So who is Jono?

Why should you continue reading this page, this blog or anything I have to say?

Am I a rags to riches guy who now has 3 Ferrari’s, 2 houses and makes over 100k per month and will show you how you can too by simply copying & pasting a PDF which I will give to you for $7.95?

Unfortunately I’m not that guy… Sorry to disappoint

I’m the guy who’s voluntarily returned to the rags stage after quite a successful but un-ethical start. I’m the guy who you can use as your life hacks case study. The human guinea pig of internet marketing strategies & methods, the test subject of the glittery push button, the guy who has been copy / pasted and may come out successful…. Or may not.

 

My intentions for this blog is to test and review all the latest gimmicks, tricks and tactics in the internet marketing world to show you what works and what doesn’t. Let me wade through all the slime and weed out the good from the crap… 

 

I’m going to do it anyway as I’m looking for that 1 golden nugget too. I will document my results right here so if you’re interested in saving you’re time & money by letting me do the ground work then please subscribe and follow my journey.

 

As you know, there are hundreds of thousands of strategies out there and there’s more & more new ones coming out every day, most of them all filling you with the same promises.

If you’re anything like me you will have bought at least 2 of these methods, tested them only to find that they don’t work for you.

You get sucked into the next method as the theory looks realistic and the results look amazing. You try it for a few days and find that you may actually be losing money on additional costs (paid traffic, hosting etc).

By now you’re pretty fed up with the whole system and actually start to doubt that anyone (apart from the guru’s) can actually make any money online.

That’s what I think anyway and I’m pretty sure that I’m not alone with my opinion…. Yet I’m curious, I have had moderate success in the past online and I know other people are doing this and being very successful and I want to know how.

 

 

So Here’s my story

At the time of writing this I’m 37 years old and I’m originally from Scarborough in the UK. I currently live in Jakarta, Indonesia and have been here since late 1999.

Indonesia

Why Indonesia, well it’s a long story which you can read about here if you like but basically I hated life in the UK (the weather mainly), and wanted to move to the sunshine. I decided to stay in Indonesia after backpacking here back in 1999 and getting married in 2000 at the age of 20. I’m now settled here with 3 Children and have no intention of moving back to the UK… Ever 🙂

I started out as an English teacher here in Jakarta and after 4 years I got carried away with how to make a living from the internet. My salary as a young teacher in Jakarta was far from great and just enough to cover the cost of living here (around $1200 per month).

I wanted to find a way to make a western wage in a developing country.

 

 

 

 

 

Back in 2004 the internet was in it’s infancy and not too many people understood how to monetize the world wide web. One of the options that I got straight into was affiliate marketing.

I bought an ebook from clickbank called ‘google cash’ which taught the basics of making a commission by promoting other people’s products via adsense pay per click. Basically I would set up an advert on google which linked people straight from the advert to someone elses product, if the customer bought the product, I would get a commission… sounded great until I spent a lot of money on google adverts and not enough commissions in return.

 

 

 

 

 

The Amazon Scam (2006)

I needed to be assured of a sale and also get some cheap clicks for my google adverts.

I decided to sign up for amazon’s affiliate program and made a google advert with the keyword “amazon” and also “Amazon.com”. This was against Amazon’s terms or service but I thought I’d test it out anyway. I made an advert that looked something like this: Amazon™ The Official Store – I tried it without the ™ Symbol but google wouldn’t allow it.

I set the campaigns to run out of office hours in the hope that no amazon staff would notice it. This worked for around 6 months. I made over $6000 per month and spent around $800 of that on google. Sadly I got caught and my account shut down however this convinced me that affiliate marketing did actually work.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Clickbank Review Site (2006-2007)

This was my first attempt at making a website. It was really dodgy looking and a lot of the links didn’t work properly as I had to hard code the whole thing using basic HTML code (as you had to back in the days).

Everyone at the time was talking about landing pages to send traffic from google adverts to clickbank offers so I figured, why not make a review site of almost every clickbank ebook they had.

I spent almost a year creating the site, thousands of pages and reviews and sent traffic to it via google ads with the hope that i’d get some organic google traffic. I had some success with it but again was spending far too much on google and far too much time that it became un-viable.

I let the site run into 2007 without sending any paid traffic to it. I made a few sales but nothing worth documenting… it was that bad.

In Jakarta, there’s a lot of black market places to find fake branded items and nobody really cares about it here. The quality is actually really good and I frequently but my clothes & shoes from the Black Market. Here go the beginnings of the method that I’m not very proud about anymore….

 

 

Ebay – The Black Marketer (2007-2008)

The ebay bug caught on in the UK in around 2006 and almost everyone was either selling their old stuff from around the house or buying new stuff. I started by selling some old mobile phones that I had to see if it worked, which it did.

I’d visit the market and find out the latest models from Adidas and Nike, buy a test pair in a size US 9 and post them on ebay, of course I would advertise them as genuine.

The profit margin was very high. I’d buy the shoes for around $50 and sell them for $60-70. In the beginning I was purely selling on ebay until they started putting their fee’s up (2007). I had a custom website made up and started selling them on my website. I would advertise via ebay and send the traffic to my website for the sale. I also hired a freelancer from India to SEO my site and was hitting first page spots for many of my keywords.

 

Drop Shipping  (2008 – 2016)

I found a supplier in China where I could get the shoes even cheaper than I could here in Jakarta. I think they were the supplier of the black market in Jakarta. I was getting  1 pair for $50 which included the price of DHL shipping to anywhere in the world. They had a lot more models available plus they would ship for me. This meant that; I no longer had to queue at the post office, I could make extra for shipping, I had a much bigger range of shoes to sell, I could make more money for less effort. I added the shoes to my site… I made an average of $5-6000 profit per month and was hitting $8,000 around the xmas season.

I stopped doing this 2 months ago as I decided that enough was enough. I’m tired of ripping people off. It starts to eat away at you after a while and when you get into your late 30’s and have a family, it just doesn’t sit well on your conscience.

Music & TV Work (2011 – present)

I’ve been playing Guitar & Bass since I was 11 years old and have always had a passion for music.

I played with an expat band in Jakarta for a year before becoming a pro musician in 2004 with a blues band that I co-formed in 2003 the bands name is gugun blues shelter. You can do a google search for them if you like. I left Gugun Blues Shelter (GBS) at the end of 2015 and I’m currently a session bass player for a well known Indonesian singer called ‘Once Mekel’.

This has always been a side job I guess. It takes up more time than the drop shipping / online stuff but I call it a side job because the money is much less. I get paid around $300 per gig and have around 1-2 gigs per week.

 

 

 

 

This brings in enough money to pay the bills, school fees etc and put food on the table.

It’s alot of fun and gives me the opportunity to travel throughout Indonesia and perform in front of large audiences. It also gives me alot of free time during the week to work on my online businesses which is awesome.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What’s the Plan?

Well I want to start a clean slate. I know it would be easy for me to get back into dropshipping fake sneakers and make money almost instantly. I still have the contacts, the website template and all the SEO knowledge…. I don’t want to do that. I’m tired of ripping people off. I want to start a REAL and HONEST business.

From all my previous past experiences (good and bad), I have learned a few things that have worked for me and I plan to use them, as long as they’re legit!

I have had some success with product reviews from clickbank back in 2006 so I know that this works and can generate an income. I don’t want to be paying for traffic as I did before because I know that can get expensive. I realize that there are a lot of free traffic methods out there which I have used to promote my drop shipping business before. I’m comfortable being on camera so I will be using youtube as my main platform.

 

 

 

 

I’m testing a lot of new products that are being recommended to me by various guru’s and people who send me emails so I will be buying more and reviewing them in the hope that if I find a good one then people will buy it from me via my affiliate link. This way I’m not only finding what works for myself to use but also helping others like yourself to get a head start with which product to choose… Plus it’s an honest way to make money, no more rip offs and no more scams.

Apart from the business side of things, i plan on doing some short video posts about what’s going on month by month. I don’t know how regularly i’ll be doing these and i can’t promise any kind of upload schedule or video length but it’ll give you an insight into the life of Jono Armstrong and you’ll hopefully be able to watch me progress from this new beginning.

 

 

 

 

 

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed reading my in-a-nutshell life story so far and I hope you enjoy following me on my journey.

If you ever have any questions for me, you can contact me any time at: jonoarmstrong1980@gmail.com