Internet is a home to zillions of new opportunities. Today we are having a chat with someone who is finding new opportunities online. We are having a Interview with Origami.me, Founder – Peter Saydak.
How have you been, Peter? I would like to start with a little intro about you, for our readers.
My name’s Peter Saydak and I’m from Canada. My main projects right now are origami.me. A blog about online marketing, web design and entrepreneurship at petersaydak.com and a business setting up blogs for people at easymodeblogging.com.
Interesting! You should be busy running 3 different products. How do you manage your time? Any tips and tricks?
Unfortunately, no. I don’t really have any tips and tricks. I just work all day for around 8 hours and then stop. I’ve tried various productivity things like the pomodoro timer and stuff like that but those don’t really work for me. I end up just forgetting to set the timer or not wanting to stop and working through the breaks.
To do lists I guess are pretty helpful. I usually put a to do list together for the next day at the end of the day. Other than that I pretty much just work.
What did you like working with your product the most?
I really like that I get to work on my own projects and I don’t really have to answer to a boss or anything like that. In previous jobs I would be asked to do things that didn’t make sense and I would be punished for finding more efficient ways to do things. I really don’t like that kind of environment. I very much like that I don’t have a commute and that I can work from anywhere in the world as long as there’s Internet.
I’m living in Canada right now. Also, have lived in China and Africa previously and was able to still work there. Probably most importantly I like that I can do whatever I want, spend my time working on what I want and make my websites look exactly the way I want them to look.
What work did you do when you were in Africa and China? How did you get clients?
I worked on my own websites and did a bit of work for two clients I already had back when I was in Canada.
What technologies, gadgets & tools do you use for creating these awesome websites?
All of my websites are built with WordPress. I also use a lot of Photoshop. I have a resources page on my website where I have a bunch of my favorite tools listed. Peter Saydak’s favorite tools.
That’s nice! How do you generate your revenue’s? What all do you sell or charge people for?
I have a few websites that make money from affiliate marketing and things like Google AdSense. I also do freelance work building websites for people, creating online advertising campaigns with things like Google AdWords or Facebook Advertising
Tell us about those early problems that you had to face in growing your business?
I don’t know if I really had much problems going on when I started. I started working on my own stuff in my free time after I got home from work or on weekends. There was a bunch of stuff about online marketing and what not that I had to teach myself and lot of that I was able to learn through my job. It definitely took me a long time before I was able to quit my job to focus on my own stuff, easily about 2 or 3 years of working in my spare time.
Maybe you can give us some ballpark stats about how your business is doing?
Like stats in terms of traffic and what not?
The traffic to your sites would help and I don’t mind if you’re willing to share about the revenues you generate 😀?
I’m not comfortable sharing too much information about either of those but I’ll talk a bit about one site I used to have.
I built a website about Japanese Emoticons. It was getting between 20,000 and 25,000 visits per day. One day it was featured on the front page of Reddit and got over 180,000 visits that day. This was my best performing website. Back in January 2016 I sold it for about as much as I was making in a year at my previous full time job managing the marketing for a group of car dealers. I live a pretty minimalistic life and was making enough money from my projects to live comfortably.
Related Read: How Origami Helps your 5 business skills
I’m certainly not rich yet but I was fine. Since I sold that site my monthly revenue has dropped a lot so I’m putting most of my time into building up some new sites to hopefully get back where I was before I sold the site. The numbers for my other sites aren’t very impressive right now which is why I’m working on them.
That’s a good number! How much did that site make in a month with that many visitors? How did you monetize it? Also, how are you improving the traffic for your other sites?
I’m not comfortable giving out how much money the site made but it was monetized with primarily Adsense ads. Which were about 50% of the revenue and sales of a mobile app I made, the other 50%. The site was quite frustrating to monetize because the cost per click with Adsense was a fraction of a cent so even with such a large amount of visitors I didn’t make anywhere near as much money from Adsense as I had hoped. Nobody was running ads or bidding on anything to do with Japanese emoticons.
I tried other advertising networks and various affiliate offers but everything I tried ended up making less money than Adsense. So, in the end I just stuck with that. The frustrations I had monetizing the site is what ultimately led me to sell it and if you visit it now you’ll see it’s absolutely covered in ads. For the site’s I’m working on now I’m primarily focusing on SEO and social media to get traffic. One of my sites origami.me is starting to get a decent amount of traffic from a combination of Facebook and Reddit.
Please, share some Tips and Tricks for our readers at Trdinoo on how to get good traffic to websites? Like things to do in Social Media or SEO? An Example maybe
A lot of the things I did to get my Japanese Emoticons site don’t really work anymore after 5 or 6 years of Google updates. My biggest advice is to not go after the latest SEO tricks or anything like that. I’ve tried tons of little SEO tricks and things and never had much success with them.
The best success I’ve had with SEO came from:
- Really solid on-site SEO, learn about things like meta tags, xml sitemaps, canonicalization, keyword density and all the other on-site SEO factors. Without getting those in place first nothing’s going to happen. If you have a WordPress website the plugin Yoast SEO is amazing and makes a lot of the on-site SEO stuff really easy.
- Make sure you create awesome content. Nobody is going to care about, share or link to something that’s not awesome. If you create something awesome and have it backed by strong on-site SEO then that’s what’s going to get you traffic. A few other things I’d say would be to study click-bait headlines and make sure your posts have really strong headlines that make people want to click on them. Also, people really love lists.
- I recently made two list posts: 27 Great YouTube Channels with Origami Video Tutorials and 58 Fantastic Websites to Get Free Stock Photos for Your Blog in 2016 . Both those posts got a bunch of shares on social media, up votes on reddit and a lot more traffic than I was already getting.
That’s some good advice! How to approach the social media? Anything apart from the awesome content that stands out in the must do list?
I personally hate social media so my trick is to schedule and automate everything. I’m very active on multiple social media accounts for my petersaydak.com and origami.me. For both of those I use Hootsuite. At the start of the month I spend an hour or two basically scheduling out all the posts for the next month and then I don’t have to worry about anything. For origami.me I post a ton of pictures of origami from Flickr across all the social media accounts.
I use If This Then That (ifttt.com). I have recipes set up so that, if I favorite a photo on Flickr it automatically gets posted across all my social media networks. By using a combination of Hootsuite ($10 a month) and IFTTT (free) I can make a ton of social media posts and only spend an hour or two a month on it. I can’t recommend Hootsuite and IFTTT enough.
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The world would be a better place if _____.
Those weren’t easy questions. But, I’d say the world would be a better place if everybody had at least some training in martial arts. I started doing Karate in high school and it was a huge help in my life in terms of self-confidence, discipline, physical fitness and dealing with other people.
I would love to be at _____ event , to find new opportunities
Not really sure about events. I’m sure there are tons of events out there related to blogging, entrepreneurship, marketing and stuff like that. But, I don’t really know of any and I’m not sure how beneficial they’d be. I’m pretty sure everyone who goes to things like that are just doing it to try to connect and get stuff from other people.
For my origami website going to the yearly Tanteidan Origami Convention in Japan would be pretty cool. I’d definitely get to connect with people in the origami world.
Related Read: If Fashion is your trade, then Travel to Ura-Hara, Japan
What’s with your affection towards Japanese culture? Origami, Japanese emoticons, martial arts, etc…
I’m not really sure. I’ve really liked Japanese video games. Since, I was a kid and in high school I had some friends who were super into things like Japanese anime. The Japanese emoticons site was an idea a friend suggested. I did some research and found there were no competing sites back then and “Japanese emoticons” had a huge amount of searches on Google so it looked like a good opportunity.
Origami is a thing I started doing as a kid and just thought was cool. The martial arts aren’t really a Japanese thing. I started off doing Karate and did that for a couple of years. But later switched to a style of Kung Fu called Choy Li Fut. I also do Tai Chi off and on. I guess I just find Asian culture in general interesting.
They do Indeed. What are the new opportunities and business you are planning for the future?
I’m focusing pretty much all my time on my blog petersaydak.com, my origami website origami.me and a new service that’s setting up blogs for people at easymodeblogging.com. All these have a ton of potential so that’s what I’m going to be working on for the foreseeable future. That and also doing freelance projects if they come up.
Thank you! Peter Saydak, for giving us this interview on finding new opportunities online. On behalf of our aspiring entrepreneurs and our team at Trdinoo, we wish you the very best for your future.
