What online business to choose? My true story and experience

I know there are so many people who want to have real online income and earn online. Too many people struggling and getting conned by BS training programs. Let me share my true story if that can help you in anyway.

I came to Malaysia 3 years ago after winding up my Technology consulting business in Australia.

The first thing I did was by attending seminars of SUCCESS RESOURCES. I attended many of those seminars and attended many of the courses. I spent considerable amount of money and time. I won't say it's all bullshit but at least I learned few things. I would say 5% of my knowledge came through those courses but mostly were all rubbish. And yes, true, majority of these guys do earn from their followers and training programs online.

If anyone has heard of Even Chia, ok, what I learned from him was about Adsense/Micro niches. Being a very aggressive businessman, the first thing I did, setup 200 micro niches and started buying many adsense websites from flippa in those days. I spent about USD85K while aggressively buying many adsense based websites. My earning reached something like USD3K+ per month because I had been buying many existing established websites. I am talking about end 2009 and early 2010.

Hmmm, my experience. Not really cool. Still struggling because I kept spending more and more to buy more and more websites but not all sites can last longer and they can't keep making money unless you spending equally on SEO which cost too. I was new so I kept trying whatever methods I could and pushed my adsense income max to USD5K. That was the peak. The challenge was to maintain this income which was hard because many older sites keep loosing income over time due to lack of SEO work and not every new site was good enough. So I kept struggling. You may think USD5K revenue is cool enough, however please note, I was not alone. I had a team of few staff members working for me. I come for a corporate background and very corporate mindset. I won't work from home or work alone by myself. I would rather rent office space, hire few people and get them busy on my projects. What for I am in business? I am in business not to work so hard and work day and night. I am in business to work as little as possible but earn as much as possible. I know many won't agree so let's not argue on this point

In the meanwhile, I started trying affiliate commissions and I bought many affiliate commission sites. Affiliate commission wasn't cool enough because I got many of my google adword accounts suspended because google wasn't happy about such sites. I tried many things, I worked on forum marketing, blogs, ads, affiliate, adsense and the max turn over I reached was USD10K. Please note, this is just the turn over, it does not come in my pocket because I don't work alone. I have my team of developers who get all sites ready for me and follow whatever I need them to do. I had admin girl, I had accounts girl who in fact handling my left over Australian business which was feeding the business for sometime.

I had blown up more than USD170K by this time already while trying too many things, however I could say yes, I had online business, I am surviving but it's not something too good either because every day we had challenges, every day trouble, every day getting accounts being suspended on forums, google, affiliate sites. Because of my past technology background and experience, I had many virtual machines, every VM has an IP of different country and I manage many different accounts from many different countries. I did everything I could. Biggest challenge was to keep the business moving. I sold most of my assets and did re-financing of my malaysian house in order to keep getting more cash and keep continuing my experiments as I had to keep going.

Mid year 2010, I met someone who told me about Ebay and I spent USD1.7K and sent 2 of my staff members to go and learn ebay and come back and we try this ebay thingy. In fact I had been using ebay myself since year 2002. However I was just a buyer and would buy few things but never knew about using ebay as a professional seller and this is what we learned this time.

We sold couple of things on ebay and I could see that we can make some money here. This is where I got myself personally into this area and started exploring it aggressively. I started buying things direct from Chinese factories and started selling them on ebay Australia, ebay malaysia, Ebay USA, however severe competition won't let you earn much. My total business volume was between USD15K-USD20K by now. I gained enough experience competing on ebay and I started expanding the business aggressively to websites, amazon and too many other channels. I did not just rely on selling on ebay. I started expanding things by setting up a legal business in UK, USA, Australia and I started setting up Amazon account under those business names in those countries and then I started selling products on those channels. Website is the most important one where we do ranking by spending good amount for SEO.

Now, after almost 1.5 years, Ecommece is my only and only business. I have sold most of my affiliate/adsense websites. I have many ecommerce sites. We selling almost USD100K a month and had a turn over of more than USD 1 MIL in just 1 year. I have more than 20 people in my team sitting in US, Philippines, Pakistan and Malaysia. However I still have a long way to go and achieve a lot more than this.

So if you say that people don't earn online then this would be wrong or if you say people bullshitting and earning from their followers only then this would be wrong too. I don't have followers. However yes, I am building up because too many people want to learn from me on how did I build up my Ecommerce business and in fact I started giving lectures already in US/Canada and now doing in Australia and few other countries. However remember, earning from training is not the income I consider as online income. It has got nothing to do with the online income that I developed through ecommerce. The only purpose of those training programs is just to build an army for myself where we can create a bigger impact together with that army such as product branding, bulk buying wholesale deal where I know I have an army who can sell it if required. So I can't consider the training programs income to be my online income.

For me, my pure net online monthly income would be anywhere between USD10K - USD12K max at the moment which is my net salary that I take home other than any profit that company makes. However remember, I have burned up USD300K+ of my own capital to reach this stage. So for me this is not impressive what I have achieved. I wasted most of my money in those stupid training programs, adsense, affiliates, trials and too many trials and experiments. After too many trials and experiments I finally reached Ecommerce. So my real investment on ecommerce business wouldn't be more than USD30K+ but the earlier USD300K was wasted in experiments.

I am very positive. Now I have got a great business model and I am expanding it very fast and reaching USD 3 MIL in annual revenue is not more than 16-18 months away. At least I am on the right track.

Remember, ecommerce may not be right for you or everyone. I know there are people earning tons of cash in adsense but I couldn't achieve that despite my aggressive business attitude. So my point is that not everything can be your cup of cake. At least for me Ecommerce is the future and I am good at it.

Anyone need any help, any advise, no worries. I am always happy to help. You don't have to pay anything for advise. And I am always traveling and if anyone would like to catch up with me then I'll be happy to assist wherever I can.

Thanks
Sunny Ali

I am posting some free tips by writing my own book. Please see one of the post on how to identify profitable niche by using google keyword research http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=2421942

 

Nice story