Malaysian Bloggers Face The Heat (Again) As Elections Draw Near

An article in Yahoo News states:

A Malaysian government minister has accused bloggers, who have been writing avidly on upcoming elections, of being cowards and warned they are being monitored, a report said Friday.

Youth and Sports Minister Azalina Othman said opposition parties were using blogs to get their message out because they believed the Home Affairs Ministry was busy monitoring reports in the mainstream media, the Star daily said.

If there was ever a sign that the government is being run by monkeys, this is probably it. What do they expect when they control all the mass media? 

In a later article in Yahoo news:

The mainstream media in Malaysia are either government-owned or controlled by the parties in the ruling coalition. They also need annually to renew government licenses to operate. This has ensured that virtually every newspaper and television station broadcasts flattering reports of the government. The opposition rarely gets a good mention in the papers.

The Election Commission is supposed to be an independent body, whose members are appointed by the constitutional monarch. But it is largely seen as a pro-government panel that has done little to promote electoral fairness.

Why don’t they just cut the Internet, burn all the PCs and books, and lets all go back to staying in kampung houses..

Asia Tops The Spam List

asia-spam

News Source: NST Tech & U, February 14, 2006

In NST’s Tech & U column on 14th February, I noticed an article that caught my attention. It seems that Asia tops the list of spam sources, and I can bet that somewhere in there are a big group of Malaysian spammers.

If you notice Asia contributes 32.1% of spam, but in the individual countries list the only countries from Asia are China and South Korea, which only amounts to 8.1%. So all the other Asian countries are listed in the "Others" section. I bet this report was done by a mat salleh company who didn’t know (or care) about Malaysia, but I’m pretty sure we’re up there among the best.

Brand New Stylish Whitepaper WordPress Themes

Just released is a new WordPress theme that looks stylish, minimalistic and sexy. Whitepaper is upside down from conventional WordPress designs by featuring 1 column at the top half and 2 columns toward the bottom of the theme.

Top half of Whitepaper

whitepaper top

Bottom half of Whitepaper

whitepaper bottom

Whitepaper also includes the side blog Plugin as part of the download package and you can find exact instructions on installation on the authors page.

Here are the features of Whitepaper:

  • 1 column at the top
  • 2 columns at bottom
  • The width is fixed
  • Valid CSS and XHTML
  • Integrated aside / sideblog

It takes some accustoming to get used to the layout of Whitepaper I think, but I like the simple design which steers away from clutter. This theme can also be used as a photo blog theme for those who have some coding experience.

To preview the Whitepaper WordPress Theme click on the link.

Get Psychic Powers with The Psychic Search Plugin

Pawan Agrawal over at MaxBlogPress has released some great Plugins as of late. One of these is the Psychic Search Plugin that turns you into a psychic that knows what your blog readers want from you.

Imagine the powers you can have

When you download the Psychic Search Plugin it will become easier to satisfy your readers by providing the content that they were looking for in the first place. With every search that is performed on your blog you will know exactly what visitors were looking for.

Once the Plugin is installed and activated I can see the stats when I navigate from the Dashboard – Options – Psychic Search.

Take a look at the screen shot below and what this tells me:

psychic search plugin admin

As you can see I’ve had 3 specific searches in the last 24 hours looking for information on:

  • blog mentoring
  • freelance mentor
  • pro-blogging

The Plugin also tells me what was searched for in the last 7 days as well as the last 30 days. Now here is when it becomes interesting. Look at the next image to see what I mean.

psychic search plugin

On the same page further down are the results I want to see as a blog owner. This is were the meat of the whole Plugin lies. Note that some of the search terms weren’t returning any results. These are the ones I would want to blog about to keep those readers come back from more. Namely to show me information that isn’t available on my blog right now but what people want.

I can blog about:

  • blog mentoring
  • freelance mentor
  • pro-blogging
  • beginning of new blogs
  • starting free blogs
  • blog-meta
  • and all the other terms that aren’t yet searched for

You’ll never have writers block again!

Use this to beat your competition

How would you feel if you looked for specific information on a blog only to find nothing but then suddenly – magically the blogger writes about what you were looking for?

Truly psyched I guess! How did he….

You can also change the settings of the Plugin and how it reports back to you.

psychic search plugin settings

The Psychic Search Plugin is available for free from MaxBlogPress and there is also an in dept guide that explains everything in detail.

I suggest you head over there right now and become the next psychic blogger!

Why Some Malaysians Have The Wrong Mentality

Over the past 2 years meeting a lot of Malaysians who want to make money online, I’ve only met a handful of people with the right mentality about making money online. The rest of them just don’t have it takes to be successful online, and the number one reason is the way they think.

Watch this video to discover what I think separates the people who succeed, from those who never will. Get the YouTube version if you want to put this videos on our blog.

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Pictures from Internet Millionaires Mastermind 01

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Are Your Blog Posts Listed in StumbleUpon?

With Google fully integrating data on their search pages, it’s really simple to find out what pages from your blog are already in StumbleUpon.

Simple type in the following: site:yourwebsite.com

Of course, replace “yourwebsite.com” with your actual website URL, and you’ll see something like this:

stumble-upon-google

This type of search command is useful to see what pages have been indexed in Google, but now it can also be used to see which pages (red arrows) are already being visited by users. You’ll also be able to see the main tags used for your website and the user ID of the StumbleUpon user who first discovered your website, or your individual blog pages.

Are You Blogging in The Make Money Online Niche?

rbc4_40 You’ve read couple of blog and even bought a blogging course like WordPress Adsense System. You’re all pumped up to start your first blog and guess what topic comes to mind?

“How to make money online!”

This is by far the most popular niche market most new bloggers enter, mostly without any research and with no real uniqueness or direction in mind. I’ve once wondered why most people choose this topic when there are literally thousands of easier niche markets to enter as a new blogger, either to make money from Google Adsense of from affiliate marketing.

I guess most people do it for the following reasons:

  • This is a really compelling topic – When you’re spending all your time online trying to make money online, you’d naturally feel attracted to the topic of “Making money online”
  • You thought it would be easy - Yes, you thought it would be easy to make a lot of money from this market, as compared to other niche markets there are certainly more products you can promote as an affiliate in this niche.

The “Make money online” market can really be profitable, provided you can do the following:

  • Find a more targeted niche within the “Make money online” niche, for example video marketing, audio product creation, Adsense,
  • Go one inch wide and one mile deep. Find a small but targeted market, but go really really deep into the market with your information. In short, become the best source of information for that small niche, and dominate it
  • Research the growth potential of your topic, and make sure that you’re not on a sinking boat. For example, look at the graph below from Google Trends and you’ll see that this blog has the potential to grow in the future. Type in a specific keyword in Google Trends, and if your graph is on the decline it’s probably not a good idea to start a blog on the topic.

google-trends

So what do you do if you’ve already started a blog on “How to make money online”?

Well for starters, you need to redefine your content and direction. The “make money online” topic is too general and while it can be profitable, as a newbie it would be better for you to find a smaller, “nichier” topic. In fact, it’s easier to make money from smaller topics within the “make money online” market itself.

Secondly, read this post by Andrew Pavelski on “How to Survive in The Make Money Online Niche”. He shares a few valuable tips on what you need to focus on to get the results you’re looking for.

Building Your Virtual Real Estate by Sunny Tan

Here are the presentation videos and presentation slides from our first mastermind session in Armada Hotel on February 16, 2008. Presentation by Sunny Tan on “Building Your Virtual Real Estate”, part 1 and 2, as well as the presentation slides in PDF.
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Dealing With Failure

image Failure is a by product of life. Admit it. I’m sure you failed many of times throughout life. I know I have. But what do you do when things go wrong and don’t turn out as expected? Do you just give up, or do you push through in your quest to make it regardless of what’s holding you back?

Dealing with failure is hard since we need to take a good hard look at ourselves and nobody likes to do this. It’s ingrained since our earliest childhood. We hate being reprimanded and always like to display ourselves in the perfect light.

So when failure happens we need to stop and take a good hard look at why we failed. often this will lead us to some very ugly truth about ourselves which are hard to accept.

But unless we do, we will struggle to move on.

Dealing with failure becomes easier the more you do it

Failing is like falling off the bike, dusting yourself off and step on again

The more this happens, the easier it becomes and before we know it, we drive the bicycle freehanded. We can have the same effects in business. Failure helps us to move on and learn from what didn’t work.

It’s nothing you should be ashamed of.

I once learned that the more failures one person has had, the more successful he/she will become in life. After many years of failure in my private life, professional life and business life I can safely attest to this.

Instead of being afraid now I welcome failure (with measures) since it helps me to move ahead.

Sure I want to succeed in everything I do, but at the same time I know now that making mistakes isn’t going to make me look like an idiot. It is simply a stepping stone to success.

How do you feel about the subject? Are you afraid of making mistakes?