Well I must say that I am happy with my NextTutor website although it isn’t very successful. For a first time solo venture, I am happy that I can achieve a PR of 2 ( I know its low la..but its a tuition site leh) and even attract tutors to post their profiles in my site. The last I’ve seen, I have 120+ tutor profiles on my site!

My main revenue collection comes from Advertisements given by Adsense. I have also recently placed Advertlet’s code in the NextTutor blog.

However this means that I will never be able to hire anyone to help on the site since the money generated is really little and its fuelling on my passion for the site.

I am happy that I finally got the featured tutors thing up and running, though it is difficult getting tutors to give me an email interview. Perhaps I should write a little tutorial on my blog called how to get more assignments, and then link it to NextTutor’s services to attract more traffic.

I am also trying to reformat certain areas because they do not seem to be so user-friendly. The look of NextTutor is only so-so in certain areas and needs more improvements.

Perhaps when NextTutor is more successful, I can add in more sections for revenue growing opportunities and then I can grab another partner in? Haha…

Anyway I have to first revamp and get it out of beta testing mode.

Entrepreneurship is really hard, especially one that doesn’t really generate much revenue.

These days there have been much talk about Ping.sg’s business meeting. This, plus the freedom during holidays, inspired me to pursue my entrepreneurial spirit and work on the tuition site that I haven’t been putting effort in for.

These few days I did some stuff to revamp my site. I changed certain sections and abolished categories. I set myself a clearer guideline on what I want to do. Since I have an issue on manpower, I got to work smart. I can’t possibly launch a million segments only to have 1 succeed.

Following Nuffnang’s and Advertlets’ featured bloggers, I came out with a featured tutor thing that can allow parents to check out a person’s photo and their answers to interview questions before deciding whether to hire that person or not. Well its in an early stage but I’m glad that 2 tutors replied and both replied positively.

The problem I have now is to convince people to use my service. Or rather, in the student database part. I need people to come and put up profiles of students looking for tutors. The most widely used page is the student assignment search, but the irony is that there are no assignments there! How sad!

Well, lots to work out before school starts in the middle of January. Jiayou!

People who have been on my blog for a long time should know that I have this pet project called NextTutor, which I have been working on for months. In fact, in the recent days I have gotten so demoralized with it that I have not updated it.

Basically its rotting now and I have to do something about it. I need to decide which sections to keep and which to implement. Basically my aim is to help the tuition community so that people can search through tuition jobs instead of pouring through forums threads.

The whole project is beginning to become a gigantic problem. With regards to promotion, implementation and what have you.

Its much easier to maintain a blog than a website. Thats for sure.

Well well. Today has been more fruitful.

I have gotten frustrated with MaxHub’s service. MaxHub is the service which provides me my domain name ignorantsoup.com. A few days ago I requested a new domain name, and I sent them an email to enquire how payment would be made. I knew from past experiences that the payment would be debited into their account by atm fund transfer. However, I forgot their bank account number.

It took me many days of not getting a decent reply, followed by countless emails asking of the same question before I got tired and found another domain name company. In fact, it is way cheaper. Godaddy.com is a company that sells domain names registration as well as hosting plans. MaxHub’s domain registration costs S$16.00. Godaddy.com costs US$8.95. After finding a coupon code on google, which gives 10% discount, it became US$8.05. After using an online currency convertor, it amounts to around S$12.00. A saving of 4 dollar per year!

So now I have moved my tutor site and I have updated the relevant SQL databases. I am also installing wordpress on the other site so I can have a blogging mechanism up and running. Very soon later I will be launching it. Hopefully I can make some affiliate dollars.

As for assessment book diagram drawing, I have gotten an answer to how the diagrams are drawn. Using MS Word. Therefore I conclude that I have to adjust my MS Word drawing skills.

To success and beyond!

Been reading up recently..Bought this book called Secrets of Internet Millionaires by Stuart Tan, who’s a partner of Adam Khoo.. Its pretty interesting and it does give me some insight. I haven’t really finish the book as yet, but it has brought me to think more of my website. Now I’m brainstorming to improve on the site as well as to find practical ways of earning my pocket money.

There’s this thing so far called Affiliate Marketing. Basically, you get an account from places like Clickbank or CommissionJunction, and you can sell other people’s stuff on your website or blog. Amazon.com allows people to sell books and many other things online and I noticed a friend of mine who has an account linked to his blog.

So basically, if you have a blog or website, you can sell the stuff. When someone buys them via your website, you get a commission since you referred the buyer to the seller. The best thing would be if your blog has a niche, like talking about bags or accessories, and that you frequently update the site.

If your blog has book reviews, you could just very well sell books online! I’m not really selling stuff on my blog because there are less readers and I do not want to spend money to advertise my blog. I do not frequently update too. Another point is that my readers are mainly Singaporeans and I believe they would rather go to the nearest MPH or Borders or Kinokuniya or Popular bookstore to get their books. Why do you need to pay so much for shipping? If I am not wrong, Amazon charges US$12.00 for international shipping and it will only come 4-8 weeks later. I can just go out and purchase a S$18.00 book myself can’t I?

However, I thought about selling other stuff on the other website I’m working on, so hopefully everything works well!