All About Me Making Money Online

Warning: this is a long autobiography.

The first website that I built all the way back in 1998 was a website to help small business to create their own business websites. It was purely for non profit use and there was a huge demand for advice on how to create effective websites. I too was a completely penniless newbie at this stage and now realize that the idea that a business can “learn apply grow” was somewhere in my mind even at that time.

I think that it is all but forgotten that the top free website host was geocities.com and there was another called tripod.com. I used both these services. 

I used very primitive html editor to create my first web pages – talk about really complicated and difficult coding! It took me about two weeks to put up my first web page.

Thank God then Frontpage by Microsoft came around – I can’t believe it now but it was a really good software then and – incredibly enough – really popular. And the websites I created started to multiply thanks to the productivity boost of Frontpage.

I was full time employed by KPMG Sri Lanka as an auditor and later as a consultant – I guess being so closely interacting with companies made me want to help them also using my knowledge of the Net and business management good practice.

At this time I created a website on a free hosting site called bizland.com and the name of the site was bizplan.bizland.com this led to a lot of confusion as it seemed to most that this was an official  site on bizland.com !

The site was all about how to create your own business plan using business plan templates.

A company offered to register web names for free – yeah it was a crazy business model that didn’t last long but I was the happy recipient of two web names called srylanka.com and ismall-business.net

My first mentor was Dr. Ken Evoy of sitesell.com fame – I learnt almost everything about preselling and earning commission from him – and even then his software was really ahead of its time as it was a “cloud” based business model long before anyone had heard about the cloud. Many other Entrepreneurs on the web owe their start to Dr. Ken Evoy.

My first online purchase using my first brand new credit card and was Dr. Ken Evoy’s ebook all about preselling and affiliate sales commission priced at $17 – it was an enormous book.

In the next stage of my evolution I created business directories for Sri Lanka and also some niche based directories – because directories were the in thing all because of “Yahoo” and the good old real human edited directory – this site was the Google of yesteryear and you didn’t exist if you weren’t in the Yahoo directory.

At this stage Google was just testing its now famous/ infamous “algorithm”.

The next stage – Enter Adsense and began the golden age of money rolling in from my directories to my bank account and all this totally passive income streams. It was an incredibly optimistic era and the thinking that nothing could go wrong – then the bubble burst!

Google changed its algorithm and the totally passive income stream dried up overnight and never came back.

This heralded the web dark ages were everyone thought they had the silver bullet and kept shooting each other with it.

I was stubborn and thought that Dr. Ken could do no wrong and stuck with his product which was in real and steep decline and delayed my switch to the greatest open source software ever created “Wordpress”

The blog revolution probably started with the rise of WordPress and I didn’t start on my  own blogs until it was way too late and then overcompensated by creating 15 blogs – which in hindsight is way too many.

I am now in the diet and fitness, life coaching, personal finance, small business management, success related,  affiliate marketing, and Sri Lankan news-blogs-directories and make money online niches which is probably way too many blogs to manage – but I have to learn that lesson too in the hard way!

If you expected to read an epic story about a starving person who was down to his last dollar and then created a money machine that propelled him to the stratosphere – that he is now in the 1% of top capitalists.

My story is not that but one of grinding away slowly, persistently and stubbornly over the last twenty plus years – to grow a bit everyday. By making everyday count – life is not about the destination but the journey.

I guess my business vision has been drafted by my journey so far – “Learn, Apply and Grow”

Thank you for visiting my website.