Archive for November, 2008

Before you launch any new marketing campaign online, it is adviserable to research the market to assess there is market has a high demand and to identify any lucrative niche opportunity for you to explore. In addition, you also need to analyse the traffic volume and the profit potential from advertisements or affiliates.

1. Narrow down your interest

A good place to start is Wikipedia. It is a free online encyclopedia where it gives you an overall summary of the information you are interested and their associated keywords.

Let’s say you are interested in trader (finance). From Wikipedia, you will find out that there are several type of trader like day trader, swing trader, stock trader and others. And traders can buy or sell so many different kind of financial instruments like stocks, derivatives and commodities.

From the information, you have find out 3 important keywords which you can mix and match:

a. primary keyword: trader

b. secondary keywords: swing trader

c. third keywords: derivatives swing trader

This is almost known as the long tail keywords to narrow down your interest.

If you can’t find out any ideal associated keyword from Wikipedia, you can go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal which will display all the related keywords and approximate search volume.

2. Forums

Forums are a good place to find out the popular current buzz, new opportunities, untapped niche and learn from others. Go to Google or Yahoo and search for keyword + forum.

3. Assess the traffic potential

Go to http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/ and enter your keyword. You should look for high overall daily estimate with long and broad associated keywords.

4. Profit Potential from advertisement

Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox. A word of cautious is do not go for the highest estimated average CPC as it is already very saturated and highly competitive. Neither don;t go for the lowest estimated CPC as the profit is too low to compensate the marketing effort you have done. A good range will be $2-$3.

5. Monetize from affiliate programs

To find out whether you can find affiliate programs to promote, go to Google and search for keyword + affiliate. You can also go to Clickbank marketplace or commission junction to search for more affiliate programs which you can monetize.

wordpress

Wordpress is a blog publishing system developed by Matt Mullenweg, Ryan Boren and other contributors using PHP programming.

The 3 reasons why I think WordPress has win over other WYSISYG HTML editor are:

1. Support multiple theme templates, plugins and widgets

The main reason why WordPress is so flexible and effective is because it can support so many different theme templates, SEO friendly plugins and useful widgets to transform and optimize your websites.

I can still remenber 3 years ago when I developed my web projects using HTML editor. The project took me about 3 months to complete. The development was slow and tedious. Eveytime I need to update the navigation or links, I have to update all other pages one by one.

Now with WordPress, the header, body, sidebar and footer are all independent of one another. For instance, if I update the header, I do not need to update the rest of the pages. This really speed up my web development process as I completed one of my web project in just 10 days!

2. Open Source

Another reason why I think WordPress can gain so much popularity in such a short period of time is because it is FREE. You can go to this link http://wordpress.org/download to download. Alternatively, you can register your domain with a web hosting company that support fantastico script which allow you to enable wordpress easy and fast.

Only bluehost support both fantastico and simplescripts. Simplescripts perform better than fantastico as it is more user-friendly, support many other popular scripts like wordpress, Joomla and phpBB forum.

3. Use as Blog or CMS

Wordpress can be used for blogging or as a content management system. Like this website which you are reading, I used wordpress for both as blogging and content management system. Isn’t it cool ?

When I started blogging to make money online, a few things become apparent to me. The most important is the significant difference between “active income” and “passive income”. Let me explain.

“Active income” is the amount of money you make while you’re actively blogging, writing, leaving comments, submitting articles and marketing your blog. “Passive income” on the other hand is residual in nature, and it’s how much money you can earn if you suddenly stopped doing all of the things above. Understanding the benefits of both can help you decide which ones to focus on.

Active income is easy for anyone - while you’re working hard you earn what you deserve. That’s great, but what happens when you stop? It’s a marketer’s greatest fear, because 95% of people stop making any form of online income the moment they cut down on writing and blogging. If something were to happen to you and active blogging becomes impossible altogether, your online well literally dries up quicker than you can imagine.

That’s why I learned to focus on building “passive income” as well. Unlike active income, this type of income generally takes a longer time to show results, and even when it does the cash usually comes in small “streams”. Most people would scoff at it and dismiss it as mere “pocket money”. I did the same thing, but when I look back at my income for the last year, my passive income streams have been growing steadily and consistently, with almost no extra effort on my part.

If I stop everything I am doing right now and literally disappear from the face of the earth, my little passive income streams will continue to grow. Now, what if I could add more streams of passive income to this, and build it to the point where it becomes a raging river of cash, still running virtually on auto-pilot?

That got me thinking hard. Active income is absolutely necessary to pay the bills, but passive income is vital for building wealth. Read that again: BUILDING WEALTH.

Building wealth requires a completely different mindset and strategy. If you’re not consciously building wealth, then you’re no better off than you would be working a 9-5 job. Your income is to tied up to the work you do NOW, and the amount of money you make is directly related to the amount of time you sacrifice.

I found a great guide by Gobala Krishnan, a.k.a the Profit Blogger, that talks about auto-pilot income and building streams of online wealth, called WordPress AdSense System.

His guide talks about using WordPress to build niche, auto-pilot sites and monetizing them with Google AdSense. I strongly recommend you take a look at it, as I personally found it to be one of the most revealing and practical systems to making money from your blog:

Google AdSense is not something new. It’s been hyped about before, but I find that Gobala has taken the most practical and logical approach to making it work. A lot of people still make a five-figure income from Google AdSense, and can you imagine what kind of life it would be when you are that level?

You can practically quit everything, go on vacation for a year, and your income will just keep growing. That’s what I’ve been trying to say here - the allure and power of “passive income”. It’s possible.

Wordpress Turbo with Google Gears

Recently, I upgraded my wordpress to the latest version 2.6.3 and I saw a new link - Turbo appears at the top right hand corner of the dashboard. Before I clicked on the link, the first thought that came to my mind is “Turbo? Does it mean to speed up your wordpress?” Therefore to answer my doubt, I decided to click it and find out more.

1. You need to install the Google Gears into your computer.

2. After you have installed the Google Gears, the next step is to restart your browser.

3. After you have restarted your brower, login your wordpress and click the turbo link again. Click “Enabled Gears” to enable your wordpress with google gears. It will take up some times to process depending on the size of your wordpress.

4. When completed, you will see a similar message like the screenshot above.

So far, whether I was reading an existing post or writing a new page, I can see that my wordpress perform better than before. I guess my doubt is redundant.

Understand, Practice and Master the skills of relationship building is key to speed up and expand your business networks. The following are steps that I use to build up people networks:

1. Namecard

In any events networking, the first step to get people to know you is by introducing your namecard. The namecard introduces your business name, what type of business it does, your company website, your name, email, contact and address. This first lead can serve as a lead generator and can introduce more leads to you.

2. Website

If a prospect will like to know more about you and your business, the next step he/she will most likely do is to visit your website. The design of your website is very important because it can either attract the prospect to explore more or it can piss off the customers and never visit your website again. Of course beside the appearance of your website, the products or services that can meet the needs of your customers and the pricing are equally important as well.

3. Contacts

If your products or services are what the prospect is looking for, then the next step he/she will do is to contact you by email or phone.

Alternatively, you can establish a live chat from your website or facebook to help your prospect e.g. what are their enquiry? What are their requirements? What problems they facing? The purpose is to understand what is holding your prospect back from selecting or buying from you. After gathering the feedbacks from your customers, you can use them to improve your business.

4. Exchange

Once you have reached this level, you have actually establish a better relationship with your prospect and some can even become your friends, your affiliates or even your partners. Depending on the degree of your relationship with that person, you can benefit from the following advantages:

a. work exchange without money (called bartering) e.g. you may be strong in internet marketing but weak in design. Your friend whom has expertise in design can support you in that area. And vice versa you return the good favour to him/her. This way both party wins.

b. lesiure exchange e.g. if some of them become your friends, you can have more people to play team sports games, or go travelling or wine tasting or card playing or online games challenges.

c. network exchange e.g. more contacts from facebook, team building, entrepreneurship community. You can learn from them in their specialization like coaching, marketing, trading, investing etc as well as other criticial soft skills like street-smart instinct, creativity, innovations and so on.

So you see, the power of social networking can really expand your world and open out more doors for you than you can imagine.

Before you embark on any business venture, develop a business strategy is important to lower your risk and increase your chances of success. Today, I will like to share with you the secrets of my guerrilla business strategy.

1. Develop your business roadmap

Without a business roadmap, you will not be able to navigate your business from the start to the destination. It will be like you are at a foreign country without a map and you will not have an idea of how to get to your destination.

With a business plan, you will have a vision of how your business will look like when it is completed. From there, you can work out your plans backwards from Z to A.

2. Learn from the top gurus

I believe the fastest and most efficient way to  jumpstart your business or career is to learn from the top gurus of the market leaders. This is because they have gone through the “School of Hard Rocks” and have learned what’s not working and what’s working and therefore you can learn from their mistakes.

One way to learn from them is through their books or get information from wikipedia or from the internet search engine. The other way to learn from them is through their seminars or workshops. Of course this come with a price you have to pay.

3. Network with like-minded community members

Networking with like-minded people by sharing your experiences with other members can broaden your knowledge and benefit everybody. This is because “10 brains work better than 1 brain”

You can even build up a support group to encourage each other members, pull them up when your friends are down and keep pushing them until they reach their goals.

4. Understand the principles of making a living

Making money is never easy in any business whether it is internet marketing, trading or investing. The truth is no further from the fact.

The first step is to build up your credibility. Without a strong reputation, people will not trust you and less to buy from you. To build up your brand, you have to commit your time, effort and hard work to always deliver quality work to your content, product or service consistently.

The next step is that you must be passionate in your professional. This is because you will bound to face difficulties and if you do not really loved what you do, you will not be able to overcome the setbacks you faced.

The third step is you must work smart. Like learning the guerrilla business strategy from me. He He.

5. Project Schedule with Key Performance Indicator

Setting a schedule deadline is important because you can allocate the tasks to be done in order to complete the project on time.

You also need to implement Key Performance Indicator (KPI) that needs to done so that you can focus on the top priorities duties to be completed and not be distracted by other things.

With that, I give you all my blessing in your business adventure.

To Your Success.