Tuesday, March 05, 2013

Saving Money for Retirement

Came across this simple article about saving for retirement. Well for most employed people, the only option to have a comfortable amount stashed for retirement is to save, save, save! Even for a homebiz entrepreneur, saving is indeed a must too. However it would also affect your cash flow. When you put away a portion of your earnings, you are reducing that portion from working in your business.

On the other hand, if you don't put away some sum, you may not have enough when it is time to call it quits. And yet, just putting away money into your bank account is still not enough especially since there is inflationary pressure on every cost of living, you would find your purchasing power shrinking and when you retire, the money that you saved did not quite meet up to the future cost of living.

Anyway, the simple article here stressed the need to plan for retirement and to have prudent spending on your current earning. This may be easier said that done as there are dependents. You may have a family needs to take care, child education to plan, and it would seem there can never be enough leftover for savings.

Friday, February 08, 2013

Starting the New Year 2013 with New HomeBiz Projects

It's been a long while since I last posted anything on my HomeBiz blog. Having shifted it from another hosting company and then giving up the domain for this current version. Well in business there are ups and downs, and finding the right niche in the business blogosphere was just the same, not to mention very extremely competitive!

Well at first you don't succeed, try and try again. Meanwhile you would need to restructure and re-organize (sounding just like those big corp after having taken a major hit in their profits). And looking at my old website, I decided to redesigned the new template using an existing blogger template. Kept it simple but still looking nice. Nothing fancy, just try to make it soothing to the eyes at the very least to avoid garish design that would not go well with visitors that happened to drop by.

Anyway, the past 2 years was huge letdown by Google with their Panda and Penguin algorithm, and very likely made many affiliates and webmaster cry bloody murder. My own sites was not spared either despite not doing anything spammy and trying to be as authoritative as possible and yet still got hammered by the software that has no soul and empathy. It was just doing what it was programmed to do. After all it was a robot, and robots has no heart. You have been terminated! So to speak! That's why in the Terminator movies, the heroes had a hard time fighting those robots!

Anyway, I'm trying to re-look for a new angle for my SoHo Home Biz site. The old stuff were a bit too negative, and scaremongering probably won't get you anywhere much. I would still keep it around and just archive it in my website somewhere as it progress.

In the meantime, a friend of mine introduced some interesting online scheme. The returns look great, but if it is too much of a good thing, it may not be so good as it could be a scam. Anyway, just give it a try and at least recover my capital first. Not the first time I lost money.

As they said, "Fortune comes to those who dare." and I have dared many times.

Anyway good opportunity are not so easy to come by, but if one does come along, even though it is high risk, well, if you got spare cash to risk it for high returns, why not give it a go?

Of course not everybody has the stomach for this. And thus still kept on chugging at their old job, or hard to sell MLM program, and various other agency stuff. It takes a hard nut to clear the 80% failure rate. As Napolean Hill observed, you just might be at the tipping end on the verge of success and then you gave up. Not knowing you were so close to clinching the big deal of your life!

So reach for the stars, and keep your feet firmly on the ground.

To HomeBiz success!

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!