Mar 7 2012, 04:39 PM, updated 6y ago
I came to Malaysia 3 years ago after winding up my Technology consulting business in Australia.
The first thing I did was by attending seminars of SUCCESS RESOURCES. I attended many of those seminars and attended many of the courses. I spent considerable amount of money and time. I won't say it's all bullshit but at least I learned few things. I would say 5% of my knowledge came through those courses but mostly were all rubbish. And yes, true, majority of these guys do earn from their followers and training programs online.
If anyone has heard of Even Chia, ok, what I learned from him was about Adsense/Micro niches. Being a very aggressive businessman, the first thing I did, setup 200 micro niches and started buying many adsense websites from flippa in those days. I spent about MYR200K while aggressively buying many adsense based websites. My earning reached something like RM10K per month because I had been buying many existing established websites. I am talking about end 2009 and early 2010.
Hmmm, my experience. Not really cool. Still struggling because I kept spending more and more to buy more and more websites but not all sites can last longer and they can't keep making money unless you spending equally on SEO which cost too. I was new so I kept trying whatever methods I could and pushed my adsense income max to RM15K. That was the peak. The challenge was to maintain this income which was hard because many older sites keep loosing income over time due to lack of SEO work and not every new site was good enough. So I kept struggling. You may think RM15K revenue is cool enough, however please note, I was not alone. I had a team of few staff members working for me. I come for a corporate background and very corporate mindset. I won't work from home or work alone by myself. I would rather rent office space, hire few people and get them busy on my projects. What for I am in business? I am in business not to work so hard and work day and night. I am in business to work as little as possible but earn as much as possible. I know many won't agree so let's not argue on this point
In the meanwhile, I started trying affiliate commissions and I bought many affiliate commission sites. Affiliate commission wasn't cool enough because I got many of my google adwords accounts suspended because google wasn't happy about such sites. I tried many things, I worked on forum marketing, blogs, ads, affiliate, adsense and the max turn over I reached was RM30K. Please note, this is just the turn over, it does not come in my pocket because I don't work alone. I have my team of developers who get all sites ready for me and follow whatever I need them to do. I had admin girl, I had accounts girl who in fact handling my left over Australian business which was feeding the business for sometime.
I had blown up more than RM500K already while trying too many things, however I could say yes, I had online business, I am surviving but it's not something too good either because every day we had challenges, every day trouble, every day getting accounts being suspended on forums, google, affiliate sites. Because of my past technology background and experience, I had many virtual machines, every VM has an IP of different country and I manage many different accounts from many different countries. I did everything I could. The biggest challenge is capital. I had a land in Australia, I sold, I had a lot of my stuff that I sold off. I basically sold off most of my assets. I had a house here in malaysia, I did re-financing to get more money out of it. I had to take loans, cards and everything and at the same time had to keep up with my monthly payments.
Mid year 2010, I met someone who told me about selling on Ebay. In fact I had an ebay account since year 2002 that I used as a buyer mostly. I may have hardly sold 2-3 garage items the max. I had no idea how people make living out of ebay. I spent RM5K and sent 2 of my staff members to go and learn ebay and come back and we try this ebay thing. The trainer was Mr Chan of Netbiz. He is my good friend with his office in Sri Petaling
We sold couple of things on ebay and I could see that we can make some money here. This is where I got myself personally into this area and started exploring it aggressively. I started buying things direct from Chinese factories and started selling them on ebay Australia, ebay malaysia, Ebay USA, however severe competition won't let you earn much. My total business volume was between RM50k-RM60K by that time. I gained enough experience competing on ebay and I started expanding the business aggressively to websites, amazon and too many other channels including lelong, mudah, kijiji, souq.come etc. The most profitable of all is always your own website. And website can't make money unless you spend aggressively on SEO of your website. I had been growing it all aggressively. This year was tough because I had sold off all my assets by that time and with little left over, I had been growing the business. I flew to US and UK just to setup my companies over there and to setup my Amazon accounts under company names in these countries and shipped many of our products to their warehouse. I managed to get my accountants in these countries for yearly accounts, filing and taxation purposes. It becomes more complex when you have legal company setup in different countries and I went this far.
Now, after almost 1.5 years, Ecommece is my only and only business. I have sold most of my affiliate/adsense websites. I have many ecommerce sites. We selling almost MYR300K a month and had a turn over of more than MYR3+ MIL in just 1 year
I have more than 20 people in my team sitting in Philippines, Pakistan and Malaysia. However I still have a long way to go and achieve a lot more than this.So if you say that people don't earn online then this would be wrong or if you say people bullshitting and earning from their followers only then this would be wrong too. I don't have followers. However yes, I am building up because too many people want to learn from me on how did I build up my Ecommerce business and in fact I started giving lectures already in US/Canada and now doing in Australia and few other countries. However remember, earning from training is not the income I consider as online income. It has got nothing to do with the online income that I developed through ecommerce. The only purpose of those training programs is just to build an army for myself where we can create a bigger impact together with that army such as product branding, bulk buying wholesale deal where I know I have an army who can sell it if required. So I can't consider the training programs income to be my online income.
For me, my pure net online monthly income would be anywhere between RM30K - RM35K max at the moment. However remember, IT IS NOT IMPRESSIVE. Because I have burned up RM1 Million of my own capital to reach this stage. So for me this is not impressive what I have achieved. I wasted most of my money in those stupid training programs, adsense, affiliates, trials and too many trials and experiments. After too many trials and experiments I finally reached Ecommerce. So my real investment on ecommerce business wouldn't be more than RM100K but the earlier 900K was wasted in experiments.
I am very positive. Now I have got a great business model and I am expanding it very fast and reaching RM10MIL in annual revenue is not more than 16-18 months away. At least I am on the right track.
Remember, ecommerce may not be right for you or everyone. I know there are people earning tons of cash in adsense but I couldn't achieve that despite my aggressive business attitude. So my point is that not everything can be your cup of cake. At least for me Ecommerce is the future and I am good in it smile.gif
Thanks
Sunny Ali
This post has been edited by sunny2008: Jun 7 2020, 12:40 PM
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