Time Mastery for Internet Marketers July 31, 2006
Posted by Andrew Wee in : Internet Marketing, business 2.0 , 2 commentsInternet Marketing is a dangerous time trap.
You could be surfing the net, visiting forums, reading experts sites and before you know it, it’s 5am and you have to be up in 3 hours time for a meeting.
Is there an easy way out of this situation?
It’s not easy to regain control of your time, but the following could be helpful.
- Plan your time at the start of the day. Easy to do for the first 3 days. Plan how you’d like to use the day. Especially since you’re likely to be awake for about 16 of them. Factor time for eating, relaxing and doing other non-work related matters. You can have about 12 hours of productive time, so it could be challenging to plan 14 or 16 hours of work.
- Produce during your peak period. Are you a morning or night person? Are you at your best before lunch? After an afternoon nap? In the evenings after dinner, or maybe in the early morning when everyone’s gone to bed. Understanding your peak period and acting on it, may give you a 50% increase in your productivity. Work with your biorhythmns and your body’s patterns, not against it.
- Critical 20, Ignore the 80: Pareto’s principle helped him determine that 20% of the citizens of Italy controlled 80% of its wealth. Similarly 20% of the tasks you need to achieve will get you 80% of your results. Focus on the critical 20% and ignore the trivial 80%
- Fight the battles, win the war: You’ll miss targets during the course of the day. Is that a reason to give up? Nope, not if you MUST succeed. Keep moving on, it’s your result at the end of the day that brings you one step closer to success. Overly fixiating on micro level targets, may mean you miss the macro goals.
- Discipline, discipline, discipline: Time mastery isn’t easy. Nothing worth working for is going to be. (otherwise everyone walking the streets will be a millionaire) If it’s worth workng for, it’s worth suffering (if you choose to look at it that way) for.
Are these foolproof tips?
Only a fool would think so, but they’re a way to get started, so saddle up and prepare to ride into battle!
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Blogging for Dummies: Singapore’s finest July 30, 2006
Posted by Andrew Wee in : blogging , 2 commentsSomething came to mind while reading today’s Sunday Times feature on blogging.
- It’s really popular
- It’s gone mainstream
- A lot of Singapore bloggers are clueless about the commercialization of blogging
Let’s look at these one at a time:
- It’s popular: when aunties, uncles and your friendly neighbourhood mamak stall owner have a blog, expect that it’ll plateauing. There’ll be some fallout soon. (remember bubble tea? -or boba tea to our American friends).
The publicity is helpful because you will no longer have shouting matches when someone asks you what you’ve been doing.
You say ‘blog’
They look at you strangely and say ‘log?’.
No, blog.
Log?
Blog!
Log?
No! B-L-O-G?
Huh? Blog? Is that some type of log?
Grrr.
But at least some of them might’ve read the papers today. The other times I tell them, hey go look at up on a wiki.
Weak?
No, wiki!
Wee Kee? Who?
No, wiki!
(ok, i’ll stop here).
- It’s gone mainstream: This is bad. Remember the intelligensia always say, the moment something makes it to the front page of Time, it’s dead.
Remember William Gibson? Cyberpunk? Neuromancer? Bruce Sterling? Islands in the Net?
Where are they now?
Yup.
Granted, the Sunday Times isn’t Time, well if you added a “S” and the word “Sunday” in front…
But the moment it’s hit the mainstream consciousness, the concept loses it’s ‘conceptual purity’, it has to be ‘dumbed’ down to it’s ‘blogging for dummies’, ‘blogging for the IT-challenged’ minorities.
Shall we celebrate?
Horray.
HL Mencken said: The masses are asses.
- A lot of Singapore bloggers are clueless about the commercialization of blogging
This is the part that really gets me. If you looked at the article, you’ll see that a ton of the blogs are hosted on blogger.com.
What’s wrong, you say?
Oh boy, we’ve just discovered another clueless one, Henry. prepare the surgical theatre, another sterilization on the way…
If you are planning to make big money out of something, it’s worthwhile checking it out.
Your domain is very important. It’s your lifeblood.
The domain is tied to your Google PageRank and Alexa ranking.
A lot of value is tied to that, especially the frequency of spidering, SERP (search engine results page) ranking, etc.
And you seriously want to tie your domain to a subdomain on Blogger.com or Wordpress.com???
(I don’t have anything against the software, merely hosting on the domain).
If you build your site to a PR5, Alexa sub-100,000 ranking, and your blogging provider decides to put web ads on your page. Good bye and good luck.
A domain name and hosting are very affordable.
Why not sign up for it?
It’ll:
- Build up your brand value
- You have control over your domain and what you want to write about
- You can sell it some day if you wanted to. (Try selling your blogger subdomain…)
If you really need help with registering a domain name (there are strategies) and choosing a web hosting, you can visit my Internet Marketing site.
If you have questions, you can drop me a note here.
Tags:No TagsPopularity: 17%
Internet Marketing and Business Success: A Mental Game
Posted by Andrew Wee in : Internet Marketing, business 2.0 , add a commentThere is a major problem in the Internet Marketing, Entrepreneurship and Business Training arena.
In fact, I feel the problem is so endemic and pervasive that it singlehandedly is responsible for causing the failure of many new ventures.
It also separates the men from the boys and the women from the girls.
I’m not sure why trainers don’t go through this.
Is it oversight? Or a presumption that successful people will have this quantity?
There is a lot of emphasis on the hands-on skills, and the strategy and the planning.
But there is an abject failure in addressing the mental game.
Sports psychologists have been chiefly responsible for the teams like ACS (Independent)’s rugby team prevailing against larger, more powerful Australian opponents (I’m an ACS alumni). Andre Agassi’s successful comeback is in part due to Anthony Robbins’ coaching.
They say too that athletes have an edge in business endeavors.
Although I’m not an athlete (at least not one for an extended period of time!), I have a fix on what they mean.
Any idiot can be optimistic in a positive business environment (especially at the start).
However the true test of your business acumen and mettle is what happens when the chips are down.
What happens when your funds start to tick down.
Do you have a Fight response?
Flight?
Or Freeze?
It’s interesting how little we’ve progressed from our Neanderthal roots.
Almost all successful entrepreneurs are “Alpha Males”, type-A personality, fighters.
Especially when the odds are against you is the best time to fight.
You can encounter massive resistance, your chance of success might be one in a thousand, one in a million, but you still go on.
If you have the ‘need to succeed‘, success will eventually come.
Just hang in there.
Here’s where atheletes come in.
Have you ever been in intensive sports training?
After running fifty laps around the track, you come panting to the finish line.
The coach comes to you and says, ‘Man, that was below your best. Give me another 50!’
At that moment, you already feel a magnetic attraction to the locker room. You are probably staring at the coach, goggle-eyed (at least on the first occasion), but you realize the showers aren’t coming until you finish the task at hand.
So with thighs throbbing and swollen with lactic acid, you pound the track and your mind is pushing itself to the wall. Your lungs might feel like bursting, your arms feel numb, you’ve got sweat flowing down your forehead, mucus streaming out of your nose.
What do you do?
You run the first 5 laps.
Your mind counts each step. Each step made. Each step completed. Anticipating the next step. And the next. And the next.
You finish one lap.
You start on the second.
Your legs are wobbly, but you finish it.
You start on the third.
Your vision gets blurry for a moment, but you shake it off as you finish the third.
The fourth and fifth seem a little easier.
You never thought you’d made it, but you did.
It’s probably the first 5 laps you’ll ever do.
You run the next 5 laps, thinking to yourself, gee that wasn’t so bad.
And the next 10 laps feel like cake.
Soon you finish the 50 laps and think to yourself, gee, I CAN do it.
Pow! a mental barrier broken.
When they come into the business world, the barriers you encounter are cake, compared to the 50 laps.
You know that the first 5 are always the toughest.
Breaking through those means the rest although not quite ‘cake’ will be substantially easier.
And meanwhile your peers are wondering how come you’re a superman or superwoman.
Let them wonder.
Success is a mind game.
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Speedlinking #2 July 29, 2006
Posted by Andrew Wee in : business 2.0, speedlinking , 2 commentsHi,
I’m continuing the tradition my buddy, Jag Senghera, started a couple of days ago.
You can see his post here: Jag Senghera Internet Marketing Malaysia.
Here’s my speedlinks:
Jag Senghera : Jag is a cool guy with lots of blogging ideas and is quite an adsense expert too. Sometimes you read someone’s online postings and have this bigger than life impression of someone.I was looking forward to meeting him.He lives across the causeway and supposed to pop into town last week. didn’t get to see him. what a pity. he has a book on blogging coming out soon. any day now.
Stuart Tan: Stuart is a guy I’ve known for the past… gee… is it 4 years or 5 years already? He’s really smart, somewhat funny and can be very sarcastic. I can’t figure out how he manages to do NLP, public speaking, internet marketing, and come out with CDs. does the guy ever sleep? I’m not sure, but you can check the time stamp on his blogs and websites (too many to count, so i randomly picked one). he’s always got lots of strange interesting ideas.
Ryan Chua (ambatch seocontest): Ryan is a really nice guy. and he writes really slowly. i am wondering if i should take a wager with him whether he or i will finish a book first. i’m not so worried what i should wage a prize on, i’m more concerned that i’ll win… get your book out soon, Ryan… oh yeah, he’s planning to win the ambatch seocontest, so head on to his blog, read his post and support him. ’nuff said.
Violet Lim LunchActually.com: Violet or Miss Match is going to be a mummy soon. Gee, i wonder where she finds the time. besides being the co-founder of lunchactually.com (surprise! a lunch dating service for professionals), she’s active in toastmasters, women’s entrepreneurship organization, rotary club… and finds time to work on a baby.
Rachit Dayal Google Adwords expert: Rachit is founder of RachitDayal.com.
He does copywriting, PPC, direct marketing. Is there anything he doesn’t do? frankly, i’m not sure. but he sure has lots of ideas. oh yeah, he’s recently taken on the vice-president education role at Raintree Toastmasters Club and also volunteer to be program director for a Patterns of Excellence NLP course. good luck to him. he might not be sleeping much.
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Building free Blog Traffic with BlogExplosion
Posted by Andrew Wee in : blogging , add a commentPopularity: 17%
Massive Internet Marketing income and mindshare
Posted by Andrew Wee in : Internet Marketing , add a commentThe last 24 hours was an eye-opening experience for me.
Truly.
I was surfing the Domain Social forum and wow, the scale at which some of these guys are doing domain parking and auctions, and going for big name advertising programs like IntelliText (min 500,000 impressions per month) really blows the mind.
In Asia, we have maybe 15,000 impressions and we’re pretty darn impressed already.
We see someone who’s got $20,000 in affiliate income and we think, wow…. won’t I like to be one of these guys?
Meanwhile, some of our US counterparts who are pulling in $50,000 might be considered average, while $200,000 might be above average.
It’s all a matter of your basis of comparison.
Do we aspire to the a big fish in the Southeast Asian pond, or a small fish in the big global pond with aspirations to eventually become one of the big fish.
Having a hope is the first step.
But then I’ve always believed that hope is for the hopeless.
We need something more than hope, we need an Internet Marketing eco-system to help build the community.
And at the same time, we can’t just rely on talent within our own borders like Jo Han Mok and Ewen Chia, Stuart Tan, Ryan Chua, Rachit Dayal and myself (heh…). We need to do tie-ups and alliances with our colleagues across the border like Jag Senghera, Gobala Krishnan (although he slags us for having no free wireless Internet. Akan datang ok!), Kidino and Zamri Nanyan.
Unless we are able to do more JVs and soon, it’s going to be tougher to break into the market.
Maybe it’s a matter of sharing our resources, after all the pie is big enough for all.
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