About Shyam Chathuranga

So you want to learn more about Shyam Chathuranga, Right? I’m glad you do! This is going to be so long, honestly you’ll need some time because you’ll get to read a lot about me today.

I’m a Genesis developer, WordPress lover, Online marketer, Blogging enthusiast and cracking hard video gamer. I’m the founder of ScorpionGod Lair and numerous other successful blogs just like this one.

And I help you to reach your online marketing goals by improving and optimizing your business and business website with my skills. I’m doing all these things for almost 7 years.

Perhaps you realize something about me from the above words, but let me explode those words to tell you my whole story of how I started all these things. You may like it, sometimes you may not … nevertheless I’d say it today.

Birth of a Scorpion!

Haha! Birth of a Scorpion 😉 My most favorite Mortal Kombat warrior!

I was born in Sri Lanka on a cool month, July 1995. As you’ve counted the numbers I’m at my 19’s at the moment. It’s the beautiful age of a person, Agree? Just like any other person, I did have my own hobbies to kill my time as a child. Awesome thing is I’m still using those hobbies to kill some of my time even today.

As for my memory I got my hands on a computer since I was 5-6 years old. That was me on pre-school or Grade 1 in school. 14 years ago I had that lucky moment to touch something which have changed my life today.

I remember the first days I used a computer, those days had Windows 95 which was released on August 24th 1995. In my computer lifestyle I have used many Windows OSs from Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me(2000), Windows XP (My all time favorite), Windows Vista, Windows 7 and finally Windows 8.1 right now in my Lenovo laptop.

So I’m a Windows guy by operating system, but I have used Linux Mint and Ubuntu for a while back in 2012. Okay that’s all about my play with operating systems.

What was I doing for at least 10 years before my arrival to online marketing? That’s next!

Hobby That Became The Life

Games! We all like games in different levels and I’m addicted to them. Since my first appearance with a PC, I started to play games on it. That wasn’t the time of perfect graphics, but it wasn’t the time for not to be a gaming addicted. Now don’t expect me to name my first game I played, I don’t remember it exactly.

But that first game I remember is the, Dave. It was a lovely game which I couldn’t beaten yet for some reason. Today I tried to play it on Win 8 and sadly it didn’t worked with this OS. 🙁 Those days were the best days of my life, but I didn’t realize it.

Doom and Quake are few more to the list of olden and golden games I’ve played so happily. I wish I had started to write a diary or something like that so I can remember every beautiful thing I did on those days, every old game I played and so on.

Time was passing and one day I got the life changing PC game from my father, it is my all time favorite game still today and for the rest of my life. That’s the game which made me a gaming addicted. Want to know the name of it? It is Captain Claw by Monolith. I really like the story, music, art works, cutscenes, maps, levels and every single bit of this crazy game.

I played Captain Claw for many years and the most recent year is 2014. 😀 You know what I still couldn’t beat this game totally, because the Level 14th boss Lord Omar is so so hard to defeat and moreover it’s so hard to reach him even. I wouldn’t forget to show you some awesome pictures from the game.

While playing Captain Claw for a long time I started to play many games. This time I wasn’t limited just for PC games, My father brought me a VCD with the popular Super Game VCD 300. These games are the next addiction of me. I played Tank 2 over 5 hours at one sitting with my family members. I also played Super Mario, Adventure island happily.

These days we had Dial-Up connection to access world wide web and I remember I downloaded small games from BigFishGames and other similar sites. Gaming was the first thing that made me kept my foot onto the world wide web.

I received many game demo CDs and DVDs from my father and slowly I started to play new PC games. Quake demo was a great game for me. I don’t remember the exact version, but the game was played a lot by me. Okay my gaming life went that way. Long story short, I was beaten by the need of a better VGA card for my PC, so I could play all those crazy graphic games.

I didn’t had the money nor my parents were going to give that money to me ever. So what did I do at that moment? It’s coming down …

First Major Goal

I realize many people had better life goals since they were kids, but that wasn’t true for me, because I hadn’t had any true goals in my life until I was facing the gamers’ biggest problem. I didn’t have any goals to achieve in my early childhood, but now I wish I had life goals since the beginning.

It teaches people a lot, when they go after a goal.

I couldn’t play latest games at that time even though I had a great passion for them. Have you ever heard the fact that the passion drives a person? Yeah, I guess. So I kept finding a solution for my problem. Solution was to find the money required to buy a new VGA card. How did I going to do that?

If I remember things correctly, by this time I was in grade 5 or 6. I’ve got my first business idea which was a game CD renting business. Actually I didn’t realize it was business or something like that. All I wanted to do was to collect some money to buy a good VGA card.  Customers were my friends in school class.

First I rented them game CDs and DVDs which my father brought me. Those CDs & DVDs contained lot of demo software as well. Later I started to sell them software and even songs. Also I saved few bucks which my parents gave me for my meal at school interval. Despite with that type of commitment to achieve my goal, I couldn’t do it due to small amount of money and lack of customers.

Hearing The Miracle

Another few years passed and it was 2008. This was the life changing year in my life. I was more and more a hardcore gamer with an aggressive need to build my Gaming rig. It was my brother’s 2nd year in the university to complete his degree in computer science.

I got news about something I never thought possible from my brother. He introduced me to that thing where you view ads for pennies. Yep! that’s the PTC or Bux industry. I felt like I was going to hit my goal this time like a hero. I did the maths and started to view ads on PTC sites.

When the time came for the PTC site to pay me, they hesitated to do so. It wasn’t a very pleasant feeling for me to bear it again, I failed to hit my goal. However, I wasn’t disappoint about the Making Money Online thing, because I heard one of my brother’s colleague got a pay check from Google AdSense just after I started to to become a PTC noob … (It’s gamers language)

As soon as I heard that, I realized something and I started to search online marketing with the searching skill , I already had while I was searching for small games which I’ve told you earlier. Online marketing wasn’t the term I gave this thing first. Like any other newbie the term was “Internet Money”.

Due to my average knowledge in English language because I was a gamer for over 7 years at the time I started all these things in 2008, I didn’t had a big trouble in understanding blog articles. So I kept reading every piece of article I found, whenever I get the time to be free. I learned a lot about many online marketing topics.

One thing I’m regretting even today is the fact that I didn’t started to take action on what I learned since the beginning. I was became just a reader who does not take any actions. Anyhow I started few blogs and didn’t dedicated to work on them regularly. I spent most time reading, doing PTC and playing games while spending the rest for school life.

Obviously I had the consequence of finding few reliable PTC sites because I kept doing what I was doing. I kept learning about the industry I was working. Moreover I didn’t lose my focus, purpose and persistence whenever I had to face severe failures!

I made my first dollars through internet using those reliable PTC sites. Exciting fact is I was doing not more than $150 even after 2 crazy years with PTC sites. I know one could say I wasn’t doing the thing correctly, but destroying other people time for the sake of their referral commission does not look like a correct way to live. Would you agree?

Nevertheless I’m an online marketer today, because I started doing PTC 6 years ago. Therefore I feel like that part was a required piece of my timeline. And here goes my thanks to my brother for telling me that life changing news to me.

Although I started my journey with PTC stuffs, I must say the truth about them.

If you’ve never tried PTC, I’d say never try it in the future, because PTC industry isn’t something reliable. In my terms, being successful in a PTC business would get you greater sins. Let me explain that now.

Nowadays one ad view gets you usually $0.001 with 5-10 ads per day. You can figure out this too easily, if you want to make some bucks with PTC you have to build your referral strength which means you have to introduce more people to this hell in order to build your own income. Think for a moment, you just thought to build your referral strength because you cannot make money alone.

What fate would your referrals face after becoming your referral? The bad flow continues. In my opinion, you’re creating a flow of sins just like how you earn commissions from those referrals.

Perhaps now you realize that PTC isn’t for you.

After realizing the truth of PTC, I started to invest my time on other ways to make money online. So the next thing was to create some blogs and put some PPC advertising network ad codes in the sidebar. This also didn’t went well due to truck load of procrastination and low quality blogs without unique content on them.

Hitting The Professional Career

Even when everything wasn’t giving me wonderful results or nothing at all, I just kept learning online marketing. There are many experts which I’ve learned from such as Daniel from DailyBlogTips and Darren from Problogger, and you can checkout our online marketing resources guide for all the experts I’m following and reading closely.

Prior to my arrival for PTC industry, I had a great passion for Websites. I was passionate in creating websites using HTML & CSS before I started to make any money online. I learned few basics from my sister’s class book myself and played with those wonderful HTML codes!!

That passion to create websites gave me the goal to become a Web Engineer and I’m still on my way to it.

I tried to become a successful blogger with Google AdSense for many times, but every time I had to face huge failures. Long story short, these days I found a site known as Microworkers. It was a marketplace where advertisers hire workers to do small tasks such as publishing a blog comment and similar ones.

I successfully withdrawn the 1st payout of $10 from Microworkers. It is a reliable site, but the income level wasn’t great because I had to do lot of tasks to meet the minimum payout. So I abandon the site while the 2nd payout was $2 away from the minimum amount.

Due to the continuous failure, my family said not to do worthless things. Yes! family didn’t knew what I was after, but I knew what I’m working towards and what I’m doing at that moment. I had enough proof with PIN letters to prove that it is possible to make money online, but they didn’t believe in me.

All those doubts were the headlines till I prove them wrong ultimately in 2012. I started my real freelance business in 2012 on the Fiverr marketplace. Even though I had earned some money previously, I couldn’t withdraw them to my country due to PayPal service limitation in Sri Lanka.

So I researched about other online payment processors and thought to stick with Payoneer due to their facility of direct ATM withdrawals.

The first money I made from Fiverr was $28. I withdrew that money with 2nd withdrawal from Fiverr to Payoneer and then via the city’s nearest ATM. Wanna have a look on that first money I made online without spending a dime from my end?

Because of that, 12th of November 2012 was a perfect day of my online marketing life. Exciting thing is I proved my family that I wasn’t after a miracle at all. Then they started to support me by words.

The Success Feeling

I’ve worked on Fiverr since 11th of November 2011 until August 2014 with many large breaks in weeks and months. I’ve made over $15,000 with Fiverr sales. I had a perfect plan to build my Fiverr business while providing high quality services. There are many months I hit $1000 per month with so many sales alone!

Because of my huge success as a Fiverr freelancer, I thought to write an eBook by including all my strategies and experience. This was my first eBook I’ve ever written. By the way, name of the book is Fiverr Rainmaker.

Moreover you can use the knowledge gain in this book to build any kind of freelance business.

While I was working on Fiverr, I found out a similar concept marketplace was launched by Envato at that time known as Microlancer. I was really excited and joined the Microlancer community quickly. Unlike Fiverr these guys had a professional procedure when approving the freelancers.

They made sure to check my experience and portfolio stuffs before accepting me as a seller. I was really satisfied about that flow because spammy dudes were not allowed to sell low quality services. Also the price range of the services were great because I could choose the market price of the service easily. And I didn’t need to worry about incoming orders, since I had to first click on the Accept button in order to start the project.

I almost forgot to tell you my arrival time to Microlancer, that was June 2013. Later Envato rebranded the Microlancer to Envato Studio. I was making money quickly and with just few projects to cover my target income with Envato Studio rather than doing 200’s of Fiverr Sales sacrificing large portion of my freedom.

I have made over $2000 with Envato Studio so far while working on Fiverr and my private projects. By 2013, I was clearly seeing the point that I can make money online at anytime I feel the need, because I was doing better and better every month. My Web engineering skills were boosted one project after another.

Real Business Fever

I didn’t worry about my income. Time was passing too quickly and I realize this wasn’t a real business, this was self-employment. I had to work on every client project almost throughout the month. There was no much freedom!

I was still in the rat race. I was seeing the answer in front of my eyes in almost every expert’s site. The answer was to build my own products to sell on my website. I started to brainstorm how my site should appear, what I should offer, my products list and so many other million things.

I was excited to start the work on my next goal. There were million things to complete to bring everything similar to what I was visualizing. I started to work on my list while taking those lengthy breaks from freelance business, but things didn’t went well and I again hit by procrastination.

I was reading other blogs to make me motivated, so I could work on my To Do list. That too wasn’t giving me favorable results. After all I decided to do things according to a process even I felt lazy or something that keeps me away from my goal. I created 2-3 tasks to complete within a day and stuck to it, sometimes I couldn’t complete the task within the day, but I was happy because I was doing what needs to be done anyhow.

Final Words …

First thank you for staying with me so far. I hope you like my story and more importantly hope you learn something from it.

Being a successful online marketer requires great deal of persistence, self-control, passionate industry knowledge and lot of hard working at times when your mind says to procrastinate. This is not something easy as you see or wish.

I’m still living and breathing which means this page will update in the future with more interesting stuffs about Shyam Chathuranga.