Blue Oasis, Online Marketing Greenery

Just as most of you might have recall, one of the childhood games we used to play. Friends are sit in a horizontal line and words pass from one another by whispering. We always had a good laugh because content being altered during the process resulting funny outcome.

Communication, where most of us has taken for granted. To convey your thoughts and ideas accurately is never an easy task. As we grow older, the less communication we make especially to people who’s important to us. Eventually resulting communication breakdown.

Ask yourself, when is the last time you actually tell others of what’s really in your mind? Nobody is a mind reader, start sharing your thoughts today. Start communicating today.

What’s your value? Have you ever evaluate how much your worth is? How much do you worth in a company? How much do you worth in a project development? How much do you worth in an online business?

500? 1,000? 2,000? 5,000? 10,000? 100,000? Worthless? Priceless?

How do you evaluate? By your monthly salary? By your monthly achievements? By your business built? By bullshitting baselessly? Based on what others think of you? Or value derived from within youself?

Are your value rely on others?

530pm, we sat on the sofa and started our brainstorming session. Me and my first batch interns, Weikey and Chailee, wanted to explore on the new media marketing. We are targeting at online video marketing, YouTube. Jingkai shared a video clip on YouTube 2 days ago and that’s how we got the idea, to promote our products on the YouTube.

What i’ve basically shared with them ( Weikey and Chailee ) during the brainstorming session is about making full use today’s hottest online media.

“Having already served up over 1.73 billion video views and 45 terabytes of video footage to the world, YouTube is everyone’s first port of call when they want to search for online video.” - by Michael Pick for Master New Media.

Concept, ideas, and the hype we create will be the challenge of how we’re going to shout out loud from this gigantic crowd. Referring to the ‘Yellow Man’ of Digi as one of the most successful marketing strategy. The value of being talked about. The most powerful marketing tool is none other than WOMM ( Word of Mouth Marketing ). Ordinary ideas just plainly won’t work if we want to stand out from the 1.73 billion videos. Weird, funny, scary, and unbelieavebly superbly lousy ideas is what we’re looking for. Why lousy ideas? Check out William Hung.

Their assignments, is to present their concepts and ideas at the core team meeting tomorrow morning. Being boldly creative is the key. I’m looking forward to it. :)

My gf was telling me a story about her work place. Her boss bought over a 2 storey chinese restaurant in addlestone and trying to run a take away chinese food business on their own. The place is in a mess, so since they’re having limited budget, they settled in after a little bit of touch up. They’re very careful with their spending and of course, my gf’s pay wasn’t that much.

A few months later, sales wasn’t picking up as expected but they’ve manage to earn some money. Their food taste good and it’s inexpesnive, so they do have some regular customers. To improve the business, they actually planned for a new menu to attract customers, but they took their sweet time. The progress is so slow that they show no intention of completing it. Boss complaint everyday that sales are really bad. With that small earnings after a few months hard work, it came to great surprise that the boss decided to renovate the rooms where they sleep instead of re-investing it into the business. Wallpapers, paintings, carpets.. it took them a month or two to actually finish everything.. and still the business is as good as dead. It’s not picking up any faster. Boss still complaint everyday that sales are really bad.

One day, they’ve finally figured out that marketing is something they should do to increase the earning so they speed up the menu making and printed a mere 1000 copies of flyers as they think it’s a waste of resources ( money - because flyers printing is expensive, paper - because most of the flyers will be thrown away ). They went for a 3-days-flyers distirbuting activity around the neighbourhood and waited at the restaurant for miracle. Days passed by and new customers showed up, but the boss is not happy becuase they think that the marketing campaign is a waste of time and is very tiring. Complaints went on and on everyday and the boss was also planning to shut down the business because it’s very difficult.

Their food is cheap and taste wonderful. So what actually seems to be the problem?

Would it be better if the boss have decided not to waste so much time and money on things that can’t actually contribute to the sales in the first place? Would it be better if they understand that by distributing flyers is the only way that they can improve their sales? Would it be great if the boss can calculate the difference between printing cost and renovation cost? Would it be better if they market their product each and everyday non-stop for 3 months straight in different region and nearby neighbourhood? Would it be different if they complain less and have more faith on their own business?

It would, wouldn’t it?

Build a business the conventional way. Invest RM 100,000 to buy equipments, rent a shop, renovate, hire staffs, setup Wifi, buy furniture, install CCTV, and the list goes on and on… When it’s done, the business is finally up and running. So here comes the headache. You need sales and you don’t have any. Now you have to do something to attract customers. So you invest another RM 10,000 for marketing campaign to do promotion, print flyers and promotional coupons and all that… and yet the sales is still not building up to your expectation… the investment ratio is 10 : 1.

Maybe you should try, building business the sales-driven way. Why not you just, clear a room in your house, setup internet, fax machine, phone line, and there you go. Your business is ready to rock! Having less headaches, you manage to put in more effort and time in brainstorming and tweaking your business ideas. The stress is less, you can afford more out of the box ideas to communicate with your clients, take time understanding what they want and deliver it at your best. The best part is, you have less bills to pay every month, breakeven period is shorter, and the most important thing is that you spent so much time on your client that they’re happy of you and things that you’ve got to offer.

So when we’re talking about online business, to have traffic first ( and then convert them into sales ), or to have a full blown eCommerce website first? In my personal experience, most clients just don’t understand that online business is not anything near to conventional way of building a business. Why invest on a full blown eCommerce website which doesn’t promise anything when you can have a blog that can test the market resond and tweak your business direction which can cut your cost while maximize your profit at the same time? What’s better than making your clients happy and turn them into a neutral loud speaker that spread the good about your products every where they go?

One of Seth Godin’s article, Flipping the Funnel, explains that most people tend to feed resources into a funnel ( A funnel is a pipe with a wide, often conical mouth and a narrow stem. It is used to channel liquid or fine-grained substances into containers with a small opening. Without a funnel, much spillage would occur. - wikipedia ) and settle for little results.

Why settle for little results when we can actually flip it upside down and start feeding less resources while expect bigger result?

To sell or not to sell, that’s the real question.

Having hard time going through search engines trying to locate your website ranking with a few specific keywords? Going through every page of the result is really really pain in the Ass. This tool will save your day.

One of the most spectacular tool for this job is a firefox plugin from
SEOBOOK.com. After installation, click on the words Rank Checker in the bottom of your Firefox browser to activate the tool.

Enter a URL and keyword combination and click the start button to check it’s rankings.

SEOBOOK.com offers a variety of tips and tutorials to improve your rankings, traffic, and profits. Check it out!

Lately, some of my friends had been asking me the same question. How to start up an online business? This is a question where you may encounter 42 million answers if you searched in google. I came across a good article for starting an internet business. Here we go.

Starting and operating an Internet business is surprisingly similar to operating any other business. Good business practices, like building the confidence of customers through truthful advertising, providing products and services at a fair price, and developing long-term business relationships, are as applicable to Internet businesses as they are to any other businesses.

Having said that, there are some important differences related to Internet businesses.

Check out this website for the 10-steps tutorial!