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The following post has nothing to do with making money online. However, it might help you to make few (or a lot of) afterlife-money (i.e good deeds) depending on how you use it.

Picture below is an aerial view of Dubai City. As you can see the buildings are literally above the clouds. Just a few hundred years ago, Dubai and the whole of Arabian peninsula was just a desert. During that time, all you see was some mud houses, bedouins and camels. But now… this!

When I saw it I couldn’t help but remember the prophecy of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). He was asked a question by angel Jibril (Gabriel): “When will the Hour be established?”, in other words when is the Judgment Day.

Prophet said:“… When the shepherds of black camels start boasting and competing with others in the construction of higher buildings. And the Hour is one of five things which nobody knows except Allah.” (Volume 1, Book 2, Hadith No:47) Subhanallah, what a vivid description of the above picture by the prophet.

This was prophesied more than 1,400 years ago. And it’s just one of many prophecies of prophet Muhammad (pbuh) regarding the coming of the Last Day, including the Second Coming of Prophet Isa (Jesus).

So, my friends… the Hour is indeed near!

Related: Belief in the Last Day.pdf

May Allah (SWT) accept your ibadahs in this holy month of Ramadhan my brothers and sisters in Islam!

Human beings (accept for the prophets, i will tell you the story after the post) are affected by the results of our actions, I guess that’s our nature. If we relate it to blogosphere, it’s all about traffic, RSS subscribers, number of comments blog posts etc. Bloggers get happy when their blogs’ traffic increase, when their comments on the posts increase and their RSS subscribers increase… etc.

And opposite is true, when the traffic decreases, the number of comments decreases and RSS subscribers drop, bloggers get upset and demoralized. Eventually they may even abandon their blogging because of the declining stats.

My advice is “don’t bother about the numbers!”. (Yes, I know it’s easier said than done but…) Just do what you have to do (i.e blogging) and keep blogging, don’t bother about those stats. Because if you are good at what you do, you will eventually succeed.

I guess in order not to be bothered much about the stats, you need to overcome a certain barrier. In my view this barrier consists of thoughts like: I have too few readers. My traffic is too low for me to succeed in blogging. What will people say if i write in certain manner? I have to write/behave/attend conferences like “top bloggers” to be accepted by others…etc

Reason for the discouragement

Usually one of the main reasons for the discouragement is, it’s when you blog for the wrong reasons. People blog for various reasons, and if you blog for specific reason like “making money online” only. Then, there is a high probability that you will stop blogging when you hit the bottom. In other words, when your blog stops making money, you won’t see any reason to continue blogging.

Of course, it depends on the projects. Sometimes you launch a project just to make money. So, when the project doesn’t make money, it’s better to just discontinue the project.

High traffic doesn’t mean more comments

I just want to give an example that high traffic doesn’t always mean more comments on every post. For example, ReadWriteWeb is a huge blog that has more than 200 thousand RSS subscribers (see screenshot).

But look how many comments each blog-post gets on RWW (see screenshot below). Not many! So if you have few hundred or few thousand RSS subscribers, and do not get much comments - don’t sweat!

So, if RWW with its 200+ thousand RSS subscribers, on average getting less than 10 comments per post, then by right your posts shouldn’t get any comments at all! ;) Just kidding. But you got the point right!? Don’t be worried if your posts are not getting any comments.

The Story

So, back to the story that I promised in the beginning of this post. Prophets are not bothered by the results, nor by the number of their followers (no matter how numerous or how few the number of their followers are), neither by the effectiveness of their calling. They have just one task to do - and that is to convey the message. Nothing more. Because it’s in Allah’s (The God) hands who should be guided and who shouldn’t be.

For example, prophet Hud (Eber in Hebrew) peace be upon him, preached years and years to his people. However, the only response he got was the rejection from his people (most of the prophets including Isa (Jesus) peace be upon him was rejected by his own people).

After years has passed, the people of Hud even demanded saying:

They said, “Have you come in order to turn us away from our gods? Then bring upon us the calamity with which you threaten us, if you are telling the truth!” Quran 46.22

You see? prophet of Allah didn’t get discouraged by the response of his people. Instead he was patient and continued his calling to the Truth. But it was his people who grew inpatient and demanded that the punishment be brought upon them. So God punished them as they wished.

Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) had also said that, there will be a prophet on the Judgment Day with 10 followers, and there will be a prophet with five followers, and 3, and 2, and 1. And there would be a prophet with no follower whatsoever!

Can you imagine a prophet who has been calling people to the Truth all of his life and didn’t get any result? We get discouraged if our blog’s traffic drops, or get negative comments or if few people unsubscribe from our RSS… and most of us even give up if particular thing that we are doing doesn’t bear any results within a short period of time.

In worldly terms, these prophets with few or no followers would be defined as the losers. But Allah has called them in the Quran that they were the real victorious ones. And the real losers were the community who rejected these prophets. Because ultimately it’s the prophets who will be in the highest level of Paradise, and the people who rejected them will be in the depths of Hellfire.

In Conclusion

So, the moral of the story (and this post) is: So what if you lost few RSS subscribers, of if your traffic declined?! Don’t bother about these little things. As long as you love what you are doing, just continue doing. Don’t bother what people will think of you or what will they say..etc. You are better than that!

P.S Remember, majority is not always correct! And you do not have to fit in to majority’s demands, lifestyle, thinking…etc in order to be successful.

Note: Don’t get it wrong. It doesn’t mean that you do not bother about marketing, SEO, frequency of your posts, consistency of your posts…etc. Instead, you must use all the available options and ways to make your blog successful. It just means that, when you see negative results, you shouldn’t be bothered by them. Just keep doing what you are doing! And you will be fine.

Two brothers came to prophet Daud (David) and said “Judge between us, we are in dispute”. One of them said “This is my brother. He has ninety nine sheep and I have one sheep. He is now forcing me to give up my single sheep to him”.

So, prophet Daud without listening to the other brother said “He has undoubtedly wronged you in demanding to add your single sheep to his flock. He should return your sheep to you!”. Once he has delivered his judgment, two brothers disappeared into the air. Propet Daud realized that these were two angels and that he was just tested by God and that he made a mistake — he didn’t listen to both sides of the story before delivering his judgment.

So, he fell prostrating asking for forgiveness from God. And God forgave him. (Quran 38:21-25)

When mufassireen (interpreters) of Quran talk about this story they say that Daud after the mistake was a better Daud than before the mistake. In other words, after the mistake he was wiser and more knowledgeable than before.

Moral of the story: mistakes can be a great source of knowledge if we derive lessons from them, and learn from them.

About a month ago, problogger posted a blog-post on his blog asking readers “What is the biggest mistake you have made as a blogger?“. I am not sure if you have read this post and comments under it. There are over 200 comments where readers share their mistakes as a blogger and how their mistakes affected their blog negatively (directly or indirectly).

So, if you haven’t read it, go to the page and go through the comments. There are a lot of lessons to be learnt for everyone.

For the past few days I have been busy with my MBA, this is what happens when you are part-time student. End of semester comes, and boom* you are suddenly busier than any professor in the university. Anyway, I have managed to submit all my term-papers and I am done with half of my presentations. So, I have some time to blog now.

By the way, first week of june I will be having my final exams. Therefore I need some guest bloggers, if you want to get your post on this blog. Send your best unpublished articles to my email at abdylas(%)gmail(.)com. Please note that only high quality articles will be published. If you do not hear from me confirming that your article is accepted and will be published on this blog. Then, it means that your article has been rejected, unfortunately.

Business Based on Trust

Ok, now to the main article. While I was busy doing my term-papers and preparing for presentations, spending most of my time in the university campus. Something interesting caught my eye and I thought I would share it with you guys so I took few pictures with my phone. It’s a bottled water business (see pic below). The company sells bottled water in the campus for 0.50 cents per bottle.

The unique thing about this business is; 1) there is no sales personnel 2) they do not employ any *high security* vending machines for dispensing bottled water and 3) payment is left to customers’ conscience.

While it’s not something extraordinary but it’s refreshing to see businesses operating based on trust, especially in the university campus. Because you know how crazy the students can be, right? But as you can see not with IIUM (International Islamic University Malaysia).

Here is another rack I saw while I was heading to another side of the campus for my breakfast.

I have asked few students about this bottled water business and they said the business has been around for some time. Well, that only tells us that it’s not only possible to operate business based on trust but it’s also possible to make money with it (provided that the community has high morals and strong iman).

Yesterday I was preparing for one of my MBA final exams, Strategic Management. (Yes that’s why I slowed down with my blogging, sorry about that). One of the topics covered was ethics. It said:

If you have a clear moral compass guiding your priorities and those you set for the company, you will be a more effective leader.

This observation is repeatedly one of the first thing effective leaders mention when they answer a question about what they think is most important in explaining their success as leaders and the success of leaders they admire. ~ McGraw Hill, Formulation, Implementation, and Control of Competitive Strategy.

While reading it, I couldn’t stop but relate it to blogging. How important ethics in blogging? I personally think it’s very important, especially in professional blogging. By professional blogging I refer to bloggers who blog in certain niche, have authority in that particular field, and have large number of regular readers (followers).

Why it’s important that these (popular) blogs be ethical? Well, there are several reasons for that. One of the main reasons is that, some people look up to them - they want to follow in their footsteps, they want to be just like them, and most importantly they are being fed by them on daily basis. So it’s only natural if these bloggers affect them positively. Instead of influencing negatively, and making all the unethical things look normal - as if it was okay to do those (unethical) things.

What constitutes to “Ethical”?

But definition and perception of ethics is very subjective. Behavior that is accepted by one person (or community) as ethical might not be the case with another person (or group of people).

Brittanica dictionary describes ethics as:

the discipline concerned with what is morally good and bad, right and wrong. The term is also applied to any system or theory of moral values or principles. ~Brittanica

People are inherently capable of distinguishing major and distinctive behaviors that are right and that are wrong. (Eg. Cheating, stealing, killing…etc) But when it comes to small things that are not clear, there is always an argument, and you will find people on both sides of the argument. And this is where culture, religion, personal values and principles come to play major role in their decision to determine whether it’s right or wrong.

What constitutes to “non-ethical” in blogging?

Some bloggers like JohnChow have chosen “evil” as their marketing strategy, some bloggers do sponsored reviews for gambling and online casino related sites, some bloggers do not disclose their sponsored reviews and some bloggers go as far as cheating their readers, so that he/she can make few more bucks… all of them are done for the sake of earning more!

I guess for some people, money comes first and everything else second.

I didn’t list all the things that are considered unethical in blogging. That’s for a reason. Because, I want to ask you - readers, for the rest of the list. So, in your opinion, what is unethical in blogging? List the things that you personally think unethical in blogging. (It should not be limited to blog posts alone, it can be anything that is related to blogging, blog design, monetization methods…etc)

I hope readers who read this blog through RSS will take one minute of their time to answer this question too. Thanks in advance!

I often hear people say “it’s a chicken and egg situation” referring to something that cannot be solved or which is debatable.

Here is an ICQ program that brings up this topic in its installation process, asking people to solve this age old debate.

For me personally as a believer in One God this has not been a paradox at all, and certainly not an age-old debate. Because according to Islam, God created Adam in his adult form that means Adam was not born, Adam was not a child, Adam was not a teenager. He was created as is, in his adult form.

Same goes to the animals (including chicken) that they were created first. And then they went on to have baby animals and lay eggs. So simply said: “Chicken was there first”.

What do you think? It will be interesting to hear different people’s thoughts on this.