Happy New Year 2023

 I wish you all a Happy New Year 2023.  

I like the "Do it Anyway" Poem which was written by Kent M. Keith and made popular by Mother Teresa. I uploaded it as a YouTube Shorts here. If you like this, share it with your friends.

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"QPT Talks" for sharing experiences and expertise of Scientists and Entrepreneurs

Currently, I run a YouTube channel for sharing the latest Science and Technology news. Now I am planning to use this channel for sharing the experience and expertise of Scientists, Innovators, Doctors, and Entrepreneurs so that my channel viewers will get more useful content while I could earn more from ads.

So, I am inviting the experts as Guest speakers to share their experiences with my channel viewers. Either they can record a video telling about them and talking about their favorite topic, or they can talk through Google Meet which will be live-streamed to my channel. 

I will add these Talks to the "QPT Talks" playlist.

And, I will be arranging panel discussions also in the coming days.

If you are interested, you can contact me (rajamanickam.a@gmail.com)

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My Higher Secondary School Reunion

A few days back (on 19th June), I attended our school reunion. I completed my Higher secondary school at John The Baptist Higher Secondary School (JBHSS), Puthiamputhur, Tuticorin District Tamilnadu.

I felt happy to see our Teachers and Friends. I could remember the sincerity and dedication of the teachers there. Though our school is located in a village, most of our teachers were very skilled. I am thankful to all our Teachers, especially our Physics Teacher whose dedication is extraordinary. I still remember her teachings on Nuclear fusion, Black Holes, and Superconductors which were considered less significant at that time (around 28 years back) but getting more importance these days. Apart from that, she used to tell about the importance of education aggressively. Now I could understand it by going through the history of various countries and people. Nelson Mandela rightly said, “Education is the most powerful weapon in the fight against poverty". I mean real education, not the one selling on commercialized schools/colleges.

I studied engineering degree and then worked in many software companies, and then run a software company for many years. But currently, I am publishing Science and Technology news on my YouTube channel. I would like to thank my school for this also. Because my school gave me the opportunity to read news on assembly/prayer for many months while studying there. It was a good experience.

Apart from studies, this school strongly cultivated good spirituality and good habits. I believe it helped me to choose simple and peaceful life over stressful/luxury/corporate life though I got opportunities for both kinds of life.

This photo was taken in 1992 (Around 30 years back while studying 10th standard)

I am thankful for the people who started this school and the people who put their efforts to develop this school. And thanks to my friends who arranged this Reunion.

Though this Reunion made me feel happy overall, I felt some kind of sadness as some teachers who showed a lot of kindness to me were no more.

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WhatsApp Group for watching latest Science & Technology News

For many years I am uploading science and technology news videos on my YouTube channel. If you want to watch those videos, you can join this WhatsApp Group.

Let me know if you find any issue in joining this Whatsapp Group.

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Released new version (4.2) of our PHP Timesheet Script to make it work on mobile devices

We have developed a php timesheet script in the year 2010 and updated it many times to include many features, and sometimes to remove unwanted things to keep it a simple script so that usage and maintenance will be easy. As it was developed many years back, I hesitated to develop it further. Instead I thought of developing a new script from scratch. But that will take a lot of efforts, especially it will require a lot of testing.   So, I postponed that plan.  And therefore, I stopped selling it last year and I switched my focus to run my Science and Technology News YouTube channel. 

But many people approached me to get the timesheet script even when I removed the "Buy now" button from the site. I explained them that it might have outdated. But still some people bought it. It made me to realize the demand for our timesheet script. I did some detailed study to understand the timesheet market. Based on my analysis, a lot of people are selling cloud based timesheet membership. But the price is high though it looked very cheap initially. Some people are selling timesheet script, but they are not providing source code. Some open source scripts are available, but they are not fully developed. I had written similar thing when we started selling our timesheet script a decade back. It seems the situation is not yet changed. 

In brief, there is a good demand for good and affordable timesheet script even if it appears that the market is flooded with timesheet products. So, I thought of developing our timesheet product further. But at the start of this year I decided to put my 100% efforts for running my YouTube channel. So, initially I hesitated to spend time for timesheet development. Recently I heard about some events that made me to realize the risks of depending on YouTube fully.  So, I was looking for some YouTube alternative as I explained in my post about Odysee. After putting some efforts to find YouTube alternatives, I found that there is no alternative for YouTube as of now. Finally I decided to put efforts to start selling our Timesheet script again.

I have updated the timesheet script to make many pages mobile friendly. And, I replaced the popup calendar with jquery datepicker. After doing some testing, I released this updated script as version 4.2. 

Previously I was selling this script for $80 and sometimes I sold it with Discount offer. Now I am again selling it with Discount offer. If you buy it now, you can get it for just $40.

You may watch this video, to know more about our Timesheet Script.

We have done a lot of custom changes for many of our timesheet customers based on their own requirements. We have done date format changes, language changes, look and feel changes, work flow changes, changed the hierarchy (e.g added task), included various reports,  added new features like payroll, expenses, etc. 

Apart from that, we have developed separate timesheet applications from scratch for some customers.

So, we can do any kind of custom changes easily.

And, as our timesheet script comes with source code, our timesheet customers themselves can do any custom changes.

You can see  the live demo here. Let me (rajamanickam.a@gmail.com) know if you find any issue when seeing the demo. And, I welcome any suggestions for improving it further in the coming days. 

Refer this timesheet script to your friends who are interested to have their own copy of timesheet script instead of paying monthly for every user. I hope even people without technical background can also easily manage to setup and run this timesheet script, as it is very simple. Almost all the hosting services are providing php and mysql. You need to just create one database and mention it in while installing the timesheet.  By owning your own timesheet, you can easily make any changes based on your own requirements and your data will be safe with you. Ultimately you need not pay more than once, and you can create any number of users.

I am planning to start selling this timesheet script by running Google Ads. I will be doing ROI analysis in few days. I may cancel the discount or increase the price to have Positive ROI. So, if you want to use the discount offer, buy it now.

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Odysee Review - My experiences of using Odysee Video Platform. Will Odysee become YouTube alternative or just Backup for YouTube Videos?

In this post, I would like to share my experiences of using the Blockchain-based Video platform "Odysee" for the past one month.

I have a YouTube channel running from 2009, and I have uploaded more than 3500 videos, most of them are Science and Technology News videos. Though I started my YouTube channel as Hobby initially, currently I am doing it full-time.

A few years back, YouTube had disabled monetization for my YouTube channel two times.  As I am doing YouTube video creation full-time, I was exploring some YouTube alternatives to manage the risk of any further YouTube demonetization.

After doing a lot of research, I finally decided to use Odysee as YouTube alternative. One month back, I created my Odysee channel and synced with my YouTube channel.

Overall I have a mixed feeling about Odysee. All the basic things are working good and we can consider it as YouTube Backup. But, as of now, we can not consider it as our primary video platform.

I was able to create Odysee channel easily, and I could sync my YouTube channel easily with simple process. 1000 recent videos from my YouTube channel were copied to my Odysee channel automatically. In the description, Odysee is giving the link to the original YouTube video also.  Only 1000 videos out of more 3500 videos were copied. Personally it is acceptable to me, as my old videos are not much relevant now. If I want, I can download the video from YouTube and manually upload to Odysee.

Syncing will be done for videos only. It won't import playlists, comments and subscribers from YouTube channel. I manually created some playlists and added videos to the new playlists. It took significant time. 

Experience of watching Odysee videos on Web is good. But on their android app, video watching experience is not good, as of now. I hope they will be fixing the issues soon. Actually they are working well to fix the issues. A few days back, I reported a small bug related to video embedding on reddit, they fixed it soon.

Apart from uploading Videos, we can use Odysee to post text content also. And, we can earn money in crypto currency named LBRY Credits (LBC).  As the payment is in Crypto, I initially hesitated to focus on my Odysee channel. After doing more analysis I realized that withdrawing LBC to my bank account is NOT difficult.

LBC is not accepted by many Crypto exchanges. It is available only in a few exchanges like Bittrex. But those exchanges are not supporting withdrawal to my local currency. So, I had to use two crypto exchanges for withdrawing money from Odysee.

Currently we can earn from Odysee in different ways. Even for watching videos, Odysee is giving LBCs. And, as a creator, we can earn money based on "per view". 

Odysee is providing Live feature also. I tried it once, and it is working smoothly.

And, I have noticed that my Odysee videos are getting good number of views comparing to my YouTube channel.  Currently I have only 20 followers on Odysee while I have 64K subscribers on YouTube. New videos on Odysee are getting around 10 views while YouTube videos are getting around 100 views.  So, obviously Odysee is having good potential to get more views if I promote it instead of promoting my YouTube channel on my social media accounts.

And, I was very much impressed with the Odysee's decision for not blocking RT channel while many media included YouTube blocked it.

All these things made me to think about considering Odysee as my primary video platform instead of YouTube. So, I did more analysis. Then I realized that Odysee is not yet ready to be the primary video platform. Currently it is having many shortcomings. Though it is good for creators, it is not good for viewers. It is not supporting transcoding. So, the viewers are forced to watch the video at fixed resolution. It will either consume more bandwidth or limit the user to watch in low resolution. The user is not having option to choose the option of saving bandwidth and watching at high quality.

And, it is not having ClosedCaption(CC)/transcript feature. So, people can not read the speech as text. It will be difficult to watch video if the accent is not familiar.

The important things like Search and Recommendation are not working well. It is almost not useful now. It will completely push the viewers away from the platform.

Currently, Odysee is boosting the content based on Money deposited by the creators. It is like, showing "ads" to viewers without marking them as "Ads". It will bury the good content, and I believe it is insult to the viewers. I think it is a major issue. So, I mentioned it to Odysee CEO through twitter. But he didn't send any reply to me. Instead, he is very busy with mocking YouTube and others. He won't be mocking YouTube, if he knows how hard YouTube was working hard to encourage the creators initially. As I created my YouTube channel in 2009 itself, I know these things personally. I used to get emails from YouTube frequently with some offers. As I was very busy with my software development startup at that time, I missed to use that opportunity.

All these things along with the key thing of not having videos of favorite creators will force the viewers away from Odysee. It will in turn, discourage the creators also as they won't get views. Odysee's efforts to bring viewers using invite/referral program will be wasted.

And, I have noticed an another important thing. Actually Odysee is saying that they are paying most part of the revenue to the creators. But reality is different. They announced Odysee Premium for charging the viewers. But they are not sharing this revenue with the creators. I understand that they have many valid expenses. But the point here is, on the one hard they are heavily, publicly  criticizing YouTube for not sharing most part of the revenue with creators, on the other hand they are doing the same thing. I have noticed few other odd things also. For example, "per view" rate is getting changed dynamically.  And, on one hand they are saying that no one can remove the content from LBRY network, on on the other hand they are saying that their paywall will work on LBRY network level also.

So, I would say that Odysee is a good platform for using as a backup system for our YouTube channel. But, currently we can not consider it as YouTube alternative. Let us see how things are going. You can join Odysee using my Invite link. 

Share your thoughts and experiences related to Odysee through the comments.

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Are you looking to earn money online or doing a small online business?

I am planning to start working as a freelancer to guide anyone who is planning to start a small online business.

As specified in my previous post, my highest priority for this year is, promoting my YouTube channel. So, I will be able to spend only a few hours per day on this freelance thing, and therefore I will be accepting a few clients only.

If you haven't read my online money earning experience post yet, read it first before continue reading this post, to have a better understanding of what I am talking about here.

Previously I worked as a freelancer doing web development and software testing for many projects many years back.

But this freelance initiative will be a bit different from my previous thing. 

Previously I used to do whatever task given by my clients based on their requirements details and instructions. I stopped doing this kind of work, as I had to spend more time on my YouTube channel. I found it difficult to manage time to do both things as I had to make myself available according to my client's schedules.

But now I plan to spend my time based on my free time. i-e Instead of completely stopping doing freelance work, I plan to do it for people who are ready to be flexible with my available time.

I plan to set the per-hour rate based on my workload and availability of free time. 

Instead of just doing software/web development work, I plan to do complete guidance for doing online business, as I had gained a very rich experience in doing small online businesses by trying various things. Though I am not much successful in many attempts, I learned a lot of lessons from them. So, I can guide others so that they do better from the beginning by avoiding the mistakes that I made.

So, if you have a product or service idea, I can guide you starting from choosing target audience, domain, website development, landing page optimization, lead capture, SEO, Testing, Social media promotion strategy, running Google Ad campaigns effectively, etc.

Even if you don't have any product/service idea, I can suggest simple online earning approaches (e.g blog, YouTube channel, eBook, freelance work, etc) based on your skillset and passion.

As I am exploring various emerging technologies daily to upload videos on my Channel, I got good exposure to business opportunities related to emerging technologies also. I can suggest a suitable idea based on your skillset and interest.

But earning from online business is not easy. We have to do a lot of hard work and we need to have a single-minded approach and have clear communication. And, it is having a lot of risks also. I can NOT give any guarantee for the success for your business initiatives. 

If you are interested, contact me at rajamanickam.a@gmail.com

And, if you are already running any business and looking for a paid promotion, you can place sponsored ads on my YouTube Channel videos.

For many years I was selling timsheet script. Recently I stopped selling it as I don't have enough time to do custom changes, and the script is a bit outdated. I have plans to update the script and start selling it again. I am exploring options to develop it further or make use of this experience in developing a similar product. Anyone interested in this business can work with me on win-win basis. (e.g developers can earn by doing custom changes, marketers can earn commission by selling it). The primary reason behind thinking about this project is, that we had done a lot of hard work for optimizing (link building) the landing page. I would like to make use of that landing page in some way. For Example, if you have any good timesheet product, I can sell it there on a revenue-sharing basis.

A few years back I created a few simple android apps and promoted some of them using various campaigns (including Google ads) for many months. Some of them got good ratings and reviews and gave some earnings. Later on, I stopped promoting them, as I switched my focus to promoting my YouTube channel. Because of lack promotion, the growth is declining now. So, I plan to sell them.

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Showing My YouTube Channel Playlist Videos on RtoZ.Org Website using YotuWP plugin

I have installed YotuWP wordpress plugin for the RtoZ.org website to show videos from a few playlists from my YouTube Channel.

For setting up this plugin, I had to use YouTube Data API v3 api key generated from Google cloud platform.

Using this plugin, I created these pages. Check them and let me know of you find any issues in using them. And, let me know if you have created any pages by including videos from my YouTube channel. In this case, I will share your page with my social media followers.

• Science and Technology News Videos

• Artificial Intelligence (AI) News
• CRISPR Gene Editing
• Graphene
• Health and Medical Technologies
• Nano Technology
• Robots and Drones
• Solar Power

These pages will be automatically updated with the new videos added into the playlists.

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This post is for sharing my experiences of Earning Money Online

In this post, mostly I will be writing about my career as freelancer, Small IT company Founder, YouTuber, and Odysee explorer.

Because of the widespread usage of the internet, traditional business models are getting changed entirely. These days we have a lot of opportunities for earning money online. I won’t say that earning money online becomes easy, but the opportunities for earning money online are increasing, and we get a lot of information and guidance for earning money online.

Before giving more details, I want to clarify a few things.
I am going to write this post based on my personal experiences. I haven't done any research to come up with this. I am just writing it based on my own experiences and my own thoughts. So, it need not be applicable to everyone.    In the case of online earnings, you may come across a lot of scams and misinformation. So, you need to be very careful about doing online works.

My Name is Rajamanickam Antonimuthu. I have completed my Engineering Degree in 1998 in India and had worked for various IT companies including IT wings of big investment banks such as BNY and CitiGroup in various roles (mostly in software test automation) till 2008.

Then I wanted to start doing my own Business.    I explored various business options. Since I had good work experiences in Software Development and Software Testing, I decided to do freelance work related to Software Development or Testing.

Since I am living in a Developing Country, doing freelance work for a local market is not profitable. So, I started looking for online work.    I thought doing freelance work online for the clients living in ‘Developed Countries’ can help me to earn significant money. I spent significant time at Browsing Centers (Net Cafe) for using the internet to search for online work. It was not easy to get online work at that time period. I was ready to do any kind of online work including Data Entry work. But I found difficulty in finding online work. I thought having an internet connection at my home can help me to spend more time searching for online work.    But it was not easy to get an internet connection at that time. Somehow I managed to get an internet connection at my home, and started spending more time searching on the internet to find online work. Initially, I was not looking for any money, and I was ready to do any kind of task without any payment just to start my online career. But still, I was not able to get any online work for many weeks.

I put a lot of effort for finding freelance websites, as there were only a few freelance websites available at that time. And I started spending a lot of time for searching work on those freelance websites. After some weeks of continuous efforts, finally I got my first task from a freelance website called “RentACoder” which was later renamed to “vWorker” and then merged with “Freelancer”.    Interestingly, my first task was completely irrelevant to my skill set. It was related to video-editing which I was not familiar at that time.    It was not an actual video-editing task, but a question related to video-editing.    Somehow I managed to complete the task (i-e answering the question)    by referring to many websites and doing a lot of Trail and Error actions, and I got a good rating and review comment. I felt very happy about it and decided to continue this approach.

Interestingly I was able to complete this first task within an Hour though I had to spend a lot of hours to get this project. Initially, I used to bid for a lot of projects. Then I realized that placing a lot of bids is not going to help even if my bids are very low. Instead of putting my efforts into bidding on a lot of projects, I started bidding on a few highly relevant projects and put my efforts into analyzing those projects deeply. I started asking a lot of relevant questions after going through the requirements, and even I started telling my suggestions for the success of the projects even before winning the bids. This approach helped me to win more bids and I put a lot of hard work to deliver the projects as per the requirements of the customers. I did the corrections without any hesitation. All these things helped me to get good ratings and bonus money.

I started getting exclusive projects so that I can win the bid without any competition.    I focused more on PHP/MySQL projects.

As I was getting more projects easily, I started a Company “QualityPoint Technologies” and started hiring Team members to help me complete the projects.    Because of the quality of our work and competitive bidding, we used to get many projects and we were able to complete more than 120 projects within a few years.

Though I had a lot of Good Ratings and Reviews for my RentACoder profile, my account got suspended for a dispute with a customer.    By that time, I had a list of good customers who were willing to give me the projects directly. So the RentACoder account suspension didn’t affect my business. Instead, it helped me to avoid their fees and I got the freedom to have direct communication with the clients without any restrictions.    The only thing was I couldn’t see the Reviews and Ratings given by the clients as my account got suspended. Interestingly, all these Reviews started appearing on my profile at Freelancer which acquired RentACoder.    It made me think that no one can stop the rewards of our Hard work. Anyway, I didn’t want to use any freelancing websites as I got enough projects from my existing customers. More interestingly, my blog post about the RentACoder account suspension got a lot of traffic, and I earned some money by adding an affiliate link to another freelance website.

In case you decide to use freelancing websites for your online earnings, first spend significant time for finding a freelancing site which is most suitable to you. Then understand their rules properly by going through the discussions on related forums. Once you are familiar with their rules, features, and best practices, spend significant time for properly setting up your profile or any other details like skill set, hourly rate, etc. As I specified earlier, try to understand the requirements of the project properly and come up with your questions when bidding for the project.    As a beginner, you may have to bid low to get projects. But don’t bid too low. Always have clear communication with your customer. Don’t hesitate to point out any issues in their requirements. When you face any difficulty in completing the project at the specified time period, immediately communicate with your customer, don’t give them surprises. It is better to get the payment on Hourly basis in the long run.    Most of the customers may not agree to pay Hourly as they plan to spend a specific amount of money for a specific project. So, they prefer to pay based on the project rather than Hourly. But it is important to gain their trust to convince them for the Hourly payment. The main reason is, we tend to give our suggestions only when we are paid hourly. Our suggestions are very important for the success of the project. We will be getting more projects only when our customers are successful. It is better to focus on specific area of work. For example,    if you are a coder, focus on any one specific script (e.g PHP). In the long run, you will be coming up with a lot of function libraries which you can reuse in many of the projects. It will help you to save time and get more projects easily.

Let me continue my story.    Though I could get projects easily, I couldn’t earn money as the employees used to leave our Company for a better salary from Corporate Companies once they got experience from our company. All my energy, time, and money spent on hiring the Team members and for training them were not helping me to earn money.    So, I decided to change our business model. I focused more on developing and promoting our own products such as Timesheet Software. This business model is somewhat better than the previous one, because the high employee attrition rate didn't affect this model much. In the case of Freelance projects, we used to get different kinds of projects. So, it required good work experience in various kinds of projects. But in case of timesheet project, I can easily train any new team member.

But this model is also not giving much profit as the advertising cost is high.

In short, getting projects becomes easy for me. Individually I could earn from the projects. But it was not profitable when I tried to do it by hiring Team members. i-e I was not able to scale this business model.

In the meantime, I have noticed that Google Adsense is giving significant earnings from my blog which I started to share my software development experiences initially. So, I had decided to choose Google Adsense earnings as the primary source of income.  And therefore, I have started many websites for showing Adsense ads.

I even sold many websites through websites-market-places such as Flippa and Digitalpoint Forum by showing the Adsense revenue as the proof for the value of the website.    These things made me think that Google Adsense is the best and easy way of earning online. Anyway, flipping of websites didn't help much as I faced difficulty while selling many websites.

Sometimes the Fees for selling the website are more than the website sales price itself. And, the instability in our Team causes high development and promotion costs. Unnecessarily I was spending money for renewing many domains, and for the hosting servers. So, finally I decided to drop lots of websites by letting them expire themselves instead of wasting my time and money for trying to sell them through Flippa or any other websites-market place.

The unstable Team causes a lot of issues. For example, I have done a lot of hard work to bring the Automatic Resume Posting tool which had lots of potential to earn money easily. But, because of the instability in our Team, I couldn't make money from that amazing thing.

And therefore, I stopped hiring any new Team members to avoid further losses driven by unstable team.

Currently, I don’t have any full-time team member. But I strongly believe in Team work. And, I had a lot of good experiences when we were working as a Team.    So, I have plans to build a Strong Team in the near future once I finalize my current business plans.

I learned the lesson that unstable Team won't allow the Entrepreneur to earn money from any kind of initiative even if all the other things are supporting the Entrepreneur.

I am exploring various ways about making the unstable Team into a stable team.

In the meantime, I had decided to find some other ways for earning money without depending on Team members much. i-e I was looking for some kind of passive income opportunity.

I had tried various ways for earning passive income including, website flipping, Affiliate Programs, publishing Books, Android Apps, etc,    But I feel YouTube is the best among all the tried ways.

I had spent lots of Time, Money, and Energy for trying all other things. But they haven't given any significant benefits. Surprisingly, I started earning significant money from my YouTube videos without spending any money for doing it.

And, I did some analysis about future trends, and found that YouTube is the one among the 3 important online businesses, while Mobile Apps and Social Media are the other two things.    I thought running YouTube Channel is comparatively easy among these 3 things. So, I decided to focus more on YouTube.

Apart from earning money by showing Google Adsense Ads, you can earn money from YouTube Videos through many other different ways also. For example, YouTube allows you to sell Merchandise by adding the link to the products using YouTube Cards in your videos. YouTube is having list of Merchandise partners.

I had tried to sell the products like T-Shirts from Spreadshirt which is one of the YouTube Merchandise partners. It was not successful for me. Because my channel audiences are from many different Countries and I upload videos on different topics. So    it didn’t work for me.

For example audiences from India may not purchase these T-shirts as they    can easily get these T-shirt at a very low price from their local shops. But it may work well for the YouTubers who focus on specific audience. Their success possibility will be very high if they found merchandise best suitable for their audience.

I came to know that YouTube’s other Merch Partner Teespring is helping to earn money. So, now I have decided to explore it. I designed some T-Shirts and linked the Teesping account with my Youtube Account so that the T-Shirts will be automatically displayed under each of my youtube videos.

We can set our own price for our Merch products and we can promote it by giving Discount code also. I had tried this option for a few months. I had spent significant time and effort to create T-Shirt designs. I am not good at design. So, I tried creating simple designs with various Quotes and trending topic slogans. All these efforts were not much useful. I got a few sales only. So, I disabled this feature.

Before telling about YouTube further, let me first share my other earning experiences.

In my blog, I shared my software testing experiences in many blog posts. Those posts were viewed by a lot of people. So, I decided to combine all those posts and created as an eBook. I sold it from my website. It was selling well. So, I published it as a Kindle book on Amazon and then published a paperback version through  Createspace. I earned significant money from the sales of this Book. But this book is bit outdated now. So, it is not selling now.

After seeing the success of this Book, I had published a few other books, but they were not successful. I spent significant money for running paid campaigns for promoting the Books. I tried Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Reddit ads, GoodReads Give-Away, LinkedIn Ads, Book Deals sites, and Amazon AMS ads. But they were not much helpful. But I am still exploring the option of book publishing as a way of earning money to handle the risk in case I face any unexpected issues with my YouTube earnings.

As explained earlier, I closed most of my websites started with the aim of earning money from Google AdSense. But I didn’t want to close one site named TheQuotes.Net as I like this name much and I am partnered with my friend for running this website. As part of promoting this website, I had decided to develop an android App, and I came to know that I can earn money by showing admob ads. So, I learned to use Android Studio to develop simple Apps. Though the Quotes app got a lot of good ratings, my earnings from this App is not much.    But still, I published a few other Android Apps  as a way of promoting my other products.

I am putting significant efforts for doing Amazon affiliate marketing. As of now, I am not seeing any significant growth there. But, I am continuing my efforts for doing it. Because YouTube disabled monetization for my YouTube Channel two times by saying duplicate content as reason. So, as a backup revenue stream, I am continuing Affiliate marketing though I am not earning from it as of now.

Let me share my YouTube experience now. I had created my YouTube Channel “QualityPointTech” in the year 2009. Initially, I was not taking YouTube as a serious business option. At that time I was concentrating on doing software/web development business.    Apart from doing software development, I was running a blog for sharing my knowledge and experience of doing Software Testing and Web development. And, I came to know about the fact that many people are earning money by showing Google Adsense ads in their blogs.

So, I thought of trying that option, and therefore I    applied for Google Adsense. But my request got rejected many times. Finally, after many attempts, Google granted me Google Adsense, and I started showing Google Adsense ads in my blog. It took a few months to earn my first Google Adsense Cheque. During those days, Google used to send the Adsense payment as a Cheque once after our earning exceeds $100.

Within a few months, I started getting Google’s Payment Cheque every month regularly. I realized the earning potential of my blog which was started just to showcase my software testing and development skills to get freelance projects. So, I decided to spend significant time in promoting the blog. For promoting our blog, I created my YouTube Channel. i-e That time I considered YouTube as one of the link submitting websites which can help to improve the search rank of my blog in Google Search.

A few months later, I received an email from YouTube saying that I have the opportunity to earn money from YouTube videos by linking    my Google Adsense account with my YouTube account.    And, I added Google Adsense ads to my YouTube Videos. But I haven’t focused much on creating YouTube videos. I just used it for promoting my blog and our Timesheet product. One day, one of my Videos about Google Doodle got significant views and thereby I earned significant money.

This incident had taught me about the fact of how YouTube Videos are behaving differently comparing with blogs. I came to know that YouTube Videos are getting more views for Trending Topics i-e topics that are searched by many users suddenly. Thereafter I switched my focus from doing web development to creating YouTube videos. I made this decision due to other reason also i-e Problems faced in Web development business due to the unstable Team as I explained earlier.

I continued uploading videos about Trending Topics regularly, and earning money from those videos. But I felt that it is not going to be a stable business model for long time. Because I strongly believe that any business which is not solving people’s problems is not going to survive for long time. So, I explored various other things    which can really solve People’s problems or help them in some ways.

For example, I thought about adding Tutorial videos which can help people to learn software development and software testing.    But, I have noticed that a lot of other Channels were already providing Tutorial Videos. And, I found that there were    very few Channels only available for giving latest Science and Technology News. So, I have decided to use our YouTube channel for giving Science and Technology News.

Comparing to the Trending Topics Videos, the Technology News Videos are getting very less number of Views only. But I am spending a lot of Time and Effort for uploading Technology News Videos regularly. Because I came to know that many Scientists and Inventors are inventing many useful things, and they are publishing their findings in many Journals. But the benefits of their inventions are reaching the end-users after a very long time only. The reason for this unwanted delay is, the latest science and technology news is not reaching the Entrepreneurs who can bring it further to the end-users. I believe our YouTube Channel can fill this Gap. So, I will continue to upload Science/Technology News Videos even if they are not earning much.

Whenever I go through the YouTube Earning related questions in Quora, I see two types of Questions. One is, people asking about earning huge money from YouTube, that too quickly and easily. They are seeing YouTube as a magic money-making machine. I can clearly say that YouTube is NOT suitable for that kind of people.    It may be true that many people are earning Millions of Dollars from YouTube just by uploading few videos that are    just showing themselves playing Computer Games. But this is not going to work for everyone.

The another type of Quora Questions about YouTube is, people asking about earning money from YouTube by utilizing their specific skills, like, Music, Dance, Teaching, etc. YouTube will be best suitable for them, not only for earning Money, but for their Career improvements also.

For example,    assume that    you are a Musician. You can start your YouTube Channel easily and immediately without spending any Money. You have to upload your Music Videos to your Channel frequently. Many people will start watching your video. If people are watching your music videos long time, YouTube will start suggesting your video to many people. Because Watch Time of the Video is an important factor for YouTube to find whether a video is interesting or not. So, obviously your channel will get more views, and you will start earning money.

Apart from earning money you will get feedback and suggestions from your audience through the comments. Apart from making ad revenue, you can earn by selling your albums to your established audiences. And, note that just uploading video is not enough, you need to give meaningful and attractive Title, add relevant Tags and most importantly you should promote your Videos. i-e You need to share your video link with your friends and on social media like Facebook, Twitter, etc. And you may earn additional money by teaching Music to the people who are interested to learn from you. And, you need to report to YouTube if you find any other YouTube channel stealing your videos.

If you are not interested to spend time in promotion activities and preventing video stealing, you can join an MCN (Multi-Channel Network) so that they can take care of those things on behalf of you. But you should remember that not all the MCNs are good, some of them may be worst and fraud. I never used any MCN. So, do your research before joining any MCN.

The very first question from the people who are willing to make earnings from YouTube is like "How much money I will get for Thousand Views?” You need to understand that view count is not the appropriate measure for calculating revenue.    Your YouTube earning will depend on various other factors also.

Based on my understanding, I feel my YouTube Earnings depend on below parameters. There may be many other parameters which I may not be knowing yet.

Video Topic. Normally technology videos earn more than entertainment videos.
Country of the viewers. If your audience are from U.S, U.K and Canada, you can earn more.
Length of the Video. Based on my observation, long videos tend to earn more money than short videos. (Note that long video means the duration of the part actually watched by the viewers)
Traffic Source. You can earn money more if the viewers are coming from Google search, instead of from any social media site.

Note that we can use our YouTube Channel for doing Live Streaming also. You can do it from your mobile devices too using YouTube App.

In Desktop you can use any broadcasting software like OBS for broadcasting    Live programs to your YouTube Channel. And, YouTube is providing features like “Super Chat” which will allow you to earn money by highlighting user chat comments while broadcasting your live video.

I learn lots of things  from the feedback/comments given by my channel viewers. Many people told me that my voice/accent is not understandable for them. So, I am spending significant time in adding subtitle / CC for almost every video I upload. YouTube is providing a Tool for making the subtitle adding task easy. If you give the entire transcript of the video, it will automatically create the subtitle for your Video. Adding subtitle will help to increase the watch time of the video and therefore it will help to get more views.

And YouTube is providing an automatic translation option also. But I haven’t used it much and therefore I can not tell about the impact of using automatic translation.

I did the mistake of not buying a good quality microphone.    This mistake affected my channel growth heavily.    I realized my mistake after a few years only, and bought a good quality Mic and Stand for holding the Mic.

So, make sure that you are using Good Quality Mic and Camera or any other tool required for creating your videos.

For improving Voice quality, I started using the audio tools like Audacity.    I use it for doing noise removal and for removing silence.

I spent significant time creating custom Thumbnail image for my videos. Actually, YouTube will allow you to choose one of its 3 automatic thumbnail suggestions. But it will be better to create our own thumbnail image and upload it as a custom thumbnail.

For promoting our YouTube Videos, I follow many different ways. I share my videos on social media sites and I will specify my YouTube Video    in my answers in any Q&A Website or Forums. I joined with many relevant Facebook Groups.

And, I have released a Mobile App in Google Play Store for viewing our YouTube Channel. I am embedding most of my videos in my news website RtoZ.org so that people can easily navigate my YouTube Channel Videos based on Tags and Categories.

I used to spend significant time in going through YouTube Analytics which gives lots of information about our Videos, like Ad Rate, Watch time, Demographics, Traffic sources, details about Likes, Shares, Comments, Playlists etc. And, it provides Real Time stats also. We can get lots of clue from these Analytics Stats to improve our Channel. So, it is very important to go through YouTube Analytics regularly.

We need to be very careful while promoting our videos. We should promote our videos in genuine ways at relevant places only. If you promote your video to irrelevant audience, then the watch time of your video will be reduced.    Good watch time is an important factor for earning from YouTube videos.

Another important thing you need to be very careful about is, Copyright Rules.    Never violate anyone’s Copyright and Privacy. Try to be familiar with YouTube’s Terms & Conditions, Policies, Copyright rules and Community guidelines. You will get copyright strikes for violating anyone else’s copyright. And you will get Strikes for violating the Community Guidelines also.

Note that your Strike will not go even if you delete the Video. Your    YouTube account will be terminated if you get three strikes. You can not create any new account. So, be very careful about copyrights and community guidelines.
And never try to click the ads in your own videos. It may lead to your Adsense account termination.

Sometimes we may receive false copyright notices due to incorrect functioning of YouTube’s ContentID matching system. So, you need to dispute those false claims, otherwise the ad revenue from your video will be paid to copyright claimer.

At sometimes, YouTube will    allow you to remove the copyrighted song from your video instead of deleting the entire video. And, I have noticed that we will not be able to edit some details of a video if that video exceeds significant views.

Sometimes, I used to think about why I could earn from YouTube easily comparing with my other initiatives like Software Development and Web Sites.    In fact I am NOT good at video creation.    I realized that it is related to the fact about why I couldn’t build strong software Development Team even when I was working very hard to achieve that mission. The Answer is simple. I couldn’t compete with the already established software development companies in terms of retaining skilled developers.

Those companies easily attract our team members by offering higher salaries. But when they started their business a few decades back, they didn’t face these problems. Because they were at the beginning of software development era. For them, it was easy to succeed in Software Development Business. I understand that I am experiencing the same thing with YouTube.    i-e Succeeding in any Emerging Industry/Market is easy comparing to competing with already saturated industry. I believe Video is    Emerging now. When Printers were invented, there was a business opportunity for putting all the knowledge and experience of humans in Books format.

Once Computers were invented, there    was a demand for converting the Books into Digital format by doing Data Entry tasks. Then there was a demand for Web Developers for putting those digital data into websites so that people can access them from anywhere. Now people are preferring to consume those content simply by watching as video instead of reading the content by themselves.

The fast growth of computing power, increased network bandwidth and accessibility of Mobile Phones made their wish possible. And, this kind of fast growth of Video production and consumption is going to change the entire business systems.

For example, previously people used to    join any Training Center for learning any new language or computer programming language. Now they can easily learn any new language by watching Tutorial videos on YouTube. So, the Training Center business will be going down, they need to slightly change their business model. They need to plan for doing their business through video platforms like YouTube.
It is true that YouTube is having a huge opportunity to earn money. But that doesn’t mean that it is without competition.

Already a lot of people had started YouTube Channels on numerous Topics. Getting views to our YouTube channel is very difficult.    Sometime back, I got a chance to meet many YouTube Video Creators at an Event arranged by YouTube.    In the meeting, most of new video creators were saying that they found it very hard to earn money from their YouTube channels.

And, YouTube is also adding many new restrictions for enabling monetization for new channels. So, if you are planning to earn money from YouTube, you need to do it soon.

From my experience story, anyone can easily understand that entering earlier into any kind new business opportunities is the easy way of making money.

So, it is important to be familiar with the updates of Emerging Technologies such as 3D Printing, Robotics, Drones, Graphene, Nano Technology, Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning, Gene Editing, Desalination Techniques, Virtual Reality, Wearables, New kinds of Batteries, Driver-less Cars, Solar Power Improvements, Quantum Computing, Brain–computer interface, etc.

I have uploaded a lot of Emerging Technologies-related videos to my YouTube channel, and daily I am spending a lot of time and effort to find the latest Science and Technology News from various sources including Universities, such as MIT, Stanford, Harvard and UC. And, I used to check various Science and Technology related groups in various social media websites to find latest updates of Emerging technologies so that I can upload a news video about them. I would like to make my YouTube channel as a bridge connecting the Scientists and Business People.
As explained in my video, I believe Emerging Technologies will change our Life and Businesses entirely very soon.

So, if you are interested to know the latest technology news, subscribe to my YouTube channel.

As of now, I am not an expert in any kind of emerging technology. But I believe I can connect the relevant people/business/projects/problems as I am spending many years uploading news videos related to emerging technologies. I thought about creating some kind of web platform to connect the Science and Business worlds. But I postponed this plan as I expect it will be a challenge to bring users to that platform initially. So, currently I am planning to promote my YouTube channel to get more subscribers. Once after getting huge number of subscribers, I believe it will be easy to get users to that connection platform. So, I am running Google Ads to promote the channel.

As I am working on full time for video creation and promotion, I felt that just depending on YouTube alone will be risky as it may do demonetization at any time without any warning or proper explanation as it did two times previously. So, I explored various alternatives for YouTube. Finally I found the Blockchain-based Video platform Odysee which is trying to be the “YouTube of Web3.0“.

I came to know that we can earn money from video views on our Odysee channel. Especially, I was told that we can do it without spending much time/effort. We need to just sync our YouTube channel with Odysee channel. It made me to choose Odysee. But Odysee Earnings will be in its own Crypto coin LBRY Credit (LBC) only.

As I am not familiar with Crypto currency usage, I had to go through various articles/videos to learn about Crypto currencies. I came to know that Odysee’s Library credit "LBC” is not famous right now. So, only a few Crypto Exchanges are supporting it. But, those Exchanges are not supporting withdrawal into my local bank account. So, I had to find out two Crypto Exchanges. One Exchange for depositing LBC from Odysee and convert it into famous crypto coins like Bitcoin (BTC). The second Exchange is for depositing the famous coin (e.g BTC) from the first crypto Exchange, and for converting it into my local currency for withdrawing it into by bank account. After doing a lot of analysis, I sorted out two exchanges, and did the accounts setup. I will try the LBC withdrawal from Odysee once after earning significant LBC Credits. Now I got the confidence of getting paid from Odysee. So, I will be working on promoting my Odysee channel. If you are interested, you can follow my Odysee Channel.

Based on my initial observation, Odysee is working good. We earn LBC Credits based on the Video views. It seems video search and recommendation also work based our LBC credits. Instead of withdrawing the LBC, if we keep them with Odysee, then our video discovery will be good. Odysee is available as mobile apps also. I will explore more about Odysee and will share my experiences on my blog.

Apart from Odysee, I am exploring other blockchain based social networks like Dtube, steemit, hive, etc. 

Thanks for reading this post. Though I am not earning much online, I thought sharing my experiences may be helpful for someone willing to start earning online. If you are really willing to focus on your work and maintain integrity, surely you can start earning money online. Don’t be greedy, otherwise you will be getting cheated by scams. If you are good at your specific skills or have any good products with competitive price, you can easily get paying customers by putting some efforts for creating your profile, showcasing your skills or product details, doing social media promotion, and running some effective ad campaigns.

Thanks for reading this post.

Check this post if you plant to start doing small online business.

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Synced my YouTube Channel with Blockchain-based Video platfrom Odysee

I am putting a lot of efforts to upload Science and Technology News Videos to my YouTube Channel. As I mentioned in my previous post, I am doing it as full-time.

Because of all these efforts, my YouTube Channel is growing steadily. But, running a YouTube channel full-time is having some risks. For example,  monetization was disabled for my channel two times previously. So, I  was looking for some alternatives also without shifting my focus from Science and Technology news videos creation. I explored various things, and finally I decided to sync my YouTube channel with  Odysee which is a video platform running on the Blockchain platform LBRY.

Now, you can watch my Videos on Odysee also. For watching the videos without Ads, you have to create Odysee account.  It can be done easily.

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Are you interested in writing ebook about emerging technologies?

I am exploring various ways to promote my YouTube channel. As part of this mission, I have decided to publish many eBooks related to Emerging Technologies so that I could promote my channel by mentioning it and linking related videos in those eBooks. I have good experience in web development, SEO and SEM. So, I believe I could promote those eBooks easily. But I am not good at writing, and I don't have enough time to write books now. So, I am looking to collaborate with people who can write ebook related to emerging technologies.

I am planning to implement this plan step by step. Initially I will work with many people to publish separate eBooks about individual topics (e.g AI, 3D printing, Biotechnology, Robotics, Graphene, Blockchain, nanotechnology, Drones, etc) in which they have experience/knowledge. I will be promoting these ebooks simply through my blog posts/channel. Based on the outcome of this step, I will proceed to the next step in which I will be collaborating with many authors to bring a single eBook about emerging technologies. I will be putting in a huge effort to sell this Book through many ways if the ROI is positive.

This is my plan. If you are interested, please let me know your skills and your expectations.

And, I would like to know the details below.

1. Your interested Topic.

2. Whether you want to write the eBook yourself alone, or I can join as co-author 

3. What benefits you are looking for writing an eBook?

You can contact me through email ( rajamanickam.a@gmail.com )

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Accepting Sponsored content and Ads for my Science and Technology News YouTube Channel having 64K Subscribers

I am putting a lot of efforts to run my YouTube Channel "QualityPointTech" which I started in 2009. Initially I started it as a Hobby, then treated it as a side project. Currently I am running it full-time as my main business.

Though it is having variety of videos, most of the videos are Science and Technology News videos. Already uploaded a lot of Science/Technology Videos covering various topics, like Robots, Drones, 3D printing, Nano Technology, CRISPR Gene Editing, Material Science, Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, Blockchain and Gadgets.

Please let me know if you are interested in promoting your products/services/channel/blog on this channel through sponsor ads. 

Currently the channel has around 64K subscribers. All the videos are in English, and it has global audiences from various countries. Though new videos get around only 100 views initially, more views will be coming later from search traffic. Anyway, I am planning to charge very low price as the initial views are low.

I will accept the "Sponsor offers" only if it is genuine and suitable to my channel. And, I will be marking it as "Sponsored" to meet the rules of YouTube/FTC. Contact me (rajamanickam.a@gmail.com) if you are interested in Advertisement, Collaboration, Sponsor, or for any kind of business initiatives. 

I already uploaded more than 1500 Science & Technology news videos. I used to take a lot of care to upload only genuine news/innovations by referring the reputed journals.  It includes various emerging technologies like Solar power, AI, Medical innovations, Robotics, 3D printing, Web3.0, Graphene, Nano Technology, and CRISPR.

And, I may share the videos on my WhatsApp Group, Twitter accounts (personal, professional-78K Followers) and LinkedIn Newsletter.

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