Most of the posts that I see on Freelancing blogs are focused to freelancers in US, UK or any other First world country. But as you say offshore freelancers or web workers who are working from countries like India, China, Philippines, Nepal, etc. have quiet different outlook of web working. We have a different working style and timing as compared to that of freelancers in US or UK. Working for a local client might be an option for most web workers in US or UK but for people working from third world countries have to look out for opportunities on Internet only to find any decent project.

I am a web worker working from Nepal a small country situated in between the giants like India and China. Though many of you may know about this country because of Mt. Everest and Buddha but hardly anyone of you might have an experience with a Nepali web worker, that’s because there are only few dozen people from this 25 million strong country working online as a web worker.

Dying infrastructure reduces productivity
Dying infrastructure, problems of network outage, system downtime, and various other issues which might be smaller or negligible for freelancers in a first world becomes a major issue for us and immediately reduces our productivity. Though web worker in third world country might pose technically sophisticated to their clients in west but the fact is that we have to cope each day with our dying infrastructure and slow internet speed to deliver projects on fixed deadline. A 1 MBPS internet connection might be an average speed of internet in US but over here 512 kbps internet speed is quiet a luxury.

Unstable economy and working conditions
Third world countries are not economically stable and technologically advance as the first world countries. We regularly have to face situations where we have to hide our actual condition from our clients to land up the project. Though technologies like VOIP, IM and email enables us to complete with our counter-parts in the western hemisphere but in fact we have to work harder than them to equate the amount they make per month.

Lack of online payment solutions
Online payments are another huge problem with web workers in third world country. Most of the people in this part of the world have no idea of Paypal and having a credit card is considered a luxury. Few countries like India, China, Singapore and Philippines have fully operational Paypal but countries like Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, etc have to find someone in other country where Paypal is accepted to help them accept payment from their clients.

Trust factor
Trust becomes a greater factor for client when it comes to giving out projects to offshore freelancers. Though I have never faced a situation as such but i do hear from people who are talented but can’t get a project landed simply because an overseas client does not trust him or her. Secondly, we cannot quote our clients the same amount as the freelancers in their local place because as an offshore freelancer we are expected to charge a lower rate.

There are few advantages of working from this part of the world though but the disadvantages and the hardships that people over here face outnumbers the advantages. One of the advantage is that we earn in dollars but spend in Rupees so that gives us a huge saving at the end of the day.

Make Money Online is something which should be top searched term for the last decade but seriously neither Google nor Yahoo came up with it. More and More People have realized that working online and making money from internet is really possible. You want a list of things that you can do online then go Google for it. There are 162,000,000 sites that tell you how to make money online.

Here i am going to show you the real truth behind make money online phobia.

1. It’s not easy: Yes, i say you it in your face. Don’t dream of being overnight millionaire. No, you cannot. There is no way you can earn 1 million dollar overnight. I have been working online solely since last 4 years and i am not even close to that figure.

2. Work Hard: Well, if you could work hard then you could have done anything you wanted; you didn’t have to search online for make money online.

3. 99% of sites which say you that making online is easy are scammers. Run from them. If they themselves could make money online then they would not share the secret with you. Now run! You have been warned.

4. Forums, Blogs, Web 2.0, Twitter, blah blah. None of it will make you money if you just think they will make you money. You got to work your ass off to make them work.

5. Make Sites – Put Ads – Earn Dollar does not works, Go Figure.

Still interested,

Well, you can actually make money online, now ask me how?

Well, be prepared to work harder, not just 9 to 5 but beyond that because internet never sleeps, I started working online in Feb 2006, that would be almost 4 years next Feb, i was also one of you trying to easily make money online because i believed that internet worked and i too could use it make money online and you too need to have that faith in Internet. Web is not just for facebooking or chatting with your friends but there are many more things to it.

I had a diploma in web designing and had worked as a web designer before i ventured out independently on Internet so that helped me. If you have any skill that you can use on Internet than you will find working online easier than 99% of people. Web workers or internet freelancers as they say aren’t made overnight. Go ask anyone who has seriously made money from internet and they will say working in a corporate setup, going office 9-5 is lot easier than working online from your home wearing your pajamas.

That said, don’t get disheartened if you are just starting in it, The Movie has just started and there is still long way to get before this market gets saturated. But let me tell you one secret, business on internet will never get saturated, its people who get lost in the way. Things change so fast on Internet and if you don’t flow along it then you too will get saturated. Keep changing your business model and venture into new business and fields when you see your income dwindling.

Just keep faith in internet and you will surely make money.

Till, then, Best of Luck

Something about Geocities:
GeoCities began in mid-1995 as BHI, which stood for Beverly Hills Internet, a small Web hosting and development company in Southern California.

In January 1999, near the peak of the dot-com bubble, Geocities was purchased by Yahoo! for $3.57 billion in stock, with Yahoo! taking control on May 28.

On April 23, 2009, Yahoo! announced that it would be closing GeoCities, and stopped accepting new registrations, though the existing GeoCities accounts remained active.[3] In late June 2009, Yahoo! updated the GeoCities home page to indicate: “GeoCities is closing on October 26, 2009.”

The domain geocities.com attracted at least 177 million visitors annually by 2008 according to a Compete.com study.

ComScore stated that the Geocities had 18.9 million unique visitors from the U.S. in March 2006. In March 2008 Geocities had 15.1 million unique U.S. visitors. In March 2009 Geocities had 11.5 million unique visitors, a 24% decline from March 2008

One thing i don’t understand about Yahoo! is that despite Geocities being such a huge success in its heyday, how come they could not find a single way to monetize it. It’s still the 195th most trafficked domain on Internet but still Yahoo! prefers closing it. I wonder what will they close next? Yahoo Messenger where i have my account since 2000 or Yahoo Mail.

RIP Geocities! You will be missed.

See more info at Google Adsense Blog

I hope now more folks from Nepal will be able to seriously see the online income. Good Step Google. Hope oneday Paypal also becomes full service in Nepal. fingers crossed..

http://adsense.blogspot.com/2009/06/more-countries-go-western-union.html

Rule #1: Don’t assume that Muslim women need to be saved, or that you know how to save them.

Rule #2:Rather than assuming you know what Muslim women’s lives are like, try asking them.

Rule #3: Be careful of who you talk to regarding Islam and/or Muslim women.

Rule #4: Understand that Muslims are just like anyone else in terms of their belief systems.  Not everything a Muslim does has to do with Islam.

Rule #5: Understand that there is no such thing as a “Muslim culture” or “Muslim Language”. Muslims come from a variety of cultures, region and countries and culture is dynamic – it’s constantly changing.

Rule #6: Don’t create a dichotomy between “Muslim” and “Canadian” (or “American,” “British,” etc.), or between “Muslim” and “Western.”

Rule #7: Tone it down! Be mindful of the language you use.

Rule #8: Take responsibility for the consequences of your writing.

Rule #9: Leave the headscarf alone.

Rule #10: And please please don’t act like every Muslim you meet is a terrorist or a fanatic Islamist. There are whole lot of in fact the majority of Muslims around the world are way liberal than you can think of.

The last rule is added by me, since this was one thing i have been feeling lot lately.

A two-day conference which brings together stakeholders and audiences of social media and blogging, centered around WordPress. Two very special guests - Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress & Om Malik of GigaOm are joining us.

Date : 21st, 22nd Feb’09 (Saturday, Sunday), 9:00am – 6:00pm

Venue : I-1A, Sector 25A
            Noida, U.P. 201301
            India
            Tel: +91 120 244 4711

Please read the first and second part of this story before continuing here:
 New Delhi Musings Part – I
 New Delhi Musings Part – II

Fast Forwards 2009 February 1 12:30 AM, I landed in New Delhi Station with an exciting idea and a vogue plan. This time my idea was to start my own Company in India. Yes, you heard it right; the same guy who could not land up a job in same place back in 2005 is now here to start his own venture. Might sound herculean task to some but for me its piece of cake. I already have an office running in my home with around 3 people working full time for me and here I am looking forward to add few more. If you don’t know what my company or venture is called then here it is: It’s Profermics.com – Domain Development Simplified. This is it. My story from 2005 to now. More will be updated later when life  progresses ahead.

I thank you a lot if you have read all three parts of this story and have come down till here. My life never had such ups and downs since start. It only started when I started to dream big. After facing all these situations all I can say is that , Believe in Yourself – Have Faith in God – And Move ahead.

Please read the first part of this story before continuing here:
 New Delhi Musings Part – I

Fast Forward June 2005. I came back to New Delhi for a second attempt to get success. This time I didn’t focus on getting admission anywhere. Though I gave entrance exam for BCA (Hons.) in JMI but I didn’t cared about it. I had a different plan this time.

This time my plan was to get a job in New Delhi. Fascinated by the Call centers and BPO in India, I started by giving interviews in all possible call centers and BPOs I could.  I even gave an interview in Convergys which is probably one of the biggest BPO in World. As usual after giving around 35 interviews in 15 days I got only one answer from everyone. “You are an undergrad, we can’t take you.” WTF! This is why I tell my two friends Salik and Deelip that you guys are way luckier, that you got a job in Delhi despite being an undergrad.  

Harassed by the situation I again got back to Lucknow which had become like a basecamp for me. A safe landing place. The returning journey back to Lucknow from New Delhi was kind of amusing. Since I could not afford a reservation ticket so traveled in a general ticket and had to sit on the pathway of the train because the whole train was jam-packed. Imagine sitting right on the door of a train traveling with a speed of 80 miles per hr. Awesome experience! I sure will never do that again.

After returning to Lucknow I got back to Data entry job working for measly Rs. 100 per day work. Around December 2005 I got another job of search engine optimizer in a small company based in Lucknow. That paid me Rs. 4000 per month. Not huge by any standards but still was a great relief for me since I no longer had to do data entry work. My work there was to build links for websites. I loved it but six months after the job the owner of the company fired all three people along with me whom he had hired for the SEO job since he could not benefit from our work. Disgraced by the situation I finally decided to start my online venture. I worked doing some small jobs online during that time but that didn’t payed since I had no way to cash my online funds.  I left India at this point of time.

Returned back to Butwal with plans to move to Kathmandu. Story of Kathmandu is also interesting and a lot painful for me but that will be posted sometime later when I will have guts to write down memories of those scary days and experience of living in an alley.

Continued in New Delhi Musings Part III

Time passes faster than you think. It’s only been around 4 years I came here looking for a job and now in 2009 I am back here with a completely different motive that most people of my age in this part of the world will dare not think about.

Back in 2005 in the month of May when I came here for the first time I had only Rs. 1500 (approx. $33) and I had to spend around 1 week with that money. Well, you may think that was a crazy idea but that was my bitter reality back then. I didn’t had a job, had to ask money from my parents and friends. 1500 bucks that I had back then was the total sum I had accumulated doing some data entry work and getting paid Rs. 100 ($1.5) each day for punching 100*8 pages long forms in to computers. Ahh.  Those days!!! That was hectic job but still I enjoyed it. I always wanted to forget those days considering a bad nightmare but they were reality and I know it won’t go back easily.

Though I have been blogging since mid 2004 but if you dig into my blog for earlier post you won’t find a single post about those days, which was because I never thought to document those memories. But last month before leaving my home I had a thought somewhere to write a post about those days.

So, here is my story of becoming a boy of nowhere to so called rockstar. (rockstar courtesy Deelipk) .

“It all started in 2004 when my 12 standard exams ended and in spite of taking the normal route I followed advice of one of my friend to move to India.  His plan was to move to New Delhi but due to family reasons I stayed in Lucknow. It was a big city compared to Butwal where I belonged but after few months I found that it didn’t meet my expectation. After settling in Lucknow I joined Jetking to study MCSE ( Microsoft Certified System Engineer). Though that that dream is still not complete but at least I got the MCP certificate which meant I was Microsoft Certified Professional. That certification landed me in Hutch House UPE (currently Vodafone) as a trainee network engineer or whatever they called. It was a short term job for only around 15 days but it showed me the face of a corporate world or in a sense it made me addicted to work in a corporate lifestyle. That job and those fifteen days changed everything. My initial plan in Lucknow was to study BCA (Bachelors of Computer Application) but I dumped it and went around looking for job. Well, naturally I didn’t get a job anywhere but it landed me to a small data entry job which I happily took as it gave me some money and you won’t belive how much I was paid there. Re. 1 per form entered in their system and each form had around 8 pages. So, that was a huge task but paid very little, but as usual I was satisfied with it as I with my fast fingers and could rake in around 100 bucks each day. I did that job for like 3 months then.

Fast forward May 2005. Unsatisfied with my job and having no money to save and due to some major personal crisis I decided to move to New Delhi. My first intention in Delhi was to get admission either in DU or in Jamia Milia Islamia but as usual I didn’t get admission anywhere. This was first time I came to New Delhi. There is a saying in Hindi which many people in Lucknow said me “ Delhi me gum ho jaoge akele” which means You will be lost in Delhi alone. But that was me, I didn’t get lost, there was no one to help me, no godfather, no relatives, no friends. But still I all on my own managed to do everything. I stayed with one of my cousin who had a good job in New Delhi, but even he didn’t help me in anyway. That was the day I decided whatever I have to do in this world. I will do it all alone. I don’t need anyone supporting me. If I fail, I will rise again and move but won’t take any help.

My first stay in Delhi ended in less than 1 week. I had to go back to Lucknow since I had spent all my saved money (Rs. 1500). I got back and directly went to Butwal, where I planned again to get back to New Delhi in 1 month’s time. This time with more money and more courage. 

Continued in New Delhi Musings Part II