Internet Marketing – Are You Winning the Online Battle? Internet Marketing Insights

I can’t get connected to the internet right now for some reason, so its a good time to write up another post for the blog, and to do some disk defragmenting which is not done quite often enough. Wow, and now that I am on, the connection speed is as slow as the old 14k dial-up that was in vogue about 20 to 25 years ago!

I’ve noticed a slowing down too of what not long ago was a very fast laptop – the one I use for most of my work these days, so some action needs to be taken regards to this.

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Its not quite end of month and I would prefer to discuss income for the month right at the end – at the beginning of August.

However, just to make mention that again – AdSense has been up and down. Some days click through is around 8% over-all (some sites regularly see 20 to 30% click thru), whereas other days its around 2 or 3%. That’s a very large difference, I’m sure you would agree.

Further, occasionally I see clicks on a particular site that receive an income of say – $3 for a single click, and then for the next click on the same one page its 15 cents. Hmmm… yup, I can understand this, can’t I? Can you? I know there is a Google value-added click factor, but this seems ridiculous.

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Neverthelsess, making money from AdSense should really be seen just as any other business venture.

Take the hotel business, for example. For a week it could be booming with custom but no one is drinking at the bar, thus over-all takings are down. Then the next week its far less busy – room occupancy is lower etc. but bar takings are amazing. Now go fathom that one!

So I guess in this case the folks who invested time and money in the hotel are going to complain about things here. They are going to worry that business and customer spend is apparently very irrational indeed, and may even consider selling up their stake or baling out of the hotel line.

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Same for us with regards to our internet marketing work. One monetization format may work very well for us, whereas all others that we have tried simply don’t function as they seem to do for others around us.

I guess one way to get around this problem is to try to emulate others who are seeing more success than we are. That’s not necessarily at all easy though. Many say they see great success but will not show you exactly how. They will let you gain insight by selling some high end product. But that product will tell you half the story, if you are lucky.

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I don’t know where I’m going with this but its food for thought . I think we’ve all been there with regards to failure (or rather, lack of success) in business, and then buying up information products that are supposed to “tell all”, only to find that the “tell all” is more like “tell part of the story and the rest you have to guess”.

This is why its taken me a long time to see some real success with my own online work. I mean, who in their right mind would work an average 50 hour week for over a year and see no income – or at least, see no profits? Yup, it took me about 16 months or a little more before I started to see regular monthly profits, and that was not from AdSense (how odd, I hear you say), that was from Amazon! In appreciation of Amazon and being an affiliate for Amazon products, I would say that from my experience Amazon is the easiest way to begin making an online income!

When you are spending about $400 US a month on glossy internet marketing info products etc. then its gonna be tough to see profits, particularly when all of those glossies simply tell a part of the story. You’d be wiser to invest in a 400 dollar an hour SEO coach who has a real hot reputation – you’d get results much, much faster because they would tell you exactly how its achieved!

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I was talking to the supervisor of a team of labourers just the other day. He had brought a small team of workers around to my appartment to begin work on a long-awaited kitchen. Up till now and for the past 9 months, the kitchen units and sink have been made up of make-shift bits and pieces. When I first took up residence here, I was informed that the kitchen would be fully fitted up and functioning by January. Here we are 7 months later and its still very far from completion.

For sure I’ve been on the phone a number of times and told the management what I think of them. After all, you can rent appartments in this city for literally peanuts. Peanuts – being 70 or 80 US bucks a month, will get you a non-furnished 3 bedroomed apartment in center of town. Absolute bargain for sure! Well, I’m paying a lot more than this so I expect a lot more merely because of that. But you now know that if you want to live the internet dream, you can indeed do so on a very meagre income and a really tight budget!

It may be a bit ‘bare-bones’ but its still gonna be the start of a dream-come-true.

Having said this however – I was out at Basaga hotel last night for a nice meal and a few drinks. Met a couple of friends so we had a few beers and put the world to rights, as you tend to do once you’ve consumed enough alcohol . I suspect one of those friends could truly drink me under the table – he can down the beers, that’s for sure! I call him “Mr Kumar” because I can’t pronounce his real name properly – he’s from India originally and now makes an absolute fortune in the financial sector, here in Sarawak. Lovely chap!

Well, it came to my round for buying some drinks and I kinda inwardly cringed (not just because I’m a tight-fisted Scotsman ) as I know that merely buying 4 bottles of Heineken beer at most hotels in Kuching would mean spending up my weekly beer budget, all in one go. And if you prefer a nice bottle of wine or a good malt whisky, well, what can I say… Be prepared to spend! (Mind you – the local Malay home-made brew (moonshine) which is cheap as chips, is very potent. Consume a few glasses of that and you’ll be breathing fire for hours to come!)

So you gotta be sensible how you spend your hard-earned, even here in Kuching! Cars are more expensive to buy than the United Kingdom!

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However – to get back to the main point, I have to face facts here – the reason I love living in Kuching is because it is so backwards in comparison to my previous home of England in the United Kingdom. Thus, you can’t have it all ways!

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Another point I want to make from this conversation I had with the works supervisor. I asked about income levels for him and his work team. I mean, why not – he had previously asked me about my income and commented about the fact that I sit in this apartment every day all day and rarely get any exercise, even though there is a large swimming pool just outside my front door. , only too true!

{You hear fairly regularly about folks dying who are merely in their 40′s and 50′s and who were as fit as the proverbial fiddle, so when I ‘pop my clogs’ and have to go meet my maker, at least folks can’t say “oh, and he was so incredibly fit…”}.

But what he told me about income levels for himself and his fellow workmen somewhat astounded me. He works an 8 hour

day and works 6 days in a week. And furthermore, he has to travel back and forth to and from work each day which takes the best part of 3 hours a day.

He gains a salary of 300 Malaysian ringitt a week from that, which is equivalent to around $90 US. That’s $15 a day.

How about his work force?

These guys attract an income of just over half this figure. So that’s about $8 US a day, or around $200 a month.

No wonder then they are so thin. These guys do a job that I simply would not be able to – its a very energetic job and in this heat if I were to even do a couple of hours I’d need a break – for the rest of the day!

This said – I remember when I used to travel to Russia and talk with folks (in my Russian English style – all hand movements and no words due to my lack of Russian language abilities) who were earning the equivalent of about $100 a month, and I imagine that’s more than in some countries.

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Now the point about this is – I complain about my income from AdSense, right? How much time do I work on my AdSense sites in a week? On average – perhaps about 5 hours. Not much more than that, or much less than that, on average. I can sit with the Asian Food Channel or Travel Channel on in the background – enjoying the sites and sounds of Balinese culture and cuisine, or Penang and Filipino seafood & spices. And while I’m doing this, I earn almost the same income from AdSense alone as do these guys here in Kuching who work a 48 hour week doing a job that is dirty, sweaty and quite honestly somewhat detestable to my own mind.

Furthermore, I don’t have to spend 2 or 3 hours a day traveling back and forth to my work on a moped. I don’t have to suffer from being utterly soaked to the skin whilst being caught in one of those frequent tropical-style deluges we get here in Malaysia.

Hmmm, so howcome I complain so much about my AdSense income??

Does money bring true happiness or are many of us living our lives as a lie by chasing the rat race?

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Now its your turn. Do you complain about your income from your internet marketing endeavours?

Please let me know your thoughts!

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I’ll be back with more about my monthly income figures and with a few other interesting stats at the beginning of next month, so please watch out for that, thanks!

Tagged as: how to live from internet marketing, make a living from internet marketing, travel and work online, work online and travel