Who Is Syamsul Alam?
Hi, it’s me, Syamsul Alam. If you notice, I do quite a lot on-page optimization for this page. Well, that’s because I want to outrank my Indonesian blog with keyphrase ‘Syamsul Alam‘ – my own name.
Syamsul Alam’s Short Bio
Name: Syamsul Alam 
HomePage: http://www.syamsulalam.com
Blog: http://www.syamsulalam.com/blog
Birth Date: 17 July 1992
Address: Perumahan Magersari I 12 a, Sidoarjo, East Java, Indonesia. 61211.
What I like to do:
- Tweaking my WordPress site (I have lots of them).
- Cycling (just on weekend)
- Reading (I read financial and motivational book. Things that keep me stay motivated)
- Cooking (I live alone, so I have to ‘like’ this thing… otherwise I can’t be happy)
A Little About Indonesia
I live in Indonesia. And unlike what you think, Indonesia is great place to live. Live expenses here is a fifth of live expenses in your country (assuming you’re from US, UK, or Japan). And we don’t have winter here. We only have sunny and rainy season. It’s only hot, wet, or both (we don’t need electric heater, yay!)
Syamsul Alam’s Journey to Make First $1 Online
I start making sites and make my first $1 online in 2007. I forgot the exact date, but I’m sure that it must be in 2007.
Initially, just like you maybe, I don’t know that I can make money from internet and to be honest, I don’t really care about making money online (I don’t understand how important money is for me at that time).
My first blog is a blog in Indonesian that talks about my school, my day, my friends, my live, a place to submit school task, and all that good stuff that has nothing to do with make money online.
My first blog is created with Blogger. It’s free and very easy to use, so it’s really perfect for me.
Having my own blog is fun. Writing stuff, get it commented by others, talks about game with friends. Oh… good ol’ days… I don’t have myspace at that time (it’s not that popular in Indonesia) and I think friendster suck, so I basically just use my blog as my way to get ‘social’ online.
Blogger also allows me to tweak my own template (we call it theme in WordPress), and that is where I began learning about html and css… And since I need to visit lots of blog to apply certain tweaks and hacks for my blogger blog, I start to realize that there are ways to monetize your blog and get money online.
How I Easily Get My First $1 Online
I didn’t learned everything in one go. Lots of Indonesian blogger here create english blog and put Google Adsense in their blog. But since I don’t have any English blog, I don’t and can’t take that route. Instead, I keep looking more ways to make money that have nothing to do with Google Adsense.
Finally, I found something. So… just like here, there’re also lots of ‘make money online’ product in Indonesia. And thanks to that, I learned my first lesson about affiliate marketing. I learned that we can make money just by promoting others product. And since it’s a product in Indonesian, I can apply just fine and make money using my blog.
I monetize my blog with affiliate products, I put banners, I add text link, I keep my blog constantly updated. I don’t need to create new blog, I have 200 pages blog with lots of topics to cover (no I don’t use autoblog, I just keep writing). And my site get constant 6000 unique visitors per month. I do this until at some point where I make $20 a day from my Indonesian blog (that’s lots of money in Indonesia. At least for me at that time).
Even if my blog is Indonesia blog, I also make money by writing paid reviews (my blog has page rank of 4 at that time, so maybe that’s why). I also have banner ads spot where people can put their banner in my site for $6 per month…
Make Money Online is Great, But…
All of that is great, I make enough money. But it got it’s negative side-effect. I began to sleep too late and over-slept, my grade getting worse, and I ranked 37 from 38 students in my class, and my eyes suffer from too much looking at monitor. Wow, that’s a severe side effect, don’t you agree?
Even worse, sometimes there’re product owner that just gone away and left me with unpaid commissions (Indonesian affiliate program pays with Rupiah via back account, so there is no instant commission), paid reviews is unstable job (Google don’t allow any kind of links buy). So, the only one which gives me rather stable money is my banner ads spot.
That moment is the first time I know how it felt to be frustrated. And that just plain suck! Thankfully, I manage to overcome all of that stuff, thanks to my friends, teachers, mom, and dad. And steadily improve my grade and finally finish my high school with score 3.9 out of 4 in my national exam.
What I want to Achieve Before 2012
- Upload 10 products online, create its sales letter, put buy button on it, make it shippable
- Provide WordPress installation service, finish my order page, finish my showcase page, finish the pricing table
I haven’t make 6 or 5 figures a month online, not yet at least, but I paid my rent, my foods, my bills, my educations, hosting and domains by myself, so I’m quite happy with it.
I knew that I’m not financially free yet, but I’m moving there, and if you want to move together with me, you can contact me and we can help each other to build our own successful online business. Did you know that I’m always looking for JV partner?
Oh, and one more thing. Check out my product page. It’s awesome!
Contact Me
If you want to contact me via email for anything, use form below and I’ll personally reply you from my email address.
