You want to make money on the internet - right? Well, this is the place to get your proven Money Spinners!
Interview by Fellow Warrior
Posted 10th June 2011 at 05:20 AM by Will Edwards
Recently, I was contacted by a fellow Warrior (handle: Toniy) who asked me if I would mind being interviewed about my online business. I agreed to take part and I thought it might also benefit my blog readers, so the transcript is below. I hope you enjoy reading it.
1. Can you please state your name – Will Edwards
2. How would you describe yourself, briefly?
Founder of White Dove Books, I am first and foremost, a writer. In fact, I started White Dove Books primarily as an outlet for my own writing. Once I realised that selling on the web involved much more than writing a book – no matter how good it was – and then putting up a sales page, my diversion into internet marketing began. It has been an interesting 6 years and I think I am now a competent marketer, but I still think of myself as a writer.
3. How long have you been in the business?
Well, I started White Dove Books in 2003. For the first year or so, it was just a bit of a hobby. I really began in earnest after that first year, so I would say that I have been seriously involved in internet marketing for about 6 years now.
4. Where does your primary income stem from?
My primary income comes from the White Dove Books site, although I have about a dozen or so other sites. The main income streams are my own products that I sell through ClickBank, and I also generate revenue thorugh Google’s Adsense program.
5. What other income streams do you have, if any?
At present, Clickbank and Adsense are my main sources of income, however, I intend to address selling my books through Amazon. I have just published my first book to the Kindle platform and I think it looks very promising for the future.
6. What made you want to get into Online Business?
From the moment I realised that it was not only possible to make money online, but also that it was very doable, I saw that it represented the means by which I would be able to reach my goals. I realised that I would not only become financially independent – my first goal – but there would be absolutely no reason that I should not become wealthy.
Don’t get me wrong: I am not completely driven by the business of making money, but nevertheless, it is important to be able to attend to your physiological needs before you can begin to address your higher purpose. These past 6 years, I have been dedicated to building a consistent and reliable passive income in order that I would be able to move on to greater things.
7. How did you get your start?
When I started, there was no Adsense and very little in the way of the income streams that have since opened up. Affiliate programs were in their infancy and services like Constant Content, Kindle Publishing and even fiverr did not exist. So, I decided to just get cracking creating my website without any idea of how I would subsequently monetise the traffic.
When the Adsense program began, I joined, banged the code on the site and then could almost not believe how easy it was to make money. Adsense is not my major source of revenue now, but it is by far the easiest way, in my opinion, to get started making money online.
8. When did you first feel as though ‘you made it’?
It is quite a recent feeling for me. For years, I was wondering what wasn’t working and why the effort I was putting in did not seem to be producing the expected results. What I came to realise is that everything produces results. So that even if I was just making a few thousand dollars on Adsense, the answer to making ten times that amount was staring me in the face i.e. you would need ten times as many pages or ten times the conversion rate or ten times the number of visitors or ten times the click value of the ads. It’s not rocket science – it’s just hard work; something I was never afraid of.
When I stopped looking for other people’s answers to the question of how to make money, I knew I had turned a corner. That was the beginning. I now realise that I was making far more money than some of those people who were actually writing the material I had bought. Last year I bought a second home; a beautiful arts and crafts house by the sea. Later this year we will be moving into it permanently and I will be finally giving up the day job. It’s not any kind of risk at all, because my income is passive and reliable. It’s taken me six years, but I can now say that I feel as if I have finally ‘made it’.
9. Can you name some of your failures?
Now this is a tough question for me because I like to think of all my failures as successes in that each one was a lesson that enabled me to hone my approach and finally achieve success. Having said that, my first project was a kind of Yellow Pages. I made very little out of it, though I learned a lot about web design and development and it enabled me to move on and subsequently design my current site.
10. Can you remember some of the low points?
I would say that a low point for me was when I decided to install a membership script which simultaneously wiped out my forum. Another would be when one of my sites got hacked, a third was when Blogger decided to terminate their ftp facility which had the knock-on effect that the blogging network I had setup no longer worked.
11. Did you have to make any sacrifices?
Well, I have dedicated myself completely to the goal of generating an online income for the past six years. This means that I have spent about 4 hours per day, whilst holding down a responsible day job, plus every weekend on the project. Everything else, apart from my family responsibilities were sacrificed to this end.
12. What have been the high points?
High points include the following. Reaching my first 1 million visitors. We get around 1.5 visits per year at present, but that first million was a milestone. Hitting the first page of Google for the term ‘personal development’ despite there being 700 million competing sites. We are always on page #1 of the Google UK engine, generally we are on page #2 of the US engine and we are always climbing. But the absolute highest point, for me, was making my first sale. There really is no better feeling that that because it proved to me that I would indeed be able to accomplish what I was setting out to achieve.
Read the whole article here ...
Interview by Fellow Warrior
1. Can you please state your name – Will Edwards
2. How would you describe yourself, briefly?
Founder of White Dove Books, I am first and foremost, a writer. In fact, I started White Dove Books primarily as an outlet for my own writing. Once I realised that selling on the web involved much more than writing a book – no matter how good it was – and then putting up a sales page, my diversion into internet marketing began. It has been an interesting 6 years and I think I am now a competent marketer, but I still think of myself as a writer.
3. How long have you been in the business?
Well, I started White Dove Books in 2003. For the first year or so, it was just a bit of a hobby. I really began in earnest after that first year, so I would say that I have been seriously involved in internet marketing for about 6 years now.
4. Where does your primary income stem from?
My primary income comes from the White Dove Books site, although I have about a dozen or so other sites. The main income streams are my own products that I sell through ClickBank, and I also generate revenue thorugh Google’s Adsense program.
5. What other income streams do you have, if any?
At present, Clickbank and Adsense are my main sources of income, however, I intend to address selling my books through Amazon. I have just published my first book to the Kindle platform and I think it looks very promising for the future.
6. What made you want to get into Online Business?
From the moment I realised that it was not only possible to make money online, but also that it was very doable, I saw that it represented the means by which I would be able to reach my goals. I realised that I would not only become financially independent – my first goal – but there would be absolutely no reason that I should not become wealthy.
Don’t get me wrong: I am not completely driven by the business of making money, but nevertheless, it is important to be able to attend to your physiological needs before you can begin to address your higher purpose. These past 6 years, I have been dedicated to building a consistent and reliable passive income in order that I would be able to move on to greater things.
7. How did you get your start?
When I started, there was no Adsense and very little in the way of the income streams that have since opened up. Affiliate programs were in their infancy and services like Constant Content, Kindle Publishing and even fiverr did not exist. So, I decided to just get cracking creating my website without any idea of how I would subsequently monetise the traffic.
When the Adsense program began, I joined, banged the code on the site and then could almost not believe how easy it was to make money. Adsense is not my major source of revenue now, but it is by far the easiest way, in my opinion, to get started making money online.
8. When did you first feel as though ‘you made it’?
It is quite a recent feeling for me. For years, I was wondering what wasn’t working and why the effort I was putting in did not seem to be producing the expected results. What I came to realise is that everything produces results. So that even if I was just making a few thousand dollars on Adsense, the answer to making ten times that amount was staring me in the face i.e. you would need ten times as many pages or ten times the conversion rate or ten times the number of visitors or ten times the click value of the ads. It’s not rocket science – it’s just hard work; something I was never afraid of.
When I stopped looking for other people’s answers to the question of how to make money, I knew I had turned a corner. That was the beginning. I now realise that I was making far more money than some of those people who were actually writing the material I had bought. Last year I bought a second home; a beautiful arts and crafts house by the sea. Later this year we will be moving into it permanently and I will be finally giving up the day job. It’s not any kind of risk at all, because my income is passive and reliable. It’s taken me six years, but I can now say that I feel as if I have finally ‘made it’.
9. Can you name some of your failures?
Now this is a tough question for me because I like to think of all my failures as successes in that each one was a lesson that enabled me to hone my approach and finally achieve success. Having said that, my first project was a kind of Yellow Pages. I made very little out of it, though I learned a lot about web design and development and it enabled me to move on and subsequently design my current site.
10. Can you remember some of the low points?
I would say that a low point for me was when I decided to install a membership script which simultaneously wiped out my forum. Another would be when one of my sites got hacked, a third was when Blogger decided to terminate their ftp facility which had the knock-on effect that the blogging network I had setup no longer worked.
11. Did you have to make any sacrifices?
Well, I have dedicated myself completely to the goal of generating an online income for the past six years. This means that I have spent about 4 hours per day, whilst holding down a responsible day job, plus every weekend on the project. Everything else, apart from my family responsibilities were sacrificed to this end.
12. What have been the high points?
High points include the following. Reaching my first 1 million visitors. We get around 1.5 visits per year at present, but that first million was a milestone. Hitting the first page of Google for the term ‘personal development’ despite there being 700 million competing sites. We are always on page #1 of the Google UK engine, generally we are on page #2 of the US engine and we are always climbing. But the absolute highest point, for me, was making my first sale. There really is no better feeling that that because it proved to me that I would indeed be able to accomplish what I was setting out to achieve.
Read the whole article here ...
Interview by Fellow Warrior
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