Charles Lau

I do know of this theory myself. If I were to calculate it for you to see, you would think this is possible actually. Doing an Internet Business is actually an easy thing to do if you know the formula. This formula is a very simple multiplication mathematics only.

If we were to do this formula:

(Do Something Very Small)
x
(Do Something Very Big)
=
(The Results You Want)

For example, if we were to make just $1 for every person, and we use Internet Traffic to flood this website to make that $1 per person, the result will be powerful! So if we have a monthly traffic of 10,000 for an average good site, we are already making $10,000. And if we just ask $2, it’ll become $20,000… Or if we cut down on the traffic to 5000 with $2, it’s $10,000 per month as well.

To reach your million dollar goal, it is actually not about reaching your One Millionth Dollar that is important… It’s the process of getting that money… If you have already reached more than $10,000 per month, you are already a millionaire! Why is this so? Having $1,000,000 in your account doesn’t have any sense when you need to spend it away too. So today you are a millionaire, tomorrow you are not after you spent buying something. It’s all about cashflow…

Many people who used clickbank to make money for their products, they are adopting towards the two factors as well. Because of the huge word-of-mouth from the affiliates and the internet superstars, ClickBank got its fame… And ClickBank naturally is selling products to its affiliates as well.

Hence, it can either go by this flow of cash:

$67 x 150 buyers = $10050 per month
(this is considered buying at full price, and 150 buyers per month is a very light traffic!)

$20 x 500 affiliates = $10000 per month
(this is the considered price after paying affiliates, and 500 affiliates helping to market only 1 product each per month!)

If you take a look at the above 2 ways, how can you not become a millionaire? And I am considering one side at a smallest possible number and another side at a highest possible number… Having just 650 targeted visitors a month, I think it’s very possible with 80/20 rule. Let’s say 1000 visitors on your site daily, and 2% is buying. Your only difficulty is now with the traffic attraction (Let’s say you got a good web copy for conversion)…

I got this post out of inspiration when a blog linked me talking about why I chose to be an amazon affiliate. That blog is simply focusing himself to make his first million using his blog. If he’s looking at this blog, I thank him for the link.

This site has an unusual title of “Bad Neighbourhood”. It is a set of SEO tools to help webmasters to optimize their websites for search engines. Here’s the link.

According to this site, it states that doing a link exchange with a penalized website can have some detrimental results. And hence it provides a tool to scan the links on your website and flag possible problem areas. (Link) I did a test run with my own url. And I realise some of the links I have in my websites are actually Blog SPAMS, some are REDIRECT URL, and it is stuck at a WAIT mode for a paypal link… Probably this program still needs some refinement for the stucked link which jammed the whole process to a WAIT status.

Yahoo Multiple Keyword Rank Checker is a good tool to check what position you are now ranking with some of the keywords you are aiming to be related with. (link) Again, I checked with my url and realise my website is not optimized with the keywords I am working with yet.

HTTP Header Detector is yet another important thing to look at when you are working with the website (link). This is the actual reply from the web server whenever a browser calls for a certain url from your website. Here’s an example of what it returns when a url is called. This is what it will reply:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2007 18:51:19 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Pingback: http://www.charleslau.com/xmlrpc.php
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.11
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

I think the rest of the tools might not be really useful for now in the site. However, the best tools to use in this site is actually Text Link Checker Tool, Yahoo Multiple Keyword Rank Checker and Detect Headers. It eases a lot of work on our side to see some of the results which can be manually done for a very long time…

This site don’t seem to be fully supported by its author. I would suggest to use it sparingly until he works on it some more.

I think there is a flaw in the linking system to determine a page rank for every website. If you have a very famous website, does that mean you have a good linking population from external websites? Basically, that is true. But let’s take a good look at a very powerful blogger I got to know from the Internet named John Chow. His site seems to be totally removed from Google search results! I believe it is all because of the upcoming contests he has been holding for his readers who are mainly bloggers as well! By asking them to link to his blog, he will give them a chance to win various attractive prizes! Frankly speaking, I think that is a very reasonable contest since the bloggers are just introducing their readers to John Chow’s site and it is supposed to do nothing with Google. But of course, by doing that John Chow is opening a loophole of Google to give John Chow to be the top position in the search for “Make Money Online”.

A contest like this, John might have actually pushed his limits as much as possible. But to think of doing link baiting from all other sites in order to participate a contest, it is a reasonable marketing technique since every action done by a business is answerable to its income affection.

So, is John doing the right or wrong thing by having regular contests like this? It looks perfectly alright though. But if he does it this way, does it actually open a linking loophole of placing a vote for the wrong reason? I think the reason is also acceptable since they are “voting” for that site’s url…

And look from it in another way. All the Free-For-All (FFA) websites are probably being banned too… The very reason for their existence is to provide a linking to the websites. I personally feel this might not be the right thing and that Google has banned it correctly… But again on the other hand, if these sites’ main business is to provide a link directory for all relevant websites and it’s banned, I think it’s probably unfair for these link-directory-websites… I suggest you don’t do such a directory unless you are something as big as dmoz.org….

In conclusion, look at those sites which provide a real business out there like Mr John Chow’s. Having a link baiting program like this is part of the contest and that the Internet is all about linking in order to carry on with their business. It is supposed to have nothing to do with being banned from Google or not. Probably, the linking population is not the right measurement to fully determine a site’s position.

I am sorry to have written this blog so late for the Desi Baba readers in his 4th blogging batch! This post serves as a introduction of myself of who I am that you might be interested to know…

I thank you Sunny for having me in your blogging batch 4. Well, I have started trying to work out this blog since 1st June 2007. Been trying and reinstalling this blog till I got this to somewhere I want, but it is still not fully built up yet. I have so much more to write about, and yet I have to work on the construction of this blog.

I previously did physical businesses in helping companies to do web programming, and then i move on to do a console game business, and then I move on to do event business, and then I move on to do web hosting business, and then I move on to do food delivery business, and then I move on to do courier business, and then I am now moving on to do Internet Business myself.

Well, this blog is basically about my interest in doing Internet Business. And with what I know about doing business, I am writing a review of the different businesses. Previously, I was studying software engineering and computer networking in 1998 to 2001. And hence, I had a feel of how Internet works technically in those days… With that, I am now catching up with what I know about entrepreneurship, and wish to catch up to do an Internet Business.

I hope to know more people out there, and that I thank you for visiting me.

Here are a few newspaper articles talking about me in the past you might be interested.

Once again, I thank you for visiting my blog, and please keep me subscribed in your feed reader for more updates.

I heard of some friends who don’t know what to write on their blog. I know of some who seem to be doing really well. I tried doing my own blogs since 2003, without making any money. I realise the secret of blogging a better information.

As we wanted to give the best to our readers, we realise our focus is wrong if we focus too much on “wanting to give the best” than to focus on “writing better and better posts”. Many seasonal bloggers tend to blog naturally as they have a structure in their head through the experience of blogging.

So How Do You Get Started?
Simply start typing something as your head is thinking. Don’t look back at what you are blogging. Enjoy the process of churning out useful information from your brain to the words in the blog. That’s the beauty of the blog… And as you write more and more, you will understand why you are blogging along this topic and not that.

I remember writing blog in the past is all about our life story… While many of my friends’ blogs are talking about how sad their lives are or how happening their lives are, I am blogging about what I have learnt. And I really enjoy blogging what I have learnt and put them all out on the blog… In the end, my blog seems to be very positive always… My friends commented that. In fact, that’s because I have been reading on business, marketing and sales books since in 2003.

To improve for the better, simply get started and keep typing. You might want to take a look at your grammar mistakes and phrases after you are satisfied typing! Try it! It’s fun..

The more that we get to know how search engine optimization works, the more we might want to tune our site for Google, Yahoo and MSN to be able to search our sites.

Many of us know that having more sites linking to you, can put you to a better search results’ position. So when we know of this, we would start to think of ways and means to get more sites to link to us so that we are more searchable.

In fact, if you think from the point of view from the search engines, I believe they don’t want you to focus too much on such things. If you can keep on producing good contents for the website, and that people start to like you and referring people to your website, you can have a good ranking eventually.

Search engines are important. But our contents are even more important. Because we have great contents, people will start to look at our site and it will just get popular. While it may not be fair why some are simply getting a better position than the other, you can see a difference when you know some sites are consistently there without any difficulty… Their position will not be easily get off the first page.. Sometimes, there are some sites which simply got to first rank for just a while and slide down after… This kind of sites are what I believe Google thought that they are important only for today so Google better show their websites first.. I bet you won’t want to have such a temporary position.

Just do your job. People will love you… Search engines love you even more!

While I am seeing a lot of negative feedback about using amazon affiliate program, Amazon is afterall a reputable business with huge variety of items to sell online. I look for the following requirements when signing for affiliation programs.

Reputation
Is the reputation of the merchant good with his customers? Do the buyers buy a lot from him? Do they keep on buying again and again? I would want to have a relationship with such a merchant, but the condition comes with the next requirement.

Is this merchant the only one of his kind?
If he is the only one who can provide the kind of product I wish to recommend and that he is famous, I would have to work with him. Up till now, I only know of Amazon who seems to have every single book on earth in their inventory. And they are almost the first place to go for books. If I were to recommend my reader to buy a book, I would just ask him to go for the bestselling online bookstore with ease.

Is the payout good?
I would consider highest payouts amongst the different merchants of the same competition. Many times for us who are just starting out, there are many deals we can’t touch because we have not enough traffic to bring in the deals. I am glad that Amazon accepted me as I am of low traffic. I believe they have to since there are many good affiliates like John Chow who don’t wish to work with Amazon because of low payouts. Talking about payouts, even in Darren Rowse’s blog talking about the secret to increase amazon earnings is time, there are many comments which actually mean low payout… Even for his blog, he wrote that he can now easily make 50 sales a day after working with Amazon affiliate for about 4 years… I guess it’s everything to do with buying again themselves after clicking that link. I am not sure if Amazon does have that cookie to maintain the affiliate with the buyer. But if they do that, it can justify better with the lower percentage payout.

Conclusion
Because of the theme of my website is about doing an insight review of internet businesses as much as I can, the tools that I use will have to be much more relevant with the market that they need, rather than the kind of money I can earn out of it. Putting my focus on giving relevancy to my readers will give me a better relationship with them too. Probably the payout for Amazon isn’t good right now, I will want to see how a good online shopping site can provide for me till I have found a better one…

I wish to touch on this topic because I realised the google crawler returns a lot of 404 errors when it attempted to read my url without a slash at the back when it is actually needed!

What does this mean? It means your site is less searchable by many people! Many webpages on your site will not be found and hence they are NOT INDEXED!

A correct url for a file is:
http://www.charleslau.com/myfile

A correct url for a directory is:
http://www.charleslau.com/mydirectory/

Notice an additional slash at the back? That slash is very important! Unfortunately, many people forgot to add in a slash after typing the url for a directory, and don’t key that… In fact, many commercials actually didn’t!

Of course, in many cases that erroneous url also works… All the server needs to do is to be a little smart, and ask the visitor to do a redirect to the correct url. The visitor’s browser will automatically ask for the correct url later…

But just imagine whenever a client keys in that erroneous url and has a url redirect to the correct url each time… If your site is churning 10,000 requests each day, it turns out to be 20,000… An extra 10,000 requests for your error to be corrected… And if you have done a very big campaign and have expected a huge traffic for your site, get prepared for a “double espresso” for your error… And your traffic will use up even more bandwidth for nothing which would later incur costs on your site for huge Internet access! I wouldn’t mind paying for more access on my server, but probably not this way of paying… it’s such a waste… Furthermore, your server will also need extra processing power to handle that extra load… Good luck!

Problem
It may not matter to you. But it may matter to a search engine. A website with or without www in front will make a difference in your PageRanking. Because it separates the linking population giving weight to different sites which is actually the same… Some to link to your site with www… Some to link to your site without www…

Solution
Since this is something you might not be able to do, why not do a 301 Redirect? This way, you are telling all search engines to point to that site whenever they link to you…

I would always recommend to add a www in front of your domain name. It creates a standardisation and gives a very good format of an Internet website.

This only works with apache webservers only. For other servers, please look for relevant documentations for “301 Redirect”… In your .htaccess file (or if you cannot find, simply create a new file called “.htaccess”), add the following code to it.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(.*)\.charleslau\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.charleslau.com/$1 [R=301,L]

So after you wrote it this way, you will not have to bother about www… Because all urls including the one that you typed will be forwarded to www.charleslau.com.. Remember to change your url accordingly or else you would be forwarding your traffic to me.. Well, I thank you for it!

Introduction
Basically, there are two kinds of products to sell in this world. They are tangible products and intangible products. Tangible products are those we can touch and see for its value. Intangible products are those we might not be able to touch and see but it’s there for us to buy for its value as well.

How Information Products Work?
There are a lot of Information Products we can do. And they actually save us a lot of trouble in their deliverables. When a person bought something from us, most of the time we can deliver it via a download from the web server. And if we purposely do up a CD package out of it, we can charge even higher for a physical ownership of that same products! In fact, it’s the value of that product that the customers want no matter whether it’s tangible or intangible.

With the growth of the Internet, Information Products are a lot more feasible. In the past, information products come in the form of cassettes, CD Audios, VCDs, books, video tapes and even through a television broadcast through a paid-per-view television, etc. With the help of the Internet, we can have so much information to sell online which is so much more accessible. Just imagine buying a product which you really wanted at the comfort of your home, and your product is ready in minutes in front of your desktop! Customers want an instant gratification upon purchase no matter whether your product is delivered digitally from the webserver, or it is delivered physically.

Take a look at how much a bookstore can earn just by selling books. People are there to buy a book which can cost from $29.99 to $99.99… But the production of that one book (under bulk purchase) is just a few dollars. With the help of the Internet, there is not even a cost of printing!

How to Start as an Affiliate Website?
If you are only going to start your first online venture, why not start with information product? It is definitely going to make your some money out of it without the burden of any physical goods consignment… Focus on the sales, ignore the deliverables. In doing an online venture, sales mean more contents, more pre-selling, more traffic attraction to what you are writing, and lastly traffic conversion from the crowd you have brought in.

The fun part about doing online venture is that everybody in the Internet are actually having fun! No matter if you are the seller, the buyer, or even just surfing around. So, as people are surfing your site, don’t allow your traffic conversion be only strictly by pre-selling.. Sell advertisements is as important.. As many people surf your site, those people are of targeted market which might actually be interested in something relevant in the sponsored links beside.

As you get yourself seasoned with selling information products, you might want to look at selling physical products also… Of course, you can do it the “information product” way… Just sign up with Commission Junction, and you are ready to pre-sell some of the physical products as well! It is almost the same way as dealing with information products.

How to Start as a Merchant Website?
The above that I have mentioned, are focusing on being an affiliate that you can pre-sell your information products. Why not start working on your own information product soon when you have become an expert in the field after working for so long selling other people’s products? As you have previously been doing an affiliate website, you are being educated everyday of how the products work… You might actually thought of something very unique along the way!

Start with an appropriate affiliate program around the Internet. Create your product. Look for relevant products and get their resale rights as bonuses for your buyers. Build a list of prospects and customers. Market it out to the affiliates. Work on an aftersale service for your customers. Please work out a very reasonable price… I personally find it so expensive to buy an ebook for over $50… Is it really that important to buy? Somehow, I feel it’s overpriced for the sake of giving more to the affiliates…

Conclusion
Potentially, any industry you are in can be worked out as information product. Because there is always something people wish to learn from. Frankly speaking, I still can’t find anything in this world that cannot be related into an information product…