I had a good laugh the other day when I heard someone singing this song over a karaoke session, pronouncing madu as matu; singing orangnya manis, semanis matu and cintaku cuci hanya untokmu… Man, that was hilarious.
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It doesn’t matter. But if you are curious to know how Internet millionaires end up being who they are — Internet millionaires, that is — then the following information from one of the most recognizable marketers on the Internet will be useful to you.
It’s about a 12-week free course titled “ShoeMoney Xtreme Internet Marketing Guides” by none other Jeremy Schoemaker who blogs as ShoeMoney, and the guy best known for making over US$130,000 a month from Google Adsense a couple of years back.
If you are just starting out to learn about what affiliate marketing is all about, needless to say, you should not miss this one because it’s not everyday that someone as knowledgeable as Shoemoney would want to give out powerful information for free.
I’ve signed up and is now looking forward to receiving the 12-week free course on affiliate marketing from ShoeMoney.
This is what you get from the course, delivered to your email on weekly basis:
- Week 1 - The Beginner’s Guide To Internet Marketing
- Week 2 - Affiliate Marketing 101: Everything You Need To Know To Start Promoting Products
- Week 3 - Market Research: How To Crush Your Competitors And Discover Hot Niches
- Week 4 - Pay Per Click: How To Earn Cash With Each Click
- Week 5 - SEO: How To Rank Higher And Increase Traffic
- Week 6 - Site Creation: How To Build A Site With Zero Programming Knowledge
- Week 7 - Content Creation: How To Create Articles That Attract Users And Increase Sales
- Week 8 - Marketing: How To Use Social Media To Spread Your Brand
- Week 9 - Make That Cash: 10 Ways To Monetize Your Site And Increase Profitability
- Week 10 - Testing & Tracking: How To Optimize Your Site & Make Sense Of The Figures
- Week 11 - Building Your Team: How To Network With Others And Find Long Term Partners
- Week 12 - Launch Day: How To Kick Start Your Business And Manage Your Projects
Man, this is super-duper information and looks better than the US$77 marketing course I’ve paid for recently.
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In the era of internet banking, telebanking and ATMs I would have thought the good old bank account book would no longer have any use.
Well, guess what. I was wrong. How did I find out? It’s a rather short story, so here goes.
I have a CIMB bank savings account with about RM100 left, but since CIMB is not my primary banking account, I have not carried out any transaction in it for nearly two years. The RM100 just sits there, doing nothing. Collecting dusts.
Money in, but won’t come out
Two weeks ago I deposited some money using the ATM deposit machine but when I tried to withdraw some yesterday, for I need to make an urgent payment, I was told that my ATM card is not active.
I went to the bank’s branch in Cheras and was told that I need to make a withdrawal at the counter using the bank account book, and within 24 hours my ATM card would be reactivated.
“But I couldn’t find my account book,” I told the lady at the counter. “Can I then make a new one?”
“Yes, you can,” she told me as she punched keys on the keyboard in front of her. A brief moment later, she smiled.
And then came the cruncher
“I’m sorry but this is a Sabah account, you will have to apply for a new book in Sabah,” she said. I told her that it would be quite impossible to do so, “because as you know, Sabah is quite far from here and I won’t be going back there anytime soon.”
She said there was nothing that she could do. “Try to find the book, maybe it is hidden somewhere.”
I went back and search all the nooks and crannies of our small rented home. Of course, the book is nowhere to be found.
Moral of the story
Firstly, don’t lose your bank account book, and secondly, don’t leave your bank account unattended (not making any transactions, that is) for a long period because your account could get suspended and could only be activated by withdrawing money at the counter, bringing along the bank account book.
Of course I lied to the lady at the counter about not going back to Sabah anytime soon. Actually I will be going back to Sabah end of this month during the mid-year school holiday; and I am going to make sure I sort out this problem once and for all.
It’s good that I came to know about this problem just before my trip back. Imagine the expletives coming out of my mouth if I only know about it after I return to KL from my Sabah trip.
Old folks in my village would say muli kampis barait…
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Last week, I took out a total of US$241 or about RM870 from my PayPal account to make two online purchases — US$164 for the developers’ option of the Wordpress theme called Thesis, the theme I am currently using, and the other, US$77 for an online affiliate marketing course.
That has been the largest spending online I made in a single day, all in the name of taking my online game a little further.
Why Thesis theme, and why the developers’ option?
Flexibility is the main reason why I chose Thesis. The theme is anything you want it to be. You can tweak it to your liking — make your blog run on a single column, two-column or three-column layout — even if you don’t have any html or CSS knowledge.
You can also have the freedom to arrange the columns and sidebars and align them to the left or right or have the content in the middle and the sidebars on the sides. This is just one out of dozens of other customisations you can employ on the theme, making your Thesis completely different from the next guy’s.
To demonstrate this point, head over to the Thesis gallery showcase and see “killer customisations” from around the Thesis community.
In there you will see several high PR blogs using the theme. You can also see how different one Thesis theme is from another even though they are from the same source — Thesis theme, the same one used on this blog.
You can also set the width for the content and sidebars and all the Thesis “universe” will automatically align according to the width you have chosen, without causing the sidebars to “fall” or resulting in other design anomalies.
For a better idea about how flexible Thesis is, head over to the Thesis demo site and see the Thesis theme in action.
I could have bought Thesis’ personal option for US$87
But I choose to pay for the developers’ option of US$164 because I want the freedom to install unlimited number of the theme across my current blogs and future blogs which I may want to set up.
The personal option only allows me to install Thesis on a maximum of two blogs. Actually, at first I bought the personal option, installed it on two of my blogs and liked so much that on the same day I pay US$77 to upgrade to the developers’ option.
That is a demonstration of how powerful Thesis theme is. Now I no longer need to change my theme. All I need to do is tweak the current theme I’m using and come up with a fresh design.
To me, Thesis theme is an asset. I can now have a “core” design engine for all of my blogs.
Affiliate marketing course
I’ve also decided to enroll in an online course about affiliate marketing. It’s not that I want to be an internet marketer anytime soon. It’s just that I don’t know a thing about affiliate marketing and thought that it would be good if I know something about it.
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Macro Photography Blog, the photoblog which I set up in October 2007, is the blog I’m most enthusiastic about.
It is gaining traffic as well as revenue albeit in its slow and steady way. Although the traffic and revenue are still low by any standard, they are growing and in any type of businesses, a positive growth is certainly a welcome development.
By growing, you will eventually outpace your expenditure and from then on, register profits.
From the two charts here, you will be able to compare the blog’s traffic. A year ago, the photoblog registered slightly below 600 visitors a month. Last month, the monthly traffic was slightly below 6,500.
In other words, I can now achieve the same number of traffic in four days what I took a whole month to achieve a year ago.
The overall traffic is of course still very low, but the growth percentage is good considering that I have not implemented any SEO or promotional strategy ever since I set up the photoblog.
If the growth is sustained and with a bit of promotion, I can realistically hope to achieve at least 15,000 visitors a month a year from now.
I doubt I can achieve a monthly visits of 50,000 but if Hongkiat, a blog run by a Malaysian blogger can achieve over 30,000 visitors per day, I don’t see any reason why I should not aim to achieve 3,000 visitors a day.
If the trend continues in the months and years to come, I may be able to depend on it to finance my online activities.
My online expenditure comprises RM792 in annual broadband internet bill, USD95.40 (RM340) in annual web hosting service, USD72 (RM257) in domain charges for my four other self-hosted blogs and RM288 in annual fixed line telephone charge.
That makes it RM1,677 a year or about RM140 a month. So, what is my blogging income? Not much, but overall, I’ve passed the break-even point.
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If you are a HSBC internet banking client and at the same time a fan of Mozilla Firefox browser, too bad because you will have to use Internet Explorer each time you carry out online transactions.
That is what happen to me recently when I book AirAsia flights for my mid-year trip back to my homestate in Sabah on Borneo Island.
At first I didn’t know about the issue HSBC has with Firefox and went on to go through the process of booking the flights, seat numbers and so on. When the time came to process the payment, I entered my credit card number and clicked on the payment button.
After several anxious seconds — for some reasons, I am always nervous every time I carry out an online transaction — a notification came on screen saying that the payment could not be processed because HSBC did not support the browser I was using.
I thought there was something wrong with my Firefox but a quick search online showed that there was indeed an issue between HSBC and Firefox. So much for Firefox’s safest browser tagline.
I was forced to repeat the whole process again on IE and this time, it went without a glitch.
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Yesterday, I embarked on doing what I always wanted to do — live blogging an event. There was a strong rumour the previous day that new prime minister was going to unveiled his cabinet line-up yesterday, hence the live blogging.
But as it turned out, the cabinet would only be announced later today. It was nevertheless a very enlightening experience.
The live blogging experiment, using the Scribblelive live blogging platform, is now off and I’ve scribbled my last entry, which I reproduce below:
This is the final entry of this “live blogging” experiment. Before I sign off, I would like to say that it has been a very enlightening experience and I would do it again for other events in the future, that is if I am not working.
Live blogging redefines what the traditional media call “news bulletin”. In the right hand, live blogging can be a very powerful tool for news organisations to “fire” away bullets of information in rapid succession.
One of the advantages of a live blogging is that it frees the live bloggers from having to present the information in the from of news items, allowing him or her to provide minute-by-minute updates of a running story. Through live blogging, news and information can be presented in their raw and unofficial forms — a reflection of how the stories are developing throughout the day.
Elections results, for instance, can be presented in tandem with the vote counting process without having to wait for the official announcement.
Having to wait for “official” results and only report when there is an official announcement is a very traditional way of presenting information.
Some online news portals like the NST Online and Malaysiakini are already using live blogging during special events like in the recent by-elections and in the Umno elections.
And they are very successful at it that even reporters of some news organisations are logging into these live blogging platform to find out the latest updates — which is an irony because they should have been able to get the latest updates from their own websites or online portals.
Enough said. One more thing, I’ve promised to live blog until everything has been accounted for — ministers and their posts announced — but I no longer think that is possible because I’ll be working at the time when the cabinet lineup is scheduled to be announced at 3pm today. I was able to live blog yesterday because I was off
Thank you for the support and for watching me blogging live. See you in other events.
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Live blogging? Well, sort of. This is not as live as it can be in its true sense because I won’t be at the scene where the prime minister will announce his cabinet line-up.
But this is “live” enough in a sense that every bit and piece of information I can get hold on will be posted here as live updates.
For this, I’m using the Scribblelive live blogging platform. To use this Web 2.0 platform you can either register or sign in directly using Twitter, Facebook or Flickr account.
You can watch this live blogging of Malaysian cabinet announcement here.
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Anyone who says Mike Tyson’s English is not good had better watch this clip
The great Mike Tyson’s knockouts…
Will there be a knockout on March 26 or will there be ear-biting?
Mike Tyson spells out mission and vision
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It almost looks like a scene in the Knight Rider television series — a super car roars to life and speeds off, leaving those around it stunned and dumbfounded. Only in this case, it is not a scene from movie.
In an incident in Shah Alam, a Porsche Cayenne Turbo S, like the one in the picture — not sure about the colour though, belonging to a member of the Kelantan royal family was stolen from Puspakom, the vehicle inspection centre.
According to a report in the New Straits Times, an inspector and a driver were inspecting the RM1.42 million sports utility car’s undercarriage to verify the chasis number when they heard the engine roaring into life in the 2.30pm incident on March 2.
“In seconds, the car had sped off, driven by an as yet unidentified suspect.
“It is understood that a customer later told police that the suspect had been spotted loitering near the centre prior to the incident,” a source told the newspaper.
A nationwide hunt has been mounted for the brand new “runaway” vehicle.
Moral of the story: never turn your back on a Porsche Cayenne with the ignition key inside, never even go to its undercarriage without taking the ignition key with you. And they call themselves vehicle inspectors!
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