might have just found the blueprint to ranking high on Google searches. Let me know what you guys think about the new dot com site of mine if you have any suggestions (:

As my full time contract comes to its last month, I was wondering if I could anything meaningful for the remaining time before I head off to uni.

If there was anything I learnt since September 2009 about starting up dot coms, it is that, content is really king on the Internet. There is no question about that. All the blackhat ways to get revenue might work, but only for in the shortrun, eventually the Big G will catch up with you, and before you know it, your site would have disappeared from the first few pages of the search results.

It took  me a while, but my Football Manager blog is consistently ranking on the 1st page of google for the search term “Football Manager Blog”, and it is living proof that content is king on the Internet. I realised, to set up a great site, you have to immensely passionate about the content you are writing, and one should not make monetary rewards the focus and goal of setting up a dot com.

With that in mind, I ask myself, what can I contribute to the Internet that has not been done by others before.

It struck me one night, when I was driving home late at night around 11pm, and I was listening to Class 95 on the radio. It was some late night show called “Pillow Talk with <insert forgotten DJ name here>” or something.

And they had some marriage counselors on the show to give advice on how to ensure one’s marriage is a success, not only was the advice good, I felt the selection of songs the DJ picked was perfect. Reminded me of those songs that you listen to constantly on a loop to get over a bad heartbreak.

Only then I realised, how great would it be if there was a site, that had all the different kinds of songs, to help all the broken hearts in this world get over their sorrows.

I am certain such a concept has never been put into action before, and I would like to give it a shot.

If this idea is remotely interesting to you, you might want to contact me, I am looking at the feasibility of making this dot com a joint effort. Cheers!

]]> http://x0dus.com/new-ideas-for-my-next-dot-com/feed/ 0 http://x0dus.com/my-first-business-card/ http://x0dus.com/my-first-business-card/#comments Fri, 02 Apr 2010 12:56:22 +0000 x0dus http://x0dus.com/?p=49

Click on images for a larger view.

Interesting story, about how I decided to get my own name card. After coughing for like an eternity, I finally decided to take a day off and head down to look up my old family doctor in the East of Singapore, to my surprise he is no longer working at the clinic anymore. In his place was a new doctor and well he was a really friendly guy, and I was like the only patient in the whole clinic, so we chatted a bit.

He eventually asked me what was I working as, and I told him I designed websites for Health Sciences Authority and he became really interested in the work I do. It turns out, a while ago, he was thinking of setting up his own website, and asked if I would be interested in helping him set up his website for a fee. During then, I simply wrote down the URL of my online portfolio on a piece of paper.

Only then, did it struck me how important it is to have a name card or business card. It makes you come across as more credible, trustworthy, and of course, helps so much in networking. Perhaps I am a little young for a business card, but I am going to give it a shot anyway, after all I am probably one of the 100,000 graduates walking around in Singapore in a few years time, one must differentiate himself.

So apparently, white does not count as a colour when designing business cards, so hence my design only used a total of two colours, yellow and black, and I am about to send them for printing.

I am rather excited about this step I am making, because after some serious consideration, I realised that I had to differentiate myself from the thousands of BBA holders out there in a few year time, and I think web designing will be the gateway to that.

Do let me know, if you have any suggestions or thoughts about making it better, drop a comment or talk to me directly (:

Is it even possible to make money online? The question that many have asked since the dawn of the Internet. After many, many months of trying to make money online, I’ve came to the conclusion, it is possible, but it is really hard.

I’ve dabbled in it all, well almost all. From legal white-hat Google Adsense, to Blackhat Codebreaker, to CPA Leads by Content Gateway, I’ve done it all.

Adsense

If Adsense was really such a cash farm, and caused many people to just quit their day jobs and sit at home designing sites to earn money via Adsense, then tell me, why does my adsense statement look like this yesterday?

401 people viewed my sites, and not a single one clicked on the ads. Don’t tell me it is not optimized, I’ve combed all threads on white hat and black hat forums, and I am already using the size of ads that churns out the most click, and the hyperlink is changed to match my site’s colours.

So don’t you tell me, it is because I did not optimize it. It is also above the fold, in fact, before every article. You can view an example of it on my Football Manager Blog.

One of the major reasons I think Adsense does not generate as much money, is because people are becoming ad-blind. Honestly, how many of you readers, have actually clicked on a Google Adsense before simply because you were interested in the comments? I bet less than 10% of you did.

Sure I’ve made a couple of dollars from Google Adsense, but is it really sufficient to cause people to quit their day job? Only if you are the #1 site for a high paying keyword. Now to get to #1 spot of Google’s Search Engine Result Page (SERP) of let say Forex, you probably have to put in so much time and effort, building links and doing SEOs, that if you worked that hard at your day job, you would have made tons of money already.

I do believe though there is a small handful of people out there who really knows the secret of Google Adsense, and they would never share that knowledge with people on the web.

Why would people sell eBooks on how to be rich via Adsense, if they could simply get rich by using their own methods? Which brings me to my next point.

Sales of Blackhat Techniques

Search on Google and you can easily find tons of people selling their eBooks, telling you how to quit their day job and be rich at home by doing nothing and setting up autoblogs, etc and the list goes on. I would like to pose a question to all these people.

If, your method guaranteed you could stay at home and make $300 a day from Adsense, CPA leads, Email Submits and what not, then what on earth are you doing disclosing your method for $10 each person who buy it from you on the web. At the rate you are spending the effort writing the eBook, won’t earning $300 a day from Adsense worth more of your time?

Blackhat Is Unstable

Yes, I’ve dabbled in Blackhat Techniques before. More specifically I set up content gateways that requires you to fill up one of my offers to proceed reading my site, or getting a video to load or something. Yes, on the first day I earned $5, guessed what happened the next day?

I was banned from a CPA Affiliate Network, Peerfly. All my money earned in the first day was gone. Why? Because Email submits done via Contente Gateways is not what CPA Networks really want. Eventually they are going to find out when people submits an email reporting your site.

Even your mighty cloaking of referrer scripts will be useless when the admin visits your site to find out it’s a dubious site.

Greed Causes People To Be Disillusioned

I will admit, I am one of those people who dreamed of making it big online. I combed Blackhat forums everyday, tried all Whitehat Techniques, bought domain, bought programs to automate processes.

And so far in real life, I’ve only seen one guy make it big online, and that’s my mentor in website building, and he dedicates an immense amount of time to building sites, almost as much as a day job, albeit flexible hours.

Autoblogs, CPA leads, Blackhat techniques are not going to work in the long run. Real hard work will only pay well online, search engines will get smarter each day and will not be gamed by your phony links.

But I can see why many people try so hard at making money online. The dream of doing nothing everyday, knowing every second, your pocket grows with money having done nothing at all.

It’s not as though I am financially in adequate, I am more than financially sufficient, heck I even have enough to buy such an expensive speakers! But the allure of easy money is simply too great.

What Really Works

I guess what really works to earn you the amount of money you dream of having is sheer hardwork. And it does not matter what form of hardwork it is. Be it working immensely hard at your day job to get a promotion, working really hard to raise your skills of programming, designing and coding, or be it building links and doing Whitehat SEO for all your websites.

Hard work is the only thing that pays off in the long run. I guess it is time for me to wake up, and simply focus on building quality content, instead of chasing after pipe dreams of striking it rich online from autoblogs and other kinds of nonsense.

To everyone out there, who’s stuck in that cycle of, “I want to make tons of cash from the Internet the easy way”, snap out of it. There is really no free lunch in this world.