Charles Lau

I remember the day when I decided to change my blog into a review brand to review websites. This domain name has been with me since 2004 when I was still trying to use PHPNuke as my content management platform. At that time, I used it more like a Portal. Back then, I was still working as a real estate agent. It was really fun to discover about using the website to tell people about me, and just me.

When I left my delivery startup company in May 2007, I was already equipped with an idea of making money online. I have been thinking what I can do online. That’s when I search for the keyword “make money online” in Google. And I found John Chow dot Com.

I was wondering at that time… Why would Google give the number 1 search result to a blog? I thought blog was not really credible to the Internet world? I was wrong in the end. I started to read John Chow’s first ebook when he shares his experience to start with WordPress. I tried to explore the various blog platforms around at the same time. I realise MovaType is quite hard to install. TypePad is not free. Blogger.com seems to be a little inflexible and ugly to work with. Even when blogger.com implemented widgets, I just find it not very flexible either.

Then, I find out about GoDaddy who hosts my domain names and web back then. Bob Parsons was using Serendipity if I am not wrong. It was quite flexible, but yet it is too complicated to understand.

I gave up and follow what John Chow is recommending.

It turned out to be too easy to use. It’s too easy to understand the whole platform, and I can laugh when I see how to implement any plug-in and themes with WordPress because they have made it too easy to code with. Then, I fell into the trap of focusing too much on designing my own blog. I couldn’t really find that design flair in myself to get a nice WordPress Theme till today!

And to tell you the truth, I am now engaging a really good web designer who has the creativity to design some of the well-known websites around. I really wish to find a good one and get the things running!

I find that blogging with my own name, I tend to blog a lot about myself. It’s the same with John Chow when he also blogs a lot about himself. So, I have decided to keep my name identity as who I really am. And I am really feel that blog should have a certain branding by itself.

It could be your name, if you want it that way.

It could be a verb or a noun found in the dictionary.

It could be a nice little unique name to work with.

Whatever you are choosing, it works. I am very sure! It’s just about what you wish to work on.

Content is the one that keeps the person coming back. It wouldn’t be nice for a person to see what I am blogging which doesn’t interest him. It’s especially when you are into online publishing business – blogging.

Get yourself up and blog a lot of link-baiting quality articles!

Are you one of the business buyers who are looking into buying an online business? Are you finding a business to do online, and have enough cash to take over an existing one? It can be really tempting to buy an existing online business just because it is rolling in a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. And to pay $10k to $50k seems as easy as buying something valued at $1. All you need to do, is to paypal the business owner $50k, and you have everything worked out to be passed on to you with the accounts ready.

Business content migration can be quite painful along the way. Especially if you are taking over a business which has tens of thousands of contents online which you may probably need to re-look into. And it can be exciting to see money rolling in automatically into your bank account as you are simply taking over a money-making website.

But when it comes to maintaining the website, it is yet another story to tell. Especially in a blog business where you need to get the idea of keeping the existing subscribers and frequent visitors interested. And if you are doing an information website where you bring in the traffic from Pay-Per-Click market, you will have a very faint idea of how and why it works this way. Unfortunately, the search patterns always change over the period due to the fast-changing trends. Your predecessor’s formula of keywords may not be as effective as before. And you will have a hard time finding out the right keywords just because you have not gone through the learning curve that your predecessor had. In the end, you will start paying more money than you make. Thus your cashflow will start to decrease along the period of time as fast as a year!

Selling a website has a lot of variables which are not foreseen. It can be especially hard if you have no experience in that particular industry in the Internet arena. You can be an expert in the real world offline. But you can be treated with stupidity when it comes to bringing your business to the online world. If you are really that unlucky, you will find your outsourced web designers taking advantage of your insufficient knowledge.

So what can you do about it? Internet has been a fantastic platform to learn how to do your own business online. It can be more feasible to join an expert in his mastermind group where he will teach you how to get yourself equipped with the things that you need. And you will get to socialize around with likeminded people with possible joint ventures. There are so many things to do online once you got yourself hooked up.

In my own opinion, I will never advise anybody to buy an online business even though it is currently making attractive sum of money. Unless you are buying a share and it is not run by yourself, it is not advisable at all! That’s because I still don’t believe there’s such thing as a self-running website on earth. If you do find my opinion wrong, let me know and let’s explore why.

Once upon a time, there was only one brand of every kind of product in the market. Everything went so smoothly for the brands at that time. When I walked down the street, I only get to see brands once a while. I don’t mind getting interrupted by these brands since they are so familiar to me. In other words, I have already given them my permission marketing without them having to approach me.

Why is it so? That’s because they are the only ones who have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on advertisements to interrupt us. I don’t mind being interrupted since I have enough time to be interrupted at that time. There are so little number of entrepreneurs when I was young. Most of the people are either working or studying. There is simply too much space in the TV ad space as well as the Radio and Newspapers. Same goes to the Internet websites as well.

Right in the Internet in 1997, I know of names like Yahoo and Geocities. Back then, I still remember having my first hotmail account. It was so cool to have those email addresses, and I don’t know what I am using them for.

Today, we get to see so many kinds of brands around the same product or service. I have to think who I would want to buy. Also, we get to squeeze almost every bit of our time on enjoying the products and services. Almost 24 hours of our time have been utilized fully. One day, I typically get to see so many brands. One flip on the magazine or newspapers, you will see a lot of them. One TV channel and you will see sponsors, advertisers and even reviews. One surf on the Internet, you will see your own laptop’s brand, Google brand, your windows brand, your browser’s brand, your favourite websites’ sponsors and reviews and every other brands.

It’s simply too noisy… And yet these people don’t understand that people don’t have time to catch up with your expensive advertisements like in the past…

It can be nice to have an interesting TV advertisement to watch today. But it is costly to maintain a sequential series of all the TV advertisements! Moreover, the effectiveness of the TV is always a blind spot. So what if you are letting so many eyeballs to look at your ad? You are just one of the many many advertisements out there…

It is definitely effective if you are the only ad on the TV! People will remember you. People wouldn’t be disturbed by other brands. You will have better effectiveness.

But it also voices down to the call-to-action for your advertisement… So what if it’s interesting?

That’s where permission marketing comes into play… why not sending them a free menu because they are your potential customers today or tomorrow? Keep them in your list so that you wouldn’t have to waste money on TV advertisements to target the same group of people! Instead, you could actually use YouTube to tell them about the following series! It’s just a matter of a thought to work it out… And it is extremely viral if you work it out properly.

It’s so noisy out there! Are you still using the ineffective way of advertising?