Celebrating One Year of Profitable Online Marketing
Greetings from Siddharth Rao’s blog! It has been almost four weeks since my last blog post. June has been a super-busy month at work and I’ve been traveling a lot, so couldn’t find time to write anything. Anyway – today (June 23, 2009) is a special day for me!
On this day last year – I entered into the world of performance based search engine marketing (or PPC marketing). I had known it since the last three years – however, I actually started building a business model and using it on a large scale since last year.
Looking back at what all occurred in this one year – it brings a smile on my face. From countless days of frustration, restlessness, analysis, dissatisfaction and stress to days of anxiety, anticipation, coding, research and calculating profits – I’ve had my share of all of them. I got to learn hundreds of new things, techniques & concepts and most importantly – the importance of thinking like a customer. If you’re a techy person, chances are that your brain is designed to think differently compared to a non-techy person who wants to buy something. There are exceptions but in business – we look at the majority and sell our thing to them, not the exceptions.
Here’s a short breakdown and analysis of the festivities.
I started off with the following:
- A vision to design a business model – where automation technology works as primary functional operators (and not people, meaning more technology and less employees to do day-to-day work)
- Reasonably solid and broad knowledge of Web & Internet technologies
- Sound understanding of the LAMP architecture and programming languages
- Good hand on computerized graphics designing tools
- An advertising budget of a few hundred dollars
- Strong desire discover and capitalize on new business opportunities
- Passion to build a large-scale online business which is portable and highly scalable
In the last one year, this is what I learnt, achieved and discovered:
- Learnt literally hundreds of small (but highly important) new techniques in the Internet world
- Educated myself with a lot of essential marketing techniques for the online audience
- Discovered the best business model that I’ve ever come across – in terms of scalability and return on investment
- Achieved a certain degree of financial independence
- Discovered a definite potential to scale this business model to a million-dollar business
- Made contacts with some leading directors and industry experts for ecommerce giants
This last one year looks like five years in the Internet world. Things change rapidly and that makes the game very exciting – at least for me! There’s so much more to learn and implement – I can certainly see a promising future for myself and others in the ecommerce-sphere. Although I’m still not that experienced to pass judgments for others – I believe that patience, perseverance and determination will separate the winner from the followers!
On a closing note – I’ve decided to post a poll question to my readers.
If you were given a choice to choose between:
- A job of a manager for a publicly traded large company (or)
- A job title of a CEO for a small private startup company
What will you opt for / why? Please leave your comments and thoughts on it!
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Hey Sid, nice to see your blog. Have been trying to contact you. whats your email?