How To Make Money At Home

Hope all of you are doing well.

Some of you will know that I did a seminar on internet marketing in July – it was attended by around 30-45 people and was a pretty good night. As India is still new to the whole internet marketing thing, I didn’t get any sponsors so had to fund the thing myself – around $500 usd for a hall booked for 50 people (with a killer dinner buffet included).

Now some of you may think – why book a hall and spend $500 of your own money for something that hasn’t directly made me any money?

I used to think offline meetups were a waste of time, I mean I’ve got Skype, I’ve got MSN/Yahoo/GTalk, so if you can talk to people online what’s the point of arranging to meet them offline and putting in the effort to go wherever you decide to meet and talk in person?

After I started doing a few of them, I realised my thoughts were wrong. Here’s some of the reasons why:

Credibility

The number of internet marketing seminars that have been held in India are next to none. I think apart from the one I held and one other one in Bangalore by Alok Jain, there haven’t been any.

Putting in the effort to hold it, promoting it offline (something I had no experience with) and being one of only two people that have held a seminar in India has given me a lot of credibility. Especially from the people that were at the event and I shared knowledge with.

Networking

Now a few of the people at the event I knew from before online (people that had contacted me through forums or read my old blog) but at least 15-20 of them I had never talked with or met before the event. I met people that had setup successful offline companies, people that worked in India for a long time, people that could help out with various things here, people I could JV with on online projects…

Of course I didn’t know this at the time but when I decided to move to India these people were a lot of help. One of the guys I met at the event filled me in on tax laws – another told me the average employee salaries and rent so I wouldn’t waste money setting up my own company. One person at the event ran a freelancing company which was relatively cheap compared to other ones for high quality – I still use him sometimes for articles. I’m probably going to do a big product launch with another person at the event sometime this year, while I’ve spoken with others about running paid coaching classes in India in future.

Although I can talk to some people online an hour a day for a year, I’ve found that it’s easier to build strong relationships in person (or even over the phone). I consider some of the people that attended strong business friends and will be meeting a few of them over the next year while I’m in India. It’s also good to have some friends that are in the same field as you – if I talk to people from school / university etc about IM, they’re interested but don’t really understand, whereas people you meet at seminars will know the basic stuff.

The Ripple Effect

This is part of the credibility thing, however going to an offline seminar / meetup also has a ripple effect.

See, (as an example) every person in internet marketing tends to have one or two friends that they talk to on a daily basis (at least). So say Jack came to my seminar, he tells his friend James what he did. Months later, James’ friend Bob asks him if he knows this guy called “Jason Pereira”. Wait a minute, yes he does!

The roundabout thing above is just an example, but in real life I’ve had people contact me or have them reply when I contact them, something like You’re Jason Pereira? Didn’t you hold some marketing event thingy in Mumbai? You get the idea.

So on a multiple of five, if each person at the event tells five people they met me, that’s an instant 150~ more people that have heard of me. This is subconscious trust – they’d be more willing to work with me, for me or buy stuff from me simply because they’ve heard my name before.

I’ve done one seminar and met maybe 20 people in other meetings because of Internet Marketing. Some of which I still talk to, others that I can call if I need help / advice with anything (and they can do the same, of course). Directly, I haven’t made any money from that seminar itself, but indirect I will make thousands due to the credibility, JVs and all that. And not to mention all the new friends.

The last thing is mastermind groups… which again is a type of networking, but it’s basically a way to make sure that all of you stay on track. For example, it’s easy to waste time online if you aren’t focus – imagine if you met five marketers every week or twice a month and had to tell them your progress, and you were held accountable for it? You’d be more likely to work hard if you knew five other people were waiting to hear how you did, and you also had five other people that would help you if you ran into any problems.

You could have a mastermind group for blogging, for affiliate marketing, for niche website development, for pay per click… whatever you want. You and your group could learn together and grow together – five heads are better than one.

So find 5-10 people from your area and see if they’d be interested in an offline meetup. Just to touch base, make new friends and learn. You can find them through places like Twitter, forums and so on.

Speaking of offline events, if any of you are in India check out this page… a coaching week in Bangalore teaching you how to make $500/month passive income at no cost whatsoever. Just a little thing I’m working on with a partner.

I’ve learned how to use h2 tags on here now, and they look pretty nice so posts should be better formatted etc in the future. Still not sure if I can be bothered to use things like images, but we’ll see