How To Make Money At Home

As I mentioned in my last post, I moved from my comfortable setup in Dubai, United Arab Emirates and dropped out of university to set up a company in India, looking to take the whole internet marketing thing to the next level.

Although I stopped most internet marketing activities over the last 4-6 months, I was still involved in a few offline web development projects for local businesses (read more about this) – basically creating websites for them / offering other online services like SEO, marketing etc and charging them for my knowledge.

Now for most of my online projects, I’ve used the services of freelancers – the ideas for projects, keyword research I do myself, but all the complicated stuff or stuff that will take some time (for example, writing articles, building backlinks, design etc) I prefer to outsource simply because a) I’m not skilled enough to do most of that and b) I’m lazy.

However, when working in the offline world – more so than the online world, you have to deal with things like set deadlines, project updates… when you tell a company that their website will be done by Tuesday, it should be ready by Monday. Unfortunately, what I’ve found dealing with freelancers is that whenever you’re dealing with lower – mid priced freelancers, especially over a period of time, something always comes up that delays things – they get sick, or someone in the family visits, or a pet dies, stuff like that. A lot of that is truthful, but a lot of freelancers also work way too cheap, take on way too much work and then find out they can’t complete it because they’re overloaded.

So what I decided to do is move to India and set up an actual physical office there, one that would help me deal with this and also train my employees on aspects of internet marketing, so I could completely outsource everything and go bulk. My idea was (for example), I know how to build a niche website that can make $1/day within a week in say 1-2 days (if I did all the work myself). If I pay a freelancer to do it, it generally takes 3-4 days, not taking into account any delays.

If you go bulk, freelancers are expensive. In India, where a good salary for people is around $300 – $400 a month, it’s a lot cheaper to have someone full time as long as you’re willing to train them and teach them certain things, because “internet marketing” is still young there and thus employees have never heard of things like niche websites, Ezine Articles, directory submissions and so on.

My idea was that I’d get 4-5 employees at say $300 a month, train them on various things and then do whatever I wanted in bulk.

Those turnkey Clickbank product websites that sell for $500 a pop? I’d train my employees to put that together in one day (which would cost me about $50 total) and rinse, repeat forever.

Those niche websites that make $1/day? I’d train my employees to create 4-5 a day and rinse, repeat.

Those huge blogs that have thousands of backlinks, a lot of high quality content, thousands of subscribers and traffic per month? I’d train my employees what it took to create them and create five a month. Rinse, repeat, etc.

You get the idea.

And if I had any offline projects, I could guarantee my clients delivery – if I say X would be delivered on Tuesday, it would damn well be ready at least 3-4 days before. Offline, you can get paid upwards of $1,000 – $5,000 for a single website that would take a competent freelancer a day to produce – if you can guarantee delivery (and train your employees how to find those clients), can you see how much of a good idea this was?

Of course, nothing ever turns out as easy as you thought it would be (sometimes it turns out easier, but sadly this wasn’t one of those times).

I advertised on a website called Naukri.com (jobs in Hindi, rough translation) and have spent over 200,000 rupees (about US $4,500 – $5,000) to learn these lessons. Hopefully they’ll help you, amuse you, or even allow you to offer me advise!

From my advertisement for a) a full time web designer and b) a full time content writer (I decided to start with 2 employees), I found out…

1) Age matters

I was of the impression that no matter how young you were, finding employees would be no problem, given the world is  in a recession and as long as you were knowledgeable about your field (whether I am or not is up for debate, but for this let’s just say I am ) people would be happy to work for you.

As soon as I saw the look on the first interviewees face when he walked in I knew I was wrong.

He didn’t say anything, of course, but I could see him thinking something along the lines of wtf? This little bacha thinks I’m going to work for him? Why did he waste my time and ask me to come in for an interview? (bacha = kid in Hindi).

Unfortunately, age plays a part in credibility. Of course, I had no (and still have very little) experience in setting up an offline, physical office, so the suspicions / cynicism may be well founded, but I found it more difficult to get people to commit to things simply because I was so young. In India for smaller jobs, especially for my company which is a sole proprietorship, things like formal contracts etc don’t really exist so people perhaps were wondering whether I’d last.

I didn’t realise this at the time, but thinking about it it’s a valid concern – if I was looking for a job, went in for an interview and there was a 14 year old sitting on the opposite side of the desk, I’d have a hard time wrapping my head around it.

2) Money matters

Once we started getting into things like salary and bonuses, I could sense a change in the mindset/attitude of the employee. Immediately, they became more serious, communicated more strongly and were not afraid to negotiate. This is because of the market – working for an 18 year old with no experience of setting up offline companies is probably a million times better than not having a job at all.

3) Don’t always take the first option

I originally set up in a place called Bangalore, partly because a) my grandparents stayed there, so I’d have a place to stay, people looking after me etc and also because b) Bangalore is a tech city so I thought getting employees would be easier there.

Because of this I rented out a two bedroom flat there, paid ten months deposit confirming a one year lease, renovated it and bought all the required equipment like computers, furniture, Internet etc.

What I found out around a week ago was that this was probably the wrong thing to do – in fact, I may be scrapping the Bangalore office completely (and wasting one year of rent) because of this.

The next city had an associate who I was introduced to by a friend, who had his own company with 100~ employees doing a similar thing – there they had business centers which could be rented for a month at a time, he were paying the same rate as I was for a non commercial flat for full fledged office space (with carpeting, good lighting etc) and employees were much, much cheaper there because the cost of living was less. (As an example, you could find people with similar skills / experience for around 6,000 rupees a month there (around $128 a month) compared to 15,000 a month (around $320 a month).

And before I’m shouted at by someone on paying inhumane rates etc (which is what I thought, I mean $128/month is less than $5 a day) that is the average for employees in that area, most of them are happy earning it, and you can live (I presume) fairly comfortably for that per month – not as a king, but comfortably.

So I’m looking at setting up my main business office in that city.

4) Contacts are everything

I literally knew nothing about India (since I’ve never lived there) or doing business there. Thanks to a few contacts, who kept introducing me to others, I managed to learn a lot – things like setting up a company officially, tax laws, employee laws, office laws and a whole lot of other things. I was also given a lot of business advice on things like handling my employees, scaling up from people that knew what they were talking about.

Online, the more people with experience / knowledge you know, the more experience / knowledge you can gain for yourself by sharing and communicating with them. Offline is no different

5) Professionalism is way better

In India, most of these kinds of businesses (2-5 employees, working on computers) are run out of residential space – ie flats converted into offices. I found that even though you’ll save a few thousand doing this (my Bangalore setup I’m paying a cheaper rent for space that’s more than ten times bigger than office space at the space cost (13,000 rent for 1,300 sq feet is what I’m paying now compared to 15,000 rent for 150 sq feet office space that I looked at earlier),  employees are more likely to take you professionally if you have a “proper” office setup and you’ll see increased returns in things like productivity which should make up for the extra costs of rent etc.

So those were five things I learned as a result of hiring people and setting up an office. I’ve learned a few other things, but this post is around 2,000 words already and I’m sure your eyes hurt too much to read more.

I can say that I’ve found out costs and it will cost around 30,000 – 40,000 rupees (around $600-$800 per month (in one of those business centre setups) for full fledged office space, computers on rent, Internet, electricity, coffee, along with two employees. So around $20-$30 a day with all included. If I can make even $50 a day (utilizing the services of two full time employees working eight hours a day – of course they’ll have to be trained first) then I’m doing $900 a month profit. Which is nothing, really for places like the US etc, but in India?

You can live like royalty if you’re a person with no family to support making upwards of $900 a month profit in India.

Of course, my aims is that once the office fully kicks off (I hired one employee at 15,000 a month but recently fired him because he wasn’t up to scratch, and am looking at moving to another city than Bangalore so the office is on hold for now) is to step it up to huge amounts of money, as in $50,000+ a month (this just from the office activities, and not the stuff I’m doing myself).

I have the knowledge (I believe) to get to that level, and think that doing things is bulk (having 2-10 employees that can work on different things for me) will make it pretty easy given what I’ve been able to accomplish on my own.

However, I may be foolishly deluded, lose all the money I’ve spent on this so far as well as the rest of my balance in reserve, go bankrupt… if you’re interested in finding out how I do read this blog.

Given that I’m spending in rupees (the currency of India, in case some of you had no idea WTF I was talking about), and earning in dollars (one dollar = 45 rupees), I can screw up quite a lot and still do pretty well. Which is awesome for someone like me.

People asked for a post on my experiences, you may have found this post the most interesting/entertaining one in the world or think me someone that needs to get to the point and STFU. Let me know through the comments, and thanks for reading MMD.

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