Charles Lau

Following the sequel of We Think Best When We Rest, I have been having a lot of things at hand to work on which require a lot of critical thinking. And now with Cash Quests review, I have to look into my own blog for a revamp as well… While working on so many things related in both personal and business, I have recently overworked myself with too little sleep… And caused myself to be really sleepy! And while I was driving outside, I almost fell asleep once just last night! That’s so dangerous! I told myself not to overwork again… Ok, now let’s start this Part 2!

Do you know that we have no choice in learning what we want to learn? All these while, wherever we go we tend to use our eyes to see things. And because we see things, we might not be able to choose what not to see as well. And when we see things that we didn’t want to see, we start to learn new things in our sub-conscious mind… This learning curve is not as though we are trying to learn conscientiously by reading a book which teaches us things. And as too many items start to cramp into your brain, it is time to close your eyes and clear your mind and dump them inside your brain. (Please see Part 1 for greater understanding… I am not going to repeat what this means over here.) The more you keep your eyes open to work or to play, the more you will need to close your eyes and use your brain to start collecting the information your eyes have stored. Yes, the brain does its job of collecting information as well… But if you keep on going from places to places, your brain is not able to catch up with the collection… And in the end, you will end up with incomplete information in your brain which is still not stored yet… Plus, remember that we only retrieve information from our brain, not from our eyes! Hence, there are people who tend to be forgetful when too many things came happening together…

No, we still have some control over what to learn! This requires some discipline on our part… We can choose not to be too playful to go anywhere that might be dangerous… Or, we can choose to go anywhere that is good for our eyes… For example, we can avoid watching television programs… For years, it has been known that television can be an effective tool to “brainwash” any particular country to learn the things that is required… For example, if your government wishes to promote babies, they might ask the television producers to create some TV programs related to happy family and the joy of having babies… Or, if you wish to learn more about business, you can simply take a business book and read it. Whether you choose to read or not, so long as your eyes and ears go anywhere, they will keep on capturing information on the way whether you like it or not! So, start going to places you want to learn or have fun… Don’t be too open-minded about anything..

Be careful of the words you speak, or the songs you sing! Many people tend to say things that they don’t meant to… Things like “I am now so poor…”, “Oh I have lost…”, “I cannot make it anymore…” or even just “Oh sh*t!”… When in reality we are really at a certain stage that we don’t wish to, we better watch out for our mouth saying out negative things… Instead of saying negative things, we could say positive things like “I could have done better!”, “Oh I will win the next time…”, “I will make it again!” or just keep quiet about it! This kind of thing produces the attraction around you to fulfill what you have just said, as well as educating yourself sub-consciously to store it in your brain!

Even the songs that we are singing affect us as well… When you focus on the sad songs, chances are you might have a sad life now, later, either on the surface or deep inside your heart… You might say that it will not happen to you as the song is really very nice to listen…. But your mind is capturing everything, giving no chance!

Conclusion
Everybody has been saying that if you want to be rich, you should mix around with the rich people… If you want to be the top salesman, you should mix around with the top salespeople to learn from them… If you can understand the technically why it is so, you should appreciate why you have to do all these things!

I will be working on some reviews on a few sites. Thank you so much for the interests! Ever since Cash Quests gave me some comments on it, I have been sitting down looking through some of the things in my blog which need some improvements. I have changed my 19 lines to something shorter. I am going to have some revamps in my blog, and to work on the reviews. This should make me busy for a while on this blog.

As you can see in “Review You For Free“, I mentioned that I would want to review you if you have reviewed me in your blog. I also requested about buying me a drink for reviewing you as my reward of writing almost 300 posts in this blog. Simply contact me and ask me for it.

But from now till 7th September 2007, I will want to give free reviews to anyone who are interested for it. Just contact me about it.

But you could still buy me a drink of any amount that you are comfortable with, if you just wish to reward me…

I wish to thank Cash Quests so much for writing about the things I have to improve on in Cash Quests’ review. It can be really refreshing just by looking at a review written by another person. The way Cash Quests has written is allowing me to understand how far I am from from them. Somehow, the same exact review being read by different people will get to learn different things; When I was reading other Cash Quests’ reviews, I can’t really feel the same as my own Cash Quests’ review!

Starting Out
For a blog which started since 22nd June, I have done using whatever knowledge that I know of, learning from the rest of the people online. A review like this is definitely tuning me for the next level of blogging. While blogging might be simple, the presentation of a blog is also important. I used to focus a lot on building contents back in the past two months. Just recently, been trying out new themes and found mystic to be suitable still…

My Singapore English
The Grammar Police has caught me red-handed! Probably because I don’t speak 100% English in Singapore.. It is pretty common in Singapore to speak “Singlish” language where we tend to mix English with Chinese and some other languages. And when we are blogging, it may sound unclear to some English speaking people. But those who are staying in Singapore will tend to understand it immediately. Well in fact, when I went to China for a tour, I also have problem trying to relate Chinese properly too. I speak English better… Oops! Worse than John Chow…

About the Banner
Yeah! The banner is probably the most unique from many others! I have been thinking of a design for a blog about myself. While I am not so proficient in graphic design, I like to try them out and make something out.

The Topic Of This Blog
Somehow this blog is giving an impression of helping people make money online, I am looking at learning various kinds of marketing we can use for our business usage. Though the contents might be the same as make money online, I would want to focus more towards marketing.

The Age Of This Blog Matters
As I was reading Cash Quests review, I believe they might have problem reviewing my blog because I am too new in the blogging industry. And myself, I am probably a 2 month old blogger right now. At the age of two months, I am glad to see lots of critics for me to improve…

Review Requests
There are a few people who requested for a review all at the same time. It is most likely come from the Cash Quests Effect… Thanks… But I wish to highlight in the review-you page again that I am able to give you a free review when I have seen your review about me in your post linking to any part of my blog with the anchor text “business blogger”.

For those who are requesting for a review without linkback, may I have a small request of buying me a drink for working almost 300 posts in 2 months? Simply buy me a drink at any amount you wish, and send me an email of the amount and website you wish to be reviewed. I promise that I will do a good job in reviewing your website… Is that a deal? I will discuss more in details to those who paid a handsome amount for their worth…

Trust me that I will write more about the Cash Quests effects in another post…

Now, let’s compare the life between working online and offline…

I had a guy who approached me for advertisement just recently to put up his link on this blog. I personally feel that he is doing the right thing to advertise on this blog, I just hope he is really as sincere as he has been having email chat with me recently, and I would want to see it fulfilled without compromising the two of us. I think in the business world, there is no such thing as win-lose situation… If that’s the case, don’t count me in! It’s such a shame!

Advertising On Growing Blogs, Not Big Blogs!
I think that he is smart to do that. If I were him, I would also do the same thing. Looking for a growing small blog which is ranking well on Google for certain keywords, and working out with the blogger for a better click-through-rate to the advertiser’s site. That’s because smaller blogs tend to be on a constant lookout for advertisers and will be happy to be able to get advertisers, especially their first one! And it is usually more affordable and having a better value than bigger blogs where you also get to negotiate for a better space.

Identifying Growing Bloggers
The idea is to identify bloggers who are here to stay! I have started to see some bloggers who blog only a while and disappeared. Or, blogs which only do auto-retrieval of RSS feeds and display on their blogs where they don’t usually get good readers’ feedback because of the artificial information. Or, blogs which only copy and paste other people’s contents.

Writing Reviews
I have not been doing video reviews for a while. Simply because of a few things that crop up in my life to engage my time in both personal and business. And hence, I put my focus more on writing contents and socializing around, commenting on other blogs that I got interested in. Unless anybody approached me for reviewing their stuff, I will wait for my things to settle down, and I will then start my rounds of reviewing websites, software and books again!

Blog Posts Come Naturally
Sometimes, I don’t really have to worry what topics I am going to write about. That’s because I get to see a feedback of googlers who found me naturally, and I will write along to fulfill them even more. Or when I encounter something which struck a marketing idea on my head, I would write them in here.

My Monstrous Contents
And the interesting part is that, I seem to be writing monstrous content every time without realizing it. While I am always trying to cut short on my post length, it seems like they are important to tell the world about. I kept on laughing when Carl told me that I wrote a monstrous guest post on his blog! And I thought he wanted me to cut short, but he told me it’s good! Thank Carl for your recognition! And he even put my post on his front titled “Getting Started”. The post is about “Why People Failed To Make Money Online“.

Ask Me To Write On Your Blog!
I start to enjoy writing guest blogs everywhere! Please do approach me if you want me to write something! I would love to write for you!

While my focus in this blog is more towards marketing reaching out to the mass and bringing them into your page, I would want to talk more about writing a sales pitch on your website. It might give you a better idea about converting those visitors who managed to reach your landing page. This is not talking about specific copy writing skills. But it is a skeleton of a sales copy whereby we can get to learn and test various copywriting while working hand in hand with marketing.

Identify Visitors Who Just Stumbled Upon Our Site
There are many visitors who managed to visit our site by chance, or by your marketing skills. So much so that you might want to know that these people are here for what they want. We won’t want to have 100% bounce rate in our website! Even if you managed to hire the best copywriter to write a sales copy for you, an uninterested visitor will simply move off right after your site is fully loaded!

Sidetrack a bit about attracting targeted traffic.

That is why many marketeers of the same industry out there simply work hand in hand together, to promote relevant information to their database. These kind of marketeers, as they have confessed, are not good at search engine optimization. Those marketeers – who have great information to sell – will approach marketeers with huge database of emails to sell their ebooks as affiliates. And it turned out that building a list is important in many people’s eyes.

There is also another group who focus a lot on search engine optimization. They are usually the bloggers or informative sites who market their information on both static and consistent level. Selling their products, referring other people’s products and selling advertising space. They usually build their list from their anonymous RSS subscribers. They don’t have to know who their subscribers are. So long as their subscribers are interested in what they are doing, that is good enough!

In the short term wise, I would think database sharing is the fastest and only work for a while. In the long term, you can build a very stable business with informative sites where there is a consistent flow of traffic from various sources even though the initial stage is very minimal.

There is no universal sales pitch for everybody! Check out which group of people are most interested in your product. Although it largely depends on your product information for understanding which traffic is interested, it might be even better if you know something deeper. For example, let’s say you are talking about Make-Money-Online which is still a hot topic online. You might want to talk a bit more about the way you are making money. It could be blogging… Or if it is still shallow, talk further if it is an auto-blogging or a true real blog online. People are always more attracted to real blogs than auto-blogging… Auto-blogging is usually used like an informative site.

Writing A Sales Pitch
A sales pitch relates strongly to how the reader is feeling. It tells about the benefits of the reader what he is trying to achieve. I remember writing a simple sales letter which took me really long to feel for my reader while writing as a salesperson.

Sales pitch only works with the focus of a single product (or relevant products of the same category).

Components of a Sales Pitch

Headline: This qualifies the prospects and tells him the benefit of being on the sales page. It is usually bold, Tahoma font with a huge font size right on top of the page. Writing If/Then summary will let the reader understand in summary from the lengthy webpage what you are trying to sell even if he is not going to read them all. For example, “IF you are looking for the right business to do with little capital to invest, THEN this is surely the most important message you will ever read!”

Length of website: One LONG web page (with about 20 pages long if print out on A4 paper). This is to tell him all the things about that particular product and why it is worth that much to buy. Would you buy a $50 product with only about 100 words talking about it? It will mean you have to take 100 words to convince your prospect why it is beneficial to buy!

Why I want to buy?: Your product must address to your prospect’s problem, so he will have a reason to buy from you. Show the benefits of your product to him.

Why I should buy?: Show him your credentials in helping him out. Show customer testimonials, medias, any physical books you have written, the years of experience you have. Basically tell him why he should choose you.

Why this price?: Show the value of your product which is worth the price value he is paying for. Basically show him how much value you are providing which over-exceeds the pricing he is paying for. People always like to pay lesser than they are getting. Please show him the way! For example, usually an ebook is all about telling something useful to the reader. Hence, tell him about the kind of consultation fee you are charging on a personal basis, where you can get them all in just a book!

Why now?: It is always good to provide some bonuses he can get for buying it now, and not later. Show him the reason to buy now. Maybe, you want to let only a limited number of people to know your secret? Maybe, you want to give a free consultation for first 50 buyers? Just something that sets the person to buy now, and not later.

If I don’t buy?: Don’t let those interested prospects go without getting something. Ask for their email in return for a free gift. Educate them and let them know more about things that they wish to know. Keep in touch with them if you can. It is always good to know more prospects… Set up an email automation of giving them some bits of information they wish to learn from.

Conclusion
The information I have written here is quite a commonly used around. And it seems like it is a proven basic system to use in every ebook we want to sell. Just something that I think my readers might want to know about.. Enjoy!

Where we get to see so many things online, we tend to miss out an important point. There are many places on the Internet which we frequently visit. They are attracting huge crowd everyday… And they either capture our attention to come back for more, or it is a must to come back to visit the sites because of a certain thing which is related to us. Having that kind of relation, it is pretty sure that we are going to see yet another interesting marketing technique.

Before I carry on, take a look at this creative designs on buses…

Existing websites for useful marketing
Do you have some websites which you have to go back frequently? Websites like Mail.com to check your email, Yahoo.com to check your financial stuff and news, or a blog at Problogger.net which you are going to advertise on?

Many of these sites are simply crowd puller! And because it is so, they are being targeted a lot by the advertisers around the world to sponsor them for linking. And what these advertisers usually do, is to buy links for their marketing purpose. They would look for relevant websites for a more value in their Click-Through-Rates (CTR).

Many links as said to have better CTR, are using contextual and not image banners. While it might be true, many of the ads are as straightforward as just putting a link near to the article for a better CTR.

So far, the creative ads are still with JohnChow.com where he thinks of creative ways to market every money-making item in his blog. One image banner which caught my eye is a photo of himself with a title “The First Ever Free John Chow Ad Contest” and it is linking to an external site! That’s the kind of existing material and making a useful marketing.

Any Crowded Website Might Be Relevant Anyway
Lots of people are saying that you have to look for a relevant site to your topic, to have a better targeted traffic clicking on your ad on that site. While technically speaking, that is true… It can be done in another way too!

Why not repackage your website to be relevant to that crowded site in a way? All it takes is to build a better landing page for the visitor to click on to see what he wants, and slowly familiarize him into your idea of the website.

For example, we can be talking about a website talking about cooking recipes. Then you have a website talking about marketing. You might actually have a workaround talking about “how to market your cooking recipes” at your landing page for that site! Slowly, the visitor will start to see what you have to offer about marketing to improve their marketing techniques for their site!

Vice versa in another example, we can be talking about a marketing website. Then you have a cooking recipes site. You might actually workaround and talk about “Need a product to market?” at your landing page for that site… Slowly, the visitor will be converted into a relevant visitor anyway!

In my opinion, this marketing will only work for heavily crowded sites only where you should have a safe conversion rate of 0.01% for all click-through visitors! And either one of the sites must be of a broad topic such as marketing, technology, computer, cars, people, etc…

If two sites are on a niched topic, we can try creating a business link in between. For example, you are looking at a gadgets website which is so heavily visited. And you have a cooking recipe website to advertise on it. You can have a workaround talking having a “cooking recipe” ebook on your IPhone. Just a thought, you can make different business links in between anyway…

Overdoing Online Advertisement can kill Creativity
While smaller companies tend to think out of the box to make themselves unique, the big companies wouldn’t want these kind of companies to do anything to become a jeopardy to their business. Things like link scheme guideline to restrict a little on the creativity to increase the number of links to their websites.

Website is all about linking. And having a lot of people linking to your sites is actually increasing the chance of your site being visited by those participating sites. But on the other hand, Google might not like certain way of working with it. While it is still a blindspot of what can do and cannot when Google mentioned about excessive linking is prohibited… which means it is still ok to do it?

Conclusion
The fun part about doing a business is that your limit of creativity is up to your creativity. Some of the ways people adopt in marketing online may be deemed as a “wrong” way of marketing and are banned by search engines, but I think the correct definition of “wrong” should be for those who used ways and means to copy and paste, or creating a doorway or having useless sites linking…

There’s one very powerful marketing outside the world of blogging happening on the Internet… Something which is already on the net being utilized by many of us already… But it just caught my attention when I was on a lookout for more marketing ideas. That’s what YouTube called it “Video Responses”. Yes, you might tell me that you knew about it already… But just imagine you able to capture the market instantly…

There’s one girl on YouTube who seems to be having fun talking to the world with video. Being able to tell the world something and asking for responses, that’s what many businesses has been paying huge amount of money to do it! Her name is Emmalina. While many blogs out there have been doing blog contests, she is doing a Video contest, offering just $5! And people just response to it!

Take a look here.

And below are 3 of the many responses she has received! Click here for more!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsYRZZeB1q4[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5Ps06n7U_0[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUMODlbQ9Rw[/youtube]

What’s so amazing is that if a person is able to hold a contest successfully over YouTube, it means that there is a potential of getting to the mass which could be faster than just blogging! It is amazing to see how marketing can be done from Video responses! It is nothing new, but it is definitely worth to look at to get a bigger market share in your blog or other forms of website!

While there are many forms of marketing online, video is something viral! Just imagine when I start to talk about Emmalina over here… You can be the potential market for her to look at when you find out more about her! Being able to embed videos on websites is the most powerful marketing tool ever created… Thanks to YouTube…

Let’s take a look of how we can make the best out of this powerful tool in blogging world which I am experimenting now. We can call for a contest on our blog, and letting the people in YouTube know more about the contest and participate by commenting… Or even a Video Response on their blog, linking to your blog!
Look at how many market openings you have created…
1. Your own blog
2. Other people’s blog
3. Your own video on YouTube
4. Other people’s YouTube response

With four openings to your contest, you will be able to see how many more other openings it can create when people start to embed your video code on their blog talking about how cool your contest is!

Just a quick word in my mind… Although I don’t know when my page rank is breaking its “egg” (zero), I am getting pretty good search result positions on certain keywords on Google.

Probably because of my zero page rank, I tend to position lower for many other keywords just be next page or two…

Back in 2004, I remember when I was working on my physical business wanting to set up my website, I happen to meet a guy who is so crazy about search engine results. I was all puzzled what so important about it… He was so happy to be able to rank better with certain keywords… And I just ask him what so good about it… Then he shared with me the idea about search engine marketing and explaining to me that many people start to be able to see your website only through the search engines… I begin to understand why but I just carry on with my business until this year, I start my own online business… And I wonder how that guy is doing now… Lost his contact and even forgot his name! He has opened my eyes…

As we can see, sometimes it is very obvious to see how something really works. But we choose to see it as it is, and take it as it is, and later found it not really as it is, and so just leave it as it is. What am I talking about? Sometimes, there are many things which are very obvious and yet people are taken into it just because somebody made a very big fuss out of it. What do I mean again?

Broken Things
Broken things sometimes are very obvious. Yet there are a lot of “monkey see monkey do” people out there. When they see others are doing the same, they thought it work anyway and will do just the same thing.

Story Plotter
Then, there is a group of marketers out there who took advantage of this situation, and start to tell people to do exactly what they wanted, telling them that others have done the same and you should do it too. They started up with all the “proofs” on their websites saying how much they are making. Not showing the idea that there could have huge percentage of refunds, the marketers just want to show the people what they want!

What the consumers want exactly?
They want to make money online! Exactly! So, there are many sales pages out there which only show pages after pages of how much they can make, and “proofs after proofs” that how much the marketers themselves have made.

Consumers seem to like to see only the benefits, and wouldn’t want to bear the responsibilities of taking up a real online business.

I remember going to one very huge Internet Marketing seminar… The self-proclaimed “super affiliate” accidentally showed his many accounts with clickbank on the screen demonstration. And he even boasted that he has many accounts… What’s the use of so many accounts? Somehow, I have a feeling that these accounts are to create “proofs” of affiliates buying his stuff. Which he can later refund them all after. He might have created a scenario for the real affiliates and affiliate-wannabes to buy his product… But somehow, I just think super affiliate should be good at affiliate more than just create his own product? Anyway, he is really making money now, showing the people broken things which he claimed not broken…

Maybe one day, if you see a sales page and you can’t see what they are teaching you exactly, you might want to question it…

Marketing
While marketing is the way to let people understand of their product, many marketers knew that consumers are really very selfish and want to look for what is beneficial for them only… And hence they could write a sales letter which target entirely about their benefits and put a $79 just for that “magical” ebook which is going to “change their lives”!

Words do count!
The same scenario, with different ways of saying, can create different results ultimately. The title of a book, the heading of a website, the subject of a sales letter, and even the brand name and company name does matter! Many people nowadays tend to use very nice names as their company name and brand name, where the people of the past tend to use their own names which look old fashion.

Take a good look at what Seth Godin has to say about broken things: