I’ve the fortune to be a member of a business-focused mastermind from whom I’ve got great advice, and have a number of established marketers on my skype list that I can consult regularly.

I’m not one to stand still, however, and have also enrolled the help of some of the greatest business minds to give me some advice in the next step of my internet marketing journey.

Donald Trump “How To Get Rich”

Property magnate and business owner Donald Trump has been a great help.

I haven’t had the chance to talk to “The Donald” on the phone yet, but I have been reading his bestseller “How To Get Rich“.

It’s not so much a “How to Get Rich” book, but it does give you insight into how Donald Trump runs his business, his business strategies, negotiation techniques, views on beautiful women and how some of his seminal projects, including his golf resorts and business operating procedures are decided.

For fans of the Apprentice, there’s great insight into how Mark Burnett and The Donald came together to work on the project.

And if you think you have a busy day, you also get a rundown of one of Donald’s typical days. It might leave you feeling like an underachiever, even if you are already a Type-A personality.

As soon as I make my way through this volume, I’m planning to check out the other 10 bestsellers he’s penned.

Gene Simmons “Sex Money Kiss”

The “Demon” in rock band Kiss might seem a strange choice for a business biography. But look beneath the makeup and you’ll discover an astute businessman.

Going back to his childhood entrepreneurial pursuits, you’ll discover that Gene has had a hand in starting up profitable businesses since his early childhood days.

His prime motivation for becoming a rock star (getting lots of hot women and making lots of money) are a living example of how passion and income generation can be combined successfully.

My interest was piqued about Gene after reading rave reviews about his presentation at Dan Kennedy’s SuperConference a couple of months ago.

I’m going through Sex Money Kiss now and Gene candidly shares his philosophies (and suggested action plans) on making money, relationships with women and ideas for kickstarting your business.

–

Both these books have been helpful and given me new ideas to implement in my business not only because I have picked up new techniques and strategies to apply, but also because the books penned by Gene himself and with the assistance of a copyeditor in the case of Trump shift my thinking a couple of notches upwards in terms of what’s possible.

This “brain food” might just be the spark to set you off to a higher level in your business and personal life.

Check them out:
* How To Get Rich
* Sex Money Kiss

So I thought this would be a good opportunity to review how some of the bloggers have done since launching their blogs.

Here’re 3 bloggers who’re using the system:

• SimCooks.com

California-based Yich’s food and cooking related blog is about 4 months old.

Check out her blog for lots of pretty food pictures and good content too.

In that time, she’s developed quite a following and the search engines like her content too, having raised her blog from a PR0 to PR4 during the recent PageRank update.

SimCooks is Alexa-ranked 299,000, though I’d imagine that her audience profile might not generally install the Alexa toolbar, so her uniques are likely much higher.

• DesignGuruRyan.com

Australia-based designer Ryan Jackson has also been using SBW for about 4 months (SBW had a closed door launch in May 2006). He focuses on web design.

Besides myself, Ryan counts Tiffany Dow, who’s worked with several of Internet Marketing’s top guns and Traffic Generation specialist and Warrior Forum regular Ross Goldberg among his clients.

Ryan’s rated at PR3, Alexa 151,000.

• RisingIMStar.com

Singapore-based “Tofu Lover” (yes, a weird way to brand yourself) is a new Internet Marketer and focuses on blogging, SEO and traffic generation.

His blog has gone from PR0 to PR3 in the last update and the domain is about 4 months old too. He’s Alexa-ranked 149,000.

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• How effective is SecretBlogWeapon?

What’s useful about SBW is because it’s a foundational product, it will ground you in the basics of setting up a themed blog, having a plan in place to optimize your keywords and WordPress installation. You also get basic traffic generation tools and plugins.

SBW isn’t intended to cover the flashy technologies which in my opinion just detract from the reader’s interests (and you can already read my blog for newer developments in the blogosphere).

But where its goal is to ground someone who’s been mucking with a blog without much effect, or not got the results they were expecting, SBW delivers the goods.

—

Back to Joe’s comment “I was just curious if you know people in america who have had success with this because foriegn search is different then american seo.”

SBW is a foundational product, so whether you’re in the US, Europe, Asia or Africa, it’s equally effective.

—

On another note, I don’t think there’s a major difference between “foreign search” and “american seo”, except for the contextual ads will be geotracked and appropriately served.

Having said that, although I’m Asia-based, have a look at my traffic geo snapshot:

As you can see, the US is responsible for the majority of traffic (roughly about 60%), with Singapore responsible for another 30%. Aside from the other Asian country Malaysia, the top countries include Australia, Canada, the UK, France, and the Netherlands. Hence, outside of the US and Singapore, the geographical profile is fairly diverse.

Up till mid-Jan 07 (15 days), I’ve had more than 3,300 uniques.

Only 4% of my traffic originates from the search engines. Not because I’m terrible at search engine optimization (Just about all my pages are indexed), but rather, 96% of my visitors come because I’ve been using social traffic generation strategies.

If you’ve arrive here because of a link in blog comment, a forum post, or from a social networking site, my social traffic strategies are working.

It’ll be an area I’ll be looking at in the next couple of months.

But in the meantime, if you’d like to get a leg up in your blogging efforts, check out SecretBlogWeapon.com.

Gobala was down to collect some equipment and we met up for lunch and hung out for a few hours.

Gobala Krishnan and Andrew Wee

It was a good opportunity to meet up with Gobala since I’d be marketing his WordPress blogging package since last August.

If you haven’t had a chance to check out the package, do look at the page and I’m sure it’ll help you bring your blogging to the next stage, just like it has done for me. He’d also mentioned that I’m all-time top affiliate for the product.

Gobala’s been busy launching his project 100% Malaysian and has been busy preparing for his next project, due next month.

Gobala’s pretty well known and if you haven’t, you should check out GobalaKrishnan.com. What I’d found inspiring was his story about how he’d gone from a full time job to full time Internet Marketing. Read: Do I Regret Quitting My Job. It was one of my sources of encouragment in my early days.
Over the course of our talk, I also squeezed three tips to help bring your blogging to a new level.

Take it away, Gobala:

• Target Your Niche

You can either focus directly on a niche, or approach a general topic, and differentiate yourself by your blogging style.

• “Here’s something I learned from Andrew Wee. Participate in the community”

Participate in forums, visit other blogs, leave comments. This will help you generate traffic and build relationships with other online marketers (positioning yourself for possible joint ventures).

• “Here’s a tip for your niche marketing efforts”

You can locate established Internet Marketing players who have produced several ebooks and videos. You can blog about them, not so much as a worship blog, but rather you can get into their affiliate program and understand their marketing system. You can also expand on the information contained in their ebooks. At the same time, you can add adsense to this blog, to derive some income from readers who don’t buy any products.

—

It was a good opportunity to compare our experiences and I picked up a number of new strategies which I’m planning to apply to my blogging and product creation efforts.

Did you check out Gobala’s journey?

–> Do I Regret Quitting My Job
What did you think?

His intriguing title “Is Your Plugin Naughty or Nice?” features a guest article by Aaron Brazell informing developers to ensure plugin compliance with WordPress 2.1 which is ‘almost here’.

It’s hard to realize that it’s almost been a year since WordPress 2.0 “Duke” was released on December 26, 2005.

I was looking for more info on WordPress 2.1 but there’s scant info available now.

You should be using some variant of WP 2.0 and if you haven’t patched it to 2.0.5 already, this is a good time to do so. There were a number of security-related patches in the last update.

I really like WordPress and a quote on the WordPress site captures my feelings:

“WordPress: free, yet priceless”

If you aren’t already optimizing your WordPress blog, you won’t be able to traffic generate and monetize as effectively as you could, you might want to check out Secret Blog Weapon.

I really love hearing from those who’ve started using Secret Blog Weapon and are getting great results!

Adam’s known for helping my buddy, millionaire entrepreneur Adam Khoo, launch his Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires product.

Take a look at this:

Adam Wong clocked $9,000 in 2 weeks through his internet marketing efforts. Although I believe it’s a revenue figure, the net profit would be close to that because it’s Adam Khoo’s digital product at: Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires.

I was talking to Adam Wong the other night and he was asking about traffic generation strategies.

I believe traffic hasn’t been difficult to generate provided you have a traffic plan.

Jo Han and Ewen gave a great presentation at their Unstoppable Traffic workshop a couple of weeks ago and will be releasing a DVD set soon, but in the meantime, I’ll be doing a short series.

Traffic generation is, unfortunately, related to Search Engine Optimization. I don’t particularly like spending inordinate amounts of time figure out the optimal keywords, staring at keyword lists and spending all day insert meta and other HTML tags into my blog post. So I’ll cover the organic aspects of traffic generation.

• Onsite Traffic Generation:

Blogging, hands down, is a great platform to begin with, compared to creating a static website.

Between Blogger/Blogspot and WordPress, I hear that Google just loves Blogspot and gives preferential positioning to blogger blogs in the SERPs (search engine results pages) (Though no one has exactly come out to say this publicly.). It probably helps that Google owns Blogspot.

I like WordPress though, because the plugins such as Popularity Contest, help level the playing field and give your blog a level of functionality and benefits that Blogspot blogs lack.

I plan to author a series on essential WordPress plugins that I’m using that should be in every WordPress bloggers arsenal.

If you are looking at profit-oriented blogging, be sure to check out SecretBlogWeapon.com for this amazing tool by blogger Gobala Krishnan. It incorporates a niche research guide, SEO optimization specifically for blogs and traffic generators.

• Offsite Traffic Generation:

By targeting blogs and forums in your target niche (such Internet Marketing, golf, dog grooming, wedding planning), you can go outside of your blog and prospect for high targeted and relevant prospects.

For the Internet Marketing niche, I head to:

Blogs:

• Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker (Shoemoney.com)
• Darren Rowse (ProBlogger.net)
• Derek Gehl (Internet Marketing Center)
• Super Affiliate Ewen Chia (SecretAffiliateWeapon is a great resource)

Forums:

• DigitalPoint (forums.digitalpoint.com)
• Internet Marketing Singapore
• Conquer Your Niche
• And my own DigitalKeiretsu forum

My belief is that if you provide original content (even in a blog comment!) which:

• provides value to the reader
• deepens the conversation
• provides resources to relevant posts or websites

You will be viewed as a good contributor.

As you demonstrate your knowledge and competence, you can expect visitors to your site.

Traffic generation is simple, isn’t it?

In addition to announcing the release of WordPress MU (multi user) 1.0 (the software/platform that hosts numerous blogs at WordPress.com) and bbPress (the tag-based forum software), they’ve just announced the launch of WordPress 2.0.5 earlier today.

According to the post: WordPress 2.0.5 Ronan released

This latest incarnation contains about 50 bug fixes.

Despite what some might say, I believe that WordPress is a superior blogging platform, compared to others.

Two factors ring in it’s favor.

• For on-site optimization, the software’s RSS and SEO-friendly features are incomparable.

• Also the open-source nature of the software and the numerous plugins available enable you to configure it like a static website, an online magazine, or as an e-commerce storefront.

It’s the Swiss Army Knife of blogging platforms in my opinion.

Which is why I’ve built the DigitalKeiretsu community centered around WordPress with SecretBlogWeapon and SecretWebHostingWeapon playing strong support roles.

Onward, Income Blogging!

We had a good training session covering

• Internet Marketing basics
• Blogging
• Affiliate Marketing

About 8 members turned up.

We shot about 1.5 hours of footage and this’ll be productized soon.

Here’s some feedback from two of the attendees:

Luo Bin (Robin) says:
I should say thank you for the invation. the group is just great.

Sunnygal says:
yah, it was good. I had many questions answered, so my confidence in doing IM is somewhat boosted
Looks like we’re on track to work towards the first goal of $2,000 recurring monthly income within 2 months.

Then proceed to work on $5,000 recurring monthly income within 6 months.
I’ve got a few requests to join the Keiretstu team, and you can check details at:

Want to succeed at Internet Marketing? Get into the Keiretsu

Although official enrolment has closed, we’re still taking in members subject to individual review. We still have a few more places.
Our tracking system will monitor the orders placed at http://www.secretblogweapon.com and http://www.ultimateaffiliateweapon.com and we’ll process the membership if approved.

PS: If you’ve bought SBW or UAW, some of the emails I’ve sent to the people are bouncing back. If you haven’t received email from me yet, could you drop me a note at the Contact Me page together with the email you registered when buying the products? This’ll help me process your membership.

According to WordPress Adsense System creator, Gobala Krishnan, I have the highest conversion rate among all affiliates.

Despite being new at affiliate marketing, I landed the top affiliate position for August 06. You can read more about it here: http://www.WhoIsAndrewWee.com #1 Affiliate Internet Marketing partner for SecretBlogWeapon.com!

By the end of the first week of September, I am on track to hit the same number of sales for the ENTIRE month of August.

Will it be top affiliate again? Well, if you’re the betting kind, I could give you a good return on your wager…

The success of the campaign was unexpected, but I suspect it has to do with the SecretBlogWeapon components that I’m offering compared to other affiliates.

But more on that later.

What is the WordPress Adsense System anyway?

It costs $67.

Is it worth it?

Or is it just another ebook that makes lots of promises and is full of hot air?

(Trust me, having spent hundreds of hours reviewing lots of blogging tools, I’ve discovered my share of turkeys, chickens and outright donkeys in the batch!)

I realized I haven’t done a formal review of Secret Blog Weapon, so here goes:

This is what you get in the system:

• 2 ebooks
• software
• 2 guides.

Sounds expensive, doesn’t it?

I thought so too, until I checked out and started using it. And from the results I’m seeing, I feel it’s actually priced too cheap! (but don’t raise the price, Gobala!)