Charles Lau

I was busy working on my reviews in my room at night when my mother opened the door with a birthday cake. This cake was baked by my little sister. And I am really touched by the simple little surprise by my mother. And luckily, my sister and mother only got to disturb me only when my video review was done! Else, I will have to re-do that video review again.

Above is my mother holding the cake to celebrate my birthday as she walks into my room with a birthday song. That’s how sweet she can be…

So, that’s me above trying to blow the candle of my birthday cake. Oh yes, I have made a wish before blowing it.

The cake with the three of us celebrating. My elder sister is outside working right now. Just look at my sleepy eyes for working all night on Internet marketing while surviving on a sales job outside…

I am now 28 years old. Oh my… Time flies really fast… I am reaching 30 pretty soon!

I just wish to take this opportunity to thank all my readers and commentators for supporting me in my blog. This blog can’t do without all of your existence. Thanks for sending me emails and birthday greetings.

I was thinking through about this topic as I was working outside. I start to think that this is so true. It may not be visible when you have just started because you would spend more time to work on your business. But as you grow your business, you should be spending more and more money instead of your time. This will bring in even more and more time on your side to focus on buying time with money, rather than buying money with time. I think it can be really tedious to work on a business which takes up almost 24 hours of your time every day…

Are you spending time to make more money today?
I think that this is almost a must-do task for every startup business with almost-zero capital. This is when you have not much money, and you have all the time to work on your own business. However if your business is growing, you will start to wish that your employees are as capable as you. This is when you have spent too much time working on the business yourself and not spending enough time and money building up your very own assets.

While it may be true to leave your employees to be independent, it is still an uncertainty when it comes to building your own business. Many MNC companies are very willing to spend money on trainings, activities and even a cost center just to cater to the employees making money for them.

Are you spending money to make more time today?
As you spend more and more money on your business, you will start to see yourself with more and more time. That doesn’t really mean you will have more time for more business yet. It only means that you are ready to build up your cost center. Paying some employees to do full time on some activities for your other employees.

Making more money will simply make more time to work out more expenses to be poured back at employees to build a system. A system where everybody is dispensable. A good business depends on system, and not on human beings. If you are depending a lot on yourself or your employees only because of their individual capability, that’s to say that you are in deep trouble because the limit is up to the human being himself.

Yes You May Be A Superman
Yes, a human being may have only used only a few percent of their brain, and they can actually push themselves further. But a business is supposed to make money, and not to create a stressful environment where every single staff is being pushed (willingly or unwillingly) to the point where they can become even better. But in this world, there’s no one appointment that never ends. In the end, the business still must move on while the employees may be working somewhere else again. And in the end, you are still the most capable person in your own business.

It’s all about system. It’s all about keeping the things neat as it is when the business is reaching to a stage of finding a base to stabilize on…

Do you know that many wealthy people around the world are in search of that good idea to invest in so that they can make even more money out of it? They are willing to travel around the world, just to listen to that particular person’s idea. In this world, we are talking about ideas that work and will exponentially increase of income. We are no longer in the world of working hard to make money. We are now in the world of idea generation to make money. So what idea do you have for your new online business?

I was discussing with my friend about the new online venture that we are going to work on. It is a pretty good leverage in the business as we don’t have to slog 24 hours just to make that amount of money. We do have to work very hard in long hours at the very initial stage to get the things right. That’s because business is all about creating values for people to buy. If you don’t have a good value with you, why would people want to spend so much money on you where they can spend on other better things in life?

Let’s take a good look at this video talking about ideas.

Ideas are free. Ideas are there for us to share and take. Many people kept ideas so tightly like a secret and in the end, it’s all just a dream. I think it’s most important to know who you are sharing with. A person who likes to steal idea may not get what he wants in the end even though he might win temporarily at first. Sharing ideas can make you and your idea grow maturely. You tend to see a bigger picture of what you want to do in life.

All businesses start from an idea. Hence, keep your idea as your vision as you work out and expand your business around it. Forget about working too many things around that same business as it is going to make you off-focus. Instead, leverage on your competitors to give you the edge to do even more things. This way, you may grow together with your competitors. And you can make a better business with focus too.

Have you started on an idea already?

I just had my small little celebration of my birthday with my family and girlfriend together. Everyone of us are busy on weekdays, and it is not easy to get everyone of us to sit together to have a dinner together. I brought my girlfriend along to celebrate with my family at a restaurant at Shaw Towers. I must say that the food is pretty good! We tend to spend some time out to celebrate one another’s birthday at a restaurant. Usually when it’s my birthday, I would choose to go western food. My mum and sisters would usually choose asian food such as Tom Yam.

This is the cafe that we went. This picture wasn’t captured properly as I took a quick snapshot of the place while my family were already leaving the place.

Here’s a photo of all of us having dinner together at a cafe. This cafe is recommended by my little sister because of its unique food that they served. It’s a western food with Singapore style. Take a good look at the dishes below.

We had 5 sets of dinner at SGD$15.20 nett per person. It includes creamy soup with garlic bread, Main (Pasta), Dessert, and Drink.

Let’s have a quick look at the kind of food that this cafe served.

This last dish is pasta with Laksa. Laksa is a special curry flavor that I think is very famous in Singapore. They all taste very nice as I grab every bit of their portion to try!

And finally, we had five desserts of apple crumbles and chocolate.

This is the result of having my N95 camera! I think I am going to write a review of this phone pretty soon. It has so many features that I am really overwhelmed by it. Happy Birthday to Me! Not today, it’s at the end of January…

While I was having problem revamping my new blog design, I am planning to get this blog into another stage. I am thinking of doing review of some very good and bad websites out there in the form of blogging. This form of review is natural and not sponsored. And I will only review sites which catch my sight on certain things. It may be a good opinion. It may also be a bad opinion as well. I remember blogging about a blogger who cheats on his feedburner counter. It gives me a very good idea about what to write about in my blog in the coming posts and more.

In my opinion, blogging is something which is natural. You simply write what you like to talk about. You may have plans for scheduled blog posts, but so long as they are of your own effort you will start to see a growth in both yourself and your blog. Why do I say so? That’s because they are all purely from your very own words which you have been squeezing your brain juice to produce. Especially in the days when you have nothing to blog about.

I have a secret to tell all of you about the usual bloggers’ habit. Whenever you see a blog talking about the topic “What can you talk about in your blog?”, there is a very high chance that this blogger is running out of idea of what to blog about! And this is actually when blogging helps him to make something out of nothing. By blogging about this topic, you are actually doing a brainstorm of what you can blog about in the near future.

I have been blogging different styles to see the kind of market acceptance. If you have seen my guest post at Thomas Sinfield’s blog, you will notice that I am writing about How To Write A Review For A Blog in a very different way. I write in such a way that I am striking into the mind of the reader, making him and her to think how to write a review for a blog. I also remember writing a guest post at Carl Ocab about Why Make Money Online Is Easy, Yet Many People Failed! That post was written in a more formal format of having a paragraph title in every paragraph I created.

Ok now, my blogging style has changed slightly again where I blog as I think in a natural flow. This blog itself is a perfect example of flowing through as my brain is thinking what to blog about.

I am thinking if I should start engaging someone to assist me with the blog design according to my needs. My recent purchase of blog themes don’t really suit my needs. And I have to get my hands dirty into reworking the themes too. Probably because of my workload from my sales job, it is making a very high toll on my concentration to work well in my own business as well as in my job.

Oh yes, I am currently working as a IT sales engineer for a local company in Singapore. It has given me a very huge exposure to this familiar industry back in 1998. The learning curve is also very deep because of my lost touch with IT over the past seven years. Being in sales, I have to work on building up my sales skills upon IT industry while learning the numerous IT products and services.

From now on, I will start to stretch my learning curve as an online reviewer more than the blogs… You should be expecting to see more reviews on different online materials, as well as sharing my learning experience along the way.

Thank you for subscribing to my feeds. You should see more things than ever…

While as a buyer, you will tend to look for the cheapest alternatives for your items you wish to buy. But what you didn’t realize is that you are being watched amongst the sellers. It is practically useless to compare that exact same thing amongst different sellers because in the end, we know that the buyers are not being faithful in the end. This kind of buyer, we will usually ignore since they aren’t going to be loyal customers for recurring sales. But of course we wouldn’t ignore as well, so long as we have not spent too much time with them.

I am talking about physical business of selling items above. Be it as online of physical business, as a seller, we are supposed to buy low and sell high. And if we are going to sell low for disloyal customers, we would usually avoid spending too much time with them. Customers, who usually take three quotations from different sellers, can be at the losing end when the three sellers decide to collaborate to sell high together while they do profit sharing behind. What the customers didn’t realize is that the resellers usually get their goods from the same distributor. And hence, there is not really such thing as which reseller is selling cheaply than the rest. It is especially true when the resellers are all on good terms with the distributors where we share information.

It goes the same to a property owner who wishes to sell his or her property without the interference of giving exclusive to a real estate agent. A smart real estate agent will simply look for buyers, promoting the property cheaply and force the property owner to sell cheaply since there are only potential buyers at a cheaper price.

The conclusion I have drawn is that if you are looking for a sales help, just look for one and stick to it. You will get a good price for what you need.

While many Singaporeans out there don’t really believe about blogging, blogging is one way which will make the whole world know about you instantly. It has brought to my attention when Mr Poon approached me for IT solutions when he found me through my own blog. I was so curious about him approaching me because I never expect that my blog is really going to give me sales for my system integration company I am working in.

Currently, I am working as a sales engineer for a system integration company. Though I don’t know how long I will really work there, I am thinking of settling down my future in one way or another when I found a really wonderful girlfriend.

As I blog longer in my own blog, I start to see better about the magical touch of blog. While there are people who say that blogging is simply a website with appending contents on a regular basis, they never realize how powerful this “appending contents” can do for you and your life.

Words can grow you up. Words can even crash you. It’s all about how you are using the words to your advantage when you found a meaningful combination of the words. Just like the alphabets of “A B C”, we may not understand what these alphabets are, but once they are combined meaningfully, they can be very comprehensive to explain almost anything in life.

You may be typing your words away in your first three months of your blog life, thinking nobody is looking at it. But when your blog is growing with contents, it is not easy to hide anything once you have blogged it out.

Your every step of blogging is being “watched” by the other side of the world. Just like when John Chow mentioned about CashQuests replacing a new post. In fact, in that post, he blogged about bloggingdosh destroying his own reputation by cheating. CashQuests blogged about bloggingdosh stealing feedburner counter. I also blogged about this bad blogger myself quite some time back.

You can imagine how powerful your every word can make or crush you!

Start today to make your blog as perfect as you would want it to be. Build up quality contents in your own blog. Won the hearts of the bloggers around the blogosphere. Let the search engines around have the faith and trust in you. You can really start a business without the need the reinvent the wheels too much. Creativity is a wonderful thing only if you have the ability to juggle the balls properly. It voices down to the very basic skills that we have to understand again. Once your basic understanding is there, the rest is history…

I like to review more websites. It gives me a lot of ideas of how a website is proving to the world of its worth. And to show them all to the readers LIVE in video from my browsing experience. This is what I called it video review. Video review is all started when I was just starting my blog in June 2007 right after I broke up my partnership in a delivery business which was in 30th May 2007. I was amazed by the people doing text review of a website, and to give their thoughts about how a website is and what the webmaster might want to do to improve further in his website.

At that time, I was also blogging about “Make Money Online With Charles Lau dot Com”, just like many others. However, I thought it might just be too boring to talk about making money online when I should focus on a niche in my own blog. I started to think of reviewing other people’s websites in a different way. And it all started from there, and the rest is history.

This phrase “Charles Online Review Element” was founded when I was thinking of writing a review magazine out of it. And the magazine shall be called as “C.O.R.E. magazine”. And this name simply evolves along the way when I started to review on other people’s blogs. I am so excited to do my very best to review for bloggers in their review orders. And thus, the element has just spread to their website onwards.

Adding “Charles Online Review Element” on your blog isn’t as hard as you might think. We are talking about a partnership here where I am going to review your reviewees’ websites in your own blog. Efforts and money are being exchanged on a mutual agreement. Simply offer me a proposal of how you would want me to work with you, and the flow will just go on and on between us. I am looking forward towards a Win-Win situation where we give in to each other’s needs and wants to get a smooth transaction.

Start asking me about it now.

After posting my blog about choosing mobile phone, I have finally chosen N95 to be my next phone for another few years. My previous phone K700i has been with me since 2004. And it has been a really lousy phone because of the keys really hard to press, camera which defeats its purpose since it is not useful, and it’s really used for calling and sms mainly. I still managed to check emails as and when in urgent usage. Now, this N95 is really a mini computer by itself where some of the work could only be accomplished by laptp previously.

Good bye to K700i. Hello to N95! It took me quite a while when I was deciding on N81 (see my previous post) . I was surfing the Internet for N81 reviews when I saw Stefan reviewed lousily about N81. Spending too much money on too little hardware is really a little silly for anyone. Although I wasn’t really looking at 8GB version, his review is sufficient enough to convince me not to buy N81.

Then, I took my N95, and took a picture of the phone browsing my own website along with my laptop. It looks pretty cool to see it fit quite nicely. N95 has quite a huge screen, and hence it is pretty good to surf as a mobile phone.

This phone shall accompany me with my blog to show you guys about my life together with my online reviews.

I am really grateful of Carl who appreciates my reviewing skills to give my very best reviews for the website owners in his own blog. I am also happy to see more and more people appreciating my reviews of their websites. It has come a long way before I actually got the chance to review so many websites till now. And as you can see, this is one of my incomes to make money online. This is the power of focusing on one specialty and make that skill your very best. I am grateful of my past business partners who have made me grow over the past 4 years. And that motivates me to do my best in my own business.

Of course, I faced some problems setting up wireless Internet connection from my own wireless access point at home. I tried to configure in as many ways as I can. I found in nokia forum about No Gateway Reply which I have been facing in the afternoon today. It helped me a little to solve this problem. Anyway, I just wish to tell all those people in forum that the problem has to do with the wireless connection. If they can’t solve it, I would usually set static IP connection to solve it. Or sometimes, they need some special step such as to access a certain website in order to activate the Internet connection. I don’t think the problem lies with the phone… It is either the setting of the wireless router with your phone, or the additional step required to activate the actual Internet connection, which is not really visible through the phone but the laptop.

Thanks to Archit T for the recommendation to buy N95… I got it now!

I can think of three ways of naming your blog. You can either name it after your own name, brand it under a unique name, or to use keywords in your domain name. All three methods have their own pros and cons when you are attempting to start a blog yourself. However, it actually comes to concern as you build the blog down six months and more. That’s because your focus on the blog and the readers’ attraction will become more and more defined, and you will understand if you have made the right move.

Your Own Name dot Com
Like I did it myself as when you start to write a blog under your own name, you will start to understand more about what you want to write about your blog. Because you have branded it under your own name, you tend to have the feeling of writing something more towards what you really want which is not focused towards a certain topic. You are the “product” which people wants to come down to read about. As you build along the way, people will start to recognize you easily because of your name in your own domain. You will become famous instantly by your own name.

A Unique Brand dot Com
This is slightly a better choice which I think you can even sell this blog once it is ready. That’s because it is a brand and it can be easily ported from one person to another. People will be going for your brand more than you. Your blog will become a better choice for business sale. People might not recognize you because of your branding. But they will continue to support as long as it is a good site for reading contents. And because of your unique naming convention, it might require you to do extra marketing effort to make people understand what you are trying to talk about.

Keyword dot Com
It almost has the same effect as unique branding. Except that you can only have one type of focus along with what your keyword is about. And I think this is good for producing a type of brand which has its single focus. Instantly, people will understand what your blog is all about. You will be able to make a good brand name instantly.

Your domain name is the first impression that people will think whether they want to visit or not. If you have a branded domain name, people might want to visit it out of curiosity. But if you have a keyword domain, it will be more market-focus to think twice before visiting. It’s all up to you now.