Backup Your Blog!
May 30, 2008 | 4 Comments
2 days ago my other blog, personaldevelopment.com got stuffed up. Of all my blogs, I didn’t backup this one! Good thing that the hosting company does a backup every week. So I lost a few days of content since their last backup. Now I am waiting for the hosting company to restore my blog database. Hopefully my posts and pages are still intact.
I hope that everyone will backup their blog once a week, regardless how new is your blog. This way, you can restore it anytime without waiting for the hosting company to do it for you.
Doing a backup is simple, you can backup your blog by going into your Wordpress Dashboard, click on “Manage” tab then click on “Backup”. Select all your tables and I would suggest that you set up a schedule to automatically back up every week. Its up to you whether you want to email the backup files to yourself, download it or save it in your server.
I prefer to download it to my notebook and save a copy to an external hard drive. So, remember to get into a habit of backup your blog, it’ll save you a lot of heartache.
Hakka Lei Cha
May 28, 2008 | 2 Comments
Yesterday I had lunch at Jalan Bawasah, a hakka coffeeshop cum mini museum for Wong Pow Nee, the first Chief Minister of Penang. The coffee shop occupies 2 pre-war shophouse which was tastefully restored. On 1 side there is the coffeeshop, on the next shop there is a small museum where you can see photos of Wong Pow Nee and some historical news about him.
In the coffeeshop there are several dishes cooked traditionally by hakkas. We had the Lei Cha which is a tea based soup eaten with rice and some condiments. I had tasted one in Johor Bahru and according to my brother-in-law who is a Hakka, the JB one taste quite authentic.
Well, the one in Penang has a stronger tea taste but the servings for the vegetable condiments is a bit small. Overall, it is still tasty. Below are photos taken before we mixed everything in and after we mixed everything up. This is quite a treat because I think no other person in Penang island sells Lei Cha. Those of you know a good place in Penang please give me comments.
Lei Cha before mixing Lei Cha after mixing everything up
10 Simple Ways To Get Targeted Traffic
May 26, 2008 | 2 Comments
Every business whether it is a home business, a company or a multinational corporation needs targeted traffic. Without traffic, there is no way of making a sale. Targeted traffic is easier to convert to a customer. This is because these people are looking for a specific product or services that you may be able to offer. Needless to say, all the marketing tools and information that your merchant provides, regardless of how good they are, are just tools and information. You need loads of targeted traffic to visit your website to ensure that your home business prospers.
Getting internet users to visit your website is difficult and painstakingly slow if you are not doing it right. The ease of starting a home business through the internet means more intense competition for customers’ attention. With such fierce competition, how are you going to stand out? Here are 10 ways to get targeted traffic to your site.
1. Search Engine Optimised
The first thing that most people do when they want to search for something is to Google it. That is running a query in Google’s search engine. Google will then display results for your query. The person will then click on the links in the result page to try and find the information they are looking for. So, it is only logical that your website is indexed by Google and optimised for it. Being optimised will enable your website to have a high ranking in the result page. Thus, ensuring your website has high visibility to people who are searching.
2. Link Exchange
The second way is to contact other webmasters to link to your webpage. You cannot just link any webpage to yours. Relevance is the utmost importance in link exchange. Search for related websites, contact the webmaster and request politely for a link exchange. This is a win-win situation where both websites can direct traffic to each other’s site, increase exposure to more potential customers.
3. Article Writing
When you write original, quality and relevant content, you will build your credibility and visibility to your website. The author’s resource box will have a link back to your website and it is through the resource box that readers visit your website. Readers who find your articles useful will visit your website to learn more. Being a useful content, readers may copy it and distribute it, thus readers can indirectly be advertising for you.
Benefits Of Affiliate Marketing
May 22, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Affiliate marketing is the easiest and most convenient way for everyone to start their home business. As long as you have an internet connection and a website, you can start your affiliate marketing business. Joining an affiliate program have many benefits, we will discuss some of the benefits below.
Affiliate marketing is an arrangement between the merchant (supplier of the product or services) and the affiliate (marketer of the merchant’s product or services). The two parties will form a working relationship whereby, the affiliate will refer customers to buy the merchant’s product or services and the merchant will pay a commission to the affiliate.
By setting up an affiliate program, the merchant can recruit many sales persons to help market his or her product or services very quickly. It cost very little and it is more effective to the merchant as compared to advertising. Furthermore, the affiliate is only paid after the sales is completed, hence reducing cost upfront.
Most marketers are good in selling but may not be good in product development. In addition, most new marketers do not have any product to sell or they do not know what to sell. So joining an affiliate program is an attractive option. Finding a product or service that you like is not difficult because almost anything will have a product in an affiliate program. With an established system in place by the merchant, the affiliate can focus on selling and not worry about developing a system to collect payment, product or service deliveries, handling refunds, providing after sale support services and in some cases, monitoring stocks level too.
This is a fair working relationship to both parties because the affiliate is remunerated only on each completed sale. Also, both parties need to contribute some effort in order to attract potential customers to make a purchase. The more each party contribute to their respective responsibilities, the more sales can be closed.
So what are the responsibilities of each party? In affiliate marketing, the merchant usually provides record keeping and tracking services on the potential customers as well as completed sales. This is to ensure that the affiliates are remunerated correctly. The merchant also provides deliveries either digitally online or physically offline. Lastly, it is the duty of the merchant to provide after sales support or help to the customers. Good merchants will provide market information and marketing tools to help affiliate to promote the product or service.
For the affiliate, his or her duty is to drive as much traffic as possible to the merchant’s website to buy the product or service. The affiliate can also attract traffic to their own website, convert the customers before sending to the merchant’s site to process the payment. It all boils down to getting customers to buy the product or service.
The beauty of affiliate marketing also lies in the ease of entry and ease of exit. It is very easy to join an affiliate program of your choice. Once you have found a product or service which you have an interest in, you can search the web for an affiliate program. Most good affiliate program can be joined for free. Beware of merchant requesting for joining fee. A good merchant will have a separate support system for their affiliates. This usually includes marketing materials, tools and tips as well. Certain merchant even provide training on how to market their products! So you don’t really need to be expert in affiliate marketing before you start.
| Click Here To Become A Super Affiliate Now! |
Some products you choose to promote or advertise may not make much money. You have no obligation to the merchant if their products don’t sell. You can either stop promoting it in your advertising campaign or remove it from your site. There is not exit fee, nor do you have to resign from being an affiliate. Just stop your promotion.
The growth of internet users worldwide has made the internet a good place to set up your affiliate marketing business. More internet users mean more potential customers for you. You can choose to start your home business by selling people’s products as a side business. Then when your side business grows, you can quit your job and focus on your lucrative home business. Most successful internet marketers sell other people’s products. If they can get rich doing affiliate marketing, so can you!
3 Essential Tools To Succeed In Affiliate Marketing
May 21, 2008 | 2 Comments
Written By Tan Hai Liang
Affiliate marketing is recognised as one of the easiest and straight forward ways to start an internet marketing business. Anyone who is marketing affiliate products and services will have the same set of questions. The “what to do” and “how to do” boils down to fact that everyone wants to be successful at it. Though the merchant may provide you with all the tools and keywords etc etc, what do you really need to be really successful?
1. Your Own Website
Your website is the most important, if not most indispensable tool for affiliate marketing. Why? This is because your website is the first point of reference to your customers. Your website is where you do your marketing to your customers. Therefore, building a credible and professional looking website is as important as renovating a retail shop.
A retail shop should have easy passage for customer to walk in and browse the products on sale easily. This is the same with your website. The interface should be easy for customers to navigate. The design of the website should encourage the customers to click on links to the products or service you are promoting. It’s like a discreet sale person prompting customers to look at an item more closely or to buy it.
It is a fact that most people surf the internet primarily to look for information on something which they are interested in, or are looking for answers. So they are not surfing the internet to buy something. To draw people to visit your website, it has to be filled with information that people are lookng for. Information which are original and relevant are the ones that stand out and these are what people are searching for.
People love reading articles that help them learn something that they are searching. By providing lots of useful and original content on your website, you build yourself up as a credible expert in your area. Reputation is important in building a loyal customer base. Your reputation enables your customers to trust your word, hence, your endorsements on the products or services you are promoting. This makes selling your affiliate product easier. So build up your reputation by being a provider of original and quality information on your website for your customers.
2. Incentives and Bonuses
Since affiliate marketing is an easy way to start a home business, many people will be involved in it. So, competition is going to be intense. How do you differentiate yourself from other affiliate marketers? How do you encourage people to visit your webpage? You need to attract customers by giving away presents. Give them incentives or bonuses when they come to you. Give them more incentive to stay with you eg, giving away free ebooks, reports or softwares or free subscriptions to your newsletters that are useful to them. The perceive value of these bonuses is up to you to decide. However, if it is useful and relevant to the customer, then the value of the free gift is high, even though you may have bought it as a private label right item.
The thing is, to stay ahead of your competitors, you must become a generous provider of information. Everybody loves gifts and presents, more so when the gifts or presents are relevant. So give away information that is useful and original, build your reputation as a generous person who only have the benefit of the customers in mind. This will build your reputation and trust very fast.
3. Link Popularity
Finally we come to traffic to your website. When you set up a retail shop, you need visibility. Without visibility, nobody knows you exist. To help your affiliate marketing, your website need to be visible as well. Ranking well on search engine is one of the ways to draw traffic to your website.
Building your link popularity is one way of improving your search engine rankings. More people linking to you is an indication to search engine that your website is popular and possibly possess many relevant content.
One of the tried and proven free method of building your links is to write articles and submitting the articles to various article directories and e-zines. Each article has an author resource box that you can write about yourself and your website. It is through the author’s resource box that links are pointed back to your website. So, the more articles you submit, the more links are build back to your website. If your articles are original, unique and relevant, more people will copy it and put it up in their own site, thus increasing your exposure to other readers and drawing more potential customers to your site.
The above 3 tools are what you need to have to succeed in affiliate marketing. Ask any successful affiliate marketers and you can see that they have their own website, they have very good rapport with their customers and their websites are high traffic sites. There are many other ways to build up your 3 affiliate marketing tools, so explore with different ideas and strategies that works for you.
Internet Marketing For Novice
May 16, 2008 | Leave a Comment
I’ve just done up a video about helping newbies or novice to start up their internet marketing business. Basically my service is to set up 6 affiliate income streams in 24hours! Everything is automated so newbies or novices just have to drive traffic to their new site. There is a 30 day marketing plan included as well as other many bonuses. Follow the 30 day marketing plan and you can learn how to generate traffic to your site.
Roger Loh’s Accelerated Affiliated Marketing Workshop
May 13, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Last weekend, I was helping Roger Loh with his workshop on starting an affiliate marketing workshop. This was my first time helping out as a mentor in an internet marketing workshop. What can I say? It was a blast!
All the while I look up to experts who make millions online. Looking at them, it seem that I don’t know enough or didn’t do enough. Why? Because I’m don’t earn as much as them…yet.
Roger encouraged me to be a mentor because he said that I have more than enough knowledge to help people who are starting up. True to his words, I was able to be help out many participants in the workshop to sort out their difficulties. Though it was tiring, I find it very rewarding to help people solve their problems.
This weekend was a great experience to me. It helped me to rethink about myself. More often than not, we always think that we are not good enough. We keep looking at other successful people and we are blind to our own little successes. I have forgotten what I had learned from T Harv Eker last year! He said we should celebrate our own successes and feel good about it. This will motivate you to achieve a higher goal.
Those who are starting out in Internet Marketing, strive on! Though you are making a little now, persevere and your accumulated ongoing efforts will bring in the millions in due time.
How To Choose The Right Home Business Opportunities?
May 9, 2008 | 4 Comments
There may be many reasons why people are looking for opportunities to work at home. Some may be out of job, others may want an additional stream of income. Regardless of the reason for starting a home based business, the number of opportunities is growing. Technology helps in digitising many traditional businesses, thus leading to the…To read more please go to Articles section.
Durians!
May 8, 2008 | 3 Comments
My friend Carl has recently bought a 5 acre Durian orchard in Balik Pulau. He was so kind to invite my friends and I to visit his orchard and have a Durian feast there.
We were suppose to go to his orchard last week, but I had to attend Fabian’s review/graduation class so it was postponed to…TODAY!
After a light lunch (we want to save space in our stomach so we can pig out at the orchard), we met up at his place and off to his orchard.
The road towards Balik Pulau is winding and quite sickening to some people. But the anticipation of going to have Durians didn’t really affect us.
The orchard had 200+ Durian trees and they were all so fruitful.
Every tree had so many Durians
This bunch looks more like grapes instead of Durians
Once we arrive, we wasted no time eating the Durians. We had all the different Durian species in Carl’s orchard namely Hor Lor (Gourd), 15, D24, 14, Xiao Hong (Little Red), Ang Hae (Red Prawn) and the one and only Lilian. Yes I kid you not. There is a tree with no name and even the estate manager doesn’t know what is the specie, so Durians from that special tree is named after Carl’s wife, Lilian. This is so cool. Mind you, the fruit taste good too.
After a sumptuous meal of Durians, we took a walk around Carl’s orchard.
Durian flowers blown away before it had a chance to fruit
I’m standing between 2 vertical bamboo sticks used to support the branch of a Durian tree. With so many Durians on the branch and each fruit as big as my head, the branch will break without the bamboo support.
An unripe Mangosteen fruit on Carl’s orchard. Carl’s orchard have a range of different Durian species and a couple of Rambutans trees, Cempedak trees and Mangosteen trees.
This Carl and he is the owner of the Durian orchard. No I’m not joking, yes he is an ang mor, but not an ordinary ang mor. Carl is an American. If you don’t know him, you won’t believe that he loves Durians. Yes, he loves it so much that he has bought an orchard. Of course Lilian is also a Durian lover and I bet she was just as enthusiastic as Carl in getting this wonderful orchard.
In the past weeks, after talking to a few of our regular Durian seller, apparently this year’s Durian season will be different from the previous year. There will not be a bumper harvest all at a time. Resulting in an over supply which drives Durian price down. This year, Durians ripen on a more evenly spaced out time. I suppose it has something to do with the weather but a quick check in Carl’s orchard shows some trees are only begining to flower…
So looks like this year will have a longer supply of Durians but at a higher price.
Newsletter Subscription
Categories
Recommendations
Recent Posts
Archives
Other Good Sites I Read
Recent Readers
Airasia specials!
