Karamveer’s Blog

[This is a post which I wrote in 2008 on one of my other blogs jimkarter.com. I am moving it here as it is about personal journey.]

I received an email from one of my readers asking me how did I receive so much traffic and how did I reach this level in web business. I thought why not write down my own journey of internet adventure and how did I reached here. Let me give you some insight on how did I start. I am sure its gonna be a big post, so bare with me.

Year 1997

I belong to a very small village in the state of Rajasthan, in India. I did my schooling in a small city. In 1997, I got selected to study in I.I.T. Bombay, one of the prestigious technology institutes of India for my engineering. This is when I first touched the computer. This is when I first learned FORTRAN, C and C++ through official courses in IIT.

Year 1999

In 1999, I was appointed as the Computer Secretary of my hostel (H6 IITB). I got my first PC (Intel Pentium 133 Mhz with MMX) and managed to get the internet connection up-to my room. This was the time of great technology and internet boom. All those “Get Paid to Surf” sites were making a lot of money by installing that small advertising bar at the bottom of the desktop. Myself with 3 other colleagues of mine, started a company to bring that get-paid-to-surf business to India. We registered two sites called earnindia.com and publixzone.com. These were our first sites. Venture failed, sites lost. Pockets burned. Moved on.

Year 2001

Graduated from IIT Bombay and joined VERITAS Software (now its Symantec) in 2001 and worked there till February 2004. In 2001, when I joined VERITAS, I had access to quite good (read as fast) internet connection. That is when I registered my first website hindilyrix.com (this site gets around 7 million page views per month now). It was just a hobby site of mine. Site didn’t do well initially and there were hardly any resources to monetize it properly. But slowly the traffic started to grow and I started earning few pennies out of it. Then one day Google Adsense was launched and everything else is history.

Year 2002 and 2003

This was the time when I was earning from my first site and I started investing it into building my other sites. At the end of 2003, I was having around 5+ sites making me around $300 per month. My day job was also pretty good, hence I was able to save some good money. One day, I decided to quit my day job and enter into internet business full fledged. Planning took some time and it was not till Feb 2004, when I finally quit.

Year 2004 - The Toughest Year of my life

This was the year when I quit my day job (Feb, 2004). I started my company with the help of one of my friends [Mr. Amol Naresh]. The company was officially launched on 1st April 2004. In this year, my wife was pregnant, we were expecting a baby in the month of May. Company formation, salaries and initial investment were heavy on pockets. I was almost out of money at one point. Then the baby came and money became even more scarce. Many times I thought that I should ask my dad for some money, but could never do that. We started our company with only two people, myself and my friend. In two months, we were able to start making some websites and earn some pennies, that is when we hired the third person, then in two more months, the 4th person, and then two more months, the 5th person. In all these times, I was almost out of money with my banks showing nearly zero balances. It was till the end of year 2004, when we started getting good revenue from our new sites on which we all 5 were working day and night.

Year 2005 - 2006

In year 2005, our company grew in size and revenue. This is the time when I slowly started making the company independent of myself. There are employees in the company who knows what to work on and how to work on. There are people to manage it. I am there to mentor them. So I slowly started working on my own sites (the ones I used to work before starting the company). I kept all those sites outside the company. These are my personal sites and company has nothing to do with them. Then slowly started outsourcing my personal work to our own company or some other companies and individual.

Year 2007 (Current Year)

The company has grown quite a bit. The company now manages around 300 websites. With time I registered many more sites. I personally manage few of them. So, it was not just one night business to start and running things. I had lots of ups and downs in this business. There were times when I was almost out of money. Its the hard work. When I started there was not many places (like digitalpoint) to help people find information on making money online. All things needs to be tried and tested myself.

Finally

Finally I am happy that I took that toughest step to quit my day job and started my own company. I thank god for all the help I have been given.

After three years of break from blogging, I have decided to to start blogging again. This is my first post after 3 years on this blog.

I used to write some informative content on this blog 3 years back when we stopped working on it. I was writing on my other blog jimkarter.com till August 2009. That is the time when I completely stopped the thing.

I am back on my website to do what I used to love a lot. I have removed most of the previous posts from this blog as I am changing the theme of the blog.

What will I blog about?
Previously, I used to blog about how to make money online. Now, I will be blogging mostly about following themes:

• Web and Webmasters
• Entrepreneurship in India
• Technical aspects of Linux / Apache / MySql / PHP / Perl
• Etc. etc.

There might be some more sections added as and when required.

I will be using this blog mostly as my diary to keep track of things I am doing, just in the hope that somebody else might also need to do the same thing which I have learn by spending some amount of time.

With this hope, wish me luck.

I was in Mumbai this weekend (29^th March 2008) for BlogCamp Mumbai Style event. BlogCampMumbai was a part of overall barcamp event.

There were around 300 to 400 attendees for the event. I went there for attending blogcamp. It was being held in School of Management, IIT Bombay (my own college).

I went to IIT after around 3 years. Before entering the event, I drove around the campus of IIT to see what are the things which have changed since last I saw them. A lot of things have changed.

Finally I went to school of management and registered for the event. There was a informal sort of introduction on what barcamp is all about and what people are going to discuss/present in various threads. Then separate threads of the event started and I moved to the blogcamp seminar hall.

There were some presentations by various people about blogging, SEO and making money online. I also gave a presentation about how to make money online. My presentation was more of a question and answer session about various aspects of SEO, site building, link building and making money online.

I met with lots of interesting bloggers like Tarun Chandel, Moksh Juneja, Dinesh, Meetu, Rohit, Ashwin & Mani and some others.

DNA newspaper covered the event and there was a full page dedicated for the event on 31^st March 2008 Mumbai edition. I was also interview by Mahafreed from DNA. You can read more about it here. Thanks Mahafreed.

Here are some of the pictures from the event:

Presentation at BlogCamp
Posing for DNA Newspaper:
Introduction at BarCamp:

BlogCamp Seminal Hall:

My Interview in DNA Newspaper: