Charles Lau

This recently, I was captivated by this drama series about “Taiji” on TV.  I found taiji is a little similar when working with business.  While you may want to force everything out of  your business to make profits, you also have to convert all the forces which are against you  to become part of your force.

For example, when we found competitors along the way, we should always think of how we can leverage their strengths to become part of ours.  

One way is to outsource all our existing work to them to help us?  Another way could be to consolidate our efforts to become a more value-added provider?  

Or probably just helping your competitors to become successful, and trust me that it will make you successful in one way or another.  And this works very well in Twitter when many people simply don’t understand what’s so good about it even after joining in for a few months…

Anyway, enjoy this two selected videos which I have been watching when I reach home.

Learning how to apply Taiji against boxing

Using Taiji in fighting competition

Many big companies still don’t know what they don’t know about leveraging on the technology to make their work more efficient.  You can be surprised that many of them are still using the “best” office software for all their needs.  i.e. They cannot live without their Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel.  Simply said, they are stucked with using Microsoft Office software or else their business may be affected.

Please don’t get me wrong.  I am in favor of using Microsoft Office.  In fact, I have software in my Nokia N95 which allows me to view and edit the Office files.

What I mean is that they are basically using the wrong tools for the “right” jobs.  For example,

1. they use Microsoft PowerPoint to write a whole bunch of words for their boss to see, thinking that it is better to see wordy document in the form of presentation slide.
2. they use Microsoft Word and tabulate information which is better done with Microsoft Excel.
3. they use Microsoft Excel, to write in all the words which Microsoft Word can do a better job.
4. the worst is that they have to share the manipulation of  so many Office files with many users!!!

Have these people thought of using blog, wiki, or web-based project management?

Fears of starting such applications

Definitely, they would think this is a good choice.  ”But” the barrier is with the fear of learning curve to adapt to new working environment.  The fear of implementing and maintaining such web-based applications from the perspective of the IT department.

They may knew it, but they are not touching it

They are all logical people.  They would think that it is still not time to work on such things.  After “calculating” all the “risks”, they have decided to keep with the old system.  They would not want to do anything silly or look silly.

Their “face” is much more important than “risking” for an improvement.

So many web tools

There are so many online tools to use.  We virtually only need to have a laptop.  And I think we only need a web browser.  Preferably, I would suggest to have Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer.  That’s just in case any of them is not suitable with certain browser.  Interestingly, they are downloadable without any cost!

What are you waiting for?

Thanks KC for holding this networking session with a group of Internet entrepreneurs.  KC has invited me to speak at his networking session,and I felt really privileged to do so after hiding behind as an online evangelist for 2 years.  I know I have been telling my story in my blog when I first started here.  But the feeling of telling the story to a crowd, it’s like exposing myself to an unknown force that may be coming to look for you anytime.  It reminds me of John Chow who held several meetups with his blog friends at Canada. 

How I met KC Tan

I met KC  when he was marketing his ebook.  He sent his book to me for review.  I read through the few ebooks that he has written, and those information is pretty good at teaching people about marketing yourself in forums.

I really appreciate his sincerity in our communication online.  And when we actually met up for the first time, I was shocked to hear that he is a trainer who teaches people how to make money online,  and also a consultant to guide brick-n-mortar businesses to work on something online.

Once again, thank you for your invitation.  Your networking session has expanded my horizon to go beyond just the Internet.  :)

My Presentation

Here it is.  My first presentation as an online evangelist to the world of the unknown.

It’s really fun to have such a group to meet up with while you continue to work on your blog.  Probably, we can start holding our own Singaporean style of Blog Expo in future to showcase our blogs, meeting different bloggers in Asia.  Who knows what happens next?  Let me know if you do have such plan too!

Photographs

Some of the guys I have met over there.

The guy on my left is somebody who has helped companies made over SGD$3 million dollars.  His  name is Rachit Dayal.   He holds his own talks and working as an Internet marketing consultant.

Some more photos below:

What I have presented there

For the benefits of my RSS subcribers and blog visitors, here’s the presentation I have done over there.

Guys, we shall catch up again one day!

If you are interested to read more posts from me, please subscribe to my RSS feed.

Why Internet business?

Training and events for the Internet are becoming really hot in Singapore.  There could be several reasons for that.  First of all, the economy doesn’t really favor people who wishes to start a “real” brick-n-mortar business today which is really hot in Singapore.  Just ask any Singaporean out there what they will do if they want to start a business, and they will tell you that they will want to start a shop, a factory, be a freelance, consultant, service or just product trading.

Internet ready

Secondly, in Singapore, newspapers has been mentioning about people making money online, social media is on the rise with more and more people becoming online with the tools ready to serve them.  What’s left is for the business to bring more value-added products and services to these people on the social media.

New Internet Entrepreneur course from a friend of mine

I am going to attend a course which is taught by my online friend – KC Tan.  This course is known as Internet Entrepreneur Boostrapping Course.  It’s about building your own websites without having to understand any daunting programming language, getting your site search-engine-optimized, and to make a profit even before you start your own Internet business!  Well, I don’t know how true that is.  But I will be attending this course which is provided to me by KC, and I will write a review on that shortly after this course on 18 April 2009.

Review of this course after that

As mentioned, I will be going down to take up this course and find out if it is really useful for those of you who wishes to start an Internet business yourself, and yet have difficulty in starting one yourself.  I will then write a review of it on my blog post and let you know about my thoughts about it. 

Are you keen to join this course?

If you are keen, please do join us in this course, and I will be glad to get to know you too.   It’s held in Singapore.   And It’s going to be on 18 April, which is 7 more days to go.

Join us in Internet Entrepreneur Bootstrapping Course on 18 April 2009.

Are you working for the big picture or the small picture?

You can be so busy with every little things in your job. But are those things going to contribute to your vision, to your objective, and to your key performance index?

Many people are so busy, and yet their work don’t make sense to their customers, or even to their own bosses.

They are probably just too busy working one big round the bush.

Solution
It may be better to take one step back and have a good look at whatever you are doing.

Are they efficient enough to contribute to your big picture?

Do they save time

We have just started a new Facebook group called “Internet Review“!  It has been a while since I tried to find out the best way to review websites.  No matter how much I review, it is still from my own point of view.  And when I do search for better internet review websites (which are my “competitors”), I realize that there aren’t many good internet reviews around, and the potentially good ones are only for the eyes of the buyers who want to find out how their websites fare.

Objective of the Internet Review group

The objective is to gather the group’s opinions on the Internet.  It could be websites, webware, web hosting, web articles, or even products and services which are selling on the Internet.

Who is this group for?

Basically, this group is to gather as many people around the world as possible who are interested in helping to review the websites which are also created around the world.

This world is lacking of ordinary people’s opinions!

I found that there is a lack of a space where people can give their review of how a website should look like.  It is always the case where the website owners are using website optimization techniques to discover the best way to increase their conversion rate.  What they may be lacking, is still the test of their content quality, which is the real reason for a better customer satisfaction.

We are going to have a new website on Internet Review!

Sometime ago, I rambled about expanding the review industry.  I am still setting the things right on that website, but Yahoo is already giving me some traffic over there, probably because I am leaking the url out over at our Facebook group, and also on our internet review twitter (will cover on Twitter below).  This Internet Review website is currently still under construction while it is serving live on the Internet because I don’t think there will be much traffic coming in while we can build on its contents to feed the search engine spiders around the world.  (hint: You may find the link at Twitter account actually.)

We are going to have our new Twitter Account!

We have set up a new twitter account just for Internet Review.  That’s because I don’t want to mix my own Twitter ramblings with the real Internet review information.  I will want to focus on bringing out the Internet juice at the Twitter.

Join us today!

While building a tribe of people to be our reviewers in Facebook, we are also building up our own website and twitter account.  It is not going to be long when we will have a strong team of reviewers (who can be of different industries other than the web) helping to review the Internet!

Join us in our facebook group today!

I have recently wrote a review about a web hosting company in Retireat21.  It’s my first review for the guys from England.  Thanks Michael Dunlop for giving me a chance to work with you.   He is a very nice guy with lots of ideas.  When I was discussing with him about the new review, he was brainstorming what to do to give more value to his customers.  And most importantly, he waits patiently for me to go for my honeymoon with my wife before I came back to talk to him!   Thanks bro.

Retireat21 is all about making money online.  In the world of retirement, 21 is the new 60!

In this new review, I talk about web hosting.  It reminds me of the days when I was busy migrating my contents from BlueHost to MediaTemple.  It was such a terrible experience when you see all your contents being ceased from publishing because your website is causing their database to be unstable.  I suspect it has nothing to do with the website, but with the common usage of  a single database user across my websites.  But anyway, I am now a happy customer with MediaTemple.

Just reviewing this web hosting website, it gives me a thought about giving free things.  Imagine having 600,000 free customers and a few thousand paid visitors… Free is also a form of marketing where it will just spread and look for people who are willing to pay.  In his free hosting, it means free advertisement for him too when it is compulsory to link to his site.

Oh yes before I end, Retireat21 has just posted a great article about “The Most Successful College Dropouts“.  It talks about Ford, Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Richard Branson, Jerry Yang, Larry Page, etc.  Heard of them?  They are all very famous people from Ford Motor, Microsoft, Dell computer, Virgin, Yahoo and Google!

It’s no doubt that Singaporeans are awakening to the idea about internet marketing. That’s the good news. But the bad news is that they only think it’s for people who can do web design.

I have friends who are asking me to do internet marketing together. Their initial thought is good. But their thinking is to ask me to be in charge of designing the website. My first answer is that i will have no time to do any websites. We can only outsource to experts to help us.

They don’t understand that website itself is a business. And to setup a website, it’s better to get someone to help us than to do ourselves. It’s especially true when we have our existing things to work on.

And till now, most of them don’t believe that doing a website should cost anything more than $1k. I should say that you can either spend more time, or more money on the website completion. And a cheap website doesn’t really mean it’s not good. It only means u r using certain templates, or maybe there’s some similarity to other websites. So long as your contents is good, it should not matter.

Many of them still think that once the website is done, it’s there to wait for money to drop from the sky. Such a silly thought.

Some even think of setting up a portal like amazon which can cost them a fortune, and they don’t know how to market the website.

Engaging an internet marketeer to work together doesn’t mean he or she is going to help u with website setup for free. We still need vendors to help us while we think of web strategy.. We don’t do things technically. We work from the business point of view..

Anyway, it’s a friday! Enjoy your weekends, folks!

I was into a heavy discussion about the topic of setting up a blog for corporate websites. There are two different opinions about it. One talking about setting up a blog is good, while the other is very much against setting up a blog.

As those of us who are very much into the internet world, especially into blogging, we will embrace blogs for as much as we could. That’s because we have gone through a lot in our days of blogging and it can have enormous effects in either good or bad which depends on our returning traffics.

As we can see a lot of new web businesses being setup, they do have a blog shown clearly up there. They know why they must set up a blog. And they know they can’t do without it..

Most corporate companies have never really made a lot of money directly from the websites. They mainly get their business from retail marketing. Things that you can see, touch, and feel directly. Most importantly, you can buy immediately. I can really understand their situation when they can spend as little as 1 day in every month to work on updating the websites. That’s a wasteful thing to do.

In 2003, I can vividly remember about Google having to set up their pagerank around the websites where they count every link as a vote to their webpage. That sounds really cool when i start hearing comments saying that blogs have ruined Google’s big plan. That’s because a lot of people don’t really take blog seriously, and hence all the cross-linking has caused Google’s ranking system all messed up.

But since 2007, Google has proved everybody wrong as more and more people are looking at the information in whichever format. Blogs included. So what is right? And what is wrong?

While many websites are still not using blogs, they did it passively by having blogs at the back. For example, i don’t see HP’S main website linking directly to their many HP blogs!

We’ll keep on observing about it…

I had a pleasant moment working with my web designer on my new website. While working with him, I had this thought in my mind – My mind is relaxed on the enormous unrelated work which I am not supposed to worry about. All I have to worry is my main stream of business – Quality Contents. I always had the thought that I have to find out everything myself. No longer shall I be worried about it anymore because my designer is there for me!

That’s the beauty of outsourcing. While I am busy with many other things as well, designing a new website up is always the troublesome part to begin with. I just hope to find someone trustworthy so that I can focus on my work (my contents), and he can focus on his work (his web designs) as well.

Business has never been so much easier before. When on earth can you have something which opens 24 hours business without much overheads? It only costs a few dollars to start everything up, and the profit margin can be as huge as any big company is offering you. It is the kind of quality we are all pursuing. And because of that, we tend to pursue highest quality in life that we can afford.

Outsourcing has been very popular in business, no matter you are working online or offline. Many companies tend to look for other companies who can help them in other aspects of the work which are unrelated to their business. Even if you are into the business of selling a certain product, you can also outsouurce your business operations to another company completely.

Big companies know the secret. They always hire the best companies to help them to produce the best results for their own customers. Small companies did not know this secret at all. They kept on doing everything by themselves. They just don’t wish to outsource because they are thinking of cost saving in every little thing as possible. Little did they know that they are spending more precious time which is replaceable with money to make even more money.

Outsourcing is beautiful because it is effortless on our part. It makes your vendors want to work with you more often than ever when you gave them more work. And the intersting part is that you tend to get more and more discounts when you become faithful to one company’s sales. That’s beautiful.

And because it’s so easy, the whole transaction is so smooth, it’s almost forgotten that they are a different company from you!