It’s been months since my last update about the local project I’ve been working on since early 2009. The growth rate is really slow due to the slow economy, but it has been growing steady over time. There are two more days before closing the month of May 2012. I have reach new record high in terms of Google AdSense revenue. Although the subscription revenue declined, it is still NOT a bad month and half year at all.

This got me thinking if I should stay with my current subscription model or simply focus on generating more traffic. I think I am going to lower the subscription rate to increase the signup rate. The new goal is to generate 10x traffic before the end of the year and hopefully to generate 10x Google AdSense revenue. This is NOT going to be easy, but I think it’s NOT rocket science. I can do it.

While growing my business slowly, I am also applying a grant from Chase for $250K. It requires 250 Facebook user votes. This is so far the most challenge part to me. I felt down because I realized that most people I know or friends with on Facebook don’t help me to get votes. They simply ignore me. Some of them are even my old time friends and very close friends.

I know everyone has the rights NOT to vote for someone else, but this is the perfect time knowing who your true friends are. I am also amazed by some totally strangers who have the entrepreneur mind-set and were willing to give a total stranger a help. This makes me happy too! Thank you! I appreciate their kindness.

So I end up creating a new contact list to keep those who have helped me in the past. One day, I will pay it forward and return their favor and give them some helping hands.

For those who refused to help me or tell me “Suck it!”, I won’t forget their friendship and ignorance. It’s a small world, we shall meet again.

I have not had an AH-HA moment for sometime until last night.

I’ve spent my life on the Internet since 1992 and become on and off on many projects. I worked as corporate slave for years too. I finally realized that I miss the most important key to become success in the digital world.

I know I have to do my best, and I know I have to be the best I can be. However, I was never motivated to become the AUTHORITY of what I do. I was blind, distracted and not seeing things from third angle. Really. I look back the past 6 years since I move on to my own entrepreneur journey. I have had up and down, good time and bad time, but I keep changing my direction and working some side projects to just make extra passive income. I was never an authority of anything other than my name. I enjoyed too much about “I have done good enough!” I obviously have NOT done enough.

I was focusing too much on generating passive income and become #1 on Google search. I totally ignore the fact that all the true successful businesses in the world have one thing in common. They are the authority of what they do.

Be the best in the industry! Become the authority!

It really doesn’t matter the size of the industry or niche you are working on. No matter what you do and how you do it, you are basically trying to become the authority! Think about the SEO we do all the time and how Google evaluate your website ranking. It’s all about authority! When Google becomes the authority of search engine, Google beats Yahoo and Bing totally. When Facebook becomes the authority of social network, MySpace is fading away. When Apple iPhone becomes the authority of Smart Phone, Blackberry is forgotten.

I have had hard time to compete with the super large company in my industry, and I blame on the lack of funding and their industrial monopoly and bad business practice. I also have had some success with bigger companies wanting to partner with me, I thought I was just lucky and brag about my my SEO success. I miss the true point. I was chasing the wrong thing.

I was doing the right thing using the right technology, but I was not putting myself in the position to become the authority. I pay too much attention on things that won’t make me the authority. I keep asking why do people paying big company huge amount of money with no result and not willing to pay me 1/10 of the cost with much better result?

The answer is easy. I am NOT the authority of the industry. People don’t know me, don’t trust me and don’t have confidence to pay me.

Shame on me to take this long to discover this common sense. Now I see things differently. I am going the right direction from now on.

Again, the niche site will not run Google AdSense to generate revenue. It’s going to be a website rental model. With the little success, I decided to build a second one to rank and rent. Again, the website is also built with Free Weebly’s website builder.

The new website is call ChandlerFootSpa.com, which will be the ultimate resource for people looking for foot reflexology, foot bath and foot massage. The format of this site will be focusing on listing only the top 10 best foot spa and massage center in Chandler.

Honestly, the Foot Spa and Body Massage niche isn’t a very high competitive industry, so it won’t generate huge income like many other industrial driven niche site. However, it is easier to get ranked with the domain name. Of course, you may ask if Google’s new Panda update will get this site banned? Yes and No. It all depends on how you optimize your website for search engine. The website is already ranked on the first page of Google using the main keywords in 3 days.

The stage 2 will be optimizing the content with unique information and add some value to help local shopper find the right information they need. You may also ask how much would you rent it for? I don’t have answer yet, but it will range from $15 a month to $120 a months.

Do you build passive income niche site using Weebly? I recommend you do. The total cost to me so far is $50 for 3 domains for two years. That’s it! Of course, my time is money too.

Stay tune for more …

No wonder other Weebly competitors are going down (Yola, Webs), but Weebly still stands still.

[UPDATE] Read about the round 2 of building passive income niche site with Weebly.

Here is few reasons that I choose Weebly for niche project over blogger. I am not saying Blogger is bad, it is just better to use Weebly for non-Google AdSense type of website. In other words, on those Weebly built sites, there will be NO AdSense, which is 50-50% shared with Weebly. Ouch! The income will come from the value you put on the site with quality content and lead generation.

Here are the main reasons I use Weebly for niche project.

1. Very easy to use – For web developer like me, I can easily setup a new site in less than 1 hours, get custom domain point to the site, register Google webmaster, Bing webmaster and get indexed in matter of just one day.
   
2. Better Design and Template – Weebly gives a whole bunch clean designs and allows you to change image header and add text in it.
3. Really clean code – Weebly generate a clean HTML code, which reduce the page load time.
4. Multiple Media – Weebly gives pretty much all the multiple media integration you need. I can easily add a new Google map and video.
5. SEO Friendly – Weebly gives you the power to create unique title, meta description for each page, but NOT each blog post.
6. No Hacking – So far, I have not heard any one claiming their Weebly site being hacked. I, however, has so much trouble on my own WordPress website being hacked over and over again. I also have to take care of all the upgrade and plugin update. That’s time consuming. It cost my time (money) to do so.

If you are a paid customer of Weebly, you can host 10 custom sites on one account for only $71.80 for TWO FREAKING YEARS. That’s what I did. And here is how I did it.

I already have a Weebly account that host 10 sites for my experiment, which already generate the money to pay for itself. Now I am starting a new account and generate new income to pay for the 2 years hosting. I will then multiply to create 9 more niche sites on the same account. Since I don’t have Google AdSense running on these sites, it means I have to generate income from other methods. So I rent out the site to targeted customers. With one customer for one month, it will pay for the $7.99 .Com domain, stock photos, 2 years web hosting and some ad campaign.

I started a new site just yesterday. It’s called ScottsdaleFootSpa.com. You can see how easy and clean it can be to start a new niche site. The most difficult part is to get it ranked and get it rented. You first have to prove your site can get ranked, otherwise, there is no one rent it for great price. The site is still just 1 day new. I will come back in few months and update my progress.

Just like other niche site program, you build a high ranking website and rent it out. To avoid Search Engine Penalty, you really need to put efforts into it. And Weebly make your job much easier.

I highly recommend you to give Weebly a try. The only visible cost to you are domain name, some stock photos and $72 dollars. If you ever signup Weebly, come back and leave your comment and website URL. I would love to check it out and give you some pointers!

After all, there is one major downside with Weebly. It’s not compatible with any other platform. You can NOT export to blogger.com or WordPress.com. So if you are serious about building a site that you have 100% control, you should host your own WordPress at my current webhosting company.

Sure! You can laugh at me!

It’s been a while since I joint social media like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, Instagram, Google Plus, Plurk, Foursquare and many more that you don’t even know about. I have procrastinate a LOT. I mean LOTS of my time has wasted. My main reason to join social media was to learn how to effectively connect with other like-minded people and promote whatever I like to promote. I was thinking like a passenger, a follower and act like the 99%.

My majority effort are simply wasted even I did get some great benefit from it. It is NOT as expandable as it should turn out. Those social media are simply making money on people’s time. With my worst experience of being drop from the earth. I really can’t waste no more time. I need to stop procrastination!

So I decided to stop log into Facebook for 7 days. It’s day #3 now. Well. It doesn’t mean I am not using Facebook. I’ve setup semi-automated process to update my Facebook fanpage. My personal profile will simply be silent for 7 days. #nofacebook.

I don’t even check into my Facebook app on mobile phone and on computer. The only few things I am still using is Hootsuite and Buffer App to post my update to Facebook fanpage to twitter to Tumblr and Google’s Blogger. It’s a semi-automate way to get my message out and hopefully gain some SEO side-effect. Focusing on SEO is still the ultimate way to get long term result. That’s why I am still using Google+, but not too much time spent on it either.

Well. If you see my post on Facebook. It’s scheduled post. I’ve been long gone for days.

I also decided to get my real life back in the 7 day break from procrastination. I went to South Mountain in Phoenix to enjoy sunset and took some HDR photos! I also went to hike with few Asian friends. I felt so good without Facebook. I think I can live without Facebook entirely pretty soon. Not to mention that most semi-automate posting can be done by hiring other people to do so for me.

Hopefully, I can totally live like the 1% without social media very soon.

Are you procrastinating? Join me and stop checking your Facebook for 7 Days.

Here are something that we really need to learn and execute!

• Use other people’s money to buy time
• Use other people’s time to make money
• Create expandable system to fulfill 99% needs
• Do it fast and repeat it over and over again

Facebook recently bought Instagram for $1 Billion. This is the perfect example of fastlane business model for people who wants to be the 1%. What do you think?

Last night was not a great night in terms of life changing event. I missed the big opportunity in simply 3 seconds. However, I did learn something I never previously thought about. Thanks to the person who drop my business card to the dirt in 3 seconds. I know it may sounds that the person is ridiculously rude. It actually hits my head really really hard and makes me believe that I will do the same when someone hand me their business card in the future.

This is what happened last night. A friend of mine introduces me to a high profile business man. He is well respected in the industry and a very busy business man. What amazed me about him is that he DOESN’T DO ANY WORK OTHER THAN MAKING PHONE CALLS.

With one simple call to the right person, he can get what he wants, get job done and make lots money. For people like him, he doesn’t have TIME. Time is most valuable assets to him. It was my honor to be able to meet him in person. So I got my chance to introduce myself to him. He asked “What do you do?” I handed my so-called very professional and double side business card to him and said lots things that I don’t even remember now. He looked at the card for 3 seconds and said to me. “Interesting! Where is your phone number?”

Before I had my chance to open my mouth and tell him that the contact info is on the back side of the business card, he drop my business card to the floor and took off in 3 seconds. I stood there with my mouth wide open. My friend said to me nicely “That’s just the way he is, but we are done here!” At first 5 seconds, I thought about how jerk this guy was. How can he treat people like dirt and shut people off right in front of other people.

Suddenly, I saw myself in his shoes. I was doing exactly same thing, but nicer to other people when I thought they were wasting my time!

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM! I knew I’ve wasted his 3 seconds to look for my phone number on the business card. He doesn’t even flip my card to see my title, phone and email address. So my life has NOT changed since.

Here are the problems with my business card. I had a really nice logo and slogan on the front side. I have another tag line on the back side along with my name, address, phone number and email address in small font. I look at my business card and it hurts my eyes too. Now I know why he didn’t like my business card and decided to drop me off the earth in 3 seconds.

• It takes more than 3 seconds to look at both side of the business card. It will take even longer to understand what the slogan and tag line means.
• My phone number in between my name, title and email address. It was not easy to spot.

I don’t even have my Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn on my card. He would NOT care that anyway, so why bother showing people that you are on social media? If they are interested in you, they will give you a call and talk to you on the phone or in person.

Don’t waste people’s valuable TIME.

As you can see, my new business card is simplified. It shows only my Name, Title, Email and a super big phone number. It basically says it all. If you are interesting in marketing and investing, give me a call!

Finally, after all these years hard working and making no huge revenue as affiliate marketer, I’ve decided to slowly move away from being an affiliate marketer selling other people’s products. I am starting a new chapter. Now I am offering affiliate program to stay home moms, coupon bloggers, deal catcher and anyone who wants to make 50%+ residual income month after month.

I know there are a lot of challenge ahead of me, but I know I am one step closer to take control of my business model and spend less time on something I don’t do well. Here is the only catch. You have to be a US citizen in order to get paid. I am not ready to blast out the network to international affiliates, since it’s all about promoting local businesses in the US.

I am also getting tired of being dragged by small local businesses, which don’t dare to spend marketing money to improve their businesses. They are not the target customer. I am going after the big fish.

After knowing one very well known affiliate marketer making only $50K a month while spending unknown amount of advertisement fee to claim their victory. It got me thinking how far they can go. In my own experience, earning 3%-30% isn’t big enough. Not to mention that you may be kicked out by your vendor at any time without any reason. You have NO Control. You are working like cheap slave in the modern world.

I decided to use Post Affiliate Pro as my affiliate tracking software. There is one main reason for this. Post Affiliate Pro support direct link and anchor link. In order words, it’s search engine friendly link format. You can easily share the link on social media without being flagged. If I can get 300 affiliates signup and post the link on their website, it’s better than spending $300 for poor quality backlink service from third country.

Other than this, it’s a low cost starting point. I’ve checked out other affiliate network such as Link Share, ShareASale, Google Affiliate, CJ and many more. They are all very expensive and don’t support SEO friendly URL tracking.

The software tracking part is just a most easy step. The next step is inviting people to join the affiliate program and make the sharing link process easier. It’s under implementation now.

That’s for now. Don’t forget! It’s your chance to make huge difference and make significant income month after month.

Image Source: Day 486 / 365 – Late Night High Level Coding Courtesy Of: JasonRogers

Well. It really took me a long time (days) to find out the solutions to clean up the hosts file on Windows. The solutions is actually fair easy. So I want to share this solution to people who had so much troubles fixing it. Almost every search result I found on the Internet are asking me to down extra software, which may or may not contain spyware or virus. So it actually make your problem worst.

The problem:

For some reasons, my computer was infected with either undetectable virus or spyware (tried MacFee, TrendMicro HouseCall and even Microsoft Security Essential without any luck) that lock up the entire etc folders and make the hosts file disappear even I login as administrator on my Windows7 PC.

The hosts file is located under C:/windows/system32/drivers/etc folder.

What hosts file does is to cache a copy of website / domain with their IP address. Hackers and spammer knows how to use this files to drive traffic to their advertiser sites.  Once every few hours, when I click on link on Google, Bing or even Facebook, the browser redirect the link to a third-party unknown advertisement site or porn site.  So I know my DNS records was hijacked.

So the only way to solve this problem is to find out what process are locking up the hosts file, and delete the file and clean the hosts file.

The solutions:

1. First of all, I have to download the HijackThis software (HJT) to check what resources and processes are locking the hosts file found on HijackThis log at line O20. (It was nvinit.dll under sysWOW64 folder).
2. I run msconfig and restart my computer into SAVE MODE
   
3. Delete the nvint.dll file by running cmd as administrators and run del command to remove the file
4. Restart the computer back to normal startup mode.
5. For the same reasons, HJT told me that the hosts file can NOT be modified due to permission. So I know there was a problem with the hosts file, which is owned by non-adminstrator account.
6. So I run cmd as administrator again and run the following commend to change the ownership of the file to administrator using ICACLS Command.
   
7. Now I can change the attribute of the hosts file and make it modifiable. Just type attrib -S -H -R hosts command to change the file attribute to un-hide and writable.
   

Here you go!

At this point, I am still not sure how I got myself into this troubles, but I do believe I click some malicious email or pop-up windows on the browser.

I also wonder how many people will say “Yes. I saw that amazing place!” and turn around say “Nuh. I will never be able to go there.”

[Update] Here is an other shot of the awesome place. Click to find the original resource. http://www.zadan.nl/pics/mount/

Well this picture brings up a good question. What is the purpose of my life?

I found a great personal development blog by Steve Pavlina. I also found his method to identify the purpose of your life in 20 minutes. I think I found mine.

Travel Around The World And Bring Happiness And Excitement To Other People’s Life.

This finding really changed my point of views about what I do for living. If what I am doing doesn’t serve the purpose of my life, I am wasting my time and life achieve nothing but other people’s purpose. I know I love traveling and taking photos, but I haven’t really thought about why I like it so much and the real reason why put up my digital photography blog and the happiest blog on earth!

Today I was all alone for the Christmas. So I went on a discovery tour to visit the Talking Stick Casino in Scottsdale AZ. I took some photos and was able to sit on their balcony for a while to think about what Steve said in his article. Watching people dumping their precious money into the slot machine, it makes me wonder what the purpose of those people’s life are? Seeing people waiting in line for over an hour on Christmas day and pay for $42 for a NOT very healthy over-eating buffet, I bet they don’t know their purpose of life.

While I was trying to find out my purpose of life, I realized the purpose has to ADD VALUE TO OTHER PEOPLE’S LIFE. Not mine. It really makes the purpose searching process much easier. Give it a try!

There is no guarantee that I will be able to achieve the purpose of my life, but it means I am willing to die for it. It’s crystal clear. By looking back my life, there is a lot of stuff I have to get rid off. Or I’d better change the way I live and do business. It’s killing my dream.

At the moment, I still don’t have the guts to put everything behind me and go for a ride like I did in 2006. At current age, it’s hard to draw a line between brilliant brave and impulsively stupid, and chose the right side. I will find out that pretty soon.

What’s the purpose of your life?

Have you visited Mt. Roraima, Venezuela Guyana? If so, please tell me about it.

Image Credit: Cash

I thought about writing this for a long time. While I am in the process to foreclose my unused Internet assets and web properties, I was able to generate Google AdSense income on many of those sites. So I am here to share that with you.

First of all, this is NOT a long term way to generate significant passive income. This will just generate some extra income to pay for your Starbucks coffee, iPad or fancy digital camera gadgets. It will also give you a quick start to test your niche. However, You will need to put more efforts into it to generate significant income.

I am about to close the last chapter of my SLOWLAN Passive Income plan, but I do know there are people out there trying to create extra income and they value their money more than their time. This is for them! It’s a SLOWLANE way to generate extra money. If you want a FASTLANE way to generate money, you need to create an automated system.

So what do you need to accomplish it?

1. An idea about a specific niche
2. Free Website to host your content and Google Adsense or Affiliate program
3. Get your website indexed
4. Get your site linked
5. Get Traffic
6. Keep posting unique content

Many people don’t have extra money to purchase cheap domain name. They don’t have to. The following sites allow you to create free website without costing you a penny. I don’t recommend to use those sites for your Google Adsense passive income for reasons. They do serve the purpose of creating quality DO FOLLOW backlinks.

1. WordPress.com – This is the largest and most famous blogging platform. You can also download your own from WordPress.org to host on your own servers. WordPress.com DO NOT allow you to post Google AdSense (Javascript) on your website unless your site has tons traffic. In that case, you’d better host your own site.

2. Weebly.com – Weebly is so far the best FREE, simple, and flexible website builder behind Google’s blogger for Adsense. It doesn’t have lots unnecessary features and it runs super fast! However, you are sharing 50% off your Google Adsense profit with them. The selling point is that you can really create a multi-pages website is less than 20 minutes. They have pretty good SEO features.

3. Webs.com – A very robust and complicate website builder that is over kill. It means slow page loading. They also share 50% of your Google Adsense profit. They make their system so robust, you will end up hiring someone to do the work for you. Ouch!

4. Yola.com – Good for backlinks and nice landing page. However, their site is slow and their website traffic is fading.

So here you go. I pick Google’s Blogger.com for few reasons.

1. It’s Google’s property
2. It’s simple and stupid easy to setup.
3. You can post anything
4. You own 100% Google AdSense profit
5. You can auto post content from third-party script or write your own

Few things that Google Bloggers bothers me.

• No Fancy Template
• No Flexible Layout
• Too many spam blogs
• Sloppy comment system
• Poor SEO

Here is what I’ve done on Google’s Blogger. I have about 70+ blogger websites linked to each other. Each one of them represent different niches or regions. It took me few hours (SLOWLANE) to setup each site with different template, header image, sidebar and scheduled two week content. One beauty of using Google Blogger is that Webmaster Tools can automatically pick your blog based on your GMail account. You can them add Google Analytic code to the template quickly and almost instantly get indexed.

My best record is to get my new blog indexed in 3 minutes. Awesome!

Once you’ve done that. You can start sharing and generate backlinks from all the sites and make comments everyone of them. Many of these processes can be automated or outsourced.

In my case, I automatically post new content from my main site every night (FASTLANE). The key point is to create 100% unique content. Thus, if you can’t automate your process to create new content, running 70+ websites will kill you!

Once again. This process took me a while to put in place and to run smoothly. One BIG RISK is that you don’t have control. If Google ban your site, you are DONE. So far, there is only 1 site out of 70+ are banned by Google. Obviously it was reported by my competition in the same niche. So I start a better one.

I hope this give you some idea about how to make money online in the SLOWLAN way and inspired you to make it a FASTLANE passive income generator.

The idea is to create a system or process to make money.

Good luck.