2009
I’m Taking This Seriously Now
Posted by Jason in GeneralBefore the groans and the cyncism start, I’d like to say that you have no reason to believe me. In fact, in a post I made on the 22nd of January, 2009 (that long ago?) I promised I’d be going strong with this blog but it saw just three posts in the next 10 months, and none since April.
Pathetic!
I’m sorry about that – things came up, but hopefully the offer of some killer, personal content will persuade you to stick around. 
This time I actually have ideas (and have already written some of) the posts that I’ll be putting up for the next month.
Here’s what I’ll be covering:
What I’ve learned hiring people offline
My biggest mistake in internet marketing which would have made me at least $500,000 by now had I not made it
My second biggest mistake in internet marketing which would have made me another huge chunk of money had I not made it
The <censored> (to be revealed) trick that cost almost nothing, brought in 100 subscribers, a tonne of publicity and goodwill
My plans for Make Money Dynamo and getting back to internet marketing after a 4-6 month break
What I’ve been involved in setting up an offline office and my experiences with that
The benefits I’ve found in attending internet marketing meetups
Interviews (one with Swastik Agrawal, one of my JV partners, and about our partnership that made over $1,000 the first five days after we started it) along with a few others
Talk about some of the big website sales and interesting happenings in the industry
How I got scammed… for how much, by who, and how to avoid it happening to you in future
Why you’re way too awesome for education
More how to make money online posts
I’m aiming for a post every 3-5 days, and already have a few people I’ve promised to on instant messenger – who will spam me to death should I not follow through. The above ideas should last me at least a month or two, and I’d love you guys to give me some things you’d like covered.
What’s been up with me? Well, I took a 4-6 month break from internet marketing, because I needed it – visited a couple places, met a few friends and made some business contacts that I’ve established mutually beneficial relationships with, and I’m currently working on setting up an offline office to take my internet marketing exploits to the next level (I have 3 full time, paid employees at the moment that are working on stuff for me).
I want to step it up to the elite level – $50,000 per month passive income. I do not believe that I have the work ethic or ability to do this myself, which is why I’m hiring – looking to expand as much as possible.
I dropped out of university simply because I was learning more useful things every day in the internet marketing sphere than I had learned in two years of my Business Administration course, and moved to India (Bangalore to be precise – if any of you are there or in India, would love to connect) to set up my office.
I’m getting back into IM blogging because a) I do miss it, even though I didn’t directly make a lot of money with it… I made a tonne of friends and build up a reputation for providing killer content – having read back I’ve just realised how good the content on my old blog was compared to the rest of the blogosphere (where most of the content is absolute garbage).
I also realised that I did all the initial work on this site, build up 1k+ subscribers and a lot of good posts, market it hard initally… and then forgot about it. Too many of my sites have gone the same way so didn’t want the same thing to happen to this, and although I’m emailing you guys after ages, hopefully a lot of you will stick around.
As for Casey, like me he just didn’t have the time to “blog”… unlike me he was never a blogger in the first place or someone that interacted socially with IMers so couldn’t really be bothered with the benefits. We’re still friends, we still work on projects together and give each other advice, but he won’t be continuing here at MMD.
I believe I am one of the most approachable internet marketers out there… so if you have any questions about something related to internet marketing, let me know and I’ll try to help you out.
I also plan to do a few webinars with this blog… did one yesterday with a partner, had a lot of fun and gave out killer income strategies. Get in touch! I’ll be trying to do a blog comment spree in the next few weeks, visiting some of the blogs I haven’t for ages and discovering a few new ones as well.
Uh-oh!
Awesome news, dude! This is gonna rock. And your content totally blows everything else out of the water.
Thanks man. I’ll hit you up for our interview
Great to have you back Jason! Can’t wait to hear what you have been up too and I’m sure there are a lot of things that we can learn.
Long time no talk mate.
I’ve got a tonne of experiences to share, as do you. We can check out each other’s blogs to see what’s up.
mmmm…..been working in the background….
I like that. that’s usually when you come back better.
GO FOR IT.
I’ll be watching my mailbox…. (I’m on your list)
Good to hear, you’ll get posts sent within an hour or so of them going live, I think.
Good stuff. Looking forward to the new posts.
Welcome back! I understand where you are coming from, going through the same process myself rate now
Fantastic! Looking forward to hearing from you frequently.
Fuerza, Alan and Rose,
Thanks for the welcome!
Hope to see you guys around here over the next few weeks / months. :p
Jason,
That break you had will colour the way you work online in some way. So what if you haven’t updated in a good while? It’s ok with me. I followed you from University Kid and appreciate your wisdom, insight and experience on things, your go-getting & fearless attitude and your willingness to share your knowledge with others.
It’s great to have you back (if you can’t tell already!) and I’ll be looking forward to your posts.
All the best with whatever you put your hand to, old soul…
Take care.
Hi ebele!
I still remember you from when I first started TUK and you offered to send me $5 to help me out. Long time no talk, how’ve you been?
Hope to see you around a lot more.
Jason
It sounds like you’ve made big mistakes that stopped you from earning vastly more than you’ve ever earned before, if you’ve made those mistakes, why haven’t you corrected them, so that you can tell people what you did right, rather than what you did wrong?
Just a question, when are you going to start making businesses that don’t completely rely on the “make money online” niche?
Your only big successes have been in this area – and it’s quite funny that you put yourself down as some sort of “make money online guru”, when you’ve never really created a business out of what you do, it’s all just little website flips and ebooks about making money online.
I’m NOT trying to bash you, I just want to say that there are plenty of other people in this “niche” who can provide more value than you ever could. This is just another blog that you’ll sell on in 6 months for a nice profit.
I just don’t like the fact that the only way you’ve made any “real” (let’s face it, not that much) money online is to teach people how to make money online. See how ridiculous this is?
If you’ve got proven advice that relates to online business then fine – but you really don’t. It’s just little tricks and “methods” to make some quick cash, and there’s about a zillion other people doing the same thing, and dozens that can do it better.
There’s more value in the blogs/free content coming out of Frank Kern, Jay Abraham, Ryan Deiss, Eben Pagan, John Reese, and others, than you could ever produce given the knowledge you currently have.
Please, wake up people and realise that reading blogs like this isn’t going to get you anywhere. It’s just going to be rehashed content and crappy ideas that will never make you more than a few $.
Stop polluting the “make money online” niche with crappy ebooks and old content – it’s all been done. Get out there and build a business, one that doesn’t rely on chumps hanging onto your every word to make $1 an hour – then come back here and start giving advice.
…and if you’re reading this as a subscriber, you’re not too “awesome” for an education. What this blog will teach you will never account for the amount of money you can earn by working hard at school, college, uni, etc.
Hi David,
Firstly, thank you for leaving a well thought out comment on here. Any discussion is good, as long as it’s not abusive and I agree you haven’t been. However, I do feel I should correct you on some points.
The mistakes – I’m in the process of correcting them, and have already had successes doing that. However, I think that had I known earlier I would not have made them, and by reading the screwups I’ve done, others can avoid them.
To explain, here’s the mistakes:
a) Not building an IM list, even though I should have the first day I sold my first product. Had I done this a long time ago, given my product sales which I did not opt in I’d have a list of say 30-50k. From which $500k is… I wouldn’t say easy, but not impossible once leveraged.
b) Selling my other blog when in hindsight I should have worked on it a little more, all it needed was a push.
I’ll go into detail more when I write the posts, but I have been working to correct them for the last say month for the former, and by restarting this for the latter.
As for working only in this niche…
I’m not sure if you read my old blog, but I detailed stuff I’d done outside the IM niche.
In fact, most of the money I’ve made has been through things like that – niche website development, website flipping (a couple big sales in the IM niche, but most of the smaller ones outside), offline marketing (have sold website services to businesses here for $5k a time – whether a small or large amount of money for you it is more than most people make in a year doing it)
In the last couple months I have been heavily (the whole purpose for the office is this) working on setting up passive income streams. I do agree with you that most of my income (however large at a time) is derived from one time sources, which is why I’ve moved into this model. And yes, I have seen “success” with it, enough to live off comfortably if I stopped promoting them today, although our definitions of success may be different.
As for my blogging…
I do not believe I have ever portrayed myself as a “guru”, just as someone that has had more success and taught more people good things than 99.9% of the other internet marketers and blogs out there.
Sure, I may be nothing in comparision to Kern, Pagan et al, but from some of the people who have thanked me and the results they’ve had following my posts, I think what I have to say / teach can help others, although you may not agree.
My old blog I practically never promoted anything to them (which perhaps was stupid of me, but I was fine with it), unlike the “gurus” who tend to produce something or the other in every second post.
Sure, they make much, much more money than me, and I may never reach their level, but does that mean I can’t help others see a little success? I’d disagree.
As for the education thing, I’ll talk about it when I do that post. Should be fun, anyone is welcome to disagree with me.
If you’re not too disgusted with this blog, please stick around as people that care are awesome.
Jason
Thanks for the reply Jason. I think you caught me at a time when I am sick and tired of the “Make Money Online” niche. Now this doesn’t necessarily apply to you, but it’s basically made up of a bunch of people reading MMO blogs and trying to make a few bucks, as soon as they start making a little bit of money (even if it’s stuff like paid to surf shit) they immediately start an MMO blog telling everyone else how they’re making money online and that they can give “internet marketing” advice. It’s nonsense….none of these people know anything about marketing or building a real business.
I’ll have a read of your stuff from time to time, but I’m afraid I just don’t agree with the type of content that most of these blogs produce.
If you really want to do something, start talking about building serious businesses online, not just creating WSO’s and ebooks to be sold on DP. I’ve had enough of it, and I think anyone reading this sort of stuff should just be pointed to one site that will tell them all the stuff they need to know, so they can stop reading shitty make money online blogs.
Let’s face it, the only reason people write make money online blogs is to make money – it’s stupid to try and sugar coat it. Likewise, it’s the same for the people who write “make money” ebooks (there are a few good ones, but they aren’t written by people selling them as WSO’s).
The amount of rehashed content, over simplified rubbish, and generally pathetic “business” content is incredible.
The make money online niche is filled with people doing this stuff, and (although it’s not nice to say it), people are only interested in marketing their own site, they couldn’t care less about yours (unless it can provide them with content they can rehash). So all the blog comments with links or URL’s in them, all the twitter accounts, social networking stuff, it’s all just shameless promotion to try and get a little bit of traffic. The mentality is far too often “as long we get traffic, it doesn’t matter about content” – which is why 99.9% of the content written on these blogs can be found somewhere else – even in a free ebook produced by one of the larger marketers.
The thing about the big marketers is that they provide true value. They can charge $997 for their products because they actually help people build big businesses and make tons of money – make money online blogs do not, sorry
Haha man I actually used to (and probably still would, if I read blogs over the last few months) had the same annoyances as you do.
In fact when I first started my old blog, I’d made like $20 and (following the trend) started a blog saying here’s how to make money, I’m awesome, I’m so cool etc. Partly cos I’m a bit of an idiot, but you could probably blame the community and teenage immaturity for some of that.
After a month or two, I was hammered by someone who said if you can’t do X, don’t teach it, $20 a day or month isn’t a lot so STFU, which is when I looked more at different things, changed the blog to an entrepreneur blog (although I still tried to share ways I had tried to made money, the ones that had worked and the ideas that hadn’t).
I hate a lot of the people that do the same kind of thing, but remember how well… almost expected it was of you to do that on a forum like Digital Point as soon as you’d made anything over $1 so I’m not so harsh on them nowadays unless they’re really annoying.
I disagree on some points – I do believe businesses have been launched off the WSO, and there’s nothing wrong with charging for content if it helps your audience (even if it’s basic, if it helps them achieve the results should they stick to it, no problem) but agree that the best way to MMO is a stable income stream. As for the big namers, some of them are awesome (I admire Justin Brooke, who although not as big as Pagan, Kern etc is honest, reachable and not arrogant) but I’ve had issues with some of the stuff they’ve done like whoever promoted Arbitrage Conspiracy.
That the other stuff we can discuss in another post, people on here are probably getting bored of us now and my return would be short lived if I get thrown off my own site.
Hopefully I can hit the expectations you want (and I agree) MMO blogs should do, we’ll see over the next few weeks I guess. I’ll wait for your next comment and you can let me know.
David, you can always unsubscribe if you don’t like this blog. I plan to stay subscribed to it, but nobody has a gun to your head forcing you to read it if you don’t like it.
It’s not about that at all though, it’s about this whole industry and trying to improve the content that these blogs produce. If you’re actually happy with the blogs and the content that comes out of the MMO niche, then you’re beyond help.
You’re right Jason, you are pretty approachable.
So is Ben from makemoneyonlinewithseo.com. Based on his feedback I got motivated and started working harder on my biz.
I hope to be a big earning, friendly and approachable IMer one day too.
It’s a noble goal to strive for. And a friendly one that opens up doors to money making opportunities as well.
Hey Jay,
Never heard of that site cos I stopped reading blogs pretty much, but I like the writing style so will read a few of the posts.
If you need any help that I could provide you with for your journey, let me know, I’ve got IM and email.
Man, oh, man… you FINALLY listened to me, huh? The whole going to college thing just wasn’t worth it if you’re already exceeding expectations outside of it.
But yo, I thought you said your family would be mad if you dropped out or something?
Anyways, I’m not sure if I have the right work ethic either and until I do, I’ll only be doing my online stuff as a part time business.
I am interested, however, in partnering up in a JV if you’re cool with it. Let me know!
Glad to see you back man!
Jay
Hey Jay the 2nd, :p
Yeah, for me the only reason to go to college (if you’re eventually going to set up your own business) is for the people. You make great friends there, the girls are nice (hehe…) and the experience is worth it.
If I could just do that without the work, lectures etc, I would have stayed in Dubai. Sadly you can’t. :p
They (well, my mother) was a bit pissed but she saw that it was worth it from the results I was bringing in. If I completely die online in my business this year, well, she’ll be mega angry and I’ll probably be sent to some boarding school but for now, I’m safe.
As for the JV, hit me up over IM and we’ll talk more… I’ve always been interested in something where you do half the work and make more than double the money.
Hey Jason, great to have you back! I wondered if you were ever coming back or if this had been abandoned forever. Thought about unsubscribing a few times but never did, and now I am happy I made the decision to stay. Anyway, a lot has changed since April so you have some catching up to do. Keep at it this time!
Hey man,
Glad you didn’t unsubscribe (although I probably would have if I was to a blog that hadn’t updated for ages…
).
Hope all’s well your end, and you’re still killing it on Adsense
Finally! I like your posts better than the guy you sold universitykid to. You bring new things to the table. Keep being creative. Also, can you share your experience in dealing with your parents when you decided to drop out of uni. Desi folks don’t seem to be too keen on that (you need something more stable beta).
Hey man,
It’s like a TUK reunion in here hehe.
A lot of people have told me that, I think both approaches bring different things to the table. TUK has doubled in size etc so they’re doing something right, but I’ll cover it when I talk about it.
Definitely will do that (the parent thing). My parents were mild compared to what Asian parents can be like, but I’ll cover it…
Duuuude welcome back man, and thanks for dropping by my place.
Long time no talk mate. The blog looks like it’s going pretty well at DSWM
Have added the subscribe to comments thing just for you
Hi Jason -
This is really one great teaser dialog, much more entertaining than dry old MMO. I think it will wor kvery well.
Rhys,
Glad you like the teasers, I’ll try and make sure their posts are awesome.
Jason
Welcome back! I am glad you are back. I’ve enjoyed your old posts and online/offline marketing tips. BTW, I’m from Bangalore but settled in Northern Virginia. I am looking for ways to outsource IM work. Any tips would be appreciated. Waiting to hear more from you in the coming days!
You’re from Bangalore? Awesome! I’m glad to be back too, will add a post on outsourcing to one of the ones I need to put up on here.
Hey Jason!
You’ve finally got back to blogging! I’m looking forward to reading your posts; your previous blog gave me the go-ahead to get started in the online scene, hopefully I can better my skills by reading this blog.
PS. I managed to sell the website that we were talking about earlier, I’ll fill you in on MSN.
Cheers,
John
John,
You’re one of the few TUKers that’s kept in touch through MSN etc. Glad you sold the site, will be sure to try and put out killer content like before.
I’d be curious to see how many subscribers stayed subscribed.
Wanna share the figure?
Purely for the reason: I forgot about this blog, so never unsubscribed but I am keen to see how many people actually never unsubscribed…
Hey Jovana,
After this post (which was delivered to all subscribers), around 12-13 people unsubscribed.
I’m assuming the rest have decided to give me a chance to see what’s coming up, or have subscribed with an email they never check anymore.
The comments on this post show that there is enough potential for interaction, should I stick to my end of the bargain
Hey Jason,
Thought I’d just pop in here and say “Hi”. I’ll stay subscribed (I assume I am subscribed as I got this post in my inbox..?)
I’ve read a bit of your other blog too and came via Grizz – so will be interested to see what other stuff you come up with.
There seems to be an overabundance of J names around here – Jason, John, Jovana, Jay, J, Jarron – whew!
Ciao,
Jarron
Hey Jarron, thanks for stopping by.
Grizz is awesome, I still check him out from time to time.
And the letter J is probably the best one out there, although don’t tell anyone else or they’ll feel bad
I don’t really need to worry mate, Im subscribed both through the feeds and newsletters so just do your stuff when you feel doing it.
Hehe awesome man. I’ll see you around.
Haven’t fired Casey, we’ve just parted ways. It could have gotten ugly if he was seriously interested in this site or wanted to be a dick, but he’s a nice guy so no problems that end.
i think you have also “fired” your partner in this blog?
Nice to see you again, kid.
Hmm…maybe I should ‘come back”. lol
Post away my friend!
Cheers
Jay
Yeaaah man come back, yours was one of the few blogs that didn’t annoy me
Hit me on Skype when you’re free, we’ll talk.
Well, that was actually one of the most inspiring things I’ve ever read!
Glad to have you back Jason! I’m looking forward to your best killer articles.
If this blog doesn’t end up like TUK, I’m sure it will go stratight to the TOP!
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