High School Dropout to Millionaire

I have been reading Tycoon Talk for a while, but I forgot there was a success story section. I wrote my success story for 2 other sites and it has been getting a nice response so I decided to share it here. I hope this can be inspirational and helpful.


The Foundation: My first job

When I turned 16, I got a job at a ski shop after school and on weekends. I started out doing a lot of garbage work, but eventually I was allowed to do some sales. I was a shy kid so I had trouble speaking to customers and answering phones. When I was 16, I looked 12, so that did not help. By the end of the first season, I was getting very comfortable with sales and I was producing the most sales for the time I was putting in.

After a couple years, I learned how the business was run and I took a larger role in the shop. Even though I was never put in a management role due to looking very young, I was basically doing everything a manager was doing.

Quitting my first job...

I was getting very frustrated that I was taking on a lot of responsibility, but never given a management role. At the time, I don't think I understood why. I came to the realization that I did not want to be stuck in a job like this anyway. I wanted something bigger. I was always hungry for money and always dreamed of doing some sort of big business that allowed me to be independent. This job would never lead to that.

I am a person who succeeds when put under pressure. Even in school, I waited until the last minute to do my homework or a major project. Now, I stay up late at night to do my work because I race to get work done before I go to bed. I have produced my best work and ideas late at night.

At the time, I knew this is the type of person I was and if I would succeed, it would not be from building a business on the side while I was working at the ski shop. I needed more pressure. The only way to do that is quit.

This simple job at the ski shop gave me the basics of sales and business management at a young age, but it was time to move on.


Dropping Out Of School:

I went from a public school to a private school then back to a public school for high school. The difference between the private school I attended and the public school was huge. I felt no pressure in the public school. I slept through my sophomore and junior year. I never did homework or took a book home. I still managed to pass with B's and C's. It was pathetic. Teachers barely new me, they would give slackers way to get bonus points, there was no trust, etc. The education was a joke. It was like a review of what I already did in the private school. I was never taught how to think for my self or how to figure things out on my own. They only taught trivial things. I was being prepped to be a good little employee and do everything by the book.

Half way through my junior year, I realized this was a waste of time. I wanted to quit and work full time at the ski shop to get more real world experience and see what happens from there. I just knew high school was not helping me grow as a person or intellectually.

I met with the guidance counselor and principal. Neither had any idea who I was. They said, "We don't even know you. You have never been in trouble before. We don't understand why you are dropping out." I just laughed. That was one of the exact reasons I wanted out. I was just another one of the herd. You have to be in trouble or an all-star to be noticed. I was neither because I had no motivation to be an all star and no reason to cause trouble.

I loved the close family atmosphere of a private school. Everyone knows everyone and the teachers are really involved in more than your education. They knew me as a person. I didn't need to be a trouble maker or an all star to be noticed.


Stupid Ideas: My First Try At Business

It is usually not the idea that is stupid, it is the plan. Most people are so blinded by the thought of how much money they can make, they don't think of all of the ways they CAN'T make money with their idea. I found this to be the most important thing when planning a new business.

"Stupid ideas" are needed if you want to succeed at business. Hopefully some of those stupid ideas don't cost you much money. Stupid ideas are a learning experience. You learn what doesn't work.

If you have a successful business that you started on your own, then I am sure you hear people coming to you with ideas all of the time. They are so excited and motivated as they tell you their idea to make millions. Then they ask you, "so what do you think?" It is so hard to tell them all of the things wrong with the idea and ruin their dream, but they are blind to all of those pit falls. They have never tried to build a business to know how many things are wrong with it.

When I start a new business, I spend a ton of time running numbers on different scenarios. The scenarios don't just assume x number of customers spending y. You must be your businesses worst critic and find all of the holes before you fall in them.

My stupid ideas...

After quitting my job at the ski shop, I knew I wanted to work on my own. It was the late 90's the internet was all the hype and everyone was talking about the money to be made there. This was my opportunity to get in the ground floor. My first idea was to see what other successful people were doing. I saw one of the late night infomercials and wanted to give it a try. Yeah, it was him...Don Lapre and his famous"tiny classified ads"! Hey, I was young, hungry and gullible. He had a "new system" that would work online and I thought it was worth a try since I had no idea how to make any money online. Obviously this did not go anywhere.

I jumped from one idea to another. I searched for ways to make money online and that lead me to one Multi-Level Marketing program after another.

It always seemed like the only way to independent wealth was MLM. Every successful person on the TV was saying this. It was all over the internet. It had to be the way. It just made sense. You just build a "downline" who make money for you. It seemed so easy.

I just felt like I had to get in the right MLM program. I taught myself how to build sites and do some basic marketing. I would build sites and try to join marketing networks where i could trade some clicks. I had no money for advertising, so i was trying very pathetic marketing tactics. So many sites offered "the best way to get traffic to your site for free" and I fell for them all.

Nothing was really working. I managed to get some sales here and there, but i was not making money. I was getting better at building and marketing sites. Eventually i built up downlines of hundreds of people. Still no money.

I realized that MLM are horrible businesses. Actually they are not real businesses at all. The argument they always made was, "all businesses are multi-level". They would give examples of McDonalds or manufacturing as being multi-level. It is true those businesses, like most, have levels. There is the manufacturer or supplier, usually a distributer and then the end retailer/sales person.

They made it sound like the levels in MLM are just like any business. The reality is the "levels" in MLM are ALL in the bottom level of normal business levels. I was just a salesman like any other salesman except my income is commissioned based. I either made a commission on a product sold or products sold by people in my downline.

The natural problem with MLM is everyone is attracted to it because it is sold as a way to make money while others work for you. Basically, it attracts lazy people. This is why i had hundreds and sometimes thousands in my downlines, but not making money. No one in my downline wanted to work.


Better Idea: Just Basic Business

Instead of looking for the perfect business, I realized I should just be doing something basic. I was learning how to market websites online. I was getting thousands of people to join MLM programs, so I obviously was learning how to get visitors and get them to join a program. I was just marketing the wrong thing. I needed to market normal things so I can get paid a commission right away instead of waiting for someone else to perform.

Affiliate marketing seemed to be the way to make great money online with no expense. I basically needed to build sites and promote some offers and the cash should roll in.

I found several products that were in the "make money" market which was similar to the MLM market. I felt like this was an easy market to capitalize on. I eventually taught myself how to get my sites to rank in the top search engines such as Alta Vista, Lycos and Excite. I built small sites that showed people html tricks, marketing strategies, which affiliate programs were good and how to market them. I received commissions when someone would signup for software that I recommended for marketing online, when someone signed up for an advanced marketing guide, etc.

It was all starting to add up. I also built sites for something called "paid to surf". These were becoming very popular back then and there was some big commissions to be made. I was one of the top ranking sites for many of the keywords back then and generated around $10,000 in profit each month from these programs... that is until they all stopped paying and went bankrupt in the dot com crash.

Ok, it was time to make sure the companies I choose to promote can actually pay me what they say after all of the work I do.


Secrecy: Growing Quietly To Avoid Being Eaten!

Despite taking a hit with the "paid to surf" companies, I was still generating good revenue and I wanted to expand. I knew how to rank at the top of the search engines. (It was easy pickin' back then!) I just needed to scale up. I built many more sites for different products and different niches to get them ranked in the top of the search engines. I was going for a large quantity of small sites to generate more and more revenue.

After a few years, I saw a problem. Affiliate marketing is EXTREMELY competitive and had a very small cost to entry. This means once you start making money and people know it, they copy exactly what you are doing. It is cheap, it is easy, it works and it is a pain in the *** to battle. I went silent for 8 years. Everything I did was a big secret and this was the case with all of the successful affiliate marketers. Even the affiliate marketers who sold "how to make money online" programs kept quiet about their actual money making sites. No one wanted their strategies, site layouts, traffic sources or anything else getting leaked to other affiliate marketers.

One of the important rules was never to talk about your success in affiliate marketing and show one of your sites. Some people did this and I stepped in and took a big share of what they had.

I built hundreds of sites in many different markets. I was sometimes building a site a day. Each site had to sell a product in order for me to make a commission. I needed more than just traffic from search engines, I needed to convert that traffic into a sale. After building hundreds of sites and trying countless strategies, I discovered ways to increase conversions to maximize my revenue from each site.

Some of the sites I built were not small. I put a lot more attention and money into some of them.


Fundamental Problem: I had to get out

By 2006 I had an empire of sites generating over $2 million a year. I felt on top of the world. I was making so much money and could afford anything I wanted, but I felt like I had to make more. I felt something was wrong. Making that kind of money should of made me feel very comfortable. Something was off.

I felt maybe it was not a good thing my business was built off of a ton of small sites. My most successful sites made millions by themselves, but I always felt like they could die at any time.

In 2007 I finally realized why my model was so fragile. Despite expanding, my income did not grow. I did a lot of digging and found the problem.

Like I mentioned before, affiliate marketing is very competitive. Any other marketer could copy what you are doing and hurt revenue. I was always a step ahead of them and very secretive. There was a bigger enemy. The actual companies I was promoting.

In the first 10 years of online affiliate marketing, companies relied on affiliates to drive a massive amount of business. Good online marketers would never work for one company at a regular salary. If you knew how to market anything online, then there was too much money to be made by sending traffic to an affiliate program for a commission. As colleges began to teach basic internet marketing, more and more kids would come out of college eager for a low salary job. Colleges never sell the dream of becoming a millionaire. They pound it in your head to graduate with good grades and start at a low salary in a good company where you can grow.

These kids out of college now had enough basic knowledge needed to copy what I was doing and dumb enough to do it at a low salary. The companies I promoted hired them and told them to copy what their top affiliates were doing. I was usually one of them.

The companies I promoted had all of the data from my sites. They tracked how I sent them traffic. They simply had their new employees make sites like mine (which converted traffic like crazy) and then they would market their sites like I marketed mine. I worked so hard keeping everything I do secret so other affiliates could not see everything I do, but I could not prevent the companies I promoted from seeing everything.

The entire affiliate industry was falling apart. Now, it is just a small fraction of what it was.


Selling: I finally get out

In 2008 I started shopping my business to all of my competitors who I knew were larger than I was. The only offers I would get is 1 or 2 months of revenue. I kept working on one potential buyer. He said "no" to me a dozen times. I would keep pressing to show him how he could profit from the buy. The recession hit and it was a hard sell, but I managed to get him to see the upside. I managed to unload everything for a pathetic price of $700,000.

I was certain I wanted to sell despite getting what I could make in 6 months. First, I did not feel comfortable in the ability to make long term money with the business and I wanted to be able to focus 100% on something else. Second, I was bored of what I was doing. Finally, the biggest thing that pushed me was the recession. When the market collapsed, I knew it was a huge opportunity to make a massive ROI in stocks.

I felt releived when it was sold and excited to get all my cash into the stock market.

If I had to do it all over again, I would have focused on a few sites and made them huge.


Doubling Down: Making money from a stock market collapse

I could have sold my business 8 months earlier if I really wanted to and I would have received twice the money. If I did, I would have surely invested everything in the stock market. Investing in the middle of 2008 would have surely bankrupted me.

Selling my business in November 2008 for a pathetic amount of $700,000 and getting the cash when the S&P was around 700 points turned out to be perfect. I was actually lucky to sell it for a fraction of what it was worth when I did.

I have always had a fascination with investing and read dozens of books on the subject. I was heavily researching stocks for several month in anticipation of selling my business. I wanted to invest in companies that were very solid and had the cash or assets to handle the credit lockup. I wanted very strong fundamentials. Companies that increased their revenue, profits and market cap ever year for 5 to 10 years, not just a few years. Any company can ride a hot market or a bubble. I wanted companies that could grow in a recession.

I read annual reports on many companies and dug for any information I could find. I settled on around 10 stocks and began investing. By the end of 2008 I doubled my net worth.

The first 3 months of 2009, stocks had one of the biggest declines ever. I managed to ride out the storm. By the end of the year I still made 6 figures from the investments despite ignoring the market for most of the year. I could have taken advantages of the wild swings, but it was too stressful. One day everyone was saying we would all be broke as the market would go down a couple percent. The next day, all of the same people would scream about all of the money that can be made in this market. I did not want to hear that stuff and took the rest of the year off.


Current Day: Leveraging what I know and swallowing my pride.

My entrepreneurial itch was really getting to me. I love investing, but I wanted to start another company. For years I always had the idea of becoming a consultant, but I had such a bad view of them. I thought if they could really do what they say, they would do it instead of talk about it and experiment with the budget of clients. The fact is, most consultants are idiots who really don't know what they are doing and just talk a good game. That does not take away from the other fact that there is HUGE money in consulting and those who really know what they are doing can make big money. I swallowed my pride and decided to become a consultant.

I started a firm, Prodigal Solutions, that focuses on SEO and Conversion Optimization. These were the 2 areas I had a ton of experience and I knew I could leverage this experience to build a new company for myself and help other companies expand. Despite my experience, I found that it is a hard sell. Major companies want to see case studies and testimonials. How do I get these without clients? I had to start with many smaller companies to build up some case studies. Although, larger companies want to see case studies from larger companies. Getting this firm up to the size I want is taking much longer than I thought. SEO is not something that happens overnight. It takes time to build up solid case studies for that.

Conversion rate optimization is where the real money is for companies. Optimizing a site to convert as many visitors into customers creates huge return and makes everything much more profitable. It just opens up so many doors when a company has great conversions. This is how my business was so successful. My sites converted visitors at amazing rates and that allowed me to spend more money per site for marketing.

The unfortunate thing is many companies feel that their current website designers or developers can do some basic work to increase conversions. Every SEO, design, and consulting company is offering conversion optimization now which is kind of funny. Oh well, more business for me down the line when those companies fail to help their clients and those clients realize how important conversions are. I will be there to help them.

So, there have been challenges in my new business that took time to overcome. After the first year, Prodigal Solutions has hit 6 figures in revenue. Definitely not the income I had before, but it should be profiting in the 7 figures within 2 years.

I love business and I love helping other companies work on their overall business plans, optimize their site and help with marketing. I am doing what I love again.


Source: www.webmaster-talk.com

How web entrepreneurs made money, thanks to Google

At 27, Amit Agarwal grew restless. A techie working in Bangalore, he wanted to live with his family in Agra. But what about the monthly pay cheque? Idea: a tech blog that will help him get freelance assignments. So in 2004, labnol.blogspot.com was born.

The first post was the review of a new printer he had bought. And soon he was fielding questions from people who had the printer or any other gadgets.


Agarwal didn't know it then but the blog would become his full-time profession. Seven years later, he is still writing the blog (now labnol.org), and no longer looking for freelancing. The blog with 4.5 million page views per month has him clocking in 14-hour workdays. The only difference: he works from home. "Back then, I didn't think or know that a blog could be my source of income," he confesses. His source of revenue: Google AdSense, the Google service that places contextual ads on blogs. The blog and Google stay his chief source of income, with 75% of the revenue coming from it.


With little to no capital required, taking your business to the web is clearly the way forward. But decoding the web is not that easy. As yet another tech blogger, 27-yearold Amit Bhawani, found out. Starting as a personal blogger (amitbhawani.com now techadvices.com), the MBA graduate from Hyderabad has 300 domain names registered under his company Digital World Solutions with 40 sites and blogs operational, covering technology, health, education and automobiles.


Bhawani started blogging as a 22-year-old in 2006 and soon realised that it's the only business where there's an assured 100% year-on-year growth. Last year he made Rs 1.2 crore from his blog with 70% of the revenue coming from Google AdSense.

Unlike Agarwal, Bhawani has a team of content writers (four on the rolls) and is soon planning to move out of his home office and set up a team of 16 writers to feed his 40 websites. "It's easy to make money online and you keep hearing offhand stories of webpreneurship. But it's difficult to find any guidance," he says. There are no agencies telling you what to do, and competition will misguide you. The web is the only source.


But as Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development and supporter of many internet-oriented businesses, famously said, "Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant." In his five years as a web entrepreneur, Bhawani says the three Ps that help you are passion, persistence and patience. But a few pointers never hurt.


Find a Niche


While studying to be an engineer, which he never got down to pursuing, Rishi Sachdeva, 27, realised that there's no specific service that caters to NRIs who wish to deliver flowers to India. His mother had a small florist business catering to local clients. His idea: to provide "similar or better virtual environment". He started aryanflorist.com in 2004, when he was studying engineering. Based out of Yamuna Nagar, he built a network of 100 florists within India to deliver pan-India, even to remote villages like Sangrur in Punjab for an additional cost. Today, the company has started delivering gift items like champagne, chocolates along with flowers and has a pan-world presence with a network of 250 florists in countries like the US, the UK, UAE, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.


Sachdeva has Africa and Europe on his list next. After setting up the website in 2004, designed by a Delhi web designer, he only used Google AdWords to popularise the site. gWhen I started out, there was no one to help me out. I made mistakes in reading the Ad-Words clauses, how to get traffic to the site and the search keywords to be used and learnt from them he says.


The first five years of business were spent in understanding how Google works and how to increase his site's visibility. The money that came in was pumped back into advertising. Result: what started as a Rs 200 per day ad spend has spiralled into Rs 50,000 a day (AdWords works on a pay-perclick model).


"There has to be a key differentiator to your blog, site or service you offer that will drive people onto your site," says Raju PP, a tech blogger who runs the site techpp.com (started in 2008). It started as a personal blog in 2005 and took on a life of its own as a consumer and personal tech blog in 2008.

In 2009, Raju quit his job with Infosys to start full-time blogging. The blog has 2 million page views per month with 1.23 million unique users. Raju says he's working harder than he has ever done in any job but he's happy with the results. AdSense contributes 60% towards his monthly kitty of a few lakhs while Tribal Fusion make the rest.


Get the Numbers


Ultimately it's all about the numbers, read the traffic on your site. It has to be more content creative than resource intensive as the people will come back to you only if they like what they see,says Hitendra Merchant of YoBoHo New Media. Merchant hosts 35 YouTube channels and nearly 10,000 videos on Bollywood, Hollywood, general entertainment, cooking, kids and yoga and is part of the YouTube Partner Program (YPP).


An old hand from the music industry, Merchant was in music marketing with HMV and Times Music for some time. In 2007, he joined promoter Shripal Morakhia who exited out of ShareKhan in 2007, to launch a service for digital downloads. The licensing hassles stopped the idea from taking off.


Then they decided to create entertainment content for mobile phones, but were few years too early. In December 2007, the same set of animators designed web content and desimad.com was launched. But Merchant and his men were still struggling with the numbers and thus getting the advertiser interested. In 2008, Desimad started uploading on YouTube. Within 7-8 months, YouTube started paying up and as soon as the YPP started we got regular cheques within 45 days from them, very encouraging for a start-up, and now we are one of the leading partners with the YPP he says. YPP is Google's way of sharing advertising revenue with its most popular and successful video creators. Once in the YPP, ads start appearing overlaid or next to their videos. The content developer gets 68% share of the revenue while Google pockets 32%.


"There's a fair bit of handholding from Google, as they advise on what content will fetch us more views, key searches, feature placements on youtube etc," Merchant says. But over time, he has found out that sometimes what they think will work and what actually does are poles apart. Take for instance, some of our nursery rhymes on the Hooplakidz Channel on youtube gets YoBoHo nearly 50,000 views a day. For 40-year-old Saameer Mody, part of the YPP, YouTube has been helpful in getting the numbers.


Mody, along with two friends, started 1takemedia. com to provide opportunities within the Indian Film & TV Industry. The site also had job postings a sort of yellow pages for the Mumbai film industry. "In 2009, we took the next step by deciding to set up a distribution platform for short films and documentaries through YouTube," Mody says.


The 1takemedia channel on YouTube has over 14 million views and is adding over 50,000 views a day for its library of over 1600 videos from over 800 independent and aspiring filmmakers. According to Mody, there's been a 400% jump in the company's revenues. "The way content is consumed today is changing and it's this evolution that keeps me going," he says.

Optimise your Earnings


Mody is now planning to launch a video app for Apple and Android platforms, which will generate revenues through AdMobs from Google, one of the world's largest mobile advertising networks, offering solutions for discovery, branding and monetisation on the mobile web. He also regularly conducts short film contests including the recent exclusive branded contest called Gorbatschow Pure Shorts.


Agarwal of labnol.org has started making tech videos for YouTube and monetises it through YPP but as he says it's a "work in progress". Once the idea takes off and you have the eyeballs, the rest is a matter of channelising the same resources to develop more content. M R Hari of Invis Multimedia that runs indiavideo. org is an old hand at developing video content.


It was in 1996 he got into the industry and made several cultural videos for Kerala Tourism. In 2004, they realised that DVD is on its way out. And indiavideo.org was born. But how to monetise it? In 2008, their YouTube channel started. From less than 1,000 views a day they are at 50,000 views per day at present. "This is amazing as most of our content is serious and educational in nature," he says.


But more than numbers, aligning with Google has had other benefits too. Like using YouTube as a host server rather their own, which helped in cutting down on bandwidth, server and security costs. "Our annual savings in this regards is more than Rs 10 lakh. Plus, we are free of technical hurdles and save on manpower too," he says. While Indiavideo made Rs 25 lakh last year from YouTube, they follow suggestions from YouTube and Ad-Sense that help in maximising revenues. "Our group is one of the earliest certified marketing partners for AdWords. We use the skills of the advertising team in increasing revenues from advertising by selecting most searched topic in content production," he says.


Also, since 50% of their viewership comes by way of related videos, they have started setting up brand pages of clients on their host site with videos uploaded to our brand channel in YouTube. "This has become a major player in multiplying our revenue and we are seriously thinking of a shift in policy," he says.

What Next?


Sachdeva of Aryan Florist has hired a UKbased web service agency to carry out search engine optimisation (SEO) plan for Aryan Florist that will help to get it on the first page of Google search engine as a search response to certain keywords. "I will keep using Ad-Words but I want Aryan Florist to grow organically too," he says.


And after that he plans to have a physical presence for his company through florist and gift shops. Mody has also launched an education-related video content channel called Pocketgyan which will have tutorials for engineering students and will extend it for other subjects as well.


You could have started your online venture just for fun and it paid for some time but you can't sustain it without continued focus. "It's not rocket science," says Bhawani of techadvices.com. After all, failure can be a click away.


Seven webpreneurs on how to make the online format work for you


Saameer Mody,40
Location: Mumbai
Company: 1takemedia
YouTube Channel: youtube.com/1takemedia
Business: Distribution of "alternate content" ie.
short films, documentaries, indie films, etc
Started in : 2006; Joined YouTube: 2008
Before Google: Less than 1,500 viewers a day
After Google: 14 million views, adding 50,000 views a day
Service Used: YouTube Partner Programme
Money Matters: Rs 9,460 a day
Google Gyan: "Being online doesn't get traffic. You have to network
offline. We are present at all film festivals, take part in
seminars and connect via social media"


Rishi Sachdev,27
Location: Yamuna Nagar
Company: Aryan Florist
Website: aryanflorist.com
Business: Worldwide flower and gift delivery
Started in: 2004
After Google: 30-fold increase in order volumes
Service Used: AdWords
Money Matters: Rs 46,000 a day
Google Gyan: "Google should keep an eye on clicks from network partners
to ensure that they are not spamming to generate more business
for themselves. Once you have established your credentials,
channelise towards search engine optimisation. The
idea is to feature on the first page of Google for key search words"

MR Hari,47
Location: Thiruvananthapuram
Company: Invis Multimedia
YouTube Channel: youtube.com/indiavideodotorg
Started in: 1996; Joined YouTube: 2008
Before Google: Less than 1,000 views a day
After Google: 50,000 views a day
Service Used: YouTube Partner Programme
Money Matters: Earned Rs 25 lakh last year from YouTube alone
Google Gyan: "Google should update their view meter. Their counter for
measuring views is not reliable. In certain cases, we know
that the video has been watched by more than 1 lakh people
but the counter shows 10,000. Using YouTube as the host
server you save on bandwidth, server and security cost. Secondly, it
rids you of all technical hurdles and saves manpower"


Name: Amit Agarwal,34
Location: Agra
Company: Digital Inspiration
Website: labnol.org
After Google: 4.5 million views a month and
1,25,000 subscribers
Service Used: Google Adsense, YouTube Partner Programme
Money Matters: Few crores per year
Google Gyan: "One area where Google can improve is "support." The
premium AdSense partners do have dedicated account
managers but the smaller publishers can only reach Google
by email or though online forums. Also the YPP is still relatively
new. Google can help in the training area so that the quality of
produced content can get better. They do have initiatives like YouTube
Next in the US - maybe they can introduce something similar here"


Raju, 29
Location: Bangalore
Company: Techpp
Website: techpp.com
Business: Personal &
consumer tech blog Started in: 2007
After Google: 2 million views a month,
with 1.23 million unique users
Service Used: AdSense
Money Matters: Rs 4,60,000 a month*
"You have to scale the blog to
stay topical. Extend your
coverage area"

Hitendra Merchant, 39
Location: Mumbai
Company: YoBoHo
New Media; YouTube Channel: youtube.com/bollywoodbackstage,
youtube.com/hollywoodbackstage,
youtube.com/desimad,
youtube.com/hooplakidz, youtube.com/
anandayoga, youtube.com/aniskitchen,
youtube.com/nehabhasin
Business: Video content on entertainment,
health, cooking, children, etc
Started in: 2008
Before Google: 30,000 views
After Google: More than 2 million video
views per day across 30 channels
Service Used: YouTube Partner
Programme
Money Matters: Approx Rs 30 lakh
a month*
Google Gyan: "You'd be surprised as to
what can get you more traffic
online. For instance, a
nursery rhyme gets us our maximum
hits at 50,000 a day"


Amit Bhawani,27
Location: Hyderabad
Company: Digital
World Solutions
Website:
techadvices.com (tech blog), mastergadgets.
com (gadget blog), androidadvices.
com (Android blog), helpfulhealthtips.
com (health blog), autoadvices.
com (auto blog), hyderabadadvisor.
com (city blog)
Business: Websites and blogs on technology,
health, automobiles, city info
Started in: 2006
After Google: 1.2 million views per day
Service Used: AdSense
Money Matters: Rs 1.2 crore last year
Google Gyan: "Start with a generic brand
name even if your blog is a
personal blog. It's difficult to
pitch a personalised blog
(with your name) as a viable business
brand to get advertisers in the future.
Never under estimate the power of
your social connections and start sharing
your blog content with them which
can go viral and help you reach a
broader audience" 

Source: economictimes.indiatimes.com