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.

With the recent economic crisis throughout much of the world, many people are beginning to look online as a way to make money. Although there is a wide variety of ways to make money online, blogging is one of the easiest ways.

Of course, as with all businesses, you must have a road map to guide you in your journey into blogging. These five points will help get you going in the correct direction.

First, there is one thing to understand about blogging: Content is king. The more relevant your content is to your visitor’s interests, the more likely they are to return to your blog. In other words, your blog needs to have up to date and fresh content on a daily basis. If you content is stale or uninteresting, your visitors will not return. Without visitors, your blog will not make you any money, so keep posting interesting content often.

Second, blogging is hard work. Blogging is not a get rich scheme to incredible wealth. Although many people think there are blogging short cuts, there really isn’t. You need to think of blogging as a long term investment in yourself.

Third, you need to get an Adsense account. When you start to see visitors coming to your site on a daily basis, some people will begin to click the Adsense Ads Google serves up to your block. Every time a person clicks on one of your ads, you earn money. As your site becomes more popular, clicks will increase until your making a nice amount of money daily.

Fourth, write about things you know or are passionate about. If your passionate about your subject matter that will come out in your articles. Readers can quickly tell if you are knowledgable, passionate, and care about what your writing.

Fifth, have fun. Don’t see blogging as something you have to do, but rather something you enjoy doing. If your not having fun writing for your blog, you need to sit down and figure out why. If the subject matter no longer excites you, start a different blog about an entirely new subject. Just have fun.

Throughout my online career, I have read some excellent blogs. These blogs are well written by a knowledgeable writer with an interesting style. They are informative, to the point, and up to date. Often times, the blogger went through considerable time, money, and resources getting the blog ‘perfect’.

So what is the problem with these ‘perfect’ blogs? The blogger forgot one vital aspect of blogging: Promoting or advertising their blog. If your potential reader’s do not know your blog exists, nobody will visit nor read your blog.

In other words, although the site is visually stunning with interesting articles in an exciting niche, the readers are unable to find the blog in the tidal wave of competing blogs.

There are several things you can do to not be included in this group of excellent blogs with low readership.

First, one of the quickest ways to promote or advertise your blog is to join forums or groups. These forums and groups are often the places where people with similar interests chat about the topic they enjoy. These readers are always looking for additional places to chat or read about their topic of choice.

For example, if your site is about model airplanes, google ‘model airplanes’ and view the search results. Generally, the top sites are the ones on the first page of the google search results. If you visit these top sites, become a member and start contributing to the forum in a productive way, your blog readership is very likely to go through the roof.

Soon, people will recognize you as an expert in this area. In your signature on the forum, place a link back to your website with good anchor text. The other readers are very likely to visit your site because they are interested in the topic and view you as a knowledgeable and contributing forum member.

Second, since your blog is your business, submit press releases to the major press release companies. Although a few will reject your press release, many of them will accept it and publish it on their site. Press releases will help get the name of your blog out in front of your readers quickly. The more press releases you submit, the quicker your potential readers become aware of your ‘perfect’ blog.

Third, write some articles to submit to online article directories. Do they work? Of course, they work quite well. Most article directories allow you to have a link back to your site. You should utilize it to drive traffic back to your site. If your write interesting articles for your niche, people will read your article, then some will visit your site.

So what is the point of promoting or advertising your blog? It is quite simple really: The more visitors you get to your site and the longer they stay, the more likely the are to click on one of your ads. The more clicks your blog gets, the more money you earn. If 1% of your visitors click your ads, how many visitors do you want coming to read your blog on a daily basis? 100 or 10000 visitors? Of course, you want 10000 daily visitors.

Wouldn’t you like to earn money from something you love anyway? I know I do!

There is a lot of myths concerning making money blogging. Some are outrageous claims while a few are closer to the truth. I am sure many bloggers have heard most of these myths, but I would like to tackle three of the more prevalant ones.

First, many people believe or have heard that it is impossible to make money blogging. This is just simply not true. Many people make money blogging every single day and will continue to do so into the foreseeable future. As is often repeated, content is king in the blogging world. If your blog has great content, a decent layout, and some advertising, bloggers can make a profit quite quickly.

So why is this myth always told and re-told? Because many people have half-heartedly given blogging a chance with little success and quickly quit after starting when the money fails to fall from the heavens. In other words, some people incorrectly believe blogging will make them rich in a short amount of time. Unforunately, blogging will make you a steady income but rarely make you rich. Blogging has never been a get rich quick scheme. The bloggers that understand it takes time to build your blog into a must read entity are the bloggers who make the majority of the money in the long term. Short term bloggers rarely make any money because of that mind set.

Second, many people believe making money blogging is easy. They have heard of one or two people who started a blog six months ago and it was quickly bought for an unbelievable sum either by google or one of the other huge online businesses. Once again, this is simply not true in most circumstances, but it does occasionally happen. Making money blogging is hard work day in and day out for the most bloggers. When a blogger finally gets popular with a lot of readers, they will start to make a decent living.

Of course, this often takes years of hard work and dedication. People with unreasonable expectations about blogging spread this myth constantly. If the new blogger had a plan of action when they started, many bloggers would succeed before quitting. But since many have this unreasonable expectation, they give up at the first bump in the blogging road. You need to come in with a plan when you start your online money making blogging business, just as you would with any other type of business. Would you purchase a retail store without a business plan? Of course, you wouldn’t. Blogging is a business also and needs to be treated as such.

Third, many people believe there are short cuts to making money blogging online. Many people have wasted time and money setting up autoblogs. These autoblogs scrape content from around the web then posts it on the autobloggers site. Generally, most major search engines will ignore autoblogs completely. Many are de-indexed in a short time and never make a cent. If you want to make money blogging, just remember you must not take short cuts. Hard work is the only way to make a successful blog. Although you may get away with it for a while, you will be caught and your business could collapse overnight.

Although this just touches on a few of the myths surrounding blogging, these three are the most prevelant. It just seems these have withstood the test of time because many people are looking for an easy and fast way to make money online. Unfortunately, hard work and dedication are more often than not, the only way to make a decent living online.

To all bloggers and friends,

this is my first charity giveaway. This charity giveaway is about giving donations and get free exclusive items from me. Let me explains in more details:

I organized this charity giveaway is because

I am taking part in Alvin Phang’s “Gather Success Charity Challenge“ if you wish to take part please Click Here To Find Out More

Yes, you will be helping me to get to the top blogger spot and get the highest points. You will not just helping me but at the same time, you are helping the Red Cross.

Now, here is the deal. No matter how much you donate, I will give you 2 exclusive items.

Click here to the charity giveaway

All donations will be made though Paypal to me first. By 11th May, I will transfer all donations collected in my Paypal account directly to Red Cross.

Please help the Red Cross by donating US$5, US$10, US$50 or US$100. No matter which donations you chosen, you will still get the 2 exclusive items.

Ladies and gentlemen, “We Are The World For Haiti”.

Click here to the charity giveaway

I am very thankful and grateful of your sincerity, generosity and kindness.

It has been a very long time walking in the path of making money online. When I got to know about internet marketing, I was still studying year one in polytechnic. Thinking back few years ago, I do not know anything about internet marketing or making money online. However, I did thought of finding ways to gain financial freedom.

Few years had passed and I am still learning internet marketing. Till today, I still have not made any big money yet but I do make little small money along the way. Sometimes I will still ask myself this question, “is it possible to be financially free by making money online, doing online business?”

Of course my answer is yes, always, because I believe. By that believe, I still hanging on to internet marketing. Keep learning and apply what I have learned. Unlike one of my friend, he was the one who brought me into internet marketing, did not continue the online journey. To be honest, he did not really do much on marketing. He said to me that he could not rely on internet marketing to make more money online and so he quits.

Honestly, I also did not do much on marketing, however, I still write articles, submit to article directories, write reviews to make money, and making few cents to dollars from adsense. Indeed, I am still making money and I quite happy for what I have done.

Random thoughts end for today. One small tip when blogging, do not just blog about related topics every time. Blog about something different like what I did today.

These few days I have been doing a mock up for my wordpress theme, Archampremium. I am going to revamp some part of my wordpress and it will look more nicer than it is now. Frankly speaking, I always tend to tweak my wordpress as I want it to be perfect and be unique, and different from other people. I do not like a shabby looking wordpress theme.

Here is one part of the mock up that I have done.

  (Click the image to enlarge)

I always like blue colour so I still maintaining the blue colour as my unique wordpress theme colour. The idea of this mock up design come from Mashable.com as in the retweet, facebook and buzz buttons. I also came out something similar in term of those buttons, a comments speech bubble. I want to show people that how many people have commented on the particular post.

This is only a phase one of the revamp mock up design. Hopefully I will able to finish up the mock up, implement it and revamp the entire wordpress. I am sure that this coming new look will freshen up this wordpress blog. I will also be adding date to show when my posts are posted. Reason of showing the post posted date is that currently I am participating in a blogging challenge and this challenge is so important to me that I cannot afford to miss it.

Alright then, I go back to continue on the mock up. Do come back to see the new look.