Charles Lau

This article is affiliated with Winners’ Circle, while Charles has purchased at $27 to be a member of this circle too.

Recently, I have reviewed a free ebook at Carl Ocab’s blog known as “The Ultimate Checklist of 500+ Proven Internet Marketing Strategies“.  After reading that book myself, I am totally convinced of the knowledge and experience that Gyutae Park has with him.  He has spent 9 years creating websites for himself and working for big companies such as Nokia, The Northern Trust Company, and the Bradford Group.  And he has done quite a lot of consulting job with several people for the website.

Today, he has already launched a new subscription website called The Winners’ Circle.  I have subscribed to his membership myself, and I got myself at the discounted rate of $27 per month for early birds.  After which, he will be keeping it at $47 per month.

I would think that spending $27 to find out more about how the experts think, and how the anaylsis works is really worth it.  Moreover, we get to have a free bonus of finding a niche for ourselves, plus access to his community to communicate with like-minded people.  The return-on-investment can be potentially high, but that’s only if you know how to monetize opportunity.

I don’t think I will re-write any of his sales pitch on my blog.  Just go to his website and find out about his offers yourself.

If you are really serious to make it big online, then it’s time you check out the Winners Circle.

Sometimes, the most difficult social websites in the world seem to be easy to understand. It takes a little while for us to understand how Facebook work.  It takes us a little while to understand how WordPress works.  So are Digg, Delicious, Friendster, and even Gmail, Hotmail, and so on.

Twitter is something that is so simple, that the normal people will not even understand why a person want to tweet.  And why they want to tweet.  Long time ago, there are friends who ask why there is a need to blog… Why would you want to tell the world what you are doing… And in the end, some of the greatest websites out there are using blog!

So what is twitter?

Twitter is a small little blog for you to post 140 characters.  You can’t really write a lot of things at one shot.  Only a short sentence telling people what you are doing.

Does Twitter really matter?

For those who don’t use Twitter, they will think it is a waste of time.  Why would you want to tell the world what you are doing with your dog?  While there are a lot of people out there who really tweet a lot of messages which seem to be wasting time, they must think again why people are using it…

It’s really not easy to understand until you use it for quite a while yourself.

So what are you doing?

This phrase “What are you doing” doesn’t have to mean what you are doing literally.  We get to see different places adopting the same kind of “What are you doing” such as Facebook and Tumblr.

“What are you doing” can be about any of the following:

• twittering (broadcasting) promotional messages to your followers.
• twittering (logging) the status of your health, your plant, your grades, your height, your weight, your sleeping habits and so on.
• twittering (announcing) your new blog post to your followers.
• twittering (reporting) the happenings that everybody is concern about.
• twittering (socialbookmarking) the great URLs out there who catches it.
• twittering (greeting) to the whole world a very good morning instantly!
• twittering (rumbling) about who should be the latest American Idol.
• twittering (chatting) with your followers about what you have been doing and asking them too.
• twittering (interviewing) with a celebrity online where everybody can sit and listen to the interview, while giving their comments and questions which may or may not be answered.
• twittering (question) the world why is it like that? How is it like that? When is it like that?  It’s like an instant search engine with a personalized answer!
• twittering (telling) the world what you are really doing right now (which is kind of boring to listen to as your followers)

What’s next after telling the world?  Search it!

You will want to hear the valuable information that the world has to tell you about.  You can instantly do a search of the twitter messages to find out what the world is talking about with your selected keywords.

Search is a very powerful tool on twitter.  It may even be taking the place of Google search engine because Twitter messages contain both human voices as well as website links which are relevant to your search.  The web results that come up is determined by human beings, and it is searching based on the latest trends.

Extendable Twitter!

And with so many 3rd party websites out there making use of Twitter API (stands for “Application Programming Interface”), you stand to gain a lot as a twitter user.  Have a good look at what twitter apps are out there.

With the extended applications, you will be able to turn those twitter messages around the world into a goldmine.  A place where you can do a lot of research and finding out for your industry.

What else do you want from Twitter?

Twitter is really just a simple application where it logs our messages at 140 characters.  Though this cap may limit the way how Twitter can expand, it also helps to keep Twitter simple to use and understand the messages.  There have already been too much information out there, all we want is really a short and sweet message to read about.

So to all newbie out there, do you still understand what Twitter is?

This article is a review of the website InSing.com,

When I open up my mobile phone, I see my service provider – SingTel.  They have been a reliable service provider for my mobile phone as I am using their Broadband on Mobile plan, and some mobile phone plan for my calling usage.  I have with them for years.

Today, I get to see SingTel having a subsidiary to start a new website business called InSing.com.

My first impression

My first impression is  that it is a one-stop service for everybody, where we can do our shopping, looking for food and drinks, checking for news, looking for entertainment, and even to look for business.  Sorry if I got any of the value-added services wrong, because it simply tries to cramp everything together.  It looks like one of the dot com business plans found in 1997 during the Internet bubble burst.

Let’s have a quick look at their sitemap.  They are basically trying to cover anything and everything on earth!  From news in Singapore, to Asia and Europe, talking about sports, health, lifestyle, entertainment, business, and any others.  From food in restaurants, to streets and pubs.  From music to celebrity gossip and asian entertainment.  From shopping in fashion, home & hobbies to electronics and gadgets.  From events to performing arts, body & wellness and reading.  They even have business and service finder.

Looks like a magazine with many faces

Seriously speaking, this website is very likely trying to behave like a magazine of many themes.  Is this a lifestyle magazine?  Or it’s a food magazine? 

Taking a good look at their about us page, this website is aiming to educate the visitors to be in the know of everything that is happening in Singapore with them. It means that they will go out there to scout for all  sorts of information for you to know.  That means they have a lot of work to do to keep this online magazine busy.  I really wonder how many people they have in the team to work on this gigantic ambitious project… and whether their online banner ad spaces are going to help them to break even or not.

Having a website with many different types of information, you will not attract very highly targeted traffic.  Most likely not for people to come back again for more… And I have a strong feeling that the team behind is quite new to the web business industry.

The web interface

This reminds me of this picture below.

Every “unique” content is trying to catch the attention of the visitors by being in the red color!  However, it turns out that there is only one outstanding color here!

The contents on the main landing page is so crowded with unique contents that I really don’t know where to click to begin with!  Everybody is trying to be unique here!  My thought is that there should only have one outstanding content, as too many outstanding contents will end up like the above picture with too many red balls.  Especially when the contents are attracting very different markets.

There is simply an overflow of information on the main landing page.  (Another example, take a good look at www.google.com and www.yahoo.com.  I would prefer to see only 1 search bar, than to see so many other disturbing unique contents!)

Untargeted traffic for the web

I have a strong feeling that this website’s incoming traffic has to be sustained by the expensive offline advertisements which are highly untargeted and not-so-effective.  After a spike on the traffic with expensive offline advertisments, the next step that InSing should do is to work on the retention of the first-time visitors to come back for more.  But I have a strong feeling that they are  using the traditional method of giving discounts and promotions to sustain them, instead of focusing on their contents.

Missing Web 2.0 tools

I can only see 5-star rating tool.  Where have the rest gone to?  Things such as digg, delicious, stumbleupon, facebook, twitter, blog and RSS are really important in retaining visitors.  They will help a lot in the attraction of new visitors from around the world, and will also allow enthusiasts to subscribe to the RSS feeds for consistent information without having to ask them back.

Our website today is not about asking them to come back or not.  The focus should be to build a list of targeted community whom we can always market to them with contents, products and services!

Conclusion

Not that this website will fail or not, it really needs a little fine-tuning on the web contents and its traffic generation strategy.  On the web, content is king.  Content is the one that is going to convert the visitors into returning visitors.  On the web,  all of us have been bombarded with overloading information.   How many of us will really bother to go back for more information except when we need them?  The focus of streetdirectory.com is more of a demand basis, which is essential for our personal and work purpose.  The focus of facebook.com is more of an entertainment, a soon-to-replace-email-usage-between-friends place that we will just go back to look for new messages every time we are online.

One suggestion is to categorise them into different sub-domains to focus on different niches.  A good example will be HowStuffWorks where they attempt to teach how stuff works in almost anything and everything!

Good luck! I will be really interested to find out how this project will evolve…

Photo credit: dvgphoto

I have started several kinds of website projects.  I tried working on my first website back in 1997 with a good childhood friend of mine.  All I needed to do is to sign up with Geocities and get my website up and running.  Later in 1998, we realize that domain names are so easily accessible.  All I did was to ask my sister to use her credit card to purchase my first domain!  That was when I had my first web hosting plan which is hosted by a company in United States.

I do realized that website has its potential to tell the world who you are, and it was really cool to have our very own homepage about ourselves.  Every website that I have created, whether it is a collaborative effort or not, seems to have its own personality which starts to surface through its design and copywriting.

Below are two examples of what I mean

When you create a website which contains all your products, the focus of this site will be more on your company rather than its products.  But when you pick one of your products and create a website out of it, the focus will be about your product more than your company.  The focus about your company will not be as strong, and I think that is very good for new product launches.

Another example will be the rising sales letters that we see out there.  It has been true and tested that sales letters have created many millionaires out there.  When a person chanced upon a sales letter, the only function that the sales letter does is to convince the visitor to buy.  It sure does turn off some of the visitors who don’t like hard selling.  But with a little pre-selling information out there about this product, the pre-sold visitors will then buy their products almost immediately because they know that they are going to benefit from it.

Don’t create too many focuses on a single website

I don’t believe a website can achieve so many things at one go.  If there is, there must have been a lot of planning and testing till it really works.  One-stop website sounds easy to create, but it is actually very much harder to maintain and to keep the visitors remember what you have to offer unless you have absolute exclusive on it.  And I personally believe that only companies who have deep pockets will be able to create a website with so many focuses because they will have so many sections to work on which requires a lot of manpower behind!

Conclusion

So, whatever website that you do, do remember what you want to achieve out of it.  That’s because your visitor will be equally as confused of what you want them to do when you have too many things on your website that you wish to tell them about!

Oh by the way, Geocities is closing this year.

Photo credit: Kashif Khawaja

A good website structure is able to cater as many different groups of people as possible.  There are different parts of the website which are only visible to the visitors only if they are looking out for them.

1) Social Bookmarking tools

Every little part of the website means something to someone out there.  When we browse a website, those of you who are frequent users of social bookmarking tools such as Digg, Delicious or StumbleUpon, will tend to identify those logos easily on the web.  And somehow, these logos will be a blindspot for the rest of us.

2) Advertisements

It goes the same to the ad banners on the website.  Those who simply don’t click on the ads, will not be able to see the ads even if it is placed in front of him or her!  And those who appreciate ads, will tend to see what that advertiser has to offer.  I can still r

3) RSS Feeds

Those who like to subscribe to feeds,  will tend to look for the feed logos and click on them.  This is because they want to read more about it in a single place such as Google Reader.

4) Breadcrumbs

If you are familiar with the little arrows in navigation path that you have been surfing (such as below),

Websites > Web Designs > HTML/CSS

you will usually appreciate to see them so that you know where you are currently surfing just in case you wish to surf other areas of the website.

5) Teasers

Teaser campaigns may come in as and when.  It usually happens to websites which are very much more active online.  They may sometimes come with prizes.  They may come with surprises.  It could be tied up with a new product launch.  Or probably just want to keep you entertained so as to come back for more.

6) Home Page Logo linked back to main landing page

Though simple to create,  this logo is usually linked to the homepage.  It is good for SEO purpose when every single page are  ”casting their votes” by  linking to their main landing page.  Hence, this main landing page is the single most important page.  It should have the most number of clicks on the website.

7) Login Textbox/Sign Off button

Web 2.0 has settled down on the Internet.  Some may even say there is such thing as Web 3.0.  Basically, it means the website is getting more interactive to the user and encourages user responses.  And logging into the system is one of the common ways that the website wants the visitor to do before they can interact with the website.

I got to know a friend last year personally who has been creating interesting contents at his own blog quietly.  I mention this word “quietly” because I have been reading it whenever I am free, and I found some articles which actually capture me.  Take a look at his blog titled after his name “Wee Kian“.

This blog mentions a lot on his very own experience he had been through. He reviews on business books, finance, leadership, parenthood, and his own viewpoint on things.  A very simple niche blog talking about things that he knows the best.

It takes a lot of determination to write and don’t know if anybody is going to read them.  Especially a blog which contains no personal secrets of his own, and wanting to have a blogging voice of his own in this blogosphere.  Do show him encouragement by taking a look at his blog and seeing whether his information fits your taste.

Find out more about Wee Kian’s theory!

This post is sponsored by EmpireDotCom.

Make-Money-Online blogs have been around and increasing in numbers every single day. I tend to see more and more blogs doing this just because it seems to be the way to make money online. First of all, they are all exposed to the people who are teaching them how to make money online. Secondly, they have no idea what products or services they can offer. Thirdly, since they have been paying money and learning so hard about making money online, it makes sense to start another topic about making money online.
Before I get into details about this blog which started up since only in March 2008, I have some thoughts about all the new-born make-money-online blogs out there. There is not much marketing vacuum to work on in this topic. Though they have an easier way out to start another such blogs (that’s because the previous gurus have filled up the marketing vacuum and pathed a route for the newbies to follow), it really takes a lot of stamina and time to bring their blogs into maturity where people are beginning to believe in them. And while these new blogs are building up, they are actually giving more credibility to the matured bloggers since they are so established that it is better to be associated with them, than not to. Will this Empire DotCom rise to our expectations while the blogger behind is still working part time? We’ll know in two years’ time… As for now, let’s continue with my blog review.

About EmpireDotCom
I was reading through the contents of this blog. This guy seems to know what he is doing with his blog, even though it is only a few months old. His name is Wong Chendong (also known as C.D Wong), and he started his journey as an affiliate since August 2007, making his first online income of US$375.65 within 4 months. Not too bad. And by the way, I don’t like his background music in his About Me page (even though it is quite meaningful) because it is disturbing me from reading his blog.

Just by reading through his profile, I can feel his passion and that he is really looking into making money online. He is now building up his credibility, and I think he is a very frank person online when he revealed that he is still learning and rephrasing the contents in his own style. This can be a potential niche itself if he can continue to post related topics consistently in the years to come.

The Brand Identity
I like his domain name. I also like his blog interface. It consists of a good mixture of some of the proven blog interfaces used by Carl Ocab, Darren Rowse and John Chow. The three infamous sections on top and below which most of us will look at it naturally since it has been adopted down since Nate Whitehill from UniqueBlogDesigns invented it (I think).

I may not know how, but he has gotten everything done professionally. It could be a blog theme Alvin Phang has done for his atomic blogging product. No, I didn’t buy his product because it was too shallow for me after reading John Chow’s review about it. This theme is definitely optimized to look good on Make-Money-Online topic. There is just one missing picture over here. Probably because I am somehow blogging about internet marketing, I tend to ask myself what niche he is in this broad topic about Make-Money-Online. Hence, I would go to his About Me page, and I was pretty much disappointed to see what he has wrote. Well, he has definitely done a good job to introduce himself, leveraging his contents on the knowledge he is learning from others. That is absolutely ok. But I am wondering what he is trying to teach about. He didn’t cover the purpose of this blog. He basically covers everything, and his About Me page is not telling us any particular topic he is covering.

Or is his brand identity an atom from the molecule called “Atomic Blogging”?

Going Horizontal Market, Not Vertical
Ok, let me explain why he is covering horizontal market. That means, he is basically telling you tips and tricks of making money online. He is not as laser-sharp focused like Alvin Phang, Darren Rowse or Yaro Starak who focused on different levels on the topic “blogging”. That’s probably because C.D Wong is covering the new-born marketers who are looking at how to make money online. And I must give applause to Alvin for his viral effect in the Internet of teaching blogging where his customers actually adopted fully with his branding. Definitely a win-win-win situation for Alvin, Alvin’s resellers, and Alvin’s customers. C.D Wong has really been spoon-fed a lot by Alvin! No wonder it is called Atomic Blogging.

Nice Try To Get The Engine Started
I must give some credits to C.D Wong for his time, patience and his passion. Definitely at the very beginning, the website is like an empty shell. It’s like a chicken-or-egg story here. Do you have the supplies for the potential demand out there? Or do you have the demand for your potential supplies? Whichever the way, just get the blog started and talk later.

Somehow, I feel he should have waited for a little while longer before getting brand awareness by getting reviews around the blogosphere. But definitely, it is good to get it from the lower entry levels first since it is an unlimited source of potential referrals. Probably he has reached to the stage of knowing what he doesn’t know and filling it up the gaps. And now, he is trying to find out what he don’t know about at all. That’s where the entry level bloggers tend to give a better next-stage thoughts. But anyway, I still must say that he has a better blog design than mine right now.

Centralized Around Marketers, Not Engineers
Over here, C.D Wong mentioned a lot about Ewen Chia, Joel Comm, Russel Brunson and others. These are great marketers, though I don’t really like the way these three guys marketed. I remembered the times when Mark from 45n5 and I were responding heavily towards Joel Comm’s Adsense Secrets which has a recurring charge that was previously not shown in the ordering table. They are definitely great marketers, and I would like to classify them as Web 1.0 marketers who used traditional ways of paying lots of money in Pay-Per-Click to bring in the traffic, and then wait to see results… It looks so similar to the big companies out there who are spending millions of dollars in advertisement and yet they will never know how effective it is. But of course, Pay-Per-Click lets you know the effectiveness… It can cost about tens of thousands of dollars every month just to arouse brand awareness.

But after playing around in the Internet, I would prefer to connect to those Web 2.0 marketers via twitter, blogging, friendfeed and other social networks. We no longer need to depend on search engine marketing solely for our traffic generation.

This blog is definitely focusing around marketers where we speak about marketing, and not engineers. Well in my opinion, he has done pretty well here.

Smooth transaction for the beneficial visitors
He has made it smooth for the visitors to get what they wanted. If you want to subscribe to his secret newsletter, it is there. If you wish to subscribe to his RSS feed, you can enter your email address. He seems to have abolished the anonymity of the RSS subscribers by cutting off the smoothness to get that feed url. Instead, his anonymous RSS subscription clicks are found at the end of every post in the blog.

Focusing specifically on Digg and Del.icio.us as the official bookmarking sites for this blog, that’s smooth. But I personally think StumbleUpon is a much better traffic generation not to be missed. So for StumbleUpon users, this is not smooth. You can only either use your StumbleUpon toolbar, or to go back to your stumbleupon website to get what you want.

What’s With All The Diggs?
While he is still creating a buzz behind using the Digg traffic, he seems to have actually dugg every single post he has in his blog. Well, I personally think that’s not a cool thing to do since it actually depreciates his value in providing to the visitors. Quality posts become saturated. It makes things look so manipulated. Anyway, it seems like it’s getting some diggs along the way too.

Anybody still wants a Link Exchange?
I think it is a bad idea to ask for link exchange. Google identifies this as Link Schemes. John Chow has got himself into trouble and in return, he doesn’t get any search result for his own name even though he has his domain name named after him. Those were the days when he has done a massive link schemes around the blogosphere. He also got himself into trouble with the Technorati ranking too. Whichever the case, it would be the best to focus on building up the contents and bringing in traffic with style!

Would You Be Interested In Article Resource from EmpireDotCom?
A Article Resource page dedicated to show all the various urls of the articles you can find. It looks a pretty cool link for the people who wants to submit their articles. Any explanation to the market for these article sites? Because of the kind of target market EmpireDotCom is focusing, I think this article resource might be a redundant. It is definitely useful for the internet marketers who are more seasonal. You would probably need a post to explain about it. (Or it could be in a series of posts as well.)

I would actually suggest a page focusing about “Recommended Money Makers” might be a better choice to guide the beginners where to start, and how to get started.

Advertising On EmpireDotCom
If you take a good look at the advertisement page, C.D Wong simplifies the whole advertising page by showing you the stats. The stats may be good to see, it is just too boring. While it is a well-known fact that google does a Page-Rank slap to many of the bloggers (including myself), it is often used by bloggers who still have something to show. The value proposition is actually very blur if he were to continue to leave it like this.

People will only know the few numbers that he provided. What the advertisers wanted to know is the target market he is focusing on. Whether this market is related to the advertiser’s products and services. These two factors alone can tell generally about the conversion rate of the visitors into customers.

Uninteresting Archive Page
So what if he tells me the archives by month, or even by categories which are already provided by the side? As a first time visitor myself, I don’t know what his recommended or top posts are in his blog. Or at least an introduction of a few posts which speaks about the blog which gets me interested. Generally speaking, I may only stumble upon one of his posts from Google as his landing page for me. It might get me interested in that particular article. Then further on, I would want to find out what other interesting articles he may have. Any blogger will tell you that all of his posts are interesting when they have put in a lot of effort in every single one of them till they finally gave up.

Conclusion
On the surface, I would give this blog a good Thumbs-Up for the blog interface, and its seemingly interesting series of posts in the blog. But as I scrutinize further, I start to see some of the things which an amateur is likely to make. And they are so obvious to me.

Chendong, it’s a nice blog you have put up. You must have spent a lot of time and money working it out. It definitely has lots of room for improvement. One last thing before I close, I think you better add in your RSS link to that RSS Man who is reading RSS newspaper while sitting on a toilet bowl.

Find out if a newbie can teach you make money online with his passion and sincerity.

There are so many people teaching us how to make money online. Making money online is actually doing small online business in other words. I happen to come across this website called Small Business Brief which I would like to share with all of you about it. I have not really studied through this whole website, but it simply gives me a thought of doing a review on my first impression.

Yes, I have done quite a lot of paid reviews for those make-money-online websites. But this time round, I don’t know anybody from this website. And I think this website is pretty cool and worthy to be mentioned to all of you to find out more about.

This website is simply a bookmarking website where it contains quality contents from all around the world, focusing on small businesses education. Though its motto is to fetch the best small business news, it seems to be focusing more on online marketing news. The packaging is pretty good as a small business news since we are now leveraging a lot on making money from the Internet.

This website reminds me of Guy Kawasaki and his truemors.com. This is where we get to tell the world about what’s worthy to be mentioned about. Both have very similar-looking platforms. But in actual fact, Truemors is using WordPress while Small Business Brief is using Pligg.

Some Statistics
Small Business Brief is purchased for its domain since 30th October 2003. And it has been evolving for quite a while. It seems to be started off as a blog initially. We can see it from Way Back Machine in 2004. According to Google, it has about 123k pages being crawled! By the way, it’s a PR5 website. Alexa also shows that it has a pretty good traffic.

Forum
What really attracts me to this website is its forum. They seem to be talking about the kind of topics I would want to join in to give my share. With its over 26k forum members, we are bound to get to know a lot of people in common doing online business.

Well, they are just my first impression. We will know when I played enough of its things.

This review is sponsored by One Click Search Engine.

Search engines have been the main guide of the Internet for many years. Since the born of Yahoo, we have been getting access to the many websites on the Internet that we have never known. At that time, Yahoo has been manually selecting the right keywords for the right websites. Back then, we were taught to add in keywords in our own website’s meta tag. But because of the abuse of using too many irrelevant keywords, this method has been quite unsuccessful. It was until Google came to the rescue with their Page Rank algorithm. Initially, the idea of the page rank system is pretty good to stay here… But as we grow together, we get to see people using black hat seo. (SEO means search engine optimization. Black hat means a violation of the SEO rules which leads you to be banned from Google results.) This gets Google to be on their guard to protect their algorithm and to continue with the trend to improve consistently. But then again, even if you know about the white hat SEO (White hat means to use SEO correctly.) simply means those websites get to rank better than the rest… And overdoing it is almost as good as a black hat…

Introducing One Click Search Engine
Uri Lederman approached me for a review on his recent project on One Click Search Engine. You may like to think of it as a commercial search engine for all of us to use as the keywords are determined by us. This is something which you would never see it in Google, Yahoo, MSN or any other search engines that are commonly known out there. This search engine is simply showing results which are being paid for. And sponsored results usually mean the websites are either doing business, or are seeking out for an exposure in a different market place that One Click Search Engine is attracting. So when you do a simple search on the keywords, and the keyword is paid for, it will immediately show the “relevant” website as the result. And if it doesn’t show any result, alternatively it will show relevant paid keywords for you to choose from.

Let’s Have A Video Review Of This Search Engine

Doing Business With One Click Search Engine
The interesting feature about this search engine is that any particular keyword(s) is only liable to one website. This totally eliminates the extra work of doing search engine optimization on your website. There is no competition for the same keyword(s). Just remember to pay your dues for the keywords. This sounds like the usual regular payment to the classified ads to your local newspaper or an ad space with yellow pages to gain exposure to the right people at the right time who are searching for you.

Probably you are a businessman who wishes to start something online. You had your website done up properly by hiring the best web designers. You had your products and services ready by acquiring some of the best PLR products and rebranding them according to your marketing expert’s advices. You are ready for business! Out of the sudden, you realize that your website is not really searchable on the Internet (You didn’t know what is Flash but your website is built purely with it!) Your website is simply sitting there like an online brochure for you to reference your customers while you are doing direct selling. Where are all the market in the Internet going?

The above scenario is very common to anybody who is new to doing business online. One Click Search Engine is probably the first website to provide the solution to your situation by providing a similar-to-classified-ads style of placing your ads while using the common way of an Internet user to search with keywords. They don’t have to provide ad space for you. They simply allocate that keyword for you to buy and the result is your website. There will be no reference back to the search engine. It’s now between the visitor and your website.

A Well Documented Website To Assist Advertisers
Uri Lederman was very confident that I will understand this whole website quickly when he first assigned me to work on reviewing his website. And when I went through myself, it was true that this search engine has done a good job in letting its visitors understand its business. Right from the start, I can already understand something about this search engine showing sponsored results.

His FAQ page is actually good enough for me to understand this business structure. And if you are unsure of what keywords to use, he even assisted you by giving you some external links to find out from. Add this page with the pricing structure, we are ready to register for a free account to start with.

Additional Things Beside The Search Engine
I may find it weird to see a search engine that allows us to do social bookmarking. i know that this is one way to bring in the traffic from the social bookmarking websites. It just looks a little weird that I can bookmark a search engine.

This search engine has a blog as well. Blogging is also another way of attracting traffic from other search engines because they love to crawl for new articles. This blog can become a good marketing exposure which helps to build relationships with the advertisers and searchers on the Internet.

This search engine also has an affiliate program for interested parties to refer sales. Personally, I think this is a very important step to bring in more advertisers. And if this affiliate program catches the eye of a high profile internet marketer, I believe things will start to look good in the prospect of this search engine since this search engine relies a lot on traffic to provide for both advertisers and searchers.

My First Impression As A Searcher
When I first look at the search engine, I was wondering why they need to boast about being the first pay-per-keyword search engine advertising network. This has nothing to do with me. They even give remarks that the three major search engines are producing unrelated search results. And below, they talk about their technology which comes with users’ feedback. Only then did I realize that this search engine is a self-service search engine where you buy your own keyword, And if the keyword is not found, it will show other relevant paid keywords for you to choose from. It even urges you to buy this keyword if you are the webmaster or the advertiser. With this in mind, I am determined that this is a commercial search engine.

A Commercial Search Engine
Search engine is a pretty big project by itself. There is a huge programming work to be done at the backend. There is also a lot of marketing work to be done to attract both the advertisers and the interested users. Not only these two major work require lots of attention, people got to have the habit of going to their favorite search engine (because it keeps on producing promising results). In my opinion, it really doesn’t matter if this is a sponsored search engine or a natural search engine. The most important thing over here is to have a good search engine to produce great results for us. And to have great results, it simply means that there are enough number of advertisers for the search engine to produce sufficient results. It can really bore me down if most of my searches are giving me no result. Is One Click Search Engine ready to bring in swarms and swarms of traffic?

What I Like About This Search Engine
This looks like a pretty good idea to solve the common problem that Yahoo and Google are facing. While the two of them are spending money on providing free results, they struggled to bring in the dollars and cents through sponsored results and other means. And while we seem to have an ideal search engine today which is Google to give us results as accurate as possible, they seem to be wrong sometimes. And yes, we will look at the sponsored results for alternative answers to our keywords.

Having a search engine which allows us to search for sponsored results only, we know that these results are not free. These results are from the advertisers who yearn for a website exposure when you ask for it (keyword search). This is as good as permission marketing. You are not interrupted with other irrelevant results where the advertisers want you to see something that you do not know of.

One Click Search Engine is in favor of giving keywords to advertisers on a first-come-first-serve basis. There will be no bidding war. And they are paying for a period of time instead of paying for every click or every thousand impressions (A good example is Google Adwords.). This means that you can get potentially unlimited number of clicks and impressions for that given period of time for your keyword exposure.

What I May Not Like About This Search Engine
Firstly, it may sound good to invest some money in getting our keywords in this search engine. Unless this search engine is bringing in substantial amount of market exposure with huge traffic, it makes sense for us to wait right now for the traffic of One Click Search Engine to be heavy enough later to start our investment. This actually means that Uri Lederman and his team have to do a lot of work (and I believe they are already working on it) to bring in the traffic for his startup project to make us feel the importance of investing in this search engine.

Secondly, I find it pretty weird to see a search engine which is making loud noises on the front page about itself and demeaning the major search engines. What’s with the live links from his site to the major search engines for? This actually gives an internet newbie a chance to find out about its remarkable competitors unknowingly. And remarkable here means that everybody is able to give remarks about them and they simply enjoy the exposure in both good and bad. See below to see what I mean.

Conclusion
I like the idea of being assured as number 1 in a search engine. It gives a kind of identification. It’s like asking for a chocolate, and I am given Cadbury. Absolutely nothing else. And this search engine is giving us that kind of assurance! When I first looked at this website to prepare my review, I seem to have a missing picture of what this search engine is lacking. It simply delayed my time to think through carefully what’s wrong with this search engine when the whole idea of starting up and getting it to the consumers are good. Then, I have come to realize that this website needs to be crowded with people searching for keywords, and people asking for keywords to be placed with their websites. However, it is currently still at its beta testing mode. This project might take off very well if handled properly, or it might fail miserably in the end. It is definitely still at the infant stage where nobody will know if it will become the next big thing. Good luck Uri Lederman. The rest is up to you to grow this search engine business…

Find Out How One Click Search Engine Can Help You In Getting Your Website Indexed In their Website.

As a website reviewer, I always like to comment on other people’s website design and such. And by the way, who I am to review other people’s website? I am positioning myself as an Internet reviewer, I studies seo, copywriting, PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS and now I am working on my new wordpress theme. I like to review about how other websites are doing, and to give my comments on them.

Let’s have a quick video review of his blog.

Yaro Starak’s blog is definitely better in the interface than his old one. The very first glance I put my eye on is his blog tips newsletter where he gives a video to introduce himself and to ask for our information to be in his list to give us tips about blogging.

Not many people actually like his blog design. My friend, Becky, doesn’t really like Yaro Starak’s design as Yaro is adopting an overloading stress on the browser. In fact, as I don’t understand why Yaro’s designer is creating so many external stylesheets which actually makes the browser to make extra HTTP requests. More work from the website, means more bandwidth to be taken.

What I like most about his blog is that he has a short introduction about himself when we first visit his blog. It gives us a very personal feeling where there are three friendly links for us to find out more about him, about his blog, or to contact him. In fact, this is nothing new since it was already previously been implemented.

Do you think that EJ logo looks nice? I think at least it is giving us an impression to remember about his blog. It looks like a RSS feed logo to me. Well, I don’t really like that logo though…

Interestingly to note, he has a “Consulting” menu for us to click on. I supposed that is his “Hire Me” page where it is a smart move for a freelancer to provide his service since he has a blog as his resume to show his potential customers.

His personalized video to invite us to sign up for his newsletter is very welcoming. I played the video and really had the intention to sign up for his newsletter from there. At least, it is more prominent to put there… Unlike other websites where they left it in one of the infamous three-mini-columns like John Chow’s, I think this has a higher conversion rate and leaves a better impression.

He also implemented free ebook upon signing up his RSS feed. This looks like a common thing to do nowadays. I last reviewed BlueVerse and the blogger did the same thing as well. Lots of interesting small tips to learn from other bloggers every now and then…

Oh well, he is still a respectable blogger for us to learn from… And yes, he’s in my twitter.