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Over the past year I've been very intrigued by the top 1% of the people online who can actually make a living from some type of a business online. I say 1% because they're very hard to find and when you do find them not all of them are keen on sharing much about their success. There are a few like John Chow - Making Money Online who go into great detail on how they make their money. It's not easy but for a dedicated person it's a dream waiting to come true.
I'm going to start putting more effort into my personal blog here and try to reveal as much as I can about different techniques and theories that are available for making money online. I've been trying to break into the market over the past year and I think I'm on the right track. Every so often you hear of someone like Shoemoney who got booted to stardom very quickly and it's great to see but very rare. I hope that with a lot of hard work I'll be able to get to a level where I can be my own boss and dedicate most of my time to my online projects.
As some of you know a year ago I've built a site called Questionville.com. Mainly based on the Digg idea but taken to the next level. The idea behind the side was to provide users with a site to ask questions and let users rate the best answers which would bubble to the top. It was a hit right from the start. But I wasn't prepared for it. I didn't know the first thing about marketing... I had a great product on my hands but no idea how to market it. Over the past year the site has slowed right down and a bunch of competitors have come out and "borrowed" some of my ideas. More on that in a future post.
Anyway so I'll be getting into some details about how I started some of my blogs and what has worked for me in the past. And hopefully everyone will enjoy my perspective of making money online.
Well this was the weekend... the weekend where I got to see Donald Trump live... and let me tell you I was not disappointed. The guy is a great entertainer, even if he doesn't consider himself one to be, he is. For those of you who missed it, well that's too bad you can wait till next year but for now here are some thoughts I had about The Learning Annex.
We got there Saturday nice and early at 8am... the Toronto Convention Center was already packed and buzzing with entrepreneurs from all over Toronto. I promptly proceeded to get my schedule for the weekend which wasn't included prior to the event. One of the first things I noticed was that all the "Big Shots" aka Trump, Bach, Branson weren't there till Sunday... however Tony Robbins was going to be there. Having listened to his CDs before I thought that might be interesting.
We got to one of our first workshops and the place was buzzing, there was about 10 different speakers that had their own workshops and every single one of them was trying to sell you "The System". Ohh man let me tell you it's was damn frustrating as hell. Each session was about an hour and a half and I kid you not they spend about 80% of the time pushing their products... here is the scoop of what you get... :
- Do you want to be rich? People clap and cheer...
- Are you sure you want to be rich I didn't hear you... people scream louder... this happens about 100 times in each session...
- Here are some pictures of cheques I get every week and how I became a multi millionaire
- Here are some pictures of my family and houses I live in... you can just be like me
- This is the only way you will get rich, join right now and you'll be rich in a few months... some say you can be rich next week...
- Here is how you get rich, buy my binders and cds and you will be rich, do you want to be rich?
- Here is a deal our cds cost $10,000 but just for today and just for 29 people today we will be giving it away for free... well almost $995 (which looks like what the agreed number seemed to be between all of them)
Anyway you get the idea... every single class was like this... you had to really read between the lines to get any useful information out of them.... and let me tell you there was a lot of NAIVE & DESPERATE people there... jumping up and down with their credit cards going further into debt trying to get rich quick...
So you get used to this pretty quick... we then got to see Tony Robbins, I've never seen him live but man he had about 30,000 people in the main keynote hall jumping up and down, hugging people next to them and acting very very crazy. A few times he had 30,000 people jumping up and down and I swear the entire convention floor shook. The guy was good.
The next day the same thing continued but I got to see David Bach, Harry Saxton ( Condo King ) and obviously Trump. Those were the highlights for me I got really inspired by all of them... and by far Harry Saxton and Trump were the best speakers... they told you how it was... no bullshit and you actually got to learn from them.
Donald was just amazing I'm so glad I was there, he's a really funny character if you haven't noticed. I got most of his speech recorded so I'll see if I can get it posted in the next little while.
All in all, the $60 I spent for the weekend was absolutely worth it... I'm pumped up and I can start getting some of my projects going again... if you missed the chance this year make sure you go next year, you won't regret it.
Yesterday was a great day for Apple, by far the best keynote speech to date. Apple TV looked amazing and well the iPhone, what can I say WOW.... it really put my eTen PDA/phone device to shame. I want to go on record and say that I'm buying the iPhone the first day it comes out, it's a very exciting time and I can't wait to see what people will start coming up for it once it gets released, widgets galore ;) .
Anyway since the iPhone is still a couple months away I thought I would play a little devil’s advocate and look at some of the problems that Apple might be facing with the iPhone, I'm sure everyone wants them to succeed, as you can see none of the smart phones have yet but if anyone can Apple will. So here we go:
Complexity of the phone
What am I talking about you ask eh? :) Well I'm talking online purchasing, specifically eBay and their lack of shipping price control. It's absolutely sick that you have pay $60 for shipping of a memory card from China or Hong Kong. I'm sure everyone one of you have gone through this at least once in your life... you order some tiny product on the web, it gets shipped to you for twice the cost to purchase it and then UPS slaps a 29.99 price tag for breakage fee, plus taxes on top and you're paying 3x the amount you purchased the item for.
So I was thinking would it be great to try to get rid of this process? Well I think for certain purchases it's possible to do. For example: Lets say you buy a brand new ipod for $100 on the web. It's NIB (New In Box) and it's located in Australia. Now lets say someone else buys the same product but it's in Canada and they're located in Australia. Instead of shipping the items cross continents you ship the same item but locally between the two people. When you find people like this you connect them together, so you have two buyers and two sellers involved in each transaction
You're basically taking purchases which would normally get shipped across the world and try to find the same item locally that's being sold by someone else. You still pay the same person but the item comes from someone else. Now you save on all those shipping and import charges. I think there is potential in this type of idea if someone can figure out how to do it. There obviously would be problems with DOA products but again if we can over come those we could save tons of money and the environment (fuel).
Thought I would throw this out there.
Ok so from time to time I get some good ideas... I'm always thinking of new products that could make it big... some of them like software I'll keep to myself because I can actually produce them and see where they go; however from time to time I get some good product ideas that involve manufacturing... and to say the least I'm not interested in getting involved in that at all. I'm dedicating a section of my site for those kind of ideas... and if someone has the resources to make these things happen, well good luck :) and if you make some money maybe send some my way ;)
Anyway I love coming up with ideas... product development is something I want to get into... I love taking something and brainstorming on how to make it better and come up with an approach nobody has ever thought of.
So my first idea I would like to share with you is:
Digital Picture Frame on steroids :) Let's call it FlicrFrame
So about 4 years ago I bought my first digital picture frame... it's great, 640x480 resolution compact flash interface... I think it was from Kodak... paid about $200 for it. Over the last few years they went away completely I couldn't find them anywhere and if I did they were twice the price... so finally the digital picture frame returns... tigerdirect has a few in stock now... I just bought one for my mom for Xmas.
Anyway I was thinking... this is all great but with flicker content exploding out there I thought wouldn't it be great to create a digital picture frame that has Wifi/Bluetooth support... image this...
You get a picture frame for your girlfriend or someone in your family... turn it on... put in your Flickr userid and select either a picture set or the whole Flickr library... and all of the sudden you have random photos coming in directly from flicker to a picture frame that's either sitting on your night table or hanging on the wall :) You could also send picture from your photo via bluetooth or from any pc in your house...
Now lets take it a step further... hmm YouTube :) Let's connect to my brothers YouTube profile and have the picture frame in the background download a few clips and display them on the picture frame every so often... Cool eh?
With all the APIs available out there this is very easy to do... all you need is some money to tie in all the hardware together and developer VERY EASY (this is key to sell to the public) UI for people to get digital content.
That's it, I hope that next Xmas or the year after this will hit the shelves... spread the word if you would like someone to make this product.
I'm starting a Video Category for SEO discussions, tips and tricks that I find on the net... written tips are great but I think you can get a ton more info from a video and it's a lot easier to read between the lines if you know what I mean ;)
Here is the first one of Jeremy, I started following his blog at for a few months now, I love his success, he's really given me a boost in my confidence to make a living online.
function obj(el) {
if( document.all ) {
return document.all(el);
} else {
return document.getElementById(el);
};
};
obj('divid').style.backgroundColor = 'red';
Well I finally got a new site design down and streamlined my wordpress theme into PHP classes so I can reuse it in all my blogs... anyway it's been a while since I wrote anything here, I've been very busy.
Just so you know who I am, my name is Bart Dabek and I'm currently living in Toronto, Canada... love it here and I've been in IT for about seven years now. I started off in graphic design and computer animation. I found computer animation field extremely difficult career to get into, after six years years of studding and working on animation I gave it up.
I felt I gave it a fair shot but at the same time I found a new passion in programming and lets face it you can't change the world animating a tail of a character working for pixar. Now more then ever with the internet we have the tools to affect millions of people and make money at it.
Right now I work at VFM Interactive full-time as a UI developer, I specialize in Javascript & Actionscript, I've been working at this for about six years so I have a lot of dynamic content experience. I had the oportunity of working with Brent Ashley back in 2001 on Ajax before Ajax was even invented which was pretty cool. Currently I work mainly on Flash ActionScript 3+ and love it but I still do a ton of stuff with JS, it's very powerful.
I'm hoping to post a lot more on here going forward, in the last 6 months I've really started getting into SEO and monetizing websites. I still have tons to learn but I'm starting to make some in roads into the industry and I hope to be able to do this full time going forward.
So going forward what can you expect to see here? Well... a variety of things... I'm not a great speller so if from time to time you see spelling mistakes or grammar errors bear with me :) Here are some other things I will be talking about:
That's all for now, talk to you all later.
