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January 18, 2007 by

I Escaped The Kluang Floods

For those that know, I actually come from a very small town in south Malaysia, called Kluang.

(Small town boy with big dream – you know how that one goes)

Last week I headed back to Kluang, Johor to visit my parents, and I managed to stop by Singapore on a day trip. From the moment I stepped on Singaporean soil, till the moment I decided to escape to my cost apartment in KL, it rained like %^&*.
[ev type="youtube" data="L_MGvM9cn8g"][/ev]

See the video above?

My parents live in a shop lot which is about 400-500 meters away from the overflowing river. This happened on the day I left actually.

Thank god, this was about as bad as it got! My parents were confidently going about their business, almost certain that the floods will not reach them.

This time, it didn’t.

Filed Under: General
January 15, 2007 by

Website Awards from Webmaster Malaysia

Got an email from the people at Webmaster Malaysia.

The first submission round for Webmaster Malaysia Website Award is open. To participate, kindly send an email to award [at] webmastermalaysia.com with the following details:

Your Website Name:
Website Basic Description:
Website URL:
Your Forum Member Name:

Your website will be reviewed and ranked accordingly by the panel judges of the award. Once the submission closed, the award winners will be featured in the Winner Showcase Forum:

http://www.webmastermalaysia.com/forumdisplay.php?f=68

For more details and questions, please refer here: http://www.webmastermalaysia.com/showthread.php?p=49835

The first round submission will be closed at 15th February 2007.

Webmaster Malaysia Website Award is a brand new award of the Webmaster Malaysia community with the purpose to show a token of appreciation to the better websites from Malaysia, as well as provide learning opportunity and model to the community on building a good website.

It’s been years since I partipated in a “website award” competition. So I’ll enter and see what happens just for fun :)

Filed Under: Internet Marketing Malaysia
January 15, 2007 by

Adding Simple Scripts to Your Salesletter

Dynamic Drive is a great place to find simple scripts you can use to add “power” to your salesletters. It’s all free, and customizable too. These are DHTML based scripts.

Dynamic Drive

Here are a few must-haves:

  • Live Date – Adds the current date to your salesletter. Almost all salescopy I have seen use something like this to make their copy look like it was written today, or recently.
  • Universal Countdown Script – If you’re launching a new site, you can use this to display the mount of days / hours / minutes left to your big launch.
  • Lightbox Preview – previews a bigger scale image of a thumbnail. You can use this to display images on your salesletter, and instead of redirecting people to a new page you can let them preview your image (screenshot etc) on the page itself

-gk-

Filed Under: Ebook Marketing
January 15, 2007 by

Paid Forum Posters – What’s Your Opinion?

Would you pay people to post on your forum. Is it even a good idea to begin with?

Paid Forum Posters I came across GetACommunity.com when I was reading Blogtrepreneur. Adnan was lamenting the death of his forum due to a lack of posters, and the difficulties he faced dealing with spammers and and not-too-user-friendly PHPBB software.

The idea of paying forum posters have crossed my mind on several occasions while developing the Easy WordPress forum. In fact I wanted to start a forum on this site as well, but was still unsure as to the viability of it.

Looking at the packages offered by Andreas Bard, the owner of GetACommnity, it’s pretty attractive. According to the site:

We are offering you professional posters/writers that write educated and high quality posts.

Their “PostPal 3″ option looks like something everyone can get:

  • 6 new members (posters)
  • 135 posts (45 new threads)
  • Minimum 25 words per post
  • Quality and educated content
  • Price: $33.75 ($0.26 per post)

I still have my reservations. If you have used this service or any other paid forum poster service before, do leave a comment. I’m curious if hiring paid forum posters is a good thing to do.

After all, forums are about interaction between members, which I think no forum poster would do, unless you’re also paying them to reply to other people’s posts.

Filed Under: Home Business, Product Reviews
January 13, 2007 by

Andre Chaperon’s Clickbank and Adwords Formula

Andre Chaperon has posted a REALLY in-depth case study of how hes used Adwords to promote Clickbank products as an affiliate.

He really goes to the most detail elements of it, including using a lot of tracking tools to test his results, and create a sales funnel for marketing products via Adwords.

I wonder if I will ever go to that extreme with my own Adwords campaigns? Currently I just use the Adwords conversion tool, a simple tracker and split testing for my campaigns.
You can read more here.

Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Google AdWords
January 12, 2007 by

Andrew Wee, THAT-2 and Unstoppable Rain

What does Andrew Wee and THAT-2 have in common?

I had to get to Singapore for both :)

First: Andrew Wee

Andrew Wee and Gobala Krishnan

Andrew is a great guy, and this is my first time meeting him in person. A real estate agent by day and super affiliate marketer by night, Andrew was the top affiliate for my WordPress Adsense System for two three months in a row.

He’s generated over 40 sales for me, more than the next two top affiliates put together.

He’s posted about me on his blog, and we’ll be doing a product together on how to get traffic to your blogs. I was impressed by Andrew’s meteoric rise in the past few months. The blog he started early last year has already a Pagerank 5, an Alexa ranking of 11,000 and total traffic of 8,000+ visitors per month.

In fact, I learned a thing or two about Andrew about getting traffic.

Andrew is going to Las Vegas this month for a seminar, and he’s set a target of making $20,000 a month by March 2007. That’s more difficult than mine, to reach $30,000 a month by end of 2007.

Andrew masterminded a trip to Mc Donalds to prove to me that my previous post about the lack of free wireless access in Singapore was not entirely true. I got free coffee to keep my mouth shut about the issue in future…:)

See: WhoIsAndrewWee.com

Second: THAT-2

The main reason I went to Singapore – to collect a JK Audio phone recording equipment.

THAT-2

To ship it to Malaysia would mean I had to get clearing and approval from the imigration guys, and it was recommended that I come down and get it myself. I didn’t mind as this meant I could also visit my parents in Johor.

THAT-2 is a phone tap, that will record any phone conversation directly to your PC. With this, recording high-quality interviews and teleseminars becomes much easier, and more predictable. I can use it as the main recording software, or as the backup system. Although you can get a lot of teleseminar services out there, most of them are internet based and sometimes it can stop recording without your knowledge.

For those interested, the price of THAT-2 is just $240, which is quite affordable compared to others, and considering that this is pro-level stuff used by radio stations and broadcast stations.

With this nifty piece of equipment, I am on track to achieve my target of $30,000 by end of 2007. In case you’re wondering, my 2006 goal was to do $10,000 a month but I only made it to $6,200 in December, which was my best month by the way.

See: JKAudio.com

And so my one-day trip to Singapore ended with rain, and more rain. In fact as I’m writing this it has been raining non-stop in Kluang where my parents live. I hope I don’t get up to a flooded porch!

Reminds me of the lyrics to one of my favourite songs by Johnny Lang: “Look out of ma’window… is it still raining?”

Filed Under: General
January 12, 2007 by

Does Viral Marketing Really Work?

Viral Marketing Works

Does Viral Marketing really work?

The checks above amount to RM888 or USD246. It’s the total amount I spent for getting over 3,400 targetted opt-in subscribers to one of my viral marketing sites, in just 30 days.

I could have been more if not for the problems I had with my hosting script being shutdown, and also the lack of dependable Internet access for over 20 days when I moved to a new home.

So yes, viral marketing works, and here’s how you do it without affiliates or high-profile JVs:

  1. Create a product – in my case, it was a case-study of a project I did
  2. Give it away for free - instead of charging for the product, give it away for free.
  3. Ask for referrals - ask new members to refer others. In my case, they have to refer 5 people to get to the VIP level, which gives them access to more stuff the free members don’t get
  4. Hold a contest - instead of paying per-lead, I held a contest for 30 days, and offered prizes and cash rewards

In my example, I was not charging for a product. Therefore, I cant reply of affiliates to make it work. I could pay everyone per-lead, but that would have cost to much to implement. So I knew I had to reply on people referring their frieds.

I got a call from my ex-colleague who heard about me and my “Internet thing” from a co-worker who wanted to fill his 5-friends quota. What a suprise! It finally proved to me that viral marketing is a real thing.

If I had not targetted such a small market (Malaysians only) I might have got much more opt-in subscribers. But I had a reason to do this, as I wanted to build a massive Malaysian list for a product (and a physical book) I had planned for 2007.

And that’s the final lesson for viral marketing – do not just build a list, if you have no definate plan for that list. The list would otherwise be wasted eventually.

Filed Under: Email Marketing
January 3, 2007 by

Avoid Duplicate Subscription Error Message in Aweber

Aweber Error

Aweber is one of the best autoresponder and mailing list services out there. But with every great service, there are some gaps that cause problems.

The main one I had was with Aweber’s double-optin procedure.

Once a prospect has already subscribe and verified to a mailing list, if he subscribes via the same form again he’ll get an error message like the one above.
To avoid getting this rather unprofessional message, you need to enter the following code into your optin form via HTML:

< input type=”hidden” value=”http://www.example.com/thank-you-already-onlist.htm” name=”meta_redirect_onlist” />

With that code, you can safely just redirect the user to your sales page without causing confusion. Remember that the same user may have forgotten that he had previously opted in to your website, and may decide to opt-in again.

However, the option above does not put the user back to the first message of your autoresponder, which I think is a feature that the good folks at Aweber need to have a look at.

Filed Under: Email Marketing
January 3, 2007 by

Back to Business in 2007

For many miserable days, I was trying to run my business with a decapitated, sick and pathetic Internet connectivity. The Taiwan earthquake that damaged the APCN 2 network will definately be my last memory of 2006.

It would connect, then right at the middle of loading the page, it would just go “poof”. And then I had to restart my DSL modem in hope of getting a fresh, new connection. Sometimes it worked, but most of the times it didn’t.

Only today did I get back the Internet I know, and have come to depend on to make a living. I got access to my blogs, and the connection is steady. I even downloaded an MP3!

So it’s goodbye to 2006′s wrath, and a warm welcome to the challenge of 2007.

I’m not a staunch believer in goal setting, but I do have my overall targets for 2007. Among them are:

  • to make $30,000 a month by the December 2007
  • to set-up a private limited company for my Internet business
  • to hire 10 – 20 new writers (blogs, ghostwriters, etc)
  • to add 10 new products to my online catalog
  • to break into a new niche market in music

To achieve that, I’m going to need YOUR help!

Yes, instead of hiring out to strangers, my new Internship Program will reward my existing customers first. They will get a chance to fill in new “Internship Positions” for the following:

  • support / helpdesk personnel
  • bloggers / writers / ghostwriters / translators
  • website / forum administrator
  • general work

Priority is given to customers, and then the remainder will be announced to regular sucscribers. Please look out for emails titled “Internship Program” from me!

So good luck to everyone in 2007!

Filed Under: General