For this interview challenge, I have interviewed one of my internet marketer friend. His name is Alex. This is a text based interview. I asked him to do an interview with him and he agreed.  Below you  will see the interview questions that I asked him. Note that this is took directly from the email I sent  to him and he replied.

Interview With Alex on Internet Marketing and Make Money Online

Calvin: Hi Alex, yesterday I told you about interviewing you. So here is my interview questions.

Calvin:  How do you get to know about internet marketing?

Alex: I got to know IM through Adam Khoo’s book: Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires. That was in 2007.

Calvin: Why do you want to start an online business to make money online?

Alex: I always wanted to start a business. However, starting a traditional business needs a huge capital which I don’t have the money at that time. After reading Adam Khoo’s book, I realized that starting an online business requires minimum capital and is low-risk, so I decided to give it a shot and try it out.

Calvin: How long did you take to start to make your first $1?

Alex: I can’t really remember exactly. But it took me roughly 6 months before I made my 1st dollar online.

Calvin: How much are you earning online now on average per month?

Alex: I don’t wish to disclose publicly. All I can say the amount is good enough for me to do this full-time.

Calvin: What is the most difficult thing when doing this online making money?

Alex: I don’t have an IT background. So, when I first got started, I know nuts about creating a web page, HTML, FTP, WordPress etc. There is a learning curve to get past the technical barrier initially.

Calvin: How do you manage to become success in making money online?

Alex: I believed it’s my perseverance. I tried a lot of stuffs previously – internet mlm, bum marketing, ebay etc. They all failed. But I never give up and keep trying until I succeed.

Calvin: What do you like about internet marketing/make money online?

Alex: Time freedom. I choose when I want to work and when I want to relax. I have the freedom to choose what I want to do in a day. If you are working as an employee, you definitely can’t do that.

Calvin: If possible, do you mind sharing your experience on how you able to make that amount per month? Example, internet marketing tips, etc.

Alex: I am doing niche marketing – that is to focus on a specific topic and target to a specific group of people. In that way, competition is much lesser.

Calvin: I know you are doing affiliate marketing. Which affiliate you get the most profits? Clickbank or any other affiliate programs?

Alex: I am doing quite well in Shareasale.com. Clickbank.com is my preferred secondary affiliate network.

Calvin: What is the key or most important thing when doing affiliate marketing or even just to make money online?

Alex: Getting traffic is not enough. What is important is how you use the traffic and convert your visitors into buyers. In other words – your conversion rate. You can have 1000 visitors going to your site daily. But if no one else is buying the product, you make no money.

Calvin: What is your best recommendation, either products or any other info or etc, to help on internet marketing? 

Alex: If you are newbie, Ewen Chia’s products will be good for you to get started and learn the ropes. I also read other internet marketer’s blogs such as Andrew Hansen, Lynn Terry etc and learn from them. They provide good information!

Calvin: Do you enjoy your life now? How is your lifestyle like now?

Alex: Yes, I enjoy my lifestyle now. I am a night owl, so I usually work at night. During daytime, I usually relax – such as swimming, watch tv, meet friends or sleep.

Calvin: How do you manage your finance upon doing internet marketing?

Alex: I save quite a lot. 50% of my income goes into my bank. I also put aside some money to invest in unit trusts per month.

Calvin: How do you choose your niche such that you able to make profits?

Alex: I am into the health niche. So, I will do keyword and product research to make sure that there is a demand for it. Also, try to involve in a niche you are interested in. If you are interested in something, you tend put more effort and won’t give up so easily.

Calvin: How long have you been in this internet marketing industry?

Alex: 3 years.

Calvin: Will you ever give up?

Alex: I can’t say for sure right now. Who knows I might go into other businesses in the future? But at the moment, I like internet marketing and I love what I am doing right now.

Calvin: What words would you like to tell those who just started online business or those who want to start an online business?

Alex: The newbies will definitely face problems and failures when they are getting started. Don’t give up. Just keep trying and tweak your strategies along the way until you find something that works for you.

Calvin: Beside working alone on affiliate/internet marketing, have you ever joint venture with other internet marketers out there?

Alex: There are some merchants who will contact and persuade me to promote their products. Normally, they will give me better affiliate commissions.

Calvin: What is your biggest reward(s) you get when you become successful?

Alex: I don’t consider myself as being very successful right now. But as I mentioned earlier, I value time-freedom a lot. So, I guess my biggest reward is not having the need to report to a boss!

Calvin: Lastly, beside being able to make that amount online, what is your greatest goal that you want to achieve right now?

Alex: To earn a five-figure income monthly and consistently. Buy a 1-carat diamond ring for my girlfriend!

To proof that I have did this interview. Below are the email screenshots I took from my outlook.

It has been quite a while since the last time I post articles for one of the GatherSuccess challenges organized by Alvin Phang.  Few weeks ago till now, I have been participating GatherSuccess challenges. These challenges are not as easy as I thought. Let’s recap what challenges I have participated so far.

The first challenge was a blogging challenge. This is the easiest challenge I have did. Simply blogs daily on the blog for 4 days.

Second challenge was a charity challenge. Okay, this is a little harder than the first challenge. I did quite couples of things to get the donation for Red Cross. I tried to sell a product with an additional promotion. I did email marketing to promote and sell the product but nothing made. I get my working colleagues to help me. All colleagues except 2, each donated S$25. The rest did not even bother about it.

I was thinking to donate myself initially and so my PayPal account happened to have some money left. I have donated all what I have left in my PayPal account plus the S$50 from my colleagues. Total amount I have donated to Red Cross was US$45.16. After I sent the money to Red Cross, I feel so happy and good about it because I did a good deed.

Third challenge was a affiliate challenge and this was hard. This affiliate challenge was about promoting and selling Alvin’s Atomic Blogging. I did the same email marketing I did for the first challenge. I posted articles about blogging and make money from blogging on my blog and even submitted to article directories. In the end, I did not make any sale at all. Maybe I did not manage to convert those visitors into buyers where this should be the case.

Fourth challenge was a retweet challenge. This was hard too. Not easy to get people to retweet the message you want it to be retweet. I only got 4 retweets for the message set by Alvin. I even give out free ebooks just to get people to retweet the message.

Fifth challenge was a promotion challenge.  It was about promoting one of Alvin’s blog post. Using bit.ly to shorten the blog post url and use bit.ly to track number of unique hits to the blog post. I got 152 hits by the time I sent my result. I could not beat one of the participants, Dino. He is just too good.

Current challenge which is the sixth challenge is about interview challenge. So far, I have only interviewed 1 internet marketer. He is one of my internet marketing friend and he has been doing so well in internet marketing industry. He is one of the internet marketers who I learned from too. In the next blog post, I will update the interview that I have done with my internet marketing friend.

Lately, more and more people are trying their hand at making money online with blogging. Generally, these new bloggers know someone who is successful at blogging and think that they could do the same thing with relative ease. After all, they have been writing for years.

In fact, they started writing in school as a child. Unforunately, they fail to realize that writing interesting articles for a blog is much different than writing a school term paper. Unfortunately, many new bloggers give up long before they have really given blogging a chance. They thought the money would just magically appear without ever giving it much thought where this money would be coming from.

Although there are many ways to monetize blogs, one of the least tried ways is selling advertising on it. Although it is a very popular way to monetize blogs and websites, I am not talking about Google Adsense accounts either. Popular bloggers can sell their own ad space to whomever they wish. The more popular the blog, the more money the blogger can get for their adspace.

But how does the average blogger know if they could sell their own adspace profitably? There are a few tools the blogger can use to find out if selling adspace on their blog is worthwhile or not to make money online.

First, Google has ranked every page with their own page rank. This rank is from 0 to 10 and the higher the number, the more importance google has placed on the site. Of course, Google.com is one of the few page rank 10 websites in the world since it is either first or second in terms of visitors. Popular blogs generally have a page rank of 5 or higher. Of course, some blogs have lower page rank, but generally the very popular ones start with a page rank of 5.

Although there are online sites where page rank can be checked, the easiest method to check page rank is to download the google toolbar. Once it is installed, the toolbar sits at the top of the browser and shows a linear graph depicting page rank. The more color that shows up in the page rank graph, the more popular the blog. One thing to keep in mind is that Google recently has de-valued page rank. According to them, page rank will probably be phased out in the years to come.

The second way to check the popularity of a website is with alexa.com. Alexa ranks online entities by the number of visitors the web site or blog has on a daily, monthy, and yearly basis. Although some people question the validity of alexa’s numbers, I have found them to be fairly accurate. If you list your site with alexa, they are really accurate. Register today to get your site listed on alexa.

Once you obtain a page rank of 5 or higher, coupled with a decent alexa ranking, you should be able to approach other sites about advertising on your site. If the other site could benefit from your visitors, many bloggers will try your service for awhile. If they see an increase in sales or visitors, you may have a long term business relationship that continues to put money in your pocket month after month. Good luck with whatever method you choose.

Is there any doubt that making money blogging is probably the easiest way to begin earning money from your Internet marketing efforts? Most people have the necessary skills to immediately begin blogging the day they decide to start earning money online.

But one of the biggest mistakes many new bloggers experience is they don’t have a plan on how to proceed. They simply start blogging one day without either a short term or a long term goal. Unforunately, this is a big mistake since many would-be bloggers quit within the first six months. If they would have had a step by step plan, most bloggers wouldn’t become frustrated so quickly and quit trying shortly there after.

In order for the new blogger to get off on the right foot, I have purchased Atomic Blogging and will review it. Atomic Blogging has been around for several years but is constantly updated to reflect the changing blogging scene. I am going to review it to see if it would help the new blogger get off to a great start.

Obviously, Atomic Blogging is geared to the new to intermediate experienced bloggers. It does mention that after reading Atomic Blogging a novice would be able to set up a new blog in about one hour. Since I have some experience with setting up blogs, I asked my husband to read it and then set up a blog within an hour. Luckily, Atomic Blogging virtually walked him through the entire process of setting up a blog step by step. He was easily able to accomplish that task in under an hour. In fact, if he could do it, I am sure nearly everyone could also do it. He is a technophobe of the highest order.

Another great thing about Atomic Blogging is the plugin given to all students to increase the search engine ranking of all their blogs.This plugin helps the blogs to become indexed into the major search engines and to often outrank more established sites within a short period of time. The plugin alone with worth the cost of Atomic Blogging.

One aspect of Atomic Blogging that was shocking to me was Atomic Blogging encouraged the readers to set up a blog network. It didn’t just focus on setting up one blog, but on many blogs. When setting up many blogs, each blog can earn just a few dollars a day, but the cumulative effect is outstanding. If the blogger made 100 or 1000 blogs which earned a paltry two dollars a day, they would earn $200 to $2000 dollars per day. Most other blogging guides just concentrate on creating one blog. Atomic Blogging wants its readers to push the envelope and make as many blogs as they can.

In my opinion, Atomic Blogging is the whole blogging solution at a very fair price. It includes a website template, wordpress plugin, videos, and a lenghty e-book detailing exactly how everything should work together. It encourages the reader to make multiple sites in order to help spread the risk and reward of blogging.

Buy it today if you want to be part of the one stop blogging solution.