Tales of two Entrepreneurs


I am a newbie. How do I make money?

May 4th, 2008 by Nitin

That’s the typical question I face every day on various forums. Putting it realistically, here is how typically people ask. I am a newbie and I have to make 100$ per day by tomorrow. How should I do that?

My answer is yes it is very easy to make money online. However setting target as making 50$ tomorrow is ridiculous. Here is my step by step guide to make money online.

First off devide your strategy in two part. One should be your long term target and the other should be your short term target.  This specific post of mine talks just about short term target. However you must focus on a long term target as well. Now coming back to specific short term target. I will help you in making 50$ a day from 30 days from now. However it will require some great effort. Indeed there are the people who can make 1000$ an hour, this post focuses on the people who are in not that specific niche. Again I am not inventing the wheel. I am just summarizing some of the popular working techniques.

# 1:> Youtube marketing:
a)    Sign up with an affiliate program.
b)    Pick any excellent ringtone offer. Register a domain name. From domain name redirect to ringtone offer.
c)    Download popular videos from youtube. When you download from youtube, the downloaded file is in .FLV format.
d)    Using a converter, convert this .FLV to .MPEG
e)    Using a video watermark tool, watermark the whole video with something like “Get ringtones @http://ringtoneabc.com”
f)    Upload back watermarked video to youtube.
g)    In description first sentence you should use is your domain name. That is http://ringtoneabc.com When someone visits the video, they see a first few words of description in summary. If first sentence is URL, 20% of people will click on the URL.
h)    In Description, put lot of keywords. If it is a song put lyrics of song. If it’s a movie clip, put review of it (you can get free reviews/ free lyrics online).
i)    After uploading the video popularize the video.

So basically this is the summary of youtube marketing. After a week of doing it, you will know the ins and outs. And then will be the right time to get bulk tools. For all these activities, you can get tools which work in batch. So you can put 500 videos to be downloaded, and they will be done by 24 hours. Similarly for each of these activities you have batch tools. So after two weeks you should be uploading 500 video a day. With 500 video a day even if each video gets a petty 2 visitors and even 10% people really click on your link, you will get 100 clicks a day. Considering very poor conversion you will convert at least 3-4 sales and that is 50$ a day. Also you keep on uploading video and in due course of time you may have thousands of video at youtube and you will get thousands of clicks for sure.

#2: Paid Per Install (PPI):

It is nasty. Here is what you do. You sign up with a company that pays you on every installation happening using your affiliate code. There are lot many companies. If you need names, just buzz me.

So here is what you do. Sign up with an affiliate company for PPI. Then download some popular software applications from mininova or thepiratesbay. Using IEXPRESS combine your exe with downloaded applications. Now create torrents for these apps. Upload the torrents back at mininova and TPB. Now every time someone downloads and installs you exe you will make some money. Again the key is doing in bulk. So if you are uploading 100 apps a day and each application is installed by even 5 users, you will make 50$ a day.

There are lot many techniques currently popular, but these two have been tried and tested by a few of my acquaintances and they are making good money.

Pimping is much better than running a call center

April 26th, 2008 by Nitin

Disclaimer: This post is nothing but wacky humor. Do not take it serious to your hearts.

Finally I managed to close down my extreme loss making business of running the call center. It is not just money, but in all totality Call Center Business was a failure. To begin with I never really liked the concept of outsourced Call Centers. Running a global business, I myself keep on facing numerous difficulties because of outsourced call center. But anyway since every other guy in India with a bit of money was doing it, I also jumped into it. After losing a good chunk of money and peace, finally I am able to quit the CC business.

Wow what a nightmare it was. Always complaining clients, hectic schedules, clients not paying the money, employee quitting once they make enough money to purchase a cell, data theft, back stabbing people. Gosh I wander why at the first place I even started it.

Now coming to think about it, here is why running a Call Center business is similar to being a Pimp and running an Escort Agency.

1. Both business typically work at night
2. In both businesses as an employee Girls are more in demand.
3. It is tough to find talent in both businesses.
4. Talents are typically very unreliable and they tend to switch places with even very little extra money.
5. In both businesses, in CC business Owner, and in pimping business Pimp is helpless without good talent.
6. Both businesses require young talent.
7. With both businesses you typically do not get any respect in society.
8. Government has tough regulations against both businesses.
9. Both businesses have moody talents.
10. In both businesses talents dream to be free of the pimp and start on their own.

Now here is why Pimping is better than Call Center

1. You will always make profit in pimping
2. In Pimping, end client is always satisfied. Whereas in Call Center business End client (person making call) is unsatisfied 95% of the time.
3. In Pimping, no one can steal your client list.
4. You do not own any obligation towards talent in pimping.
5. You do not require any infra structure in pimping
6. You  make cash money in pimping
7. Pimping is just a few hour night business as compared to CC which goes for whole night.
8. In pimping you just provide transportation to talents. In Call Center you provide Food, Transportation, Drink, Party, Movie Tickets … List is endless.
9. In pimping you can close the business any day without any obligation.
10. In Pimping talents quit and be freelancers. They never become pimp to others.

Cheers.

~Nitin

Getting traffic from lycos.fr etc.

April 13th, 2008 by Nitin

Life always comes back to full circle. I well remember during early 2005 all serps were dominated by crapy doorway pages. Sure taking a lesson now a days Google manually polices all high traffic keywords. But even Big G can’t monitor 100% web results manually. Here is how its happening right now.

1. Go to google search for any long tail ringtone keyword. For example lets search for mp3 ringtones for sprint phones . Here is what I see.

Ringtone Mafia of SERP

All top SERPs are dominated by pages hosted at free web-sites. When you click on any of the links, it is either redirected through javascript to advertiser page or a page full of banner ad with keyword stuffed in comes.

I did some reverse engineering and here is step by step how people are doing it.

A> Create a free account at any of popular free hosting site (e.g. lycos.fr)
B> Select any niche. Let’s say Ringtones.
C> Grab million long tail keywords.
D> Get a tool to build million pages each dedicated to its own keyword. Page should have some random keyword, some random article and that’s all.
E> If you are really smartass, you may put NOARCHIVE tg in meta, so that google doesn’t keep a cache of your page.

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOARCHIVE”>

F> In header do javascript cloaking to your advertiser. With javascript cloaking when a human will click on Search result, it goes direct to advertiser page, whereas when Search Robot comes in, it will see the original page.
G> Upload all million pages through FTP.
H> Now all you got to do is somehow get these pages indexed. There are million ways of doing it. Typically these Blackhaters will do blog spamming to get links or if you really want to play safe, all u need to do is somehow get ur page crawled. There are tools available at various blackhat forums, which will get ur million pages indexed in no time.
I> In 1-2 days, your pages will be in SERP. Since lycos.fr etc are authority domain + ur site has nothing but keywords, you will rank good for long tail keywords.
J> Indeed longevity of these sites is always big Question Mark. A typical site will last for 3-5 days before someone will report it to G or Lycos and they will shut this site out. But by then BH guy already has gotten thousands clicks and made $. Beside all the work is done by tool, so in a day he will come out with hundred of these sites.
K> Goes without saying, I don’t recommend you to do this or any of other BH trick. If you wanna try, try at your own risk. However If you are one of those million losers of the web who are not really doing anything other than just whining and complaining about the spam on the net thinking that they are doing something useful in life, I gave you guys enough feed for whole year. Go check Google 24 hour and you will find millions of pages to complaint about:)

~Nitin

New direction for the blog

April 13th, 2008 by Nitin

Ok Everyone. I am restarting to concentrate writing at my blog once again.
Basically during my last stint as blog writer I really lost the focus because at times to me it seemed bragging talking about how big I am and how much money I am going to make and all that. Also lately there had been a surge in make Money Online blogs. Anyone with a bit ebook reading used to claim themselves as Gurus and start giving tips for online money making. Also I got tired of people bitching at my blog about quality of the net and all that.
So in new incarnation of my blog, I am going to set a few records straight.
A> It is MY blog and I will write about the things that work for me.
B> I am very good in peeling the skin of any site / technique. So I will post more and more technique about how people are using the net to generate traffic / money.
C> All that I willl provide will be information. I do not endorse any stuff.
D> Some of the stuff that I talk about may fall into certain grey area of traffic / revenue generation. If you have any issues with that, I suggest you not waisting your precious time at my blog.
E> This blog is different than any other blog, because without emphasizing on just one specialized way of making money online, I will act as undercover agent and will disclose how people are generating traffic / making money.
F> I am not an innovator nor I have a vision like Einsteen. However I am good at duplicating how stuff works and how to produce something at mass scale. If you see something of interest on net, feel free to share it with me at nitin@omsolutions.net
G> Our focus has now totally changed. We no longer work for clients and writing programs for clients. So no client / programmer stuff.
H> Most of the stuff that you will read here, you might have read somewhere along with 1000 different ideas. However here we reverse Engineer the stuff that is working and then we will post case studies of working methods.

With these words I am starting new phase of journey for our blog.

Nitin

ezine Article Submission - Is it really worth the pain?

October 21st, 2007 by Nitin

Getting traffic through ezine Article submission is probably the only idea on which may be 90% SEOs of the world agree upon. It indeed does require some pain. The methodology is quite simple. Write good content article (at least 450 words) for the specific niche of your site, submit article to different article sites, put link to your web-site in footer of article. That’s all. Enjoy free traffic from Article sites and enjoy some link juice through backlinks.

Again as most of you by now know that we go by experiment and here is another experiment. We did write articles for many of out sites, but never tracked direct revenue generated by these articles. To us, writing a good article and submitting articles to 25 Article sites cost 10$ (we charge 25$ to our client for this service). So here goes the experiment.

We just launched a mortgage site. I have setup my content writer to write five articles a day specific to Mortgage. Then our link team will submit these articles to 25 article sites. This activity will go on for 2 weeks that is fifty articles. Overall cost to us is 500$. It will be interesting to observe how much money is made in direct revenues. I will keep you all posted about it. Also here goes list of article sites.

http://www.1888articles.com
http://www.articlegeek.com
http://www.articlewise.com
http://www.articleblotter.com
http://www.articleselections.com
http://www.ezinearticles.com
http://www.article-hut.com
http://www.articlecity.com
http://www.webpronews.com/submit
http://www.articlehub.net
http://www.articlepile.com
http://www.submityourarticle.com
http://www.articlegear.com
http://www.articleshowroom.com
http://www.articlenetworks.com
http://www.articless.net
http://www.promotearticles.com
http://www.articlerich.com
http://www.articleblender.com
http://www.article-hangout.com
http://www.article99.com
http://www.articles4free.com
http://www.articlewiz.com
http://www.articleuniversity.com
http://www.ezinesarticle.com

Nitin Tripathi

php VS .NET

October 14th, 2007 by Nitin

One of the most confusing decisions that IT policy makers of companies come across is which way to go .NET or PHP. Both have their merits and limitations. Deciding one is entirely dependant upon your budget, technical skills, requirements and your overall corporate methodology.

PHP is the most popular open source programming language used to build web-sites that rely upon dynamic content. PHP is free and so are almost all of its supporting tools, platforms, databases and even OS. Being Open Source it got good support, code snippets and helps at various on-line open source forums. It even got Zend optimizer which compiles the code and makes code much faster and hence making it almost equivalent to other compiled web programming options. It is fairly easy to get a PHP programmer and many of the times if you have budget constraints, you can get freelancers with excellent skills in PHP.

.NET is really a framework, that consist of a framework with support of various programming languages e.g. C#, ASP.NET, VB.NET etc. Like many good things except air, water, sun nothing is free in the world and so is .NET However it does come up with excellent support from Microsoft, provides excellent help documentation, has excellent professionals (though none of them are cheap - Sure you know one of the resource is outsourcing it to us:)) to sort out any issues. Also since it is a complete framework it is used for things way above than building simple web-sites.

So, in summary if you have limited IT budget and your requirement is to build a site or some other similar web based applications, then PHP may be a better choice. However if you have some budget and your requirement goes further beyond a simple web-site, and you are looking for some great dedicated support and dependency upon more solid programmers, .NET is the way to go.

Nitin Tripathi

Om Solutions Four Years of Journey

October 7th, 2007 by Nitin

I started doing freelancing five years back when I was in Houston, Texas. Later when I saw a great demand of our service as well as I had enough sites that I can handle alone with help of my wife, I moved back to India and incorporated Om Solutions. We incorporated the company on 1st October year 2003. Initially we focused upon providing programming support to our US clients. One of our clients Barry Tubwell eventually became my partner, owner of Om Solutions LLC and Managing Partner of our US operations.

During second year of our existence we relied too heavily on our content sites and cut down almost all the programming business that we used to do for our clients. Wrong move. One day we woke up to see our entire business collapsed to ground zero.

We restarted from scratch, started diversifying the company and currently we are more or less stable at least in terms of operations. Currently we have three major divisions in our company.
1)    Programming for client as well as for our own sites, products and tools (PHP, PERL, MYSQL, .NET etc)
2)    Call Center Services (Mostly used to generate Mortgage, Debt and other financial Leads)
3)    Low Tech Services for our clients as well as for our own products (e.g. Content writing, Link Building etc).

We started with just me and my wife and now we have employee strength of forty (including non technical staff e.g. security, clerks etc). Not too bad. The year 2008 is going to be a very crucial year for us. I actually have made a presentation ( Om Solutions plan for 5th year ) that I gave to all employees on our annual day. Attached is a copy of presentation for those of you keen enough to look into our future vision. We intend to cross 1 M revenue this fiscal year.

We had a wild party at a resort. I will upload a few pics and may be a video at youtube shortly (excuse me for my laziness).

Nitin Tripathi (http://blog.omsolutions.net)

5 K a day Project – Week 4

October 7th, 2007 by Nitin

Finally started making pennies. This week with 10 sites made 2$. Lol I am not excited, but its good to see sites started getting some traffic.

Now is the time to really move on to adding content in all fifty sites of alpha-1. Also for initial ten sites, the coming weeks will see lot of back links and lot of direct traffic through Web 2.0 link strategies. As said earlier the mission is to make $50 a day by end of October.

One thing that I would like to clear at this point of time, all the link building will be as ethical as it is possible. I understand a school of thought where in all type of link building is spam and all type of link request is considered spam; I can’t argue with those people. For them whole web is spam. Other than that all our sites are going to get links through link requests, article submissions, blog writing etc.

So far in initial 2 weeks, we got close to twenty links for our initial pool of ten sites. For now all traffic that we get is direct traffic from links as most of the sites have very less content (may be 5-10 page each) and they don’t have lot many back links to rank for each and every term. Right now traffic from Search Engines is zero. Overall the top traffic site is getting fifteen visitors a day. Please don’t preach about good content sites getting tens thousands of visitors a day. We have a few sites that get traffic in thousands, however specifically for this project, we are focusing on building 5000 content niche sites.

Indeed one of the biggest problems we are facing is erasing the footprints.  To erase the footprints, you can never have one fixed strategy. If you have a fixed strategy, then you are leaving footprints again. I will write a separate blog on erasing footprints once we have 500 plus successful running sites.

Nitin Tripathi (http://blog.omsolutions.net)

Palo Alto, CA, stanford and the stanford shoping center are my favorite places to visit in the Fall……

September 30th, 2007 by barry

Don’t hate the city, hate that you don’t stay there……Palo Alto is one of the nices, cleanest and wiredest cities in the world. With beautiful home’s, a killer mall and Stanford University its really the place to be anytime of the year. Don’t take my word for it, have a look at some of the pics I took while driving though Palo Alto today…….

dsc01627.JPG

dsc01628.JPG

dsc01633.JPG

dsc01642.JPG

dsc01654.JPG

dsc01657.JPG

dsc01660.JPG

dsc01661.JPG

 In closing, Palo Alto is a programmer’s Haven as it sitting dead red in the silicon valley where a programmer can have it all his/her way with a 6 figure income, fine dinning and shopping and ofcourse the homes………:).

Barry.

How to get traffic from Digg

September 28th, 2007 by Nitin

Here is another of my post on step by step guide on how to get traffic from Digg. All so called Spam haters and the people who hate to see all crap spreading around the net, don’t read it:) I know you will :) Move on.

Disclaimer: Below are the findings of an experiment that has been carried out to do a study. You should not use it to spam the Digg. Ultimately on the web if you have good quality content and good sites linking to them only then you survive.

Enough of legalities and formalities. Moving on to real stuff.

You need to be very good in handling / remembering password etc. Better use a spreadsheet to keep track of all UID, PWD, emails etc.

1.    Get a list of public proxy servers. Use a software to change them dynamically with a single click. Many such software are available in market.
2.    Create 100 Email accounts at sites like AOL.com, gmail.com, yahoo.com etc. Use different proxies to create email accounts. Make sure to use different names and different patterns for each and every single account. For example one account can be loverboy7521@hotmail.com Other should be bobofhouston@hotmail.com Make sure to write all email addresses and passwords in excel.
3.    Using these 100 email accounts create 100 different accounts at Digg. For easier management user ids can be same as email ids and password make same as password of email address. Goes without saying all this has to be done using different proxies.
4.    While creating the account at Digg, for each account go to http://www.digg.com/news/upcoming Click on “Digg It” for ten news. No need to change proxies at this step. Just make sure for each new account you need to change IP, but while you are digging at same account no need to change IPs.
5.    Pick up some technology sites, select any of its news and simply copy paste the title and summary of news to write a story about that news. Like this write one story each under hundred accounts. As said earlier make sure to change proxies for each account.
6.    Step 4 and 5 are to make sure that you are not leaving any footprint. It will be tough if not impossible to track all your hundred accounts.
7.    Now select any of your article, write a nice story for it using one of the account. Now your story is into the Digg upcoming page.
8.    Start login using your remaining 99 accounts, with each account first digg some 8-10 other stories and then digg your own story. Keep on moving fast changing the accounts and digging fast.
9.    At the end of exercise, you will have your story being dugg 100 times.
10.    Pick another of your story and go back to step 7.

Results: I picked 5 of my articles and followed above 10 steps.  Took me about 16 hours of work. Total traffic received from Digg was 1000 users. Going by the rate of 1$ a visitor I received visitors worth 1000$. Not a bad day of work.

What Next: All these accounts are still active. Next time it will take just 10 hours to do all this. Better is put a low paid assistant doing all this.

Target: At some point of time, you may have 1000 of active accounts at Digg with excellent history and some of your stories may even make to home page of digg. That’s indeed is a nice target to achieve.

Nitin Tripathi