MMWNS Episode #9: Interview With Jeet Banerjee

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The Niche Site U Podcast

Jeet BanerjeeIn this episode of the How To Make Money With Niche Sites Podcast, I interview Jeet Banerjee of http://www.jeetbanerjee.com

Among other things, we discuss his startups that include:

Show Notes and transcript being worked on and added slowly, please be patient and I apologize for the less than perfect transcription, I am testing out Dragon’s Naturally Speaking Software.

Transcript: Hey everybody, welcome to episode number nine of the make money with niche sites podcast I apologize for the long delay, obviously the holiday got into the way and now have been doing some other projects on my current business which is a web design development company as well as launching a new business, side business  for focusing towards restaurants and again just little more time-consuming than I hope so I got a couple interviews that are scheduled for the next couple days that I am gonna share with you guys and I hopefully I will get back to some more good quality content.

I’m also going to be doing a listener questions podcast shortly, meaning that if you have any questions feel free to e-mail me at Adam (at) make Money with niche sites dot com, or just go on my website  and submit a form at make money with niche sites dot com and I’ll be happy to answer and address any questions that are coming in.  I do have a couple already that can fill up some time, but I want to make sure to address any questions that you listeners have that may not already have filled in the questions for me to answer.

So please be sure you stick around after the interview where im gonna talk about two suggestions that I use often to help generate some extra buzz for my niche sites, it also helps with some link building. But most importantly, it helps get the word out that you have launched this site and a great way to try and drive some extra traffic.

So without any further delay, lets get to the interview today with Jeet Banerjee.

Adam: So my guest today is Jeet Banerjee, Jeet is a 20 year old tech entrepreneur, digital marketing consultant, author, blogger, college student pretty much does a heck of a lot of things. But the reason I wanted to bring him on today is, he has been working in the online marketing world and for three years here,  and has started a couple of companies, sold a couple companies and been quite a success. But alot of it looks towards passive income streams, so I wanted to bring in Jeet today and share some ideas, so Jeet Welcome!

Jeet: Thank you so much for the great introduction, and its awesome to be here:

Adam: Great well I got a little bit of a bio here about what you’ve done and I think you mentioned to me that you actually started a company at the age of 17 and you already sold that company so tell me a little about how that worked out:

Jeet: yeah, definitely so I was a high school senior, and i was just looking for a good niche to get into to make money and I kind of stumbled upon the Web design Web development industry it’s always been extremely hot so what I actually did was I kind of build a website and I wasnt actually a coder or designer or anything like that myself.  I kind of have teams that I partnered up with  in other countries, but what I basically was able to do was, I was able to market myself and position myself very well through the Internet through online marketing, so that I was getting a lot of inbound leads coming in for my website and I would take those inbound leads, close those sales, and then kinda translate the work over to my partners.  So that is kinda what I did, and I ran that company for two years and then I ended up selling the company to kind of move onto my next venture.

Adam: Outstanding!  Now you mention that you use people from other countries, is that just outsourcing labor?

Jeet: Yeah, so it basically started out as outsourcing and then ended up eventually developing into me creating my own back house in another country, so it was kind of a mixture of the two.

Adam: Ok Cool.  and if you don’t mind my asking, and if you do that’s okay too… at 17 you sold this company, so how much did you sell it for?

Jeet: So actually I do have a contract with the person, so Im not allowed to publicly reveal those numbers so unfortunately I can’t really give much insight on that.

Adam: No worries, I figured you gotta ask Im a sales guy by trade at the end of the day, and if you don’t ask, you’ll never find out those answers so..Im always interested in asking that.  So Tell me what your doing now, how do you make a living now?

Jeet: so right now I have one tech company I’m working on it mainly which is called Stat Fuse (http://www.statfuse.com) which is an online portal that helps high school students and parents with college admissions, we essentially can calculate students chance of getting in and, given tips and strategies to increase their chances so that the main thing I work on and on that side as well I have a couple other projects I work on it a little but speaking consulting with businesses and startups and also do have a passive income stream where I had e-books a couple niche websites and a lot of niche mobile applications that ive been kinda able to optimize whether its on App Store, or on search engines things like that so that, so thats what Im up to right now.

Adam: Awesome… well we are gonna get into that passive income stream in a minute, but I want to dig deeper into how you became who you are, obviously you jumped into the online niche.  What made you choose that versus working at the local supermarket or something like that?

Jeet: Actually, the funny thing is, growing up I was kinda raised with the mentality that if I ever wanted something, I had to go out and earn it, so with that said I had get a job at age of 15 which is really early but I learned a lot from the job and the biggest thing that I learned was that the job sitting in a cubicle or sitting in offices was definitely not for me; so thats when I kinda got really frustrated and I started looking for other avenues on what I could possibly do to make a company or build a company on my own and I can stumbled upon the Internet and just have a lot of tech millionaires were popping up all over the place and it piqued my interest, and that is when I kinda dived in full on.

Adam: Nice, well as a young guy, obviously you might not of cut your teeth too much in the real world as fare as businnesses or anything like that, but did you have a role model that was guiding you through this process?

Jeet: Um, so I didn’t have any specific role model, like my dad was always there to help me out with quick questions and things like that but he’s a busy guy and there is a few other people on the Internet where I would reach out to them via e-mail or via twitter, ask them some questions may be doing interview something like that to get some feedback there isn’t one single person that really outline that could really guide me through this whole process step-by-step.  the biggest way I kinda did his was just just trying, failing, applying myself and doing a lot of research online reading books going to conferences things like that.

Adam: Adam: Awesome, awesome.  Now, you have obviously had some successes here.   Are there any failures that go into this? Im a big believer in that you gotta throw a lot of stuff on the wall and hopefully some of it will stick, and failure is great because you can learn from it. Have you had any failures, and have you learned anything from them if so?

Jeet: Yeah definitely, along the process theres always times where I made mistakes or Ive done something and completely failed, but for me it always about staying persistent and not kinda worrying about failure and failure is just an event it doesnt define me or my business or anything like that so it’s a look that it something positive so I’ve always just been persistent and every time ive really faced failure, it hasnt derailed my path, its kind of motivated me to go harder. So Ive faced a lot of failure and everything, from my first company to the company i have today,  but it’s just been a matter of pivoting or figuring out what I can do to come back better and stronger the next time.

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Adam: Outstanding outlook at things like that!  I like that.  Have there been “a-ha” moments where you have been tredging through things and all the sudden something just clicked, like, you know what, this is a smarter, or better more efficient way, or more effective way to do things. Have there been any events like that, that have really changed you or has it just been good strategic planning?

Jeet:  No, there has actually been a couple of a-ha moments, the biggest one was actually in beginning.   I was doing a lot outsourcing and outsourcing can be brutal,  especially when you’re when your kinda new to it. So I was kinda getting torn up for a few months and then I finally came across the idea about, if I can only have my own employees and my own back office, all that kind of stuff.  Maybe I could really take the company to the next level, so I took a gamble and invested all the companies money into that and it was probably the biggest,  it was very lucky but it is also very big gamble that actually paid off and that kinda really propelled my company to the next level.

Adam:  Wow, that is kind of a nice little risk there. So you are doing some writing… I think this is your second book that you produced now, what influenced you to start becoming a writer and most importantly what influenced you most to write your most recent book The Pursuit of Passion.

Jeet: So the last about 7 to 10 months has been really crazy like I’ve had entrepreneurs, marketing guys people from all over the world kinda start reaching out to me… and its just been an insane experience for people from all over the world reaching out to me whether its asking for me for help, told me that im inspirational, so ive had all these people that i have been able to connect with and I got one question almost 80% of the time which is; I have an idea, but what do i do?  so it was a very hard question to answer especially in like 140 characters or something and so that’s when I finally decided when I got that question over 10 or 15 times that, hey, I think this is a real problem that people are facing, im gonna write a book about it so that I can go all out, add all the detail and all experience and knowledge I have, and then ill kind of just push this book out there and thats kinda why I created the book. It was mainly just to help all those people that were kinda new to the game that needed some kind of insight.

Adam: There is a lot of books, and again I want to get “your” insight on this answer, or into this answer,  what makes your book different like why should people pick this book versus all the self help or make money online type books that are out there

Jeet: yeah definitely So, my book, I wouldn’t essentially say is a make money or kind of self help at home type of book. The reason why my book is really helpful for people is because when I got started as an entrepreneur, I didn’t have an MBA or any crazy degree I didn’t have any money, and especially I didnt have any experience.  and I think a lot of people a lot of people can kind of relate to that because not everybody has all those three things, ore even any of those things so its really coming from a really raw perspective. Someone that was kind of a complete rookie, never even dealt in the business world anything like that and I can share how I was able to achieve success in the process that I took to turn an idea into a successful business that was generating revenue.  So I just feel like my perspective is really raw, really current, and it’s something that many people can relate to because not everyone has the perfect credentials.

Adam: So on your website currently,  and its http://www.JeetBanerjee.com It says that you can  get a free 30 minute consultation with you for anybody that buys this book, is this still a still valid offer?  It says its a limited time.  I just want to make sure my listeners can get in on that.

Jeet:  Yeah Yeah, its still a valid offer right now… it will probably run to the end of July so yeah definitely

Adam:  Ok, and some of the things that people can learn from this book, obviously you mention a couple of things, but turning ideas or hobbies into a business, is something I really think most of the niche site builders are really interested in because when you’re building a niche site you try to do something that’s relevant to you, you don’t want to write hundreds of blog posts about something that you really just aren’t interested in. So tell me a little bit about turning your ideas and/or hobbies into a business. How does that apply to you? I know you are building some apps, are those apps similar? Are they hobby ideas? How did you get into app building i guess?

Jeet: I really always try to start close at home, I first try to start with things that I know because I always seen that any time Ive created a mobile app or e-book or something like that around something I know, it’s been a lot more successful than me just try to hop on the bandwagon without me having prior knowledge. So I definitily think if your passionate about things, or have hobbies, things like that those are great places to start just because you already know your hobby, or you already know your passion well enough to create a really solid app. And to kind of know what people are looking for within the app itself so I always recommend that to anybody.

Adam: How do you go about generating passive income streams? creating an app is obviously great, and hopefully it gets promoted through iTunes but how do you create activity to your website-create traffic for your book? What are you using?  Im looking for any kind of success secrets if you will, that will help my listeners to drive traffic to their sites ore create a passive income stream?

Jeet: The biggest thing that I look at, cause all my products have different ways that it’s organically driving traffic so I always look at who is the ideal person that would come and use this product, or come and by this product like for example my book is typically younger and sometimes even older entrepreneurs that kind of have these ideas, that kind of have this passion, but they never really, jumped in or they never really dived in and these people often times are on social media.  So for my book especially,  I believe almost 92% of my sales streams comes actually from social media sites like Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Google plus so its all about really figuring out where your audience that your trying to sell to is at, and kind of just marketing the product there. another example is like for StatFuse, our students were high school students so what our goal was to do was to put StatFuse into places that they would see such as YouTube advertising such as PR places that they’re all going to every day to catch up on news or catch up on articles things like that. So I think those are the best strategies to use especially if you are looking for organic growth,  is to find a way that you can automate your marketing,  in one place where your target audience is already at.

Adam:  Now, you mention a word that I love which is automate. And a lot of people don’t realize that there is alot of work in setting up an automated system, they kind of think I’ll set it and forget, and they can just write five blog posts, and Google gonna send me a ton of traffic… as far as automation how much time do you invest up front and then do you set it and forget it with your projects or is it something that is evergreen and you always have to go back adn keep going back to?

Jeet: I’d say it depends, especially if your gonna try to rank a website or something like that on Google, its definitely something you have to keep maintaining and keep updating every month so it’s kind of not as automated as possible but for apps and for e-books, those kind of niches you can definitely automate it.  I think I do the most fine tuning and most work initially Id probably say the first month I spent a lot of time, alot of insight, trying to figure out the metrics all that stuff and once you figure out the secret formula how to optimize the App or the e-book on the from there its really smooth sailing and you dont have to really look at it unless there’s like some huge wave of competitors or something external affecting the automation.

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Adam:  You mentioned ways to generate traffic, and my thing nowadays, and everybody is asking… with all these Panda and Penguin updates and all these google updates..SEO.   What is your take on link building, do you believe in working heavily on link building or is most of your activity doing it through social media?

Jeet: Yeah definitely.  So actually for SEO, I actually do not build like any links so to speak myself, like I don;t do any of that.  What I actually tend to do is like, pitching to media outlets or pitching to high influencers about like a topic or like some new story that relates to what you have going on and then, having them write a writer article about you and that kinda thing creates  really really strong back links.  Im all about quality with the seo. I dont really go out there and kind of do as many links as possible or anything like that, I will kinda take a slow approach builds quality links, and even on the side of actually getting the keywords to rank Ive seen that sharing great content are publishing great content to your blog is probably the best way to do it so for my personal website itself, Jeetbanerjee.com,  i write a blog, i try to write really high-quality articles, ill take those articles and all shared on all the social media sites, article submission sites etc. and then from there I and almost getting any sometimes 100 or 200 shares per article and then once Google picks that up that is it something resourceful people are willing to talk about it with other people, Google automatically kinda pushes my rankings up to the top.  And one example is if someone was to Google self made millionaire, one of my articles shows up on the top three spots and I think someone told me Im outranking like Huffington Post and other other websites and that was all possible just because it was quality content that really got shared and really spread fast.

Adam: Outstanding, so what is the best resource that you use for helping you succeed that others might be able to tap into.  If you had to pick one way to get ahead today, is it going to be, you know reaching out to the popular people in the niche that your in, and asking them to do something, you had mentioned you reached out to high-quality individuals to help out generate links, is it doing something like that or is it heavily investing in social media, or is it better for me to create a really great product and spent a lot of time upfront and focus on that, what direction would you go in if you had to start from scratch today?

Jeet:  If I had to start from scratch the biggest thing that I would focus on is really creating quality products. I have had experiences in the past, where I kinda didn’t put the full effort forward in a product, and I was kinda too excited to get to the point where I could start making money and start marketing it and what typically happens is it works for a few weeks, and eventually you starting bad reviews,  customers arent happy, things like that, and then you end up going all way back to the beginning and starting over.  So I think the Biggest thing is I fighting the temptation to just throw something out into the Market just so you can start making some money I think it’s really building something with high quality and building something that can really be passive income because you dont want to build something for passive income and find out three months later that, hey, my product sucks., So its all about building something that will be sustainable long term.

Adam: Agreed, obviously your book out there is available, and Im gonna recommend people check out The Pursuit of Passion. What book do you like? Business book or non business book, whats your favorite book outside of your own writing.

Jeet: yeah definitely, my favorite book actually is a book called Millionaire Fastlane by MJ DeMarco, thats kinda the biggest book that told me to never get a job basically.

Adam: Yeah thats a great book.  I actually enjoyed reading that, I never got into the community which he promoted heavily in the book but I did like alot of those concepts that he talked about, I thought is was outstanding outstanding book. Gonna let you go here in just a minute, but I want to find out more about you, do you do any community events or charities that you support, just tell me a little about you further.

Jeet: definitely I definitely do support a few charities, I support the nice NFTE which is, national foundation for young entrepreneurs. Im really passionate about giving back to the entrepreneurial community, and in the future I kinda want to create an ecosystem or create something where more young people can kinda dive into entrepreneurship and get a chance to experience what it is to create a business and things like that like I was able to, whether it’s in high school or whatever it is, so i definitely want to push something like that and I’m always definitely out there trying to give speaches, talk to people, help people, and kinda just motivate people to take a chance on themselves.

Adam:  As far as… Im gonna try to tie this into niche sites, A Lot Of People Are always Worried about What is the Best Monetization strategy is, is it Creating a product like an e-book, is it putting adsense on your website, is it Being an Affiliate Marketer, or linking to Amazon products, or what have you… As far as creating an ebook, is it better to, in your opinion, and again this is more of just a tip for the audience, i know you over both.  You Offer a Free Guide on Your Site and you Also Sell an ebook, but Which Is More Beneficial in Getting the brand,  your  Brand out There and Creating More Followers?  Is Better to Sell a Product at $9.99? Or is it better to Give Away a Free eBook in your opinion?

Jeet: I Think it definitely has to Be a Mixture of the two, in my specific Case what I Do is I give People.. I kinda Leverage the Free Book to Get an E-Mail Address, and What I Count on is That My Free ebook is gonna be good enough for People to Say Hey I Really Enjoyed This I Got Something out of it,  and Then I Have Their E-Mail where like I Can Wait a Month and I Can E-Mail them out and say Hey,  a Why dont you Come Check out My Other Book If You Enjoyed This Book. So I think You Have To Really Be a Mixture of two, I Think the Free Book Really Helps Win over My Audience, People that Are Not one Hundred Percent Sure Whether They Should Read My Book or Not, kinda Give Them Something for Free Give them a Taste of What My Writing Can Be like.  See If It Something That Really Fits What They’re Looking for and If It is, it kinda Generates a Positive lead Towards My Real Books. So its kina like an Automation Process That I Use to Kind of Generate Some Leads to Sell My Book Even Further.

Adam: Awesome, Well where can we find out more about you?  This is a good time to plug your website, your twitter account, Google Plus Profile, whatever you want to do.  Tell me where people can find out more about you?

Jeet:  Everything about Me is basically on My Personal Website, People Can Connect with My Social Networks, Check out My Projects,  Reach out to Me, Read My Blog, Whatever It is. And my personal website Is http://www.jeetbanerjee.com

Adam:  Awesome, well Jeet, thanks so much for your time today, hopefully you will get some traffic to your site from my listeners, hopefully they will Invest in Your Book As Well, but again, thanks for your time and I appreciate you spending time with our community today.

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Jeet:  Yeah definitely, no problem, and thanks so much for having me Adam!

Adam: My pleasure, thank you.

 

I hope you guys enjoyed that interview Jeet is a really smart and i think he brings a lot of value and… If you don’t have 10 buckswork with to get his book I understand I certainly have no affiliate commissions, but I do recommend you check out his book most for me I recommend you do is get the consulting time with Jeet, he is a pretty sharp dude, he is a young guy but you can still learn from him and I think he can provide some real value.

So I wanted to reward you guys with two techniques I use to help generate extra buzz for my websites, my niche sites. I think they  can be very useful. One’s free ones not, either are good, I recommend both of you can just to get some awesome word out about your niche sites. I think one of the challenges we all face these days with Google making their multiple updates, you never know what they’re doing link building becoming more and more challenging. you really need to go back to the basics of of what you’re trying to do and thats spread word about your niche sites,  to get regular traffic, direct traffic and the like so one of the first things I would like to do is I signed up for a thing called Help A Reporter Out, hopefully you have heard about this, if you have then great, if not, its something you should look into right now. http://www.helpareporter.com/  Basically what they do is send out a list on a daily basis-about three times a day where it is a bunch of people that are reporters that are looking for options for expert interviews, or little blurbs from businesses, from start ups, from experts, from just regular people on a number of different subjects and there’s a good chance that you’ll see fifty e-mails before something comes up thats relevant but when there is something that’s relevant is an excellent option to get some press coverage within some pretty big media outlets like for Forbes, ABC news, Fox news, Associated Press, large medium and small websites, Dow Jones, newspapers, magazines and television shows all over the place and really what they’re looking for is content and put yourself in the shoes of reporters, they’re always try to do the same thing you are and that’s provide valuable content to their readers or audience and so what they are looking to do is  find the right people to do that and if you’re talking about a niche, and you’ve established yourself as an authority or expert in your field, then you’re a very relevant expert they would wan’t to talkto, to help give their articles some street cred.

If you will. So it is something that is, again, it’s free a lot of times all you have to do is send out an e-mail that gives you a couple of your couple minutes of of of of just self promotion if you will to them.  And hopefully they will use it.

There is tons of new e-mails that come out 3 times a day and its a  good opportunity that something you have to offer will fit and I is a great way to generate some links but most importantly it’s a great way to get some buzz on a really great media outlet.

I kid you not I filled out one of these today and submitted it,  so it’s something that’s relevant and I ..did it today.

The second thing that I recommend you do and this one might be more of an once you establish yourself and are profitable, because there is a cost to this. Is doing Press Releases. There’s a lot of different companies out there that do press releases for you or allow you to do press releases and two of the companies that I like to to work with are: IReach and PRWeb.  https://ireach.prnewswire.com and PRweb is http://www.prweb.com/m and basically they have a little bit of differences but packages run from anywhere from like a 120 bucks up to like 500 bucks depending on the options that you want to do or use, but really what this allows you to do is generate not only buzz about a new website that you launched, or your launching a new ebook, if you provided some newsworthy value it generates a lot of opportunities for quality links.

Some of the high priced packages give you better quality links from from larger media outlets, but it gives you the opportunity and that I like is it something gets produced on like the New York Times and Boston Globe Wall Street Journal or a big well-known newsworthy reference like that. Not only do you get the links from it but you can actually put that “as seen on” the Wall Street Journal on your website, and that establishes instant credibility with your audience that you’ve been talked about, or you’ve been mentioned on such wonderful, wonderfully big media outlet. So it is there’s a cost to it but again think of in terms of your readers, if they are coming over to your niche site they see something that their not sure if I want to engage or Im not sure if I want to buy the products or, can I really trust this site.

If they see something interesting along with the Philadelphia Inquirer, New York Times, or the Boston Globe, the LA Times, something like that, that immediately establishes that you will have credibility so there’s trust built up with your audience, immediately and give whether that trust is worth a 129 or a couple hundred bucks it really depends on how much money you bring in from the websites for profit. but the value that it can bring can easily cover the cost of that. and again its a link building opportunity as well, and Layered links is a link building tool that i have used in the past and thats 200 bucks just for that so, theres a lot of links, but there’s no high-quality big names that come from that so its a good opportunity to generate some extra links and extra buzz.

So hopefully those two ideas will help you with your quest to make more money with your niche sites I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Jeet and as always I thank you very much for being a listener to this podcast.  I hope you are enjoying the content I am providing, and I hope to speak with you guys again soon… Ive got Another interview lined up for later today that Im hopefully going to get produced in the next couple days and I share with you and I’ll try my best to get more content out there.

I know you guys are looking for more content.  Im also gonna try my best not to lose the valuable content.  I dont want to become a guy that just interviews people all the time, I don’t want to be a guy who only talks about success stories… but I do want to share those types of success stories when they are relevant.  For instance this interview Im doing next, is about a dating site niche, that I think isnt really relevant in terms of, most of us aren’t doing dating niche websites because its a highly competitive thing, but we can learn from the individual that set this up, to find out maybe tools and tricks that we can apply to our own websites.  And so hopefully i will be sharing that type of interview with you in the future.  But again, If Im starting to lose you, or lose the content that you want, please please please email me at adam (at) make money with niche sites (dot) com and let me know, to keep me on track, because I am here to share and generate good quality content for you as an audience, and hopefully keep you coming back. I do not want to become one of these talking heads that produces content just for the sake of producing content, I want it to be valuable.  So thanks again for listening, I hope you enjoyed the show, and I will talk to you soon.

This has been the make money with niche sites podcast with Adam Roseland please visit http://www.makemoneywithnichesites.com/ for more tips and tricks thanks for listening.

 

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