On-line Businesses

[BobAnderson]

Is anyone in Thailand (or nearby) currently operating an on-line business? I am curious if there is anything legitimate out there that can actually produce a little income over time?

I am asking specifically as it seems that Thailand would be the perfect place to pursue such a pastime. Other than the poor internet in Phuket, of course.

If so, can anyone provide a little direction? I am interested in starting a venture that might start small – and over a period of 5-6 years could produce a little income (even net a few hundred US$ a month eventually) – maybe become a full-time job – and possibly grow into a modest income. Starting, of course, as kind of part hobby, part job, part learning experience. I have an undemanding job right now – really part-time and five months vacation a year – so I have lots of time to devote to such a project.

However, when I look on the net for information about websites and web businesses – they almost all seem to be scams. It’s the old make a million on the net – send me money and I’ll tell you how to set up a website like mine – getting people to send you money so you can tell them how to set up a website that asks people to send money so that they can ask people to send money. 99% bogus crap.

I’m not interested in anyone giving me proprietary information – I don’t want to steal anyone’s business idea. But I would really like a little direction from SOMEONE WHO KNOWS. Don’t care about the opinion of bullsh*itters.

Even the most basic direction would help. For example, would it be best to purchase my domain name from the company I wish to have host for me? Where could I look to find the best hosting? What makes a good host? What kind of on-line businesses make money (THE most important question!)? Where could I look to get basic ideas? How difficult is it to get a payment system set up? Should the payment system be decided before picking a host? Should the type of business or information/service provider system be decided before selecting a host? What are the things that I am so naïve as to not even know to think about? And on and on.

I am obviously a babe in the woods on this – but I am not in a hurry and would like to take my time and do it right.

So, sage advice welcome – even shaky advice might be useful!

[meadish_sweetball]

Do you have expert knowledge within any field, something that others might be interested in and that is not readily available for free? If it is available for free, could you present some extra twist to it, still making it worthwhile for people to pay you money for your knowledge?

Create the best online resource you can think of presenting this knowledge as purchasable goods, create a user-friendly forum for discussion about this topic... etc.

That would probably be a good starting point for doing business online. I assume our Senior Administrator group would agree...

As you've noticed, most "make money fast on the Internet" ideas are pyramid-type ideas, in the best case scenario generating a little bit of incoming, but producing nothing of use to anyone. Provided that you put in a lot of hard work, some of them might give you enough to live comfortably in the long run, but spending as much time learning a specialized knowledge or service which you can make a decent business out of seems like a smarter idea.

Why not sell T-shirts with Thai writing on them to tourists?

Sorry, just raving. Too much coffee this morning.

[BobAnderson]

THe net is something I truly enjoy. Just thinking ahead to something to do and enjoy (and perhaps make a few bucks with) in my old age.

Any thoughts on good places on the net to go to learn more?

Thanks

[Darknight]

Even the most basic direction would help. For example, would it be best to purchase my domain name from the company I wish to have host for me? Where could I look to find the best hosting? What makes a good host? What kind of on-line businesses make money (THE most important question!)? Where could I look to get basic ideas? How difficult is it to get a payment system set up? Should the payment system be decided before picking a host? Should the type of business or information/service provider system be decided before selecting a host? What are the things that I am so naïve as to not even know to think about? And on and on.

aswers in order

1. No purchase it yourself , if you fall out with your host you can have problems changing your domain name later.

2. The states has the best hosting deals , be it dedicated hosting (ev1servers.net, calpop.com) or shared hosting.

3. no downtime, no fee for small administrative tasks or reboots, low price

4.selling software, some e-commerce (travel,specialist products), community site's like this one

5. The net

6. Is not difficult at all unless you want your own merchant account set up. If you are prepared to give higher commision have a look at 2checkout.com , largest provider best fee's/commision rate

7. in principal NO unless you want to have high risk payments like porn, casino ect..

8. not really i would say, you are only renting space or a server on the net, where it stands is not so important.

9. You're missing quite a lot probably. Webdesign and maintenance skills, a hobbyist who can put a picture on a page doesn't cut it anymore. There are 4,285,199,774 webpages registered in google , 95 percent of them are not once looked at daily. Networking and server maintanance skils how to setup a server or you will have to pay somebody each time you want something changed.

Be prepared to work every day on it for at least 3 years before you will start to gather traffic and paying customers.

I'm a network consultant and webdesigner and i even don't want to start on this road. To much work and time needed for no obvious returns in the beginning.

[aljaz]

What's the problem with internet in Phuket? I was there for 2 months earlier this year...no problem at all...and there's Broadband access.

[BobAnderson]

aljaz,

broad band is not available on a large portion of the island. Some providers are offline when it rains - and sometimes service is so slow you will timeout of even hotmail and yahoo.

Darknight,

Thank you! Excellent response, exactly what I was looking for! The voice of experience!

[Darknight]

Hi bob,

I have a friend who's succesfully producing a living from online sites at this time. Mind you that he had to work 7 jears on it to ba able to start living from it. And it remains a daily job to adjust, tweak, promote it.

I had some projects myself but couldn't continously put the time in as money making things were more important. Of course if you can treat it like a hobby for some years you can have some benefits later. Thaivisa started like this i suppose. Maybe you can ask george how long it took before he ran break-even (if he does

[caughtintheact]

From my experience surfing the web and frequently making purchases, a site that will eventually be successful needs both a tangible product and must provide excellent service. One example is www.dco.co.th which combines wanted tangible products, fast delivery (I've ordered at 4 a.m. and received the product by noon), and a well designed bi-lingual web site (a must if you want to build up a reputation here). Another couple of sites that I like are www.tohome.com, and www.officemate.co.th. Some items I look for in a good web site:

1. Loads fast without too much clutter.

2. Has the company name and address, phone and fax numbers as well as an email address or two (that are workable).

3. Easy to navigate (logical setup).

4. Uses contrasting rather than blending colors (light blue on dark blue is not easy to read).

[simon43]

Hi Bob, I replied to a similar posting a few months back. I'm quite happy to tell you how I make my money, because the pie is big enough for everyone. and it is not an MLM etc scheme.

Basically, I promote the various mobile telephone premium-rated services. So this could be anything from horoscopes to text-dating to very rude adult telephone services. Actually I also develop and operate the software for many of these services back in the UK, but the option is available just to 'resell' the services, without any technical involvement.

(I'm not plugging my own services here! The 'resell' refers to you reselling other people's services because I don't actually offer my premium services for resale anyway..)

What does it involve? Basically, you sign up (for free) with a company who operates these services. They allocate you a dedicated telephone number (or numbers) to promote, or for SMS, a dedicated keyword that users should send to subscribe to the service.

You then promote these services by any ethical means. Usually the best way is to place adverts in suitable magazines. (So an adult service would be advertised in top-shelf magazines, whilst a fun chat service could be advertised in middle-shelf mags or daily newspapers).

That cost of promotion is your financial risk!! The companies who resell these services will provide example adverts for you and guidelines as to the legal text required in your adverts.

Then, when readers see your adverts, some of them will respond and use the telephone or sms service. The service provider will have a contract with the mobile networks and each month they will be paid a revenue generated from the message costs. And then they will pay you!!

So your only expenditure is your advertising.

How much can you earn? Typically, for every text message you will earn about 80 pence (GBP). That's about 60 baht. And a little higher for voice telephone calls per minute.

Now, I spent 20 years working back in Europe as a space and satellite design guy. The money was very good. Then I discovered the premium telephone business! Now I live in Thailand and telework remotely, placing my adverts via email etc.

I have no employees and my overheads are basically my advert costs. Because I also develop my own services I operate them also in Ireland, the USA and Australia.

I won't tell you how much I earn from all this. But I donate about $5000 US every month to needy Thai charities Maybe that gives you an idea!!

If you are interested then I can put you in contact with a friend in the UK who resells services such as text-chat, rude adult fotos and video clips, sporting video clips, celebratory fotos etc etc, as well as another guy who operates the voice adult services. (I get no commission from these guys, they are just friends).

As mentioned, they should charge you no set-up or running fees at all! That's because they take a small cut on your revenue share (about 5%).

BTW, I don't resell my own services because I would have to support the resellers, and I just want to run my own 1-man-band business without too much hassle!!

Anyway, food for thought?? Do post or PM me if you want more info.

I have to say that this type of business can be managed from anywhere in the world! You just need a computer/email...And because there are no products to ship etc, you are free to move around whenever you like...(And even the bad internet service in Phuket is fine for your needs... )

Cheers - Simon

[thohts]

Check out Webmaster World

It's a wonderful forum covering just about everything.

For hosting, I like to check out *independent* host rating sites like Findmyhosting.

I've had about 12-15 hosts in my life. The best I have found, thus far are Jatol (.com) and WebHostingBuzz (.com). There are other, perhaps better, hosts out there of course. Downtime is my #1 concern. Find out if the host also hosts adult websites. If so, try another host (your server *will* be affected. if not by extended downtime and slowness, by resource-hogging IRC bots that these wow-I-can-do-anything-here 'webmasters' put up). #2 is support.. competency and speed. I like to test them out before I sign up with a couple of questions at odd times of the night/early morning to see how and if they respond. Jatol gives you 7 free days before you have to pay them money or give them your CC info.

If you think you are going to put up more than one site, sign up for a reseller account which gives you that ability. For $10-20/month I could host 80-100 of my own websites, for example. If bandwidth becomes an issue with one of them, hopefully revenue will grow in proportion and I will upgrade the account. One site making $30/month (not at all difficult) via advertising could easily cover your hosting costs.

Payment processors: If you want something quick and dirty, try 2checkout.com ($49 total + fees for each payment) or authorize.net (or even StormPay.com, which is free). This way, you don't have to deal with the expense of your own processor, which will cost you about $2k + payment fees. From Thailand you can use the above or myeasypay.com, which is based in Phuket. The sign-up fee is 1,100 baht and the yearly fee is 100 baht. They seem to be a legitimate company (they even provided me with their own branded mousepad, so they must be!).

(Note that if you are opening an account with Stormpay and perhaps even 2checkout you can transfer your deposited funds into your Thai bank account but you may have to sign up from Thailand. They check your IP when you sign up. If you have a US bank account, try using an anonymous IP address based in the US with SSL support. A google search can point you in the right direction for this free and handy tool.)

The big easy money is in software (read: selling abstract products using an automated script... very low maintenance.. once you have a decent product). You don't have to write it yourself. Go to rentacoder.com or elance.com to hire someone to do it for you (check out their portfolio first). Stay away from sites like scriptlance.com where a lot of novice programmers like to go.

Other huge online markets exist in pharmaceutical and medical, dating, travel and their respective sub-categories.

These areas are crowded, of course. But you'll find that it is generally not difficult to stand out from the crowd. Finding a way to make money is a different story.

A broad site probably won't make you much money. Find a lucrative niche market (it could be anything within the big to medium-sized money makers) and dedicate yourself. You don't need several years (some do) if you do it the "right way". Some people only need a few months. The more experienced may only need a week or two to make significant coin.

Forget about doing it your way. Save your ego for when you are filthy rich and can afford to lose money. Follow and listen to the market and provide it with what it wants. Find out who is successful then emulate their success (as they themselves probably did). You can even use tools like the Wayback Machine and Google to see how they evolved and re-trace their steps. This way is as guaranteed a way to online success as it gets.

Note that you don't actually have to sell something to your website visitors to make a lot of money from your website. For more passive income, focus on advertising on your highly informative and valuable site to attract visitors (and search engines).

I would recommend to a newbie wanting to 'get rich' on the web so they can have excess leisure time to get a reseller account and experiment. Because it may take you 2-3 months to build a site and have it indexed by the search engines at first, you have to be patient. Build a site and aim for the $30/month quota. Make sure the search engines know about it and also directories and other similar sites. Then forget about it and move to the next site. Do this several times a year and after a few years you should have a nice (passive) income. It will probably be somewhere between nothing and 6-7 figures a year.

chok dee!!

[BobAnderson]

thank you thots, for your excellent overview - and advice.

[asinah]

Hi Bob,

I have been in the internet business since 1993 and you can almost say it is my life.

The best way to learn what is possible on the internet is Webmasterworld.com, the best site I came across over the past 10 years.

I do the following on the web to earn my revenues:

1) I joined http://www.mediaplaza.com and I resell mobile ringtones, wallpapers etc. in 32 countries (we will launch our Thai/Chinese and Malay ringtones websites by the end of next month) - We don't advertise in publications but we have a userbase of around 900,000 web visitors per month and most of our revenues comes currently from the UK, Mexico, Argentina, Germany and the Oceania region.

2) We run an online booking service with hotelclub.com (6 languages) and receive around 5 percent of cleared transactions. We clear around 5 bookings per day and the hotels are mainly four and five star properties

3) We joined the Google Adsense system for web publishers and but I can't tell you how much money we make per month but with a few thousand clicks per day we make a LOT.

If you need a good hosting provider take superb.net; they are based in Canada and I never ever had a problem with them (i am not working for them, nor do I get a commission). If you prefer a US hosting company, use dn.net - they are good but expensive.

We also do select SEO work for our clients in the Bahamas, Belize, Greece, Malta, Spain and Japan and outsource the work to some companies in Viet Nam and India.

(In fact the Indian SEO company we just fired ten days ago as we lost around 60,000 links in some search engines due to keyword spamming and I had to turn down a client from Rayong last week and refunded the payment as I no longer had the time to look after that project)

The name of the game is Search Engines ! If you are in the SE you can generate free traffic with around 1% of your traffic to be generated into revenues.

Example : A website in tourism can make around 1-2 bookings per day per 1000 visitors. I know a company in Thailand that makes around 250 bookings a day and they generate around 100,000 vistiors per day.

Our Mobile website makes around 1 order per 1400 users but those users are not yet well targetted and it will take another 6 weeks before our pages show up in the search engines.

I never bought a book on making money nor do I ever spam, nor do I pay for advertisng on any websites.

Try to visit webmasterworld.com and read for a couple of weeks those postings, so that you can see what works and what doesn't.

I think any website will need at least a year or two to breakeven, but if you target from the beginning the search engines you could be in for breakeven within 6 months.

Good luck