Monday, February 28, 2011

Increase your own income

Whoa! Saw this news splattered on the Star newspaper front page saying, "Big Pay Hike". Wish it was so. Mine was just a meagre 0.9% increase in comparison against the benchmark done by Robert Walters Global Salary Survey for 2011. Although their survey indicated a sharp increase of 5% to 30% increase for many of the professionals, looking at my category I'm nowhere near that increase nor earning that income range. Perhaps some would say I should be working harder or carry the balls of my superior more or whatever. Well I've been working for a very long time and I found I like to call the shots to get things done. So working for someone else does curb my ability on my decision making.

Robert Walters Global Salary Survey 2011
Note: Rate RM3.056=US$1

Friday, March 12, 2010

Create business website for inquiries

One thing about building and create business website for business inquiries, it sure works! With the go ahead from top management I made a very simple business website for my company that I worked for. Nothing to shout about, very plain simple business website with just the right amount of information and SEOed to target it on my desired audience. Of course there are some hiccups here and there when management wants one thing and I want another. For those products that don't seem to fit anywhere in what the general mass are searching, they fare rather poorly. Since I know what I want for my portfolio of products that I'm handling, I get good inquiries out of them. In fact I get the most inquiries for my product portfolio. Beats cold calling.

Personally I never liked cold calling. Calling up companies one-by-one and asking them for an appointment to introduce my products is such a waste of time and energy. You will get rejection after rejection and that is very bad for morale. Only the most thick headed, thick skinned person will go about this way to get new businesses. Some of this so called super salesman says it works because they say is a numbers game. The more you call, the likelihood of getting a business is higher.

For me, I don't buy that. Sure if you are talking about probability, the higher number of times you beat at prospect doors, the higher your chances of getting a customer. But don't forget, you get lots of rejection, very high level of stress for you from all the frustration and wondering when you would ever even get an appointment, let alone closing a deal.

Why? Let's talk numbers. They call it the numbers game, true. But do you know what kind of numbers we are talking about here? 1 out of 100 calls you made will give you an appointment, if you beg and cajole, you may get higher appointment rate. And out of every visit, perhaps 1 out of 100 visits will get a reaction or interest in your products or services that you offer. That's approx 1 out of 1,000 chances for you to close any sales. So do you like the sound of this? A probability of 0.1%? A numbers game they call it. If you like pain, then go ahead with your sado-machochistic tendencies.

Nope not me. Having tried it, it doesn't work. Now don't get me wrong, I work hard too, but I rather be smart about it. Let's make the time available be as productive as possible. And so creating a business website will help, and if done well, will help tremendously.

And with the go ahead, I have made a simple website, did some basic SEO, and wait. Didn't have to wait long either, the inquiries came trickling in. Entertaining some of the inquiries, eventually I close some deals without having to run around doing cold calling. More often than not, those that call in are genuine customers looking for specific products for their production needs. And what strikes me is that those customers that called in, I wouldn't have the faintest idea how to find them! They found me!

Go try it with searching phone directory and guessing what kind of target company that may need your product. More often than not, they don't need your product because they are not looking for you, or wrong industry, or just plain wrong. But when you create a business website, they come looking for you!

In marketing, I have studied about Push vs Pull. And going around knocking at doors is Pushing, and you have to push real hard. Pulling is easier, in that customers come looking for you. Sometimes you don't even need to visit them, they come visiting to you.

Now how's that for building a successful business website?

Now do yourself a favour, don't simply just create a business website. Not just any kind of business website will give you the result, you will need guidance and the best system to use is Sitesell Site Build It. It gives you the fundamental grounding to start and build a successful business website. Sure my company business website may not be using SBI, but my experience with Sitesell Site Build It made it successful, though not a big way, because of the slower process of management approval and such, but it still worked. If you have fuller control of your website business direction, then you will definitely be more successful when you use SBI wholly and fully.

So give it a try today!

Sitesell Site Build It to build a business website.

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Web business idea

I know there are many internet marketers out there trying to make a killing but not making any headway. There is this post that came up on my comment here saying click, click, click you can generate so much sum of money.

So let me show you what they mean and how it works.
USD0.01 X 100,000,000 clicks = USD1mil
USD0.10X 10,000,000 clicks = USD1mil
USD1.00 X 1,000,000 clicks = USD1mil
USD10 X 100,000 clicks = USD1mil
USD100 X 10,000 clicks = USD1mil
USD1,000 X 1,000 clicks = USD1mil

Everybody happy become millionaires. Yippee!

Were if it that easy I've become a millionaire already. It is a simpleton idea. But the fact is where are you going to get those clicks?

The thing is they are all selling homogenous products. Which means if I'm selling sugar, you are selling sugar, everybody same-same and no USP (unique selling point), then you will have a hard time. If I do something interesting and sell organic sugar, then can jack up the price because there is something special about organic sugar, it is derived from plants grown organically and thus should not be contaminated by pesticides or other chemicals. Even then it is almost similar product. Slightly better USP.

On the other hand, if you can find some special niche, something that not many people wants to do, but something that you know very well, that's your USP. And how to achieve some success with it? Use SBI of course. It provides the tools on how to leverage what you know to create an online web business.

So far SBI has worked well for me. And so are my friends and many people. It is not a lazy-get-rich-quick system. It requires work on your part. If hardwork turns you off then don't read on. In fact don't read all those people selling ebooks about making it online. They are all the same with not much value in it. Get a real proven system like SBI.

By leveraging on what you know, you can create a niche area where you could either earn back from:



  • Google Adsense - the simplest earning model but requires a lot of hardwork to get website traffic
  • Get advertising sponsors - requires selling skill, but first your website must have traffic to show. Has a better income return from monthly renewals.
  • Sell tangible products - eg organic sugar
  • Sell intangible products - eg services
  • or a combination of tangible and intangible products


The monetizing model requires thought, and what works for one, may not work for another. But before it does so, you need to put up the website first and draw the traffic in with your well writing content geared for both humans and robots (for SEO purposes) but ultimately it should be written for people because that's where your main target should be.

Good luck!

Top ten irritating expression

This is something I should remember. Came across this top ten irritating expression in a newspaper about a research done in by Oxford University. Some of them actually sound quite cliche, we may have heard them and use them because it sounded interesting and unique but can be grating when applied to another fellow listener especially when it is directed at them.

Here's the list, try to avoid using them.

  1. At the end of the day
  2. Fairly unique
  3. I personally
  4. At this moment in time
  5. With all due respect
  6. Absolutely
  7. It's a nightmare
  8. Shouldn't of (this one grammatically incorrect, should be "shouldn't have")
  9. 24/7
  10. It's not rocket science


Cheers!

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Another SBI Signup, yey!

What makes SBI so much better as a web business? Even though it took me awhile to convince my friend eventually he got sold on the SBI web business model, and that also despite signing up a normal webhosting and making a few blunders like trying to use the free Wordpress.com blogging platform.

Initially he wanted to blog like one of those pro-bloggers who has quite a high traffic rank. I checked through that blogger using Alexa ranking and yes, this guy has very good website traffic with an Alexa ranking of around 69,000! Very high indeed. Much better than my travel site which has a ranking of 600,000.

Then on further scrutiny I found that his bounce rate was rather high. According to Alexa his bounce rate was measured as 70%. Since this guy was just blogging only, I cross check with my blogging website, which also gave me the same result, approx 70%. Alexa must be using a different criteria for measuring bounce, because in my Google Analytics, my blog website has a 89% bounce rate, so my guess is that this pro-blogger is experiencing the same.

So what does bounce rate means? A bounce is when a web visitor happens to find your website on search, curious about your site and drop in for a quick look to see whether it has the information that they need. If you are just blogging about everyday inane things, very likely it would not interest the visitor much. A quick glance (give about 3 to 5 seconds) and if they don’t find what they need it is sayonara, goodbye, adious!

Whereas on my travel website with proper structure and well written content for visitors who are looking for specific travel information hanged around longer, reading what I have to say, and either they click an ad or leave a comment or inquiry. Now that would be your most wanted response, right? If you are running a web business you definitely want your visitors to inquire more about what you have to offer. And for your info, the bounce rate for my travel site is about 45%. That’s a big difference when you compare it with a blog.

So if you just blog aimlessly you are unlikely to get the desired result even though you may get very high website traffic. That’s why when I first started out with SBI, they have a very good action guide that takes you through the steps of creating a REAL website. i.e. don’t blog, though you can create a blog to compliment your website, but your website should be a website that is geared towards giving the information that people wants and eventually get the desired response.

Here’s an interesting sidebar from Ken Evoy of Sitesell:

----- SIDEBAR-----
Many SBI! owners who are not affiliates recommend SBI! to their friends, family, local businesses, etc. For no commission? Why? Because they love SBI!, and because this monetization model does not fit their main one (ex., selling real estate). If you are an SBIer AND a 5P affiliate...

Do the same, except collect a commission, too! :-)
-----SIDEBAR-----


Haha, and I do recommend SBI to my friends who wants to start an online business. Those that didn’t heed my advise tended to wonder aimlessly in their online seeking of business.

So now that one of my friends has signed up SBI, he is now going through the action guide and digesting the finer points of setting up a web business. So will see how’s his progress in the coming months.

So what about you?
Blog or build? Webhosting or SBI?

Don’t be like my friends who didn’t heed my advise earlier and wasting so much time (and money). Take up SBI and do it right first time. (Against the advice of Billy Lim’s Dare to Fail school of thought).