March 31, 2008 By

How Safe Is Your Maybank / Maybank2u Personal Information?

mb2u_logo_r If someone knows your Maybank account, they can get your phone number, address and other details. All they need is someone (a friend?) in Maybank that has access to the system. That’s exactly what happened to me today.

Someone called me on my personal mobile phone, and didn’t introduce himself at all. He started speaking in Tamil and I told him I could not speak in Tamil. Actually I can but I prefer not to, especially considering once you speak in Tamil, they tend to treat you less professionally. Then our conversation continued in BM.

Then as usual when someone gets hold of my personal number I always ask them how they got it. If they refused to say, conversation is over. When I asked this guy, he said:

I ask my friend in Maybank to get your phone number, from the Maybank2u account number you give on your website.

I know the fact that my name appeared in NST would draw some unexpected attention, but I didn’t expect it to come this way. The fact that someone like this can easily get access to my confidential Maybank details made me angry. Does Maybank allow anyone with access to the system to see a customer’s personal details? Should it not be available to only higher level people, with limited access?

My conversation with that guy didn’t go well after that.

Although he apologized for getting my number that way (but refused to let me know the name of the person who helped him get it or his own name for that matter) I already felt that my personal information and privacy has been compromised. I was not in the mood to talk, and I wasn’t in the mood to be nice either..

Personal data security is extremely important, but do you really think any of your information like the ones in Maybank, your credit card, your EPF data etc is really protected? I think it will never really be 100% secure, especially when other human beings are involved.

Securing Your Online Data

There are many ways people can get your information, and the easiest way is to get hold of your login and password, which they can easily get by installing some type of keylogger software in your PC. Then, they are able to track ANY login and password you use to access your account. I strongly recommend you get RoboForm to protect all your online login data and please don’t do the same mistake I did; please do not use the same password for all your logins!

Filed Under: Computers and Internet Tagged With: , ,
March 31, 2008 By

Indonesian Internet Marketers To Dominate The World?

 iMarketing35

When I was on holiday in Indonesia, I met a really cool group of Indonesian Internet marketers who showed me a really good time in Jakarta, Bandung and a few other places.

Although Internet marketing in Indonesia is relatively untapped, the Internet marketers I have met are enthusiastic about the huge opportunity. After all, Indonesia has the 4th largest population in the world with cheaper labor costs than most countries and increasing Internet penetration – and these guys have a plan on how to ccapitalize.

From left (excluding me): Cornelius, Semmy Wijayanto, Francis Jimenez (imported from the Philippines) and Dee Ferdinand – a special thanks to all!

Meet these guys at the Bali Rendezvous Internet marketing event in Bali, Indonesia. Very smart guys, and even if they do not end up dominating the world, they will definitely be among the top Indonesian Internet marketers.

Filed Under: Internet Marketing Asia Tagged With: , ,
March 31, 2008 By

3 Things I Would Change With The Help of Hiro Nakamura

iMarketing33 What if you could travel back in time? What would you do to change the past to positively effect the life you have today?

Unlike Hiro Nakamura who can just blink and be teleported to different timelines in history, most of us are stuck with what we have now and try to make the best of it. But what if Hiro Nakamura was real, he was your friend, and he’s asking you “I am Hiro. How do I save your world?”

Only 3 things Hiro, just tell the “past” me 3 things:

  • Don’t Take That Loan – I would ask Hiro to talk to the earlier me (at age 18) to not accept any education loans, because they are nothing but a trap, and most of the “education” I got from taking a loan for RM70,000 was crap anyway.
  • Don’t Drink That Beer – I would ask Hiro to ask the past me (at age 22) to stop drinking every single day. I would give the past me (fit and lean) a picture of me now and he would get the point.
  • Don’t Bother with The Band – I would ask Hiro Nakamura to hit me on the head (at age 23) with my own electric guitar and tell me to stop trying to be a rockstar. I would probably go into a coma for 3 years, but when I woke up I’m sure my band would still be playing the same 5 songs they did. It was a good experience, but this year I realized how much time I wasted by not following my own intuitions in the band.

Now of course you’d say “Never regret..”

But I bet if you were Hiro Nakamura or at least had him as a friend, you’ll be pretty tempted to change things a little bit.

Filed Under: General Tagged With: ,
March 29, 2008 By

WordPress Vs SiteBuildIt for Making Money Online

SBITop_03WordPress Vs SiteBuildIt - Which is better?

Well, actually the answer may not that be obvious since we’re not comparing apple-to-apple here.

SiteBuildIt by Ken Evoy is the first complete site management software I ever used, and although it has its shortcomings, SBI still survives till today. In fact, after a recent bout of updates SBI has managed to maintain it’s relevancy in today’s marketing world.

WordPress Vs. SiteBuildIt is a comparison that’s been a long time coming. Countless people have asked me about SiteBuildIt, and as someone who started Internet marketing reading one of Ken Evoy’s excellent “Masters” guides, let me give you my take on the topic.

What Is SiteBuildIt and How Does It Work?

SiteBuildIt is an online-based website creating and management tool. Although there has been similar types of sites before and after it, SiteBuildIt managed to not only survive, but thrive in today’s blogs-ruled word of online marketing due to the ingenuity of the product owners and the massive amount of real-life success stories they have to show.

SBI is also much more complete than all it’s rivals, and as a member you get access to:

  • Proprietor keyword research tools called the “Brainstorm It” tool that is as good as any other tool you can find on the market
  • A web based site-design tool / content management system you can use to build your site
  • Access to SBI’s library of “How To” information where you can basically learn everything from building a website to SEO to email marketing
  • A very wordy newsletter sent out rather frequently that is too full with good information its easy to miss them all
  • Constant motivation to continue with your online business, with all the success stories you can read about

Here’s a screenshot of SBI’s internal keyword research tool, as shown here.

makeupkeywords

In fact, SBI’s owners recommend that once you’re on board with them, you shut off all other sources of information and just concentrate on the information they provide. This is not a joke – SBI has more top-notch marketing information that you can imagine, and it might take you a year or so just to digest them all.

Related sub-pages of the main SBI website that tackle individual needs for the SiteBuildIt range of products:

Great For Newbies, But Annoying to Experts

This is one of the reasons why I stopped using SBI. It is great if you’re completely new and you’re willing to follow their system step-by-step to build your first website, get traffic to it, and see your first income stream slowly develop on the Internet.

But after that, SBI just gets in the way of your growth.

Their online-based website builder tool that you loved so much, now seems to sluggish and tedious. Compared to getting a WordPress blog set-up with plugins and a theme, the actual process of building a simple website using SBI is really hard work and takes a much, much longer time.

For me, once I knew how to build a website with DreamWeaver and how to set-up WordPress blogs and get traffic to my sites, I got extremely frustrated with the rigid interface and bulky tools that is SBI.

The problem is they have no shortcut options and you have to go through the same tedious process over and over again just to get simple things done. A lot of text, more text, and even more text and links to click on just to build a page. Too much of a good is bad.

I eventually converted my only SBI site into a WordPress blog and never looked back.

Ken Evoy takes every opportunity to sell SBI to you even if you already believe in it, and that gets to you after a while. You already know it’s good, so why do you need to be told that SBI is “the best” on every single page?

My final verdict: SiteBuildIt is a god-sent for newbies, but extremely frustrating for advanced users.

If you’re so new you don’t even know what an FTP is, join SiteBuildIt and build your first site with them. But once you’ve learned the ropes, you may want to get your own hosting and either create a site yourself using Dreamweaver / Frontpage, or use WordPress as the content management system.

You can always invest in keyword research tools like Keyword Elite which you are free to use for any purpose, and then get an Aweber account to manage your email marketing needs.

If you do not do this you’ll find yourself moving too fast for SBI, and after that it’s just a downward spiral of frustration and de-motivation.

WordPress, on the other hand, can be confusing for the beginners but goes the distance to match almost any need, from building Adsense sites to building automated article directories, for affiliate marketing and even for completed product-based integrated marketing.

I can understand if some die-hard SBI fans want to flame this blog post, but hey I’m not saying SBI is bad – it’s just not for anyone else other than the absolute beginner.

Interesting SiteBuildIt Videos to Watch

This video explains how SiteBuildIt works, and how to turn your skill or passion into a website.


This is a rather amusing video, titled “The Origin of The Webmaster”


Filed Under: Free Tips Tagged With: , ,
March 28, 2008 By

What Are Tags and How To Use Them in WordPress

Tag is a very common word used in the blogosphere, but what does it really mean and how (or why) do you use it?

My definition of tags:

Tags are descriptive keywords used to label something.

But here’s the “correct” definition according to Wikipedia:

A tag is a (relevant) keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information (a picture, a geographic map, a blog entry, a video clip etc.), thus describing the item and enabling keyword-based classification and search of information.

How Do Tags Help You Market Your Blog?

technorati-taggedWhen you use tags in your blog posts, other web 2.0 services like Technorati and MyBlogLog pick up these tags, and will display your latest blog posts in their “tag pages”.

That way, anyone visiting a page for the tag “obama” for example, probably trying to find the latest blog posts on the topic, would be able to find your blog and the specific post tagged “obama”.

If your blog uses high-traffic tags, you may end up getting more traffic but generally the links to your page will not stay on Technorati for long because as other similarly tagged posts come in, your entry gets pushed deeper and deeper into the site.

Next, displaying tags on your blog also helps with blog SEO or Search Engine Optimization. As a typical blog may have 10-50 posts per month and only 5-10 stay on the main page at any given time, the rest of the posts are eventually pushed into your archives, where the chances of a search engine finding them are smaller.

By displaying tags to your older posts, search engines get to index and re-index your pages, which can end up as more blog traffic.

Finally, tags help you to manage your blog content as an alternative to using categories, and also helps your visitors find more related posts base on tags you’ve assigned to individual blog posts.

Displaying Tags on Your Blog

When I first started using tags, the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin was all you needed to manage and display your tags.

However, the launch of WordPress 2.3 gave us internal tagging, so instead of using plugins like the wonderful Ultimate Tag Warrior, you can just specify tags in your WordPress blog’s “Write” page like you see below:

wp-tags

Now for some reason, most themes still do not automatically display these tags on your blog, including our WordPress themes (yet). So if you want to put them on your blog, here’s how you do it:

To display the current post’s theme, enter something like this in you blog’s single.php or index.php template file:

<?php the_tags('X','Y','Z'); ?>

Here’s the breakdown of the variables in the code that you must replace:

  1. X is the text you want to appear BEFORE the displayed tags
  2. Y is the separator between tags
  3. Z is the text AFTER the displayed tags

On Easy WordPress I formatted to code something like this:

<?php the_tags('Tags:', ',' , ''); ?>

To insert the tags right after the content section of your post, put the codes somewhere like this:

using-tags

With this simple line of code, you can vastly improve your blog’s search engine optimization as well as it’s marketing reach, using tags.

Displaying Tag Clouds on Your Blog

A tag cloud is basically a collection of tags, and the size of the text for each tag represents the amount of times the tag was used on a certain blog. Obviously the bigger the font, the more popular the tag. You can use Technorati’s tag cloud as an example.

Wikipedia’s definition of tag cloud:

A tag cloud (or weighted list in visual design) is a visual depiction of user-generated tags used typically to describe the content of web sites. Tags are usually single words and are typically listed alphabetically, and the importance of a tag is shown with font size or color. Thus both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity is possible. The tags are usually hyperlinks that lead to a collection of items that are associated with a tag.

To have a tag cloud on your sidebar is easy, just log into your WordPress dashboard and use the WordPress widgets to do it. However, if you want to display your tag cloud on your blog pages, you have to use this code, and manually insert it into your theme files:

<?php wp_tag_cloud(''); ?>

Tag clouds are useful, though in my opinion not as useful as individual tags on your blog posts.

Filed Under: Free Tips Tagged With: , , , , ,
March 27, 2008 By

Vote for The Cover of "The New Millionaires"

I’m releasing a new book called "The New Millionaires" and this book talks about the blogging and Internet marketing revolution in Malaysia, and how the new millionaires are born on the Internet.

Note: This is a physical book you can get in bookstores, not an e-book!

For those of you who have asked be time and again when this book will be launched, all I can say is very soon. However, there is still a lot of other work to be done, which includes choosing a book cover.

My publisher has given me 8 samples to choose from, but instead of choosing blindly I am going to let you, my readers, decide on which cover you like the most.

sample1
Cover 1
sample2
Cover 2
sample3
Cover 3
sample4
Cover 4
sample5
Cover 5
sample6
Cover 6
sample7
Cover 7
sample8
Cover 8
[poll=3]

Which cover do you like the most? Submit your vote above…

Filed Under: make money online Tagged With: ,
March 24, 2008 By

Inbox Zero Video From Merlin Mann

This video is perfect to help anybody get their email inbox organized. granted, Merlin Mann recorded that last year, but the advice he gives is timeless. We all struggle with managing our email inbox.

Using a simple method like Mann suggests is really going to be a life saver for most of us. His tips are easy to follow and will work for most people. I think the secret is to be brave enough to hit that delete button.

The video is fairly long, but worth your while if you are looking for a solution to your email inbox problems. I suggest you grab pen and paper and make some notes then get to action by implementing Merlin’s tips.

I hope you will enjoy this as I did and get heaps of value out of it. The whole length of the video is 58 minutes, but after about 32 minutes Merlin actually starts to answer questions from the public.

Filed Under: Free Tips Tagged With: , , , , ,
March 23, 2008 By

Author Exposed WordPress Plugin

No where is a cool Plugin for blog masters who allow other others to write on their blogs. It is called Author Exposed and is fairly new. Launched this month as far as I can see.

This is how the Plugin looks like in action:

author exposed plugin

The way it works is that the author name is still displayed as a link below the post title. But now instead of clicking out onto the authors site that is linked to the profile with the_author() tag, it will pop up this box as seen above.

If the author has a photo linked to their profile, it will show this as well as

  • name
  • email
  • website URL
  • a small about text
  • and even better, a link to all the previous posts of the same author

This is done via a hidden div layer.

Installation of the Author Exposed Plugin is pretty simple.

  1. Download the .zip file to your computer and unzip
  2. Upload “author_exposed” folder to your ”/wp-content/plugins/” directory via FTP or with your cPanel file manager
  3. Place the following code inside your loop where you want your author link to appear (most users place this below the post title).

<?php if (function_exists('author_exposed')){author_exposed();} ?>

That’s it, you should now see a fancy new window every time you hover over the authors name.

Filed Under: Free Tips Tagged With: , , , , ,
March 21, 2008 By

10 Silly Mistakes Even Internet Marketing Experts Make

gk-parked

Some of you may have seen something like the image above if you visited my blog in a few days- my domain got parked by GoDaddy. In fact I managed to renew it just in time before the domain expired and was put under GoDaddy’s expired domains market, which would mean that I will have to pay USD1,000+/- to get it back. Luckily for me, I had to pay only regular domain renewal fees.

In my case it was not a typical rookie mistake. I DID put my domain on auto-renew ever since I bought it but the problem is last month the credit card I’ve been using for over 5 years expired, and I was issued a new card. This meant that any recurring payment using the old card will fail as the new card has a different security number (at the back of the card).

To make things worse, during the renewal date I was in Indonesia for a 5-day holiday and had almost no Internet access. I went online for a couple of minutes but there were so many emails, I must have missed the warning notice from GoDaddy.

All things said, it was still rather silly on my part.

This brings me to an interesting topic – silly things we do as marketers.

Here’s a list of them, tell me if you’ve done any of it before:

  1. iStock_000002680448SmallAnti Domain-Auto-Renewal - As I mentioned in the story above. I’ve lost one or two domains before from this but those domains were not critical to my business. Still, the guy who got it just put up a “domain parking” page with loads of ads and is probably still getting some cash out of it.
  2. Bad English Domains – I’ve done this with 2 domain names. The funny thing just as you hit the “Order” button you suddenly realize the spelling error but it’s just too late and you’re stuck with that domain for a year.
  3. See Only, Don’t Buy – I once spent $230 a day in AdWords and got up the next morning to zero sales. I realized not too log after that the order link was broken – and I felt like a total idiot.
  4. Neighborly Love is Bad - I once wrote the wrong address for my Aweber commissions, resulting in the checks being sent to my neighbor. Luckily for me, he had already move out by then and I retrieved my check from his mail box after checking my Aweber affiliate profile.
  5. Who Moved My Affiliate Checks? – Sometimes people move around. I moved from apartment to house to apartment (5 times) in the past 4 years and I’m pretty sure there were some miniscule affiliate programs I signed up with that finally sent me a check – just to the wrong address!
  6. Wrong Paypal Address – I did this once, send a huge sum of money to the wrong person. The I had to file a dispute and only through the grace of the receiver did I get my money back.
  7. Come See My Download Files – In Cpanel you can choose to disable indexes of your directories. This way when someone types in yoursite.com/images they wont be able to see a listing of all the images. Most importantly, if they type in yoursite.com/download and you have no index page there (htm/html/php) they will be able to steal your products. If you have a WordPress blog, try typing in yourdomain.com/wp-content/plugins and you will see what I mean :)
  8. Premature Ejaculation- I’ve sent out an email for an affiliate product that read “Product X Is Live Now” only to realize that it would a good 12 hours before that happened. In my case you could forgive me because converting between time zones can be confusing.
  9. Backups Are For Wimps - It’s soo easy to delete stuff, and by “stuff” I mean anything from your website files, your e-book source MS Word files, your database (MySQL databases are very easy to delete, just one click) and even your important emails with your login details. Then you realize you didn’t create a backup and you’re screwed. No choice but to spend another 15 days re-writing the same ebook.
  10. [yourname, [fistname], Who’s Name? – How many times have you sent out an autoresponder broadcast email and got the variables wrong? Instead of getting “Hello Gobala” you get “Hello [firstname” – this always happens when: (a) You have more than one autoresponder service and each uses different variables, and you “copy and paste” carelessly (2) you typed in the variables manually, and you made a typo, oops!

Well there you go, 10 silly mistake even Internet marketing veterans make. I made all 10 of them, how many have you got?

Filed Under: Ask Gobala Tagged With: , , , ,
March 20, 2008 By

What WordPress Users Are Ranting About

Every now and then it helps to rant and clear the air with things that are close to our heart and bug us. If you are a WordPress user you can rant about things that bother you until the cows come home on your blog if you wish to do so. The great thing about blogs is that we can write about our feelings, our experiences and business.

But if we rant about things on our blog, only a small portion of the Internet will see your rant. And all though your readers will most likely agree with you, nothing much will change.

If you rant on WordPress DOT.org however, the guys might actually take note of your issues and improve them.

But then, maybe that is wishful thinking. While surfing the site today I came across the submission page for rants. I have to say, that I never saw this site previously. I found it worth mentioning in case you have a serious chicken to pluck.

Let’s look at some of the rants that have been submitted and see whether we recognize something.

wordpress issues

wordpress rant

wordpress org

wp

wordpress complaints

wordpress wisiwyg

As you can see, the complaints range from slow loading to the editor being a waste of space. My personal favourite is actually the editor too. I’m so glad Gobala got me onto the Windows Live Writer months ago, otherwise I’d still fart around with all the image aligning and spacing.

Have you got issues with WordPress at all? If so, what is your biggest one?

Filed Under: Free Tips Tagged With: , , , , ,