If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Okay, I love working from home but it’s really started to take a toll on my health. I was going to the gym 2-3 types a week, but doing nothing close to a ‘real’ workout.

My waistline was growing!

Then I talked to my friend Jeff, from SuperAffiliateLifestyle.com, to discover he had gotten a personal trainer.

Right then and there I decided to make a commitment in 2008 to get into shape. For the last several weeks I’ve had the pleasure of working with Dominic :

I’ve had 8 sessions so far and Dominic and he is seriously kicking my butt into shape - he used to be in the Air Force - so you can imagine the level of intensity he’s training me at. I’m doing 3 sessions with Dominic a week from 9 am to 10am in the morning! Plus on alternate days he’s having me come in on my own and do cardio.

I gotta tell ya, Dominic doesn’t pull any punches, I’m nearly passed out from exhaustion after each of our workouts.

And it’s GREAT!

I’ve NEVER worked out at this level of intensity in my life. I’m seeing incredible gains in muscle, energy levels, and endurance. My goal for the end of the year is to be 170 pounds with 10% body fat, I’m at 160 pounds with 20% body fat right now.

At the rate Dominic is working me I’m going to hit my goal is 4 months! I’m going to be totally ripped!

Having a personal trainer is AWESOME. There’s no way you can get anywhere close to the same workout or results doing it yourself, it’s a whole new level of working out, seriously.

I decided to do weight training with a personal trainer for the obvious benefits it provides :

1. improve health & fitness
2. increased energy levels
3. higher self-esteem
4. reduced stress levels
5. improved productivity & mental focus.

But you know what the biggest lesson I learned from Dominic?

I learned that to grow in any area of your life you have to continually push yourself out of your comfort zone. Dominic is always pushing to run at a higher speed on the treadmill, to do more weight in my weight lifting routine, etc, etc.

Just when he suspects I’ve adopted to the new higher level he’s set, he challenges me again by raising the bar yet higher.

Dominic is continually pushing my out of my comfort zone, as any great personal trainer would, forcing my body to adopt and grow at a phenomenal rate.

This applies to you affiliate business as well.

You have to be willing to continually push yourself out of your comfort zone, doing things you feel uncomfortable doing, if you want to grow your business at a phenomenal  rate.

For many of you that could be building a landing page, finding some outsources and building a team, testing different ppc affiliate strategies, going on forums and reaching out to people and networking.

These are all things at one point or another that took me out of my comfort zone.

If you’re already a super affiliate making big bucks, then start thinking about how you can push yourself out of your comfort zone to take your business to the next level.

I can tell you right now I’m working on a bunch of projects right now that are pushing me out of my comfort zone, because regardless of what happens in those projects I know that’s what I need to do to grow myself (my skills, my thinking, etc), and as a result, grow my business to the next level.

If you want to have a multimillion dollar business you have to FIRST grow and become the type of person that can handle a multimillion dollar business.

The best way to do that is to face your fears and step out of your comfort zone - continually.

Now I always talk about the importance of having a relationship with your affiliate manager, and how it’s a MAJOR key to success as an affiliate.

And that’s true.

However, you need to have a clear picture of what YOU want to accomplish and what your goals are. The affiliate manager’s goal is to have you produce as much revenue as possible for their offers, and they’ll tell you whatever it takes to make sure this is your goals too.

If you fall for that line you’re dead in the water.

Let’s do a reality check:

1. Your affiliate manager does NOT care if your profit margin on your offer is 5%, they get paid on the gross revenues you produce.
2. They don’t care if you spend 80 hrs a week as an affiliate day trader, as long as your bringing in the sales.
3. What’s worst, they’ll offer you a donut if you accomplish their goal for them, that is if you bring in the most revenue.

What do I mean by donut? I mean an incentive, reward, bonus, whatever you want to call it. You may be offered a monthly gift certificate, vacation package, a car, if you’re one of the top affiliates for their offer.

I ‘ve chased after my share of donuts, and I’m tell you right now it’s a big mistake.

The fact is for most affiliate offers there’s a cost of diminishing returns for becoming the top affiliate (and getting the donuts). Becoming the top affiliate for an offer through ppc almost always means sacrificing ROI and considerably increasing your time investment in maintaining your affiliate campaign.

If you’ve taken my advice and opted for the steady but solid approach to building a million dollar affiliate money machine then you have to ask yourself this question :

Are you going to STOP building a million dollar affiliate business to go for the donut?!?

If you’re in this business to get a pat on the back from your affiliate manager, telling you how great you are, then go for the stupid donut. But if you have a clear vision of what type of affiliate business you want to create, then put on blinders and focus ONLY on that which will help you create that business.

Are YOU chasing after donuts or totally focused and committed to building the business of your dreams?

In the 3rd part of this series I want to talk about the importance of setting up, maintaining, and growing your site for long term profitability AND peace of mind.

IMMUNITY FROM GOOGLE SLAPS

If you’ve ever lost sleep over a Google slap you know what I mean when I talk about peace of mind. In the past I’ve had the wind knocked out of me by Google slaps, but nowadays my profits actually go UP after a Google slap.

There’s a couple keys to avoiding a Google slap :

#1

Setup you affiliate site PROPERLY so that you start out with a good landing page quality score, I’m not going to go into the detail in this post, rather check out this post I did a while back on how to make your affiliate site Google happy!

#2

Just setting up your site right initially is NOT enough to stay in Google good graces. You need a system in place to continually expand and improve your website :

1. Regularly add fresh content to your site. I have a regularly updated blog + fresh articles added to my affiliate sites on a WEEKLY basis.
2. SEO optimize your site. This includes getting backlinks, directory submissions, etc, etc. The fact is Google does factor in your PageRank, various “trust” factors, … really the overall strength of your site in natural search results side of things into your Adwords QS. This is the converge of natural search and paid search, and it’s very real.
3. Split test your landing pages. Not only will this help your conversions, Google will see fresh content on your landing pages if you’re continually split testing. This is a BIG plus!

I’ve used the above strategies to dominate my affiliate niches, laughing to the bank while my competitors get repeated pummeled by one Google slap after another.

CONTINUALLY IMPROVE YOUR CONVERSION RATE

There’s one more point I want to re-emphasis. And that’s, in addition to getting on top of the quality score, you need to continually split test your landing pages (a point I mentioned above).

Even if you only increase your conversions by 5% a month, over the course of a year, compounded that comes to an 80% increase in conversion rate a year.

Now if your conversion rate is increasing by 80% a year on all your landing pages, think of how FAST you’ll blow away your competitors that are not split testing??

You almost need to do this to assure long term profitability, especially with increasing competition in almost every niche online.

That’s all there is to it. In this 3 part serious I’ve laid out how I’ve developed a massive stable long term money machine.

Now the question is will you take my advice and do the same?

Or would you rather be an affiliate day trader launching one new campaign after another before your last campaign fizzles out?

I don’t care if each of your campaigns generate $50k profit a month, if they fizzle out after 2 months and you have to launch a new one, then you’ve got a JOB! In the long run someone who builds a long term money machine-although they might start smaller-will blow you out of water.

I’ve thought about getting an office space outside of my home for a long time now, and I finally decided against it. Instead I choose to turn my home office into a REAL office.

In the past two months I’ve spend literally thousands on totally transforming my home office. Everything in my home office was either moved to storage or outright trashed and replace with really slick solid cherry wood furniture.

Here’s me at my old desk:

Now, check it out, here’s my new desk with my NEW Mac Pro (I’ll talk about this baby in a second!):

Here’s some cherry wood bookshelves, that are also apart of the office :

Now after totally revamping my office, I decided, what the heck, I might as well buy some new computer as well. Besides I was getting frustrated running a multimillion dollar business off of a small laptop.

So I went all the way, I bought a top of the line completely souped up Mac Pro with 8 processors and 10 GB of RAM, YES, 10 GB of RAM! I got Shilpi an iMac with 4GB of RAM.

Check it out…

We also bought a high end Brother networking printer as well…

I actually hired a Mac consultation to configure and network all our computers and printer plus setup Parallels, which is a really neat program that allows you to run Windows on your Mac. It’s SO COOL, thanks to Parallels I can now run the 2 or 3 Windows only programs that I need on my Mac seamlessly!

It hard to really put in words how cool and how fast my Mac Pro is with the new OS X Leapord operating system, other than that it’s blazing fast with graphics and features that would blown your mind!

Now a lot of you may be asking : “Amit, why did you spend over $10k totally revamping your office and buying new computers??”

It’s all about mindset!

The environment that you create around you effects your attitude, your mental focus, and your productivity. I can’t tell you how many times I felt frustrated & stressed out working off a laptop on a tiny adjustable table.

With my new office, new desk, and new computer, I feel I can conquer any challenge!

It’s an amazing feeling.

And YES my productivity and mental focus has really improved with the new office environment, not to mention the fact I just LOVE working on my new Mac.

It’s so COOL

Last time I talked about how to use Adwords Editor to make bulk changes across your Adwords campaign, making the task of managing a large Adwords account virtually effortless.

This time I want to talk about how to properly build & structure an Adwords campaign for long term profitability.

First, let me ask you a question…

Would you rather make $5k/month profit or $1k/month profit from an affiliate offer running on Adwords??

$5k/month right? That’s a no brainer.

Now wait, what if I told you that that the $5k/month profit would require 10/hr a week of logging into your Adwords account, constantly messing with your bids, constantly checking your stats to see if you have positive ROI.

On the other, the $1k/month profit would require ONLY 1/hr a month of your time.

Now which would you choose? Do you see where I’m getting at here?

There are a lot of affiliates with high maintenance $5k/month because they fail to see the HUGE opportunity cost that they’re incurring.

Frankly, I would much rather have 20 of the $1k campaigns that require 20 hours of my time a month (5 hours/week) VERSES 4 $5k/month campaigns that would require a FULL 40/hrs a week to maintain.

In each scenario you’re making the same amount of money but your per hour time value for managing 20 of the $1k/month campaigns is $1,000/hr, while your per hour time value for managing the 4 of the $5k/month campaigns is $125/hr.

What would you rather make an hour?

Actually, have you even calculated what you’re making an hour effectively as an affiliate?

Now imagine this : you have an Adwords account running affiliate offers that are cranking out MASSIVE profit month after month, after month, with no more than a few hour A MONTH of maintenance?

I don’t have to imagine it, it’s a reality for me!

How is that possible?

Here’s How…

#1 Don’t Put all Your Sales in One ‘Keyword Basket’

A lot of affiliates try to focus all their energy on a small group of closely related converting keywords they find for a particular niche. They constantly monitor these keywords, spending hours a day seeing what their ad position is, what their competitors are doing, what their ROI is, etc, etc.

If you’re doing that (you know who you are) you’ve got a BAD job!

My objective with ppc affilaite marketing has always been to create a online money machine that requires a very MINIMUM amount of monthly maintenance (i.e. no more than a few hours a month).

The best way to create your online money machine is to first bid on a large broad keywords list, if you’re not sure what broad keywords are check out this post, which explains my philosophy of keyword research.

As your campaign runs (with your large broad list of keywords) and you determine which keywords are producing the most sales and traffic, expand these keywords out with a tool such as Google Keywords Tool, this will add depth to your keyword list and most definitely increase your sales since you’re focused on finding long tails of keywords that already convert.

Ultimately you want your affiliate sales coming from a LONG TAIL of broad keywords and not just one small pocket of closely related profitable keywords. This will produce much more stable and long terms profits for you.

What do I mean by a long tail of broad keywords?

When I log into one of my top Adwords campaigns I have literally HUNDREDS of adgroups, each targeting uniquely different keywords, that consistently produce sales and profits.

In other words, my sales are not dependent on the performance of 2 or 3 high traffic keywords, but rather come from a long tail of broad keywords. Almost all of these keywords only produce a small to medium amount of traffic, but trust me, it all ADDS UP!

#2 Don’t Operate on Slim Margins

Often times I hear other affiliates tell me that’s I’m crazy for shotting for high ROI, that I should be concerned with maximizing my profit and not worry about ROI.

If your goal is to bid your keywords to a position where you’re maximizing your profit you’re making a serious mistake.

Think about it, you could have an affiliate campaign generating 10% margins and be making a HUGE amount of money due to the shear volume of traffic you’re buying. But guess what, if you’re operating on thin margins like that your profits can disappear with a small market down turn.

The fact is with a small profit margin you’re going to have to constantly monitor your campaign, and deal with a ton of stress and anxiety.

Instead of maximizing profit, your goal should be to maximizes your per hour time value. That is your profit divided by the number of hours of monthly campaign maintenance required.

For my experience to maximize per hour time value (in most cases) you need to shoot for 100% ROI, that is for every $1 you spend on Adwords you should get $2 back.

That should be your goal.  And that means bidding low even if it means sacrificing net profit. So NO it doesn’t matter if you’ll only make $1k/month from your campaign instead of $5k/month.

Come on, do you want to live the super affiliate lifestyle or create another job for yourself?

Not only do I live a lifestyle most people can only dream of, my income continues to explode because I DON’T have to constantly monitor and manage my existing campaigns, which frees up my time to work on bigger & more exciting projects!

Next time I going to talk about how to setup your website, and setup systems to continually improve your website to assure long term profitability and immunity from infamous Google Slaps.

So stay tuned!

A lot of affiliates ask me : “Amit, how in the world do you managed 50+ active campaigns on your Google account, including all the campaigns you have on multiple other search engines??”

Some of you may think that I spend 8 hours a day managing my ppc campaigns, well in fact I only log into my Adwords account about once a week, and up to 3-5 times a week only if I just launched a new campaign. As for MSN, Yahoo, and the other ppc campaigns I managed, I log in about once a month.

I do all this while I continue to grow my profits with about 5 other new projects I’m working on.

So the question remains how in the world do I manage all my existing ppc campaigns with such little time involvement?

Well I do a lot of things that make my consistent rock solid profits possible, I’m going to do series of posts, starting with this one, where I talk about some of the tools and strategies I use.

So here’s the deal…

Hands down the MOST powerful tool I use is a program that’s absolutely free call Adwords Editor. If you’re not using this tool download it immediately and make it your mission to become an expert at it.

Not only does Adwords Editor make it way easier and faster to launch a campaign, it allows you to do amazing things as far as campaign management and optimization is concerned.

Here’s just a few optimization techniques that you can do with Adwords Editor :

#1

In a previous post I talked about how you can use Adwords Editor to adjust your ad positions for all your ads, shift ads that are in position 1-3 down and shifting ads in positions 8+ up. You can check out the post here.

The “create or set custom view” feature is a powerful filter that I love using to optimize my campaigns :

There are dozens of creative ways of using this filter feature to get what you need done, here’s just a few:

#2

Make Changes Across Multiple Campaigns : First off, you can filter out EXACTLY the campaigns you want to change, and then apply your bulk changes across all of these campaigns at once.

#3

Segment & Remove Traffic : Let’s say you have a campaign about Widgets all going to the same landing page. You discover blue widget is getting a lot of traffic and conversions so you setup a separate landing page with unique content about blue widgets.

But now you have a problem, you have about a 100 ad groups scattered in your campaign all related to blue widgets, so if you just logged onto to Adwords online it could take you a good hour to make all the changes to the destination (and display url).

However, with Adwords Editor filter feature you can filter out all adgroup names that contain “blue” and instantly change the destination and display url for these ads!

On the other hand, let’s say you discover keywords related to green widgets were not converting at all, you could again use the filter feature to find all Adgroups the contain the word “green” and pause them.

Performance Statistics :

This one’s my favorite, even though it’s a pain in the butt waiting for your stats to download to Adwords Editor it’s totally worth it just to be able to use the Performance Statistics Filter.

Here’s one technique that works great:

After you launched a new campaign and let it run for a while, that could be a week or several months depending on how much traffic you’re getting, download your stats using Adwords Editor for the time your campaign was running.

#4

Now, extract all keywords (or adgroups if you do one keyword per adgroup) that have 200-300 clicks and Cost/Conv. = 0.0 using the Performance Statistics filter and then pause all these adgroups.

#5

If your product commission is $X, then can extract all adgroups that have a Cost/Conv > $2X and pause then. If the Cost/Conv is less than $2X but still greater than $X use the advanced bid change feature :

to lower your bids on these adgroups by 50%.

So listen up…
Adwords Editor is THE way to managed a large Adwords campaign, if you want have the very profitable problem of managing a large Adwords campaign here’s my advice : learn to use Adwords Editor, I mean LEARN EVERY SINGLE FEATURE.

When I attended PPC Classroom LIVE last year I had a chance to see Kirt Christensen, the renowned Adwords expert talk, and I also had a rare opportunity to talk to him about how he does Adwords.

Frankly, I was blown away, and since I’ve implemented some significant shifts in my thinking and strategy as it applies to Adwords.

Here’s one BIG idea/strategy I was able to steal from Kirt :

Setup a system to continually split test ALL of your Google Adwords Ads.

The advantages of actually doing this are ENORMOUS. First off 99% of advertisers and affilaites do NOT do this. If you’re really serious you may split test your ads 5-10 times before you settle on a winner, but not continually.

Small changes to your Google ads, such as changing one word, adding a question mark, etc can potentially make a HUGE difference in your CTR. Overtime if you’re continually improving your CTR and your landing page quality score (I’ll get into that later), you’ll BLOW AWAY your competitors by having the best quality score.

So how exactly do you setup a system to continually split test your ads?

It’s not as hard as you think! Here’s how you do it in a nutshell :

1. Sign up for Winner Alert. Winner Alert is a program that sends you weekly (or daily) reports of all the split tests in your account that have winning ads within a certainty of 95-99%. It takes 5 minutes to setup.
2. Have the winner alert reports sent to an outsourcer and have then write a new ads for each winning ad by making a small change : switching description line 1 & 2, adding a question mark to the headline, etc, etc. If you have access to a copywriter and can afford the fee, have the copywriter write new compelling ads once you’ve gone through the whole gamut of possible small changes to your ad.
3. Have your copywriter/outsourcer send you a file with : the winning ads, the new ads that are to compete with the winning ads, and the losing ads to be deleted. Make sure they’re all in Adwords editor format so you can quickly delete the losing ads and upload the winning ads through Adwords Editor. This is 5 minutes a week of work!
4. Repeat the above process every week.

The real key here is understanding that you if want to win in the Adwords game long term you’ve go to think in terms of continually improvement otherwise you’re as good as dead.

Do YOU have a system in place to continually split test your ads, split your landing pages, and improve you landing page quality score?

I just recently found out from, Kris Jones, CEO of Pepperjam, that they’re launching their own affiliate network, PepperJamNetwork, TODAY!

When THE TOP Internet Marketing Agency launches an affiliate network it’s something you’ve gotta check out. Kris was kind enough to give me a rare pre-launch sneak peak at PepperJam Network, and all I have to say is WOW!

As an affiliate network here are 2 things that stood out about PepperJam’s Affiliate Network :

Emphasis on Open Communication and Relationship Building :

As I’ve mentioned on this blog before, building relationship with your affiliate network and merchant are an absolute KEY to having a successful affiliate marketing business. I know ALL of my affiliate manager and/or merchants personally.

PepperJam has gone out of the way to make it as easy as possible for the affiliate to communicate directly with merchants with Pepperjam Chat. Also, PepperJam also directly provides the name and phone number of the affiliate manager for each and every program they have. Kudos!

Tracking & Reporting :

It’s a given that tracking and reporting are extremely important for affiliates, especially with the razor sharp margins we work with.

PepperJam Network offers SID-level tracking. SID mean sub id tracking, where you can attached different strings onto the end of your url and use it to track sales for almost anything : keywords, ads, search vs content, etc.

The reporting features are slick as well : bar graphs, pie charts, quick overview which shows earnings & clicks on your top offers, and much more! You can also generate reports for whatever date range you specify for variety of metrics such as commission history, sid reports, etc…

Communication/Relationships & Tracking/Reporting are the 2 most important criteria that I judge an affiliate network by, and I gotta tell you PepperJam Network has hit the ball out of the park in each of those areas.

So if you’re searching for an excellent affiliate network, I strongly recommend getting started with PepperJam Network.

Okay, I don’t a have time to talk about everything Shilpi and I did in India, so let me tell you about the major highlight…a 3 day trip to Jaipur in the northern desert state of Rajasthan.

Jaipur is a place full of intrigue and rich history of the Rajas (Kings) that once ruled India. I don’t have time to get into a history lesson here, but the Rajas & Ranis (Queen) live a spectacular life. They live in palaces beyond your imagination.

Just check out some of the amazing forts and palaces we saw :

To top that off we actually stayed in Heritage hotel, which was a palace converted into a luxury hotel. Everything was very well preserved, it was like living staying in a museum.

It was absolutely stunning!

Now what’s really cool is that Shilpi and I had booked a basic suite for 2 night for me and my parents at $950/night. We had booked it with the black card and ended up getting an upgrade to the TOP room in the entire hotel.

Do you know what the top room in this hotel was?

IT WAS THE KING THRONE ROOM AND BEDROOM!?!

Check it out…

Here’s the front entrance :

Here’s shot from the throne room that we were staying in :

Here’s the view from our room of one of the multiple courtyards in this palace hotel :

Here’s the bedroom where the Raja and Rani slept, it’s where Shilpi and I stayed for two nights!

The bedroom itself was HUGE with a huge bathroom with every amenity you can imagine.

Okay, to TOP THAT OFF, I arranged a private dinner for 4 : myself, Shilpi, and my parents, where we rented out one of the courtyards and were treated like Kings and Queens for a evening.

It’s all started with a 5 minute firework display for JUST THE 4 OF US! Then they rolled out the red carpet, announced our names, had live music playing and a lady dancing in front of us as we walked to out to our seats in the middle of the courtyard. They held an umbrella over us as we walked, and another person fanning us as we walked.

It was exactly the way they treated a Raja and Rani when they entered a room in the palace for an event. We were all blown away to say the least.

Forget about imagining how Kings and Queens lived in those days, we actually experience it!

Once we took our seat in our lavish chairs we were waited for hand and foot with one appetizers after another as we walked a phenomenal performance of traditional dance and even fire eaters!

This performer is balancing 8 pots on her head WHILE dancing :

Here’s the fire guy :

Btw, the red, white, and yellow you see where performers are performing is are ALL fresh flower petals!?!

After the performance they played live music as we move to our dining area :

Yes, those are all fresh flowers hanging down, MORE FRESH FLOWERS THAN I HAD IN MY WEDDING!

I won’t bludgeon you with the cost but the night was worth every penny I paid, it was truly a once in a lifetime experience.

One more thing, while I was an India I had a chance to fly around in Jet Airways and King Fisher, both Indian airlines. I gotta tell you, the economy class in these airlines have better service and give more food for a 45 minute flight than first class in a US airlines for a 3 hour flight.

No Joke!

This was my 6th or 7th trip to India ever since I first went when I was about 1 and a half years old. I gotta tell you, every trip to India is an AMAZING experience.

This is my 3rd trip to India since they started implementing economic reforms and started moving towards a first world market economy. And each time I’ve gone the changes have been remarkable!

At the rate India’s economy is growing and creating wealth it will blow pass the US in 10-20 years from now.

No joke.

This time around I saw the biggest changes yet : the infrastructure has dramatically improved, especially the roads and the airports.

The airports are just as good as the US, and extremely fast, efficient, and yes, air conditioned, a far cry to what they used to be in the last eighties when I remember spending 8 HOURS at the Mumbai airport because someone had stolen our luggage.

The roads have also improved, I remember going to India in the past and having to hold on tightly while riding in a taxi or a car, if you didn’t your head would hit the ceiling every time you hit a pothole - which was about every 3o seconds!

Now the roads in Mumbai (my first stop) are just as good as Boston roads, and sometimes better-you know what I’m talking about if you’ve ever road down Commonwealth Ave.

LOL

Air quality has also improved in the cities now thanks to the widespread use of unleaded gas and natural gas. Now the major problem is all dust resulting from a lack of landscaping, but even this is improving in cities such as Vadodara in Gujarat.

It’s amazing how entrepreneurs can transform & uplift a country when they’re freed from draconion government controls and protectionist thinking, something our government seems to have long forgotten, but I’ll get into that later!

Anyhow, let me tell you more about my trip…

My wife and I had the pleasure of taking business class on Lufthansa airlines.

If you’ve never flown business or first on a long haul flight before you’re missing out! It’s an awesome experience. Gourmet food + a fully reclinable seat makes for a virtually stress free flight. If you have the cash this is one area NOT to be stingy in, pay the extra several thousand and fly in style.

The only thing that sucked was the whopping 7 hour layover at Frankfort airport.

Our trip started in Mumbai where Shilpi and I were staying with Bhaveshbhai and Sejalbhen. Shilpi and I were blown away by their hospitality. They provided us with one of their 2 bedroom and fed us so much food we could barely get out of our chairs.

If that wasn’t enough they coordinated our whole stay in Mumbai, sightseeing and all.

Bhaveshbhai actually gave us a tour of Mumbai by car. We saw a number of major sites, museums, homes of Bollywood actors/actresses, the Gateway of India, and we also had a chance to see some of the new modern buildings and developments coming up in Mumbai …very cool.

Here’s a picture of myself and Shilpi with my parents, Sejalbhen (next to Shilpi), Seryabhen to the right, parth (Sejal’s son - holding on to Sejal), and Ishan (Serya’s son - between Sejal and Serya) :

Here’s another picture that includes Bhaveshbhai (green shirt and glasses) :

Also check out the gateway of India :

Another thing I love about Mumbai is the food.

Every time I come to Mumbai I always indulge in a South Asian delight call Falooda. You can read all about it here.

It’s amazing, and you can’t get it in the US.

Overall, I have to say that the people, the culture, the hospitality in India are simply amazing. Oh yeah, my mom and my wife also had a blast shopping!

I can’t wait to tell you about the rest of my trip in Part II.

So stay tuned…