Signed documents
June 28, 2005
The loan documents finally arrived! I headed off to the New Zealand embassy so I could have an “official” witness me sign the documents. It was a long walk from the station and I was really working up a sweat as we are having an early summer in Tokyo.
They charged me 5,700 yen, around US$50 for signing the documents. I thought he was only joking when he said it would cost this, but then again government officials aren’t known for their humour.
At least now I am one the way to settlement. What a long road it has been.
Nigerian Scammers
June 27, 2005
I know everyone reading this has probably received at least one of those spam emails that promise millions of dollars if they help them transfer money out of their country. There are countless variations on the spam that they send, but all have the same theme.
Here is a great story of how one guy was able to actually scam the scammers: www.419eater.com/html/joe_eboh.htm . It is a great laugh, but also serves as a valuable warning to take care when doing busines on the net.
Loan Contracts
June 26, 2005
I am still waiting for the contracts to arrive from my solicitor in New Zealand. I don’t know who has been wasting more time, them or the bank. I asked them to send them by FedExpress, but they said FedEx was too slow at picking them up so they sent them to me by regular mail. The whole experience is a little frustrating and I am not sure if I will be able to meet the settlement date. My solicitor said they would be contacting the vendor’s solicitor, but I haven’t heard back from them about this.
Adsense on my Japanese site
June 21, 2005
I have started to add Adsense to my Japanese website: ozfudosan.com. It has very low traffic only coming from a Google Adwords campaign.
I didn’t plan on doing any advertising on the site as I only wanted it to generate leads for my realestate business.
It has only had a couple of clicks but the payouts are very good compared to my other sites, which have higher traffic but advertisers are obviously paying a lot less.
I would like to develop it more, but I cannot write Japanese well enough by myself. I have more ideas to develop the content, but I have to figure in translation costs. If I could just make one house sale I would be happy to invest more in the site and build multiple income streams in the process.
I should also note, that after adding Adsense I was still able generate new leads.
Affiliate program blues
June 19, 2005
I have a number of websites now which generate income from Google Adsense and various affiliate programs. Adsense earnings are fairly regular and consistent with any site changes you make. Affiliate earnings on the other hand are very inconsistent (at least for me).
Most affiliate programs have a minimum payout of say US$100. You sign up to a program, spend time making pages and updating links and it is sometimes not too long before you start to make new sales. The new sales sometimes come in fairly quick and you think it won’t be long before you get the first cheque.
Then you hit a brick wall. You have been in a program for 3-4 months and you can only make around $85. You don’t want to quit the program because you are only a sale away from the first cheque, but you don’t really feel like promoting a company that isn’t bringing in any money.
It is almost like affiliates have this built into their programs. I don’t want to say it’s a conspiracy, but sometimes it really makes you wonder if all sales are tracked properly.
I like to join one program and try to promote that fairly heavily. If I have some success, I try to promote it more. If I don’t get any sales, I move the links to a less popular page and then dump the program all together, if I still don’t get any sales after a couple of months.
Once I make the minimum payout, I start looking for another program and move the company that just paid me the cheque to a slightly less popular page. I don’t really get any big traffic to any of my sites, but income is definitely directly proportional to traffic.
Checking your stats can get very addictive. I check my stats at least 2 times a day. It feels great if you go away for a weekend, come back on Monday and find that you have made $200, by practically doing nothing. Sometimes you get a nice surprise but other times it can be very disappointing if you do a lot of work and then find it hasn’t made you any money.
You need to have patience if you want to make money through affiliate programs as a lot trial and error is needed. What works for one person or one website, is a waste of time for others.
I would love to hear from anyone who has read my blog and thought of giving this a go. I would be very happy to provide any advice.
Signing documents
June 14, 2005
I met with a banker in Tokyo tonight to sign some documents for my new loan in New Zealand. He said that I might be struggling for time to get all of the documentation complete by settlement.
I would like to write a big rant about banks, but I think I will hold back and just hope that my new loan goes through smoothly.
Google Adsense Layout Formats
June 13, 2005
I am not sure when this format of Adlinks was released by Google, but they now offer a horizontal for the popular Adlinks format.
I have added it to my ever slow expanding tokyoessentials.com website. I have made the colours try to blend into a menubar format. I will see if this will help with any increase on my CTR (click-through-rate).
On a separate note, I have registered the domain, “dotjapan.com”. I am thinking of making it into a Japan news site, with my own Japan news comments and a variety of data feeds. While looking for an interesting news Japan kind of domain I came across it. It seemed like an interesting domain to have.
If anyone believes domain names aren’t a good investment, take a look at this thread on my favorite webmaster forum.
New Rules of Money
June 12, 2005
I bought a copy of “The New Rules of Money: 88 Simple Strategies for Financial Success Today”
I actually read the sequel to this book and mentioned it in my blog last month. I wouldn’t say there is anything information in this book that could be called “startling”. However, I never really realized exactly how expensive it was to go to univeristy in the US. I come from Australia, where there are only a couple of private universities. Tertiary education is mostly run by the puclic sector and you don’t have to pay for the fees upfront. The money comes out of your salary later on as an additional tax.
It seems like unless you really want to become a lawyer or engineer in the US, you are probably better off to start working and possibly start your own business. There are many famous university “drop outs” that have gone on to be very successful including, Bill Gates.
CSS conversion complete
June 7, 2005
I have finally tonight finished converting all the pages of my Tokyo Essentials site to the new CSS layout.
I have read in so many places that to keep Google coming back to your site you need to add at least one new page of content a day. I am currently at 70 pages. Of course, exactly what constitutes a page is a little debateable. Some pages are just news feeds. But a page is a page. Some pages are very long which I will probably break up into smaller pages.
My goal for June is to create another 30 pages of content. It is a bit of work, but every time I add some content my earnings go up a little bit. Sometimes it goes back down again, but the trend is definitely upward.
I don’t know, if I would be able to go beyond 200 pages but at that stage I should have a forum and hopefully will be able to pay someone else to provide the content.
Web Businesses
June 6, 2005
I am about 6 months into working on websites for profit. I have about four websites and many more ideas for more sites. The biggest problem I have is of course is finding the time to keep them all updated.
Usually working on one site helps pick up the traffic and income of that site, but the others sites tend to suffer a little. I remember Kiyosaki saying that the problem of having a job is that it interferes with making money.
Unfortunately, I am nowhere near close to giving up my day job, but I am working hard as I can to at least to be in a position to do so. Living in Japan is also extremely expensive in terms of basic living costs such as rent.
With a little more work maybe I could afford to live in a country with cheaper living costs like Thailand. Typing away on a laptop on a beach in Thailand - what a nice idea!
