Archive of ‘Internet Marketing’ category
In cyberspace, you don’t know who you’re communicating with.
The website you see before you is a collection of words and images.
And getting a sense of the person through their blog or website is not easy.
That’s why it’s important to establish your credibility as soon as possible.
Have you noticed how many sites lack an ‘About Us’ page?
Even if you have them, does it contain some canned corporate spiel about how they want to deliver the best product with best-of-breed technologies.
Let’s face it, at the end of the day, you still want to place a face to a brand, a service, your cell phone, the DSL service (which is a series of 1’s and 0’s). Even if you are eating dessicated corn pieces with bovine milk, you’d feel better if it was fronted by Tony the Tiger; or Snap, Crack, and Pop of Rice Krispies fame.
If we want to see a face or some characters when we buy a $2 box of cornflakes, wouldn’t we expect more when we buy Internet Marketing products that cost $599? $997? or $1499?
Then how come so many products don’t have a human face to them?
They could be the same guys who write those:
“I am Chan Ching Chong, the son of the late General Ding Dong Bell, who died leaving a $20 million fortune. And now I need your help”
Gee.
Do you think you could up your Internet Marketing credibility by personalizing your product and service?
Is that yes? or yes?
Focusing, specifically on blogs, check out Coen Ching’s bio page here.
In 3 parts no less. Quite well done.
It inspired me to work on my bio too.
Though not as monumental as Coen’s, I’ve done a short and long version.
You can check it out here.
If you do your own bio and would like feedback on it, drop me a comment, including the URL.
To recap, speedlinking is to summarize some of my friends and contacts and their projects to help our ever expanding community grow a little closer. It builds on the ‘pay it forward’ thinking.
In case, you’ve missed the previous installment, my friend, Jag Senghera, kicked off the first installment here.
I continued the second installment here.
Today we go into the third installment.
Stuart Tan runs InternetMarketingSingapore: Stuart is an amazing guy. One reason why i’m speedlinking is that my neural connections are a little fried after talking through some Internet Marketing issues earlier this evening. He’s launching some new programs in October and if you’d like to be kept in the know, leave a comment and I’ll include you in the notification list.
The Japanese Are Crazy: one of the most unconventional sites on the web, check out the video clips. You’ll watch and think that the Japanese are the most innovative people on the planet, or they’re simply insane. Maybe even both. Check it out and leave a comment.
Kloudiia.com: Welcome to Kloudiia’s kit: dating affairs. An interesting mix of dating advice, magical quotes and occasionally Biblical references. Check out the Ask Kloudiia section where you get to pose your enquiries to the dating dame. I read it regularly. You should too.
GobalaKrishnan.com: one of the better Malaysia-based Internet Marketing blogs in the blogosphere, Gobala puts out quality content on WordPress-based blogging and adsense. I especially like his post about his Internet Marketing journey. It’s well worth the read. You can check it out here.
RomanceFire: This is my friend, JhongRen’s blog. It chronicles his wedding preparations since December 05. Wow, that’s a long time. I think I spent about 2 months preparing for my own wedding. But do check out his wedding preparation advice too. But regarding the activities on the wedding night itself, you have to figure those out yourself.
SoccerTipCentral: until a short while ago, my friend, Aloysius Nge, had one of the most…shall we say enigmatic avatars on the Internet. I’ve helped him snap a new photo (whether he uses it is another matter). Do check out his site though. I’d expect that it’d help you do better on wagers on the game where 22 men on a very big field run after a small little ball. Face it, it beats staring at the wall on Sunday.
You might already have read my previous post “Time mastery for Internet Marketers” and are wondering, So what?
What’s next?
Why do you keep harping on this point over and over again?
For the fact that it’s:
- The most equal resource, regardless of rank, wealth, status, all of us have 24 hours a day.
- The greatest resource any of us can have. It can’t be bought, no matter how much money you may have.
- It’s a one-way resource, it flows in one direction. (Time may move slower at the speed of light, accordingly to Einstein, but that’s outside of this post)
It also happens to be the most badly managed and most wasted resource any of us will have. At least 90% of people will spend an entire day achieving less than 5 minutes of productive work. In many cases, it is 0 minutes!
Why does this happen?
There’s a poor connection between our:
- values
- our actions
- and ultimately the outcomes
Our values determine who we are and how we see ourselves.
Is what you’re doing at work or in your entrepreneurial venture creating meaning for you?
Is it something you’re looking forward to each day?
If you are energized each day working on expanding your business, that’s great.
If you are less than enthusiastic, you have 3 outcomes:
- Do nothing about it
- Quit!
- Do something about it
Doing nothing is self-explanatory. The pattern will repeat itself
Quitting: while it will remove you from the situation, you may not be able to better your situation.
Doing something: by shifting your mindset, you can achieve better results.
My previous post on time mastery has addressed some of the mindset shifting and I’d like to add the element of timeslicing.
Find your peak performance time. It varies from individual to individual. If you are a morning person, perhaps you might like to do it once you’ve woken up. If you’re a night person, maybe just before you retire for the night.
Timeslicing involves allocating time to achieve specific tasks.
- Set aside an hour a day.
- During this time, you are to focus solely on the task at hand
- Turn off your mobile phone, email, instant messengers
- Lock the door
- Keep away magazines, newspapers, mail
During this hour, you are to work at your peak efficiency.
It may not be easy to disregard distractions at the beginning, but the more you do this, the more efficient you will become.
Some who have an ingrained pattern of wasting lots of time might be tempted to shoot for 4 or 5 hours. This may work for the first day or two, but the disruption in your routine might throw you off and the pattern will collapse after the third day.
Strive to achieve an hour a day and keep it up for at least 21 days.
Once you have mastered this and it becomes part of your daily routine, you can move up to one and a half hours for the next 21 days and subsequently two hours.
In time, you will find yourself becoming very productive.
By timeslicing and segragating a chunk of time that you must be productive, you will find your personal efficiency reaching a new level.
Everyone knows the Internet Marketing drill.
- Spot a trend (or niche)
- Capitalize on it
Rinse and repeat
Let’s look at trendspotting more deeply.
You probably already know to go to Overture.com, do a keyword search.
Find keywords with a high number of searches.
Next go to Google.com and key in the same keywords.
Find something with as few results as possible.
Optimally, you’d want keywords for which there are many searches, but few results.
This’ll ensure that creating a website with these keywords will garner you sufficient traffic to monetize your adsense, affiliate marketing, product marketing, domain parking or other strategy.
This approach may be shallow though, if you’re merely looking at the supply-demand side of things (your results-search ratio so to speak).
Besides the Quantitative element, you will need to consider the qualitative elements too.
There are qualitative elements like cost-per-click, clickthrough ratios, but I’d like to expand the horizon more and adopt a macro perspective.
I’d like to introduce three dimensions which will help you further analyze, capitalize and profit from these trends.
The first dimension:
- Intensity: Is this a high intensity niche? Is it a major event? Or merely a blip on the radar screen?
Obviously all sports events are not created equal.
If intensity was on a sliding scale of 1 to 10, the Summer Olympics might be a 10, the Soccer World Cup might be an 8, the Winter Olympics and Commonwealth Games might be a 6.
Even events in the same sport and category might have differing rates, for example the Wimbledon and US Open might rank higher than the French Open, which conversely has a higher profile/intensity in comparison to the Australian Open.
Bear in mind that intensity may incorporate geographical, cultural and other dimensions.
- Lifespan: What is the duration of the niche? For the Olympics it may be a month. The US campaign against Iraq could be considered nearly decades long (assuming the campaign was backdated to the 1990s)
Does the niche kick off further niches, prolonging it’s lifespan? For example, the Punk movement manifests itself in culture, music, fashion, art, and some say even food. Most contemporary counterculture traces some of it’s origins back to punk. A long lifespan indeed.
- Evolution: Does the niche permutate and evolve itself? Does it become a different animal over time? Witness the computer industry, going from mainframe computers -> minicomputers -> microcomputers -> desktops – > laptops -> PDAs -> palmtops. Maybe the next permutations might be fingertops? Who knows but the certainty is there.
Likewise with game consoles, you can witness the evolution from the old Atari consoles, Colecos, Atari ST, Nintendo, Sega Megadrive, SNES, Super Famicom, Playstation, Xbox and the new versions. (excuse if I left out your favourite console).
Analyzed outside of the typical RS ratios, the three factors can further enhance your analysis of these niches and give you a broader and informed perspective of the niche potential.
Would you like to get a tip to get ahead in Internet Marketing?
Find your greatest fear.
Got it?
Face it head on.
Seriously, you will find your efforts yielding massive results.
Consider the following:
- Afraid of making sales presentations and the prospect of having doors slammed in your face, being abused and getting turned down?
Go ahead and adopt an aggressive offline campaign, pitch to corporate prospects, venture capitalists, private equity specialists, whoever might be your target group.
- Have poor proficiency in Mandarin (like me and most of my ACS brethren)? Afraid to venture into the China market?
Take up the challenge and create a China-focused Internet Marketing strategy.
Teach the Chinese conversational and business English if you need to.
Are you crazy? What’s the point of all this? What are you trying to prove?
Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damaged capacitor…
There’s nothing to ‘prove’, but consider this.
The barrier to our greatest success is our greatest fear.
Fear paralyzes us. It creates a vicious cycle of procrastination.
The biggest failure anyone can every make is not to have tried and failed.
The greatest failure is never to have tried.
By conquering our greatest fear, won’t everything pale in comparison?
If you are afraid of heights, take this as a challenge.
Go find the highest bungee jump location you can find.
Confront your fears.
Now, this is the most important part.
MAKE the decision to jump.
YOU have to make the decision to jump.
As you jump, keep your eyes wide open.
Here’s the important part, YOU make the decision to jump because you are in the driver’s seat.
You are the captain of the ship, the pilot of your destiny. [fill in your own analogy here]
If you had someone push you, it doesn’t count.
Go up and jump again.
Are you proving anything?
Do you end up ‘better‘ having done that?
Yes, you do actually.
And it’s not what you think.
You didn’t ‘prove’ anything to me.
Nor anyone else for that matter.
You ‘proved’ it to yourself. You raised your threshold, you stretched out of your comfort zone a little more.
My friend, Adam Khoo, says he constantly does things that scare the hell out of himself.
Whether it’s addressing a crowd of thousands, or entering into a wholly new arena, he’s there putting himself on the line.
And he sees results.
He’s sharing many business secrets in his latest venture here.
Will we always be successful?
I doubt it, otherwise there’s no fear.
But the biggest things we can come up with is not the accomplishment of having facing fear.
Rather it’s the COURAGE to have faced it, and of our own free will too.
After all, conquer your fears and you can conquer the world.
Someone was asking me how to accelerate their Internet Marketing efforts.
They’d be putting in many more hours, sleeping less, were getting run down, and worst yet, felt they were on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
Worst still, they only saw a small increase in their results.
It’s physically impossible to increase their results, they proclaimed.
Not necessarily, I said.
You’ve been working hard, yes?
Yes, It’s killing me.
That’s the problem. You don’t need to work hard.
Nope.
There are two components to time usage. Quantity and quality. Instead of working hard, you need to work smart too.
This is what I told him.
We have several factors within our work framework:
- We have 24 hours a day
- Depending on your biorhythmn, you need about 8 hours of sleep a day
- You have between 16 waking hours every day
- You will spend about 2 hours eating each day
- You will spend about 1 hour in the toilet and shower
- You will spend about 1 hour travelling each day
That leaves 12 hours of work time.
If you have a full time job, that will take another 8 hours a day, leaving 4 hours.
You may just have 4 hours a day!
If you watch 2 hours of TV each day, you’ll kill off half your productive time.
Is it any wonder why many complain they don’t have any time to grow their business?
How you use your time each day will determine your results.
Here’re 3 ways to squeeze more time.
- Planning helps (a great deal!)
Spending 5 minutes at the start of the day is akin to planning your destination before setting out on your journey.
Knowing you will have 4 hours and deciding how you want to spend those 4 hours will be best.
If you wait to see what free time is available, there’ll usually be nothing left.
Planning your time means cutting out and making the time available to do the important tasks.
- Most important things first
The toughest tasks will usually be the ones that give the most leverage in accomplishing our goals.
Do those first, especially when you are fresh.
Putting them off another day will delay the achievement of your goals, and ultimately the outcome you desire.
Perhaps the most important. It takes 21 days to establish a new behavioral pattern. (Try waking up at 4am and start your workday at that time every day)
It will be difficult at first (as with all things), but as you establish new inertia, your new behavior will become unstoppable.
Taking these 3 simple steps will bring you massive results.
Test them out and leave a comment.
