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What is This Blog About?

I have been making a living online since 1998 and in this blog I will be spilling my guts out on everything I’ve learnt over the last 10 years, and continue to learn on a daily basis. Topics including Google AdWords, SEO, affiliate marketing, internet marketing, ebusiness success stories, and self improvement. I highly recommend subscribing to the free email updates using the form at the bottom of this page so that you don’t miss any future posts. For more information about me, continue reading…

I created this About page in the hope that you would have a better understanding of who I am. I didn’t mean for this About page to turn into a mini-autobiography. But I took the opportunity to put some of my memories into digital form before my memory cells start going AWOL. Trust me - they do as you get older. I recently realized that I had difficulty remembering the names of some of the girls I dated back when I was in my 20s. I told my wife about it but she didn’t seem all that concerned.

This About page was inspired by Neil Patel’s blog post, “15 Things I Wish I Had Known When I Started My First Blog“. In it Neil recommends that you open up to your readers by telling them your life story. He says, “I didn’t do this during my first few years of blogging, but now I have a very detailed about page. I wish I did this from day one because it creates a stronger bond between you and I”. I believe in learning from people wiser than me, so here’s my life story, or at least a watered down version of it.

The Early Years

I was born in London, England, in 1969. My family ran a business growing beansprouts which were delivered to restaurants and takeaways all over London. When I was around eight my mum decided to take me and my brother away from my dad. My brother and I ultimately ended up with my dad - mainly because I was neglected by my mum so I told the courts that I wanted to stay with my dad. The courts thought it was best to keep my brother and I together so he came along with me.

We moved a few times up and down the country. We never had much money when I was young. I would wear the only pair of shoes I had until it had holes in the sole, and my socks would get soaked when it rained. I envied my school friends who wore gorgeous soft sweaters and trendy leather jackets.

My First Chance At A Better Life: The Computer Games Boom in the ’80s

I was desperate to get out of poverty. And in 1984-5, when I was 15, I came across home computers like the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 which were all the rage.

I read about teenagers making a fortune writing computer games in their bedroom. One company, Ultimate, were making so much money they had a fleet of company Ferraris! Computer magazines were full of ads offering as much as £20,000 (about $30,000 in today’s exchange rate) for a game. Don’t forget that this was 1984-5, so $30,000 was a heck of a lot of money, especially for a 15 year old kid. It was the stuff of dreams.

So a friend, Neal Carter, and I started to write games for the ZX Spectrum. We would take our finished games and go around London showing various companies that we had seen advertising in computer magazines. Many were just one-man bands in the back of a store. Not one company took an interest in our games. The fact is our games weren’t good enough. We just about gave up after a while.

I persevered and wrote a card game where you could play Blackjack and High-Low. Incredibly, a company called Codemasters (Wikipedia entry), told me they were interested in my game. Codemasters was started by two brothers, David and Richard Darling. They were only 18 and were already millionaires.

I spoke to one of the Darling brothers from a phone box outside where I lived. They said they would get someone to create graphics, sound and music to spruce up the game. But during the call I let it slip that I had programmed the game in BASIC and used a software program called a Compiler to convert the BASIC code into ‘Machine Language’. Most games were written in ‘Assembly Language’ which was a step down from Machine Language. He told me that he thought the program wouldn’t be fast enough to handle the graphics, sound and music, and hence could not proceed with the game. I was gutted. I was so close to finally getting out of poverty only for it to be taken away from me at the last minute. I gave up making games after that.

Partying, Gambling & Dating

In 1988 I left high school and my dad bought a tiny cafe in the quiet seaside town of Ramsgate (photo by angelmph), Kent, which is on the East coast of England (about 2 hours drive from London) and converted it into a Chinese restaurant. My dad and brother worked in the kitchen while I worked in the front. The job was mind-numbingly boring, the hours were anti-social, and the pay was terrible. I lived pay check to pay check. I tried my luck as a financial consultant and joined several network marketing companies, such as Amway, but I didn’t have much luck at making money.

My Dad Died & I Almost Lost My Life

Then in 1993 my world crashed around me. My dad passed away unexpectedly in his sleep at the age of only 58. I was 23. My brother and I inherited the restaurant. One of the employees offered to buy the business off us. Unfortunately, after a night out I accidentally fell asleep while making curry and burned down the kitchen. I barely escaped with my life. We couldn’t stay there due to the smoke damage so we moved into a friend’s place.

The day before we were due to sign the papers, squatters burnt the entire place down. Fortunately, the buyer was willing to wait for the building to be rebuilt. A few months later the building was rebuilt and we sold the business. After that I didn’t want to own a business anymore. I just wanted a simple life. So I drifted from job to job working as a cook and waiter for a few years.

My Second Chance At A Better Life: The Dot Com Boom in the ’90s

In 1996 I fell in love with a beautiful girl. We went out for about a couple of months and I was really happy. Then out of the blue she told me she had been given a chance to move to Hong Kong and was crazy not to take it. So she left. For about a month we kept in touch constantly. She told me she missed me. But then the letters and faxes became less frequent. And then the inevitable happened. She decided she wasn’t coming back and we should call it a day. I was devastated. It took a long time to get over the pain and it became the turning point of my life.

Someone told me a story that in 1952, a James Hanson was engaged to the famous actress, Audrey Hepburn. She then unexpectedly called off the wedding. Heartbroken, James decided to concentrate on his work to forget about Audrey. Over the next few decades he went on to build Hanson Plc, one of the biggest companies in the UK and was listed on the London Stock Exchange.

I remembered that story and decided to concentrate on building a business of my own. I guess part of me wanted to prove to her that I was worth something. This girl never knew this, but she is a big part of the reason I am where I am today.

With very little money I wasn’t sure what to do. After looking at a few options, I decided to import reproduction oil paintings of old masters, such as Monet and Van Gogh, from Taiwan.

It was at that time that I started picking up computer magazines and discovered something called the World Wide Web. Slowly I saw the potential. Here was my second chance at a better life. So I started to learn about the Internet. I told my friends and family that I was going to start an Internet business, but only one person believed in me. He was my boss at the time abd offered to invest £10,000 into my business. I didn’t want to have to answer to anyone, so I politely declined.

I Launch My First Web Site

In September of 1998, after about 9 months of trying to work out how to build a web site, I launched ArtDacor.com (it was a play on ‘Art Decor’). I waited for the orders to roll in but none came. Hours, days, weeks went by.

I realized that the site wasn’t working and thought I better try something else. So I put some paintings up for auction on eBay. To my surprise they sold. A couple even attracted bidding wars and ended up selling for a few hundred dollars more than I had expected. But I didn’t enjoy selling oil paintings on eBay. Every auction took a week. And I didn’t enjoy the process of packing the oil painting and taking it down to the post office to ship off to the winning bidder. I didn’t even have proper packing packaging. Some customers reported cracks in the painting which I felt bad about. But I couldn’t afford to exchange the paintings for new ones. So after a few weeks I decided to stop selling oil paintings altogether.

I can’t remember why but I decided I should build a web site on how to build and market web sites. I came up with the name eBoz.com (no longer active). I wanted eBoss.com but that had already been registered. Coincidentally, at the same time I received a pre-approved loan offer from my bank. I took out a £6,000 loan and gave myself a deadline of 6 months to see if I could make this internet business work. I figured that the worst that could happen was that I would end up with a £6,000 debt which I could pay off with 6-12 months of waitering.

To my surprise eBoz.com took off. Advertisers were eager to advertise on the site. This was the height of the dot com boom when success was based on the number of page impressions a web site could generate. People were throwing checks at me. Within a couple of months I think I was making more than my old job.

I Sell My First Internet Company

In the first week of 2000 one of my referrals for a domain registrar I had partnered with registered something like a couple hundred domain names. That sale helped bring in $12,000 that month. That’s a far cry from earning £6 an hour a year or so earlier.

Around the same time, a guy by the name of Chris Ueland, from iBoost Technology, Inc., asked me if I would help them market their web site. I told him I was too busy promoting my own web sites and that I would only work for his company if they bought my company.

After a few months they decided they wanted to buy my company so they flew me to Los Angeles. One of the co-founders, Thomas Gorney, told me he came to the U.S. a few years earlier and used to be a washer-upper until he made his fortune in web hosting. That was impressive. I was also impressed by the fact that their new company was backed by SoftBank Capital, which also backed Yahoo! and E*Trade.

Thomas was a pretty slick salesman. Everything he did and said in his sometimes difficult to understand German accent made an impression on me. After a few days of being wowed by everything I saw and heard, I think we agreed on a price of about half a million dollars, but only $100,000 of that was in cash. The rest was in stock at whatever price the stock was valued at at the time.

I would be given the title of Co-Editor-in-Chief, along with Aaron West, co-founder of W3Nation, which was also being acquired by iBoost at the time. We would have a small team of writers. I was given a salary of $7,500 a month, which was more than most people in the company, and more than double what we paid the university graduates I later hired. It was a strange feeling being in that position. Only a couple years earlier I had been working as a waiter making £6 an hour.

So I went back to the UK, packed my bags and moved to L.A. I didn’t qualify for a working visa so I applied for a business visa. With $150,000 investment capital and a good lawyer, Cristina Perez, now better known as the host of Fox Television’s Emmy Award winning program, “Cristina’s Court“, I got my visa. I didn’t realize Cristina had become a TV celebrity until I happen to chance upon her show last year. It’s kind of strange seeing my lawyer on TV.

I guess that is just part of the effect Hollywood has on the people who live there. It seems like everyone wants to be part of Hollywood. I know of at least a handful of people in iBoost who were either trying to be an actor or had sent in scripts to the studios.

At first I thought iBoost was going to be the start of a great new adventure. But very quickly I realized that being part of a larger organization was different from running your own show. For starters I felt disconnected from the people who used to visit my site, read my newsletter, and chatted with me in the weekly online chat I used to host. I felt like I had taken a step back from the frontline. I was no longer in the thick of the action. I was a general watching the battle from afar.

Second, the immediacy that I was used to, had been taken away from me. Whereas previously I could make a decision to change something on my site and it would be updated within minutes, I now had to get every decision approved by management which sometimes took days or was even rejected. I felt completely lost and helpless. I had sold myself into a golden cage.

Anyone who’s ever had their company acquired by a bigger organization and went onto work for them as part of the deal would understand what I mean. This is why I am not surprised to read about people leaving the company that bought them out as soon as they have fulfilled their obligations. They are desperate for their freedom again.

Being acquired sounds like the ultimate dream for many internet entrepreneurs. I guess it would if you end up with enough money that you don’t have to work again. Half a million is a lot of money but not to retire on. And most of that was in stock that someone else had decided the value of. Anyhow, within a year that stock was worthless.

The Dot Com Bubble Burst

Within months of selling my company, the dot com bubble burst. Was I lucky? Hell, yeah! I got to live in L.A. for 18 months and met my future wife, Amy. She was a United Airlines flight attendant, based in Hong Kong. Her best friend whom I had met in London introduced us. We hit it off straight away. She would fly into L.A. and stay with me until she had to fly back to Hong Kong. It was a long distance relationship, albeit an unusual one. I fell in love again, but this time it was for real.

IBoost lost its way after the dot com bust and in March 2001 I decided it was time to leave the company and chart my own course again. Two months later, iBoost shut down and was liquidated. Some of the other acquisitions got their sites back and carried on as before. That wasn’t the case with mine because the content was combined with a couple of other acquired sites to create one big content site, which became iBoost.com.

I owned stock in the company but the founders never offered to give me anything for the stock I held and I never pursued it. Was I owed money? I don’t know to be frank. I heard rumors that before the company was shut down, some investors took out some money from the company. Was that legal? I don’t know. I don’t have any proof and I prefer to move on and put it down as a learning experience.

Looking back now I realize I was very naive with regards to the acquisition. I didn’t even negotiate the offer iBoost gave me. I just said okay. I didn’t even know what percentage of the company my stock represented. I guess my head got lost in the idea of being acquired by a company that had the backing of the same company that backed Yahoo! and E*Trade, and the potential to make millions from the deal.

I know a few of the iBoost people went onto achieve success after iBoost. The two co-founders, Ben Neumann and Thomas Gurney went back to what they knew best, web hosting. Ben founded Globat, and Thomas founded IPowerWeb.

Three other guys I worked with, Spencer Forrest, Matt Simpson and Paul Grossman, formed the affiliate network, Affiliate Fuel, immediately after leaving iBoost. They sold it in April 2005 to Experian, a publicly listed UK company.

Michael Wong .com: 2nd Act

It was strange being on my own again. For a while I was a bit lost. But Amy was there and fully supported me in my decisions. She was there to pick me up when I was down and it helped to cement our relationship.

In the summer of 2001 I started working on a membership site, DeanofMarketing.com, with Peter Cooper. He was someone who I had met in one of my weekly online chat meetings a year earlier. Peter was 19 at the time and hated his job because his boss was bullying him. I and another person in the chat (I can’t recall his name now) told him to not stand for it and to quit his job to do his own thing. I must admit I was surprised when Peter emailed me the very next day to tell me he had quit his job. But it was a bold move and Peter has done amazingly well since then. He was my techie guru for a while but has gone onto greater success selling two websites he started from scratch, and writing a beginner’s guide to Ruby for Apress, a publisher of many programming and technical books.

After a couple of months of development I didn’t think Dean of Marketing was good enough to charge people money to subscribe to and had little chance of being successful. So I made the decision to stop development. I think Peter didn’t know what hit him. He had spent weeks writing dozens of articles only for me to call a stop to it out of the blue. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but later on I realized that I should have discussed it with Peter before making that decision. I have lived with that guilt ever since. I have never apologized to Peter for that. So sorry Peter.

I pondered what to do for a while and it was during this time that the tragic events of September 11 occurred. Amy and I decided to move to Hong Kong. I finally decided to listen to the experts and do what I know. And one of the things I understood was search engine optimization (SEO). I had optimized iBoost.com’s website and generated over 2,000 top 30 rankings across all the major search engines, resulting in an additional 400,000+ visitors and 8 million page views per month.

So I decided to write a SEO guide. In my research I found only a couple of SEO books and they weren’t very informative. In March 2002, after 3 months of writing, I self-published my first “SEO ebook“. It contained over 200 pages covering every aspect of SEO and how to optimize a website for top 10 rankings. It was well received and a few of my customers asked me to optimize their web sites for them.

It has often been said that writing a book is one of, if not, the best ways to turn yourself into an expert and attract new clients. Let me tell you that it is 100% true. Let me also tell you it can be a good money maker. I have only sold just under 3,000 copies of the book over the last 7 years (as of time of writing), so it hasn’t exactly been a massive hit. But at $37 a copy, that still adds up to just under $110,000 in sales. And that doesn’t include all the affiliate sales of products recommended in the book. It also brought in thousands of dollars in consultancy fees. Not bad for 3 months work.

Within a month I had more clients that I could handle. But it soon dawned on me that dealing with clients is a very stressful experience. They have an unrealistic expectation of what they should get in return for their money, or maybe I was not charging them enough. They would bombard me with questions and update requests. Maybe I didn’t managed their expectations well enough.

I thought to myself that instead of optimizing other people’s web sites, I should optimize my own sites and reap the ongoing rewards of all that free traffic that the search engines sent. I wasn’t sure what type of site I should create. But then I came across Sage-Hearts.com, a dating review site by Rosalind Gardner, who would go onto write “The Super Affiliate Handbook“. It occurred to me that she was writing reviews of dating sites and earning commissions driving paid and free search engine visitors to those dating sites.

It inspired me to create my own version but instead of dating sites I decided to concentrate on internet marketing products and services. So three months later I launched Mikes-Marketing-Tools.com. The site grew slowly. I achieved some top 10 rankings for the different product categories, product names, and names of the leading marketing experts I created special categories for.

Seven years later and I still have many of those rankings. For example: keywords, Perry Marshall, and search engine optimization software.

In July 2002 I discovered Google AdWords and started advertising on Google. I would advertise a product and link directly to the merchant’s web site. This was about a year before Chris Carpenter spilled the beans on this unique method of marketing in his book, “Google Cash“. It went on to become a best-seller and taught thousands of people on how to make money with affiliate marketing on Google AdWords.

Few people were using Google AdWords back then so clicks were a lot easier and cheaper to come by. Looking at my stats, I see that Google sent me 51,066 visitors for an average cost per click of just 8 cents in the first 12 months (July 2002 to July 2003) I started advertising in AdWords. Whereas in the last 3 months (January to April 2008) the average cost per click across all my accounts was almost 25 cents.

It wasn’t until October 2003 that I hit a five-figure monthly income again - my first for almost four years. For the next few years I wandered aimlessly content with what I had achieved. Looking back now I realize that I was probably burnt out during that time. Many people in the industry go through this experience.

We Got Married!

In March 2003 Amy and I got married at the local registry office. I had outstayed my welcome in Hong Kong, so I had to get married to continue living there. Amy and I had every intention of getting married at sometime. The Hong Kong government just brought forward the date for us. In May 2004 my wife and I moved to Sydney, Australia, to start a family.

In 2004, we decided to have a proper wedding and got married for the second time by the beach in Phuket, Thailand. This time over 50 of our closest friends and family (most were our age) came along with us. They had traveled from all over the world; Australia, China, England, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, and the U.S. We all had a blast! Here’s a photo of Amy with all the girls (I left out the photo with the guys cos they’re no where near as pretty).

After the wedding we had a 3 week honeymoon in London, Paris and the French Riviera. Amy then went back to work in Hong Kong. I went home to Australia. Soon after Amy discovered that she was pregnant. Amy gave birth to our son in the middle of 2005.

I Finally Broke Through My Invisible Glass Ceiling

It was around this time that my techie guru, Peter Cooper, and I created GoDefy.com. It was my attempt to create an improved version of my Mikes-Marketing-Tools.com web site. Peter did a great job, but the site didn’t take off.

I had read about super affiliates like Jeremy Palmer were making $1.4 million a year. I have even heard of affiliates making 8-figure annual incomes! I was intrigued and wanted some of the action. So I tried promoting the same high-demand products that they were promoting. But I had trouble turning a profit with those campaigns. I couldn’t work out why the techniques that I had been using all this time didn’t work for these new campaigns.

So I decided I should go back to affiliate marketing school. I purchased some affiliate marketing books and courses. They revealed where I had been going wrong. I was still using the same old techniques that worked in the early days of Google AdWords. But affiliate marketing has moved on and affiliates are now using more advanced techniques that I have never considered before. (I will share with you the advanced techniques I discovered in a future blog post)

Some of these affiliates even created their own software to manage far greater number of campaigns that anyone could manage manually. A few even trained people to help them. They have massive advertising budgets - some spend more in one day than I did in a month. It’s difficult to compete directly under those circumstances.

Firstly, I realized that it would be difficult to try to compete with these people. Second, I don’t enjoy the process - the work is tedious. But more importantly, I had come to a stage in my life whereby I wanted to create something of real value. I wanted to create a web site that people would love, a web site that I would be proud of. Affiliate marketing doesn’t give me that. Affiliate marketers using the Google Cash method don’t create anything of value. They just point potential customers to products. It’s all about the money. And it could disappear overnight.

The latest weapon in affiliate marketing are software programs that helps you find out what affiliate products, ads and keywords are profitable, and copy every detail. Can you imagine the chaos? You spend weeks perfecting a campaign. Then someone quietly copies it, even down to using the identical wording in their ads. Or worse still, dozens of people copy it.

They would bid higher than you because they know the campaign is profitable, so their ads show and yours get bumped down a few positions. Or worse yet, if you were linking directly to the merchant’s web site, then your ads don’t even show now because Google only shows the ad with the highest bid. A few days later other people copy their campaign. And so on… Where does it end?

The chances are you may not even realize that someone has copied your campaign until all the sales have dried, because the perpetrators are using identical ads. So when you do a search for your ad on Google, you think you are looking at your ad, when in fact it’s someone else’s. Unless you are monitoring a campaign or your ads every closely every single day, it could be weeks before you realize your campaign has been stolen.

I don’t like the way affiliate marketing is heading. I can see a future whereby computers manage thousands of campaigns, automatically copying other people’s successful campaigns, and outbidding each other until the profit margins are reduced to virtually zero. Affiliate marketing is fast becoming a commodity, if it isn’t already. It doesn’t matter who the affiliate marketer behind an ad is, because they cannot differentiate themselves from one and another.

Anyway, since I had decided that I no longer wanted to make affiliate marketing my full time business, I had to come up with an idea that would fulfill my wishes of creating something of value, that I could be proud of. I was tossing so many ideas around in my head that I couldn’t decide. This phenomenon is discussed in Barry Schwartz’s excellent book, “The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less“.

Schwartz argues that we are overwhelmed by choice. It forces us to invest time, energy, and no small amount of self-doubt, and dread. There comes a point, he contends, at which choice becomes debilitating rather than liberating. Did I make the right choice? Can I ever make the right choice?

I encountered that exact problem. There are so many ways to make money online. Should I write some books? Should I start a blog? Should I create web apps? Should I just go back to affiliate marketing? I couldn’t decide!

In the end a couple of years passed by before I made a firm decision as to which direction I wanted to go. Part of the reason could be because I fell into my comfort zone again. Remember, this was the period that I increased my income considerably using the Pareto Principle. I guess life was just too comfortable.

Michael Wong .com: 3rd Act

I finally made a decision around the beginning of 2008 to create web apps and offer them for free. I would monetize them with affiliate ads and advertising. And the first web app would be an app that I would use and knew thousands of Google AdWords advertisers would also find useful. The result was, ‘JUMBO Keyword .com’, a Google AdWords keyword editor offering 70+ 1-click Google AdWords, keywords and text editing functions to help you create, manage and edit hundreds, even thousands, of AdWords keywords quickly and easily.

It took about 15 months of development, including 8 months of programming by a freelance programmer. I have never outsourced such a big project. Peter Cooper had always been my programmer (he now only programs for himself). It was an incredibly stressful experience. I made many mistakes and I think it would be a good idea to write about all the lessons I had learnt in a future blog post.

I am more proud of JUMBO Keyword .com than anything I have ever done. It won’t change the world. But I think Google AdWords advertisers will find it useful. I use it regularly. Traffic is still low but the word is slowly getting out. Sixteen fans have already shared it with their 29,677 Twitter followers, so that is very encouraging. It’s only been 3 weeks since the launch and stats already show that many people are using the web app on a regular basis.

The Future

The future is looking bright. I’m now busy marketing JUMBO Keyword .com and working on new web apps. I also started blogging again which is the site you’re on now. I have been in this business for more than 10 years now. I’m not an expert in any particular area but I know a lot about many different areas, especially SEO and Google AdWords. I know there’s more recognition and money in specializing. But variety keeps it fun for me.

Money is important of course. It pays the bills and gives you options. But there’s more to life than just making money. And this was hit home to me in a quote I read in Sarah Lacy’s excellent book, “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0“. I can’t find the exact quote but it went something along the lines of, “if it’s just about the money, then what do you do when you make it?” Retire to the beach? Anyone who’s ever done that at the age of 39 will tell you they are bored within 6 months.

The income from the internet business enabled us to finally purchase our first home recently. Yup. I got my first mortgage at the grand old age of 39! Here’s the view from my office.

Business fluctuates from month to month. But I feel I have enough knowledge and the confidence that I can always boost my business if the income drops. Having said that, I definitely don’t take it for granted. I have seen how greed can ruin lives. A lot of people are finding that out now. I had been poor for the first 30 years of my life. I don’t want to be poor again.

My wife and son are the reasons I work so hard. It dawned on me recently that I now earn a lot more money than when I was single, yet I spend far less money on myself than back then. Wife and kids are so expensive! But they’re worth every penny.

I’m hitting 40 this year. Do I feel old? My mind feels relatively young. But my body sometimes reminds me just how old I am. I will slow down in a few years, but first I have to pay off the mortgage. I am happy I’m getting older. I mean, the alternative ain’t too attractive! Every day above ground is a great day in my opinion.

Okay, I think I’m babbled on long enough. When I thought about writing this bio I never imagined I would say so much. I hope you found it interesting and understand me a bit better now. If you have ambitions of making a living online, let me tell you that it is possible. You don’t need a degree - I don’t have one. You don’t even have to be particularly smart or talented - I’m not.

Words of Wisdom

If you have ambitions of making a living online, here are some important words of wisdom:

1. Work hard: An hour a couple of times a week will not cut it. You must be willing to make sacrifices and spend as much time as possible. I would advise giving yourself 6 months to make it work. If it doesn’t work for you, that’s okay. At least you tried and you can live the rest of your life without the question, “what if” at the back of your mind.

2. Think outside the square: If you want to be more successful than 99% of the population, you have to stop doing what 99% of the population are doing. Think different. Be unique. Stand out from the herd. Don’t worry about what people might say. Just focus on the success.

3. Take calculated risks: You cannot get rewards without taking risks. You can’t make a lot of money without taking risks. The bigger the risk, the bigger the rewards. But know when to take your losses and try something else if something isn’t working out. Don’t let your ego get the better of you.

4. Make decisions, quickly - don’t be afraid of being wrong: Don’t procrastinate. Decide, and decide quickly. It doesn’t matter if some decisions turn out to be wrong. It is far better to make a decision than not make any at all. If something isn’t working, stop, and try something else. “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” - Albert Einstein. Don’t be insane.

5. Expand your mind: Don’t stop learning after leaving school/university. Continue expanding your mind with books, courses, seminars, etc. I don’t think I finished a single book at school and consequently never made it to university. But I got my degree in internet marketing by reading over 100 business and self-improvement books and applying that knowledge in the last 10 years. Did you notice how I keep mentioning stuff I learnt from books in my story?

6. Adapt to change: “In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.” - Charles Darwin. Never stand still. If you do, others will overtake you. It’s inevitable.

7. Spend less than you earn: Make sure your business is always cash-flow positive. Reinvest profits back into your business. Live well within your means. Many people have finally realized that this is a prudent way to live.

8. Make your own luck: Luck is part of life. But instead of sitting around and waiting for lady luck to come visit us, you should make our own luck. Gary Player, the great golfer, once said, “The harder I work, the luckier I get”. To give you an example of making my own luck: if I didn’t work hard, I would not have sold my company and moved to L.A., and consequently I probably wouldn’t have met my wife who lived half a world away.

9. Network: Network with successful people and people in your industry because they will help you achieve success. Having said that, not everyone is cut out for networking - I am one of those people. So although I recommend networking, it is not essential for online success.

If you enjoyed my story and feel someone you know may also enjoy it as well, please email the URL to them. If you use Digg, I would be most grateful if you would digg the story. Alternatively, you may share the story using the ‘Share/Save’ button at the end of the email. Thank you in advance.

Before I go I have to say “thank you” to Neil Patel since he was the inspiration for this About page. I would also like to give a huge thank you to my wife, Amy, for her 9 years (and counting) of continued support, love and devotion. Without her and my son, all this would be meaningless. If you have any comments about my story, please email me at @Michael.

I wish you every success online. Thank you for your time and please take care.

Warmest regards,

Michael Wong

P.S. Don’t forget to subscribe to the free email updates using the form at the bottom of this page so that you don’t miss any future posts. I will be spilling my guts out on everything I’ve learnt over the last 10 years, and continue to learn on a daily basis. Topics including Google AdWords, SEO, affiliate marketing, internet marketing, ebusiness success stories, and self improvement.

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