Mobile sites
January 22, 2008
I bought a couple of .mobi domains during the domain landrush period. The names aren’t too bad and after seeing this travel site for sale on sitepoint it has given me some motivation to do something with them.
I never liked using a mobile phone to browse the internet, but I know it can be useful particularly if you are out and looking for a bar/restaurant. I just checked my .mobi domains and it looks as though they are getting some traffic, which is always a good start.
Google has also released Adsense for mobile phones, so I think this could be something worth looking into, particularly as the market won’t be as competitive as the www.
A-ha moments
July 15, 2007
I think it is interesting to look back and try to find the moment when you discovered something like a new way of making money. You discover something you had never heard about before or haven’t given it any thought. It could be from reading a magazine or newspaper article or reading something on an internet forum.
I can remember the time I was reading a post on a Japan forum, by a guy who was boasting how he had just made $3000 selling a Japanese antique on ebay. Just that one post turned on a light for me and I got into buying and selling Japanese antiques. I had never given it a thought up until that day.
I remember just after I had started this blog, I did a search on “make money blog” and I found Probogger.net
I have lots of different ideas every day for new businesses and the last few days I have been thinking a lot about this one idea. I have had the idea for quite a while, but I came up with something related, while I was reading the 4 Hour Work Week. If I go through with the idea, I could say that was the A-Ha moment. The more I think about it, the more I can see the potential.
I have registered a couple of domains that I could use and have started doing more research.
I enjoy travelling, but it would be nice to settle down in one place for a while.
Business Ideas: Internet payment processors
June 30, 2007
Other than discovering various beautiful spots around the world, travel is a great way to meet new and interesting people. In my hotel in Vientiane the capital city of Laos I met a fellow Aussie who runs his own internet payment website, kind of like Paypal.
He is a solicitor by trade, so he has no technical skills. He is good evidence that anyone with a good idea for an internet business can successfully set it up and get it running without needing the technical knowledge. Sometimes I get the feeling that people who have great technical skills are actually the worst people to start an internet business. They generally have too much pride and want to do all of the design and programming of the website.
This results in the project getting delayed and by the time it is complete they don’t have the energy or possibly the finances to market it properly. I don’t want to downgrade people who have great technical skills, but with the ability to outsource website design and programming functionality it hardly seems worth the trouble of trying to do it yourself or employing an individual to do it.
A payment processor seems like a great business to run. Once it is set up, you basically just receive a commission for every transfer completed. Get a few big ecommerce websites using your service and you have the perfect cash generating system. Paypal doesn’t cover every country around the world, so I believe the market is still pretty much open.
Wifi business idea
June 5, 2007
If anyone has been reading my travel blog you will know that I am in Hanoi, Vietnam now. I have found the number of cafes that offer a free Wifi service to be pretty amazing. I don’t know if it is just me, but when I was in Australia, I saw very few places that were advertising Wifi.
I am sure that there are a few cafes that would like to offer Wifi, but don’t want the hassle of setting it up or maintaining it. I believe there could be a good business opportunity to start a Wifi outsourcing business to restaurants/hotels and coffee shops.
There are probably some cafe owners that would be worried that their business could suffer from offering free Wifi. You could find that people come in with their laptops, order a single drink and take up the seat of a potentially higher paying customer. To get around this, cafe owners could make a Wifi corner or only offer the service outside of busy times.
Once you have installed and set up the modem for the business, there wouldn’t be too much else to take care of, but you could still charge them a monthly rental fee.
Travel to develop your internet business
May 25, 2007
Travel is usually associated with leisure and anything but work, but if you are developing an internet business, it can be possible to combine the two and even improve your financial situation and build your business at the same time. This idea is not going to work for everyone, especially if you have children, but if you are single or have a partner who is willing to accompany you, it is entirely possible.
This idea is also only going to work if you have a business that can be mostly run on the internet. If you need to be taking calls during business hours, it could be difficult. However, if you think from the start as to how you can structure your business model so you don’t have to be working 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, not only will you be able to travel, but you will likely come up with a business system where you are not tied to it, like an employee is tied to their job.
Living costs
One of the hardest things with starting a business is building and maintaining a cash flow which can sustain your living costs. One way you can use travel to improve on this situation is to live in a country or region where living costs are low.
Consider for example where I was staying not so long ago in Nha Trang, Vietnam. It is a beach resort with plenty of places to stay starting at around $5 a night or $150 a month. I heard that could rent a house for around $100 a month. If you are in a hotel you basically have no household bills to pay - no bills for electricity, water or gas.
You can get your laundry done for 50 cents a kilo. Food and beer is also extremely cheap. If you eat at one of the roadside food stalls you can get a rice dish with BBQ’ed pork and salad for 50 cents. A bottle of Saigon beer is just 50 cents at most places.
Internet access
As long as you have your own laptop, numerous places offer free WiFi for the price of a coffee, usually around 50 cents. Connections are not the fastest in the world, but usually fast enough to get your work done.
Benefits
Other than the obvious cost savings, you will also find yourself with more time on your hands to either work or to spend at your leisure. Think of it - no commutes, no housework (even at cheap hotels they have staff to clean your room), no cooking and no laundry. You can live wherever you want, whether it is on a hill station in India or on a tropical island in Thailand. Since you are free from the usual distractions in life, the time that you actually spend working is likely to be more productive. Travel often brings new experiences and the chance to meet new and interesting people from every corner of the globe.
Other considerations
Of course you still need to get to your ideal location, but if you fly out of season you can usually get a good deal. You will also need to purchase some travel insurance and you need to keep abreast of visa regulations of staying in a particular country. Working in an idyllic location may require a little more motivation for some people, but if you think of the possible alternative to being stuck in a cubicle it might help keep you motivated to do a little bit of work each day.
Get a domain and get users to fill it with content
January 27, 2007
I don’t normally buy magazines, but I could help buying the latest edition of Business 2.0. The article which caught my attention was on Richard Rosenblatt. He is only 37 and helped broker the sale of MySpace. In 1999 he sold his company iMall to ExciteAtHome for $565 million.
His latest company is Demand Media. He sees the value of buying quality domain names and rather than just putting up a page of PPC ads, he is developing the site, or at creating a site which allows submit their own content.
I couldn’t help feeling that I am trying to implement a similar strategy, albeit on a smaller scale.
You can read the full article here.
Money making ideas from two years ago
December 12, 2006
I am in the middle of cleaning up the hard disk on my desktop PC and came across this word document which my friend sent me who I was working with at the time. We had plans to work together, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that he was good at creating ideas, but not so good on the execution.
We both started blogs around the same time. His last entry was February 2005. Not necessarily because of his ideas, but I did actually implement a few of them.
Here is the complete document:
Objective:
To increase revenue streams to 450,000 yen (around $4100) per month by utilizing multiple revenue streams across various industries
Possible Revenue Streams:
· Translation firm
· Web design firm
· Web development firm
· Discount dedicated server service (JI)
· Job board (J1)
· New Business Consulting
· Startup board
· Importing company
· Google ad words
· Advertisement revenue for content (i.e. Blog site)
· Social Network site
· Social Enterprise: get government support, international agencies, philanthropy
· Amazon webstore (API)
· Find-A-Teacher clone
Time Frame:
Immediate. Of the above possible steams, at least one should be selected and fully developed (70/30 ratio) by the end of Oct. All other streams should begin once the initial stream is set up.
Key Rules:
· No multi-tasking unless human resources are available.
· No sharing of streams with each other. They must be separate streams. Though they can be in the same industry.
Strategy:
I will build at least four revenue streams established by the first quarter of 2005. The first stream by Oct. if at all possible.
For a stream to be viable, it must generate 100,000 yen in less than 5 hours per month. Though this level of revenue is dependent on the qualities of the stream itself.
Time available:
No more than 20 hours a week is available to commit to streams. That is about 3 hours a day, every day
Installed Drupal
November 21, 2006
I finally got around to installing Drupal on a spare domain I had. There is a huge list of setup options. I am not sure what they all mean yet, but I have turned almost everything on. I have installed a different theme, which was fairly painless.
Forums and user blogs are inbuilt and I believe there is a way users can upload pictures to the site. All of these things require separate components in Joomla.
It feels like any new software at the start. It is so easy to get used to an application and as soon as you start using something different, it all seems too complex - which is where I am at with it right now.
I am no expert with Joomla, but I have been using it for around a year now and can get most things done with it that I want.
I think knowledge of these open source content management systems is invaluable if you wanted to create websites for people. Potentially a profitable little side business. By installing a few different modules you can create a fairly decent website with no programming knowledge in a matter of hours.
Any areas you are a bit rusty on you could easily outsource to an offshore company.
You could do it all so inexpensively, make a decent profit and still be able to charge a competitive rate.
Opening an Internet cafe
January 23, 2006
I know it is not the most original idea, but while travelling around the past month, I have started to think it would be nice to run an internet cafe.
I always thought that Internet cafes would eventually become redundant, but they have actually become more important for travellers. Most places I visited were often full.
Some of the advantages I can think of in running an internet cafe:
- I could work on my sites full-time while running the cafe
- Get to meet people travelling around
- Live in some beautiful tourist spot
- Cheaper living costs if I don’t live in a major city
- Fairly cheap set up costs
- Build a business which I could potentially sell at a later time
- Offer lots of other services such as travel info, network games, telephone cards, photo printing and so on.
Disadvantages:
- Long hours
- Potentially a competitive market
Inspiration
January 28, 2005
There’s nothing like reading a classic rags to riches story to get some good inspiration. Read the story here about how a homeless entrepreneur launched $100 million empire.
The good news is the company has almost be formed and have received approval for finance from my bank. I will be putting in at least one offer today on a vacant place with a potential 10 per cent return.
