Charles Lau dot Com

For the past few days, I have been busy working on reviews, my new blog design, learning about wordpress, reading ebooks to be reviewed, while accompanying my girlfriend. I also started studying on copywriting, and writing CSS stylesheets. To portray myself to be a better internet reviewer, I have to polish up myself in the various skills every now and then so that I can be a qualified reviewer. In fact, I have been reviewing mostly on the websites and their products and services. Which makes me think that I am more like a Internet Business Reviewer. I like this term as I get to review online businesses. I am trying to stay away from reviewing technically because if a website is selling well, technical issues don’t really matter a lot.

Internet marketing itself can really be confusing if you don’t grasp the skills correctly. When you first read about Pay-Per-Click marketing, you might think that this is a great trading business to work on with zero inventory since you can simply do affiliate marketing directly. But again, if your ad copy isn’t well done, you are going to spend more money than you can actually make. It is no doubt to be a good business to work on once it is converting well, but such business is not long lasting because of trend and that if you don’t own the list who buys, you are going to re-do everything from scratch again when you are looking for another trend of products to sell.

And when you try to optimize your website for search engine, it can be frustrating if you see your search results ranking up and down.  The best optimization is to do it once properly, and forget about it.  This way, you will focus yourself more on the retention of potential customers, rather than to focus on bringing in new visitors with very high bounce rate.  Bounce rate means that a visitor will tend to get out of the website within a few seconds or so.

I read about an article recently about starting up your business by setting up your website as a blog, or as a traditional information site.  Studies have shown that there is a higher bounce rate when a person arrives on a blog from anywhere.  That’s because the article is being dated and if the date happens to be very old, it can be perceived as an old article which is rendered as redundant.  Whereas if you start your business as a traditional themed website with information, you tend to retain the customer as he reads through your theme while clicking through from pages after pages.  To some extend, I agree that this is quite true.  But to get good traffic from the search engines and to keep the visitors from coming back again and again, you might want to set up a blog because of the huge consistent contents which keep coming in.  Search engines simply love new contents every time.  Keep them happy, by keeping your new visitors happy as well.  To set up a real theme website, you could actually incorporate a blog as a sub-directory in your website.  This should get the best of both worlds.

Darren Rowse was telling me about the competitiveness of making money online.  And that many make-money-online blogs are doing flipping business in the end.  Just take a look at how many people are doing flipping business for the last five months.  All of us are finding that niche in us to be different in our own way.  We have to be different in one way or another.  Don’t just copy word-for-word from other people’s business as though they are your franchise master.  It could lead into bloodshed just like my friend I know personally who is now complaining to the Google about the copycat to his website and compete for some similar keywords in Google Adwords.  Even the ad copy is the same!

I have been active in my twitter account.  I got to know quite a number of reputable friends online and they are sharing with me things on twitter.  We all give our two cents worth of thought in our twitter every now and then.

Ok, it’s time 12.10am.  I am sleeping now.  Going to wake up and work on my reviews.