I am not sure where I should start in this blog post to talk about his enlightenment.  However, the one thing that is in my mind is that I have to focus on the users of my websites first.  There are just too many things to do in a website when I get it all started.  I know all those things are good for the business, but the users are the very first thing to get it right.

There are many of you who have to work on both ways… You have to take care of your website, as well as looking out for sales and partnerships.  All those things are nevertheless important.  It took up a lot of your time as you are under negative cash flow in your finances.  But wherever possible, trim them away so that you can focus on the very ground work of things.

This recently, I found the momentum of working on the websites with my team after working with them for a while.  It seems to me that some of them might have taken me for granted, but I have faith in them that they will be able to get the business up properly.  I just got to get all the preparation up properly.

We’ll see how things go as I am now looking further into bringing the business to the next level with my existing team.

I really appreciate all of you who have been taking the time to comment on my blog.  It is really enjoyable to have an interactive blog.

Today, I just thought of writing this post to remind every blogger out there (myself included) that it really takes effort for people to comment on our blogs.  While they are doing it for the sake of many reasons (such as doing their own website marketing, getting the attention of the blogger, or just to voice out a controversial topic), every comment is really as precious as it can be!

Just take this test yourself, and try commenting on 5 blogs everyday for a month.  You will find that it takes a lot of discipline to do it continuously.  It is very tedious… And it can be very uncomfortable to do it everyday.

But one thing for sure… Every bit counts!  As you focus on doing every little thing that matters, it will eventually become an important part of your success!

In fact, this is true in many other platforms as well.  It takes time and effort to comment on twitter, facebook, friendfeed, google buzz and many others (other than just on blogs).

Photo Credit: Julie70

After blogging since June 2007, I have come to realize that I can almost never be able to blog daily unless this becomes my full-time job one day.

After  twittering for quite a while (I have no idea when I started my first tweet), I have come to realize that I can only talk to so many twitter friends.

After subscribing greedily to so many blogs on my Google Reader since June 2007, I can never finish reading so many blogs.

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Many of you may already know that it is not possible to do so many things on a daily basis.  Especially in this time of information overload, we must be selective to get the things that we want in our Internet life.

Choose your favorites

There are so many choices for you to pick.  It can be really hard to decide what to choose.  And “everything” is usually the choice.  However, “everything” will usually mean “nothing concrete to gain” in the end.

1) Follow your twitter friends wisely because it will affect what you are going to tweet about, and thus you will eventually build a stronger community of followers!

2) Subscribe to the blogs which you will most likely give your 2 cents’ worth of comments.

3) Blog a post only when you have something to talk about.

Stronger community awaits you

As you focus more and more on doing a few things only, you will start to see a bigger picture of those few things that you have been doing.  You will eventually establish a web archival of yourself doing certain things in life.  You will be associated heavily with the niche you want to be with (because of the law of attraction).

Bad habit of getting more and not less

It is not easy to be selective when you have most of the things which are equally good.  I would think that it may be still wise to choose all of them, but only the successful people are willing to choose one and let go of the rest.

Having said so, I am falling into this trap myself with too many feeds to read on my Google.  I tried to unsubscribe as many feeds as possible till I found Adage which provides one big list of credible bloggers to subscribe.

Can any of you – who follows probably a few thousand friends in twitter – really keep in touch your friends more than me who follows less than 1k right now?  By the way, it’s already quite hard to keep track for me and I must admit that the number will definitely exceed 1000 one day!

When I first started blogging, I can blog around 5 posts every day!  On some days, all the posts are really good (That’s what I think!). But I must also admit that some of them are probably not that good because I am trying to keep in trend of having 5 posts a day!  As such, I tried to embed videos on some posts when I get lazy with my postings… As years gone by, I have decided to set a pace of posting when I have a topic to start with while trying to keep a frequency of at least once a week.  And it happens that I can manage my blog better!

I think that’s where the 80/20 rule applies.  It speaks about focusing only 20% of your effort, and get 80% in results!

I find this a little “rude” in one way or another.  But when I google this sentence, it turned out that there are a lot of people doing the same thing.  And they have some interesting responses to this sentence… Let’s see:

1) Follow me too and I’ll DM you something you can use.

2) Can you follow me so I can DM you. Just tried and said you weren’t following. Thx!

3) lots of info..follow me and dm your email and I will send something through for you

4) what do you see on IE7? Would you send me a screen grab, please? Would love to help. Please follow me, and I will DM you

5) Follow me so I can DM you and enter.

There are a lot more.  I believe there are quite a number of twitter users finding this sentence quite offending in one way or another.  But having to say so, it is still good to understand that you just wish to communicate with that person, and hence you want to follow.  There is always a button to unfollow, so don’t make a big fuss out of it.

I found another relevant blog post about the same topic on “How to be anti-social on social media“.

So the next time people ask you to follow so that they will dm you, I think you can just do so, just like 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!

By the way, I am a full-time internet marketing executive, and I was working late at HarbourFront Tower on 23rd June 2008. I felt my hair was quite long and messy, so I went to VivoCity hoping to have a quick SGD$10 haircut at QB House. I rushed all the way to VivoCity, and I can tell you that I was really glad to see from a distance that the hairstylists are still there at 9.50pm. Probably I was really late for the haircut. I ran there, and saw one of the employees was just about to turn the shop sign to “We Are Closed”. I went to ask the hairstylist for a quick haircut, she hesitated for quite a while as the other hairstylist showed a crossed hand indicating to her that they have closed. This hairstylist then replied that “We are closed”. I was looking at the other hairstylist for a while, and then looking at my watch. It was 9.50pm.

Please take a good look at this snapshot I got from QB House website…

Ok, I don’t know what time they are closing actually. But it can’t be at the odd hour of 9.50pm. Or unless they are working overtime since 9.30pm or even 9pm. The correct answer from the website shows that they are closed at 10pm.

What I am trying to show you is the power of internet marketing which is so personnal, it can be done at the consumer level! So many companies out there have been spending so much money on marketing themselves, and they thought the minority of complaints wouldn’t be able to spread. I am sorry to tell these companies that the social media networks are growing in strength and there are numerous of them! Most of the big companies even chose to be “blind” and “deaf” about all these things.

All these things are going to change in the very near future… And because of the advanced level of marketing today which is made so simple and easy, products and services will simply become better and better as the lousy ones are going to be closing forever.

I am not really trying to prove who is right or wrong. I could be in the wrong too because they may have a system of closing at 9.50pm and ready to go by 10pm? I don’t know anyway. Anyway, they should not have over-promised their timing. Maybe it’s just those two hairstylists being tired and not wanting to make more money since work can never be completed. Probably I may send a email to them to find out more.

Subway came to the RESCUE!
On the other hand, I wish to thank Subway for staying operational after 10pm because I was so hungry at that time after getting myself angry with QB House. I went to their restaurant, and took Subway Melt meal. Actually, they are closing already when I was reaching there. It happens exactly the same situation as QB House. However, I went ahead and ask politely for a meal. The auntie looked really nice enough and tell me what meal I want, and even told me that they are left with Italian and wheat bread. My heart really melted by her words… What makes me even felt good is that there is no cookies for me to choose from, but the guy offered to went behind to his inventory to fetch me my choices of cookies…

And because of me, the queue for Subway food starts to form up even though they have closed.

I was wondering how they are dealing with the queue, so I stayed quietly at the side to see. I was shocked to see that they are still trying to cater to the queue! It was until there wasn’t anybody queuing that they start to do cleaning up, and that’s when they couldn’t cater anymore. Great service!

I can understand that this is probably happening more on the personal basis by the employees, and it might not be happening in other Subway restaurants. However, this kind of little service can be viral. “Pssst! Subway should be still serving food right now. Let’s go there!” Ok, it might not be a good thing for the tiring employees who worked the whole day. By working an additional 20 minutes, Subway could actually think of diverting their advertising budget towards their employees’ pocket! But it is definitely worthed it since it is gaining exposure by making the customers to spread for them. Isn’t that Win-Win situation where Subway makes a little more money while the customers are helping to spread the Subway brand as a whole? Many companies have been spending millions of dollars just to maintain the people to talk about their series of advertisement!

It is just like watching too much TV, and making your mind so tiring and yet you can’t help but being a TV addict. It’s not only bad for the eyes, you start to have pop-belly, you start to forget about your other happenings in your life.

According to ZDNet, Tom Foremski admitted that not many bloggers really can make money out of blogging. And that is why they still have to hold a day job as a living. No doubt that we do make some money out of it, it really depends on individual to become outstanding enough to become that 0.0001%… Hence, watch your health as you become a full time blogger!

I am seeing many blog designers like Adii working on new cool designs such as VibrantCMS. Unique Blog Designs has been focusing on building customized designs for their customers, and I am not sure if they are heading that direction or not.

I believe in my coming reviews, I will be working on unique blogs where the blog is on the secondary page, and not on the front page. While Matt Cutts practices blogging on the second page, he mentioned that it is always good to have your blog on your second page since your front page can do many things else. People are linking to your blogs directly too. And in my opinion, every web page is treated equally in Google’s eyes. There should be no favoritism for the front page.

We’ll wait and see the coming days for the blogs to come out as second page. Oh by the way, Problogger‘s blog is also on the second page!