Glory & Fame

Glory is like a circle in the water,
Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself,
Till by broad spreading it disperses to naught.

~ William Shakespear ~
Greatest English dramatist & poet (1564 - 1616)

Today's topic is GLORY & FAME. I'm currently out of ideas so I'll make this quick.

It's always surprising how just a little bit of publicity will either push you to glory or your downfall. And the grapevine system in our culture is so efficient that news can travel equally fast with the internet speed. I've been having a little bit of this fast-fame lately and truthfully it is a little bit suffocating for a person who doesn't like being in the limelight like me. Well, OK, everybody likes to be in the limelight but up to a certain degree. For me, there's nothing wrong with having your 15-minutes of fame like what Andy Warhol said, but if it involves your phone to ring profusely, your e-mail spammed and your privacy intruded, I really would prefer to be nobody. Then again... glory & fame won't last long. Because it keeps on spreading and growing until eventually the waves will fade.

Smile!!!

Give your smile to those who cannot smile... because they need it the most!

Awesome Sunday!

Usually I'm not this cherry on Sunday because I will be dragged down by the thought that I have to go to work on Monday. Heheh... I hate my full-time job (but I think I'll miss it later when I leave it). But today is a little bit different. Why?

I'm ONE of the 20 winners to Bitol's MalaysiaPal e-book.

Yay!! I've finished browsing through all the alternatives on how to withdraw money through PayPal and I daresay that the third option is VERY intriguing. All in all Bitol had delivered another excellent guidebook as always. Oh yeah... apart from getting genuine information on how to withdraw money from PayPal, you'll also get a few other bonus like where and how to make more money, some tips on how to maximise your profit, etc. So you better get your hands on this book quick before you lose more customers!

Spirits

"Great men a they who see that the spirit's stronger than any material force"

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~

It's been a mind blowing week for me at work. There are more troubles created by the workers because my boss is retiring and they heard that my company will extend him with contract. So they're doing everything they can to get rid of him permanently. Talk about strong spirit huh? But we as the management team has to hold on and fight back as well, but fight it in such a way that is appropriate - unlike what the unions did as of now.

I thank God because I have something to fall back on, to go back to whenever I feel so frustrated with my work. I keep it in mind that I have objectives to achieve, that I have to be strong - emotionally... because a strong mind, a strong spirit will succeed in anything it wills.

Be Courageous

"Men don't follow titles, they follow courage"

~ William Wallace, Braveheart ~

IM: Content | Blog & Sales Letter

Content is King...

...in driving traffic to your site. No matter what type of website you're building. Either it is a blog, a sales letter, a shopping site or whatever it is... CONTENT IS KING. Even if you know how to pull new visitors to your site through search engine optimisation, or using whatever backhand tactics, does that going to pull in the visitors for the second round? Remember, what you're looking for are quality visitors. Those who visited for the first time, who came back and eventually who will buy your products.

In order for you to make sure that your content can pull visitors to come back again and again, you have to make sure that you design your article in a way that will impress the reader with both the article, and more importantly, with you, the author. This is particularly true if you're building a blog. So, in my post today, I'm going to talk about blog/newsletter articles first. Mainly because shopping site are more dependent on designs rather than text. We'll focus on text for today.

So, how are you going to design a "Quality Article" ?

1. Make sure that you create a compelling headline - to grab your readers' attention.

- Make sure that the headline is targeted for the type of reader you want to attract, so you have to identify your target first. It has been proven that you only have a few seconds to grab your prospects attention, so you have to make sure that the headline SPEAKS TO THEM. Make sure your headline can answer this question from your reader - "What's in it for me?"

2. Give away enough basic information to help solve one piece of the reader's problem, but to keep back some information and leave at least one piece of their problem unsolved.

Build this technique into your articles. Make them informative, but leave the reader asking for more. This gives you an opportunity to offer them even more information via your resource box on your article.

Once they have followed the link in your resource box, make sure that you capture their name and email address, so that you can continue marketing to them once they have completed their initial visit to your site.

3. Built trust - follow up by email with additional information that they will find
interesting

4. Once you have completed your article, submit it to several article directories, and start building up your credibility as an author.

New Discoveries

"If you want to succeed, you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success."

~ John D. Rockefeller ~

How true is that? To really achieve success you should try out on new things, discover them yourself rather than follow a carefully laid out plan even though that plan has proven to be successful all the time. The things that tought you best are failures (either of your own, or of others). And the most rewarding part of following your own path is when you discover new things, new facts by your own.

Hosting Your Web

OK, listen up! For those of you who had bought a domain name... now get your credit card ready again to BUY your hosting! Remember, no sacrifices, no gain!!

Now, a hosting account is basically like renting for your apartment. You don't own the house but the whole content, your furniture, TV, etc. are yours. Since you don’t have a server to host a website, so you have to rent that server space from a company. There are lots of different hosting companies on the web, some are free, some are cheap (about $9.95 per month) but have very limited features, and there are very expensive ones, right up to dedicated servers where you have a whole machine dedicated to running your site. These cost up to $200 a month or more.

If you are starting out, you definitely don’t need a dedicated server, but you shouldn’t go for the cheapest one either (since most of the time, the cheapest goes to the most basic package). One of the best host recommended for beginners is HostGator. More than just regular hosting, they actually give you an incredible number of tools for you to use, as well as a dedicated and easy to use control panel. With just their “Baby” hosting package, you can host an unlimited number of domains for only $9.95 per month. My advice would be to sign up with them straight
away. The great thing about them is that they don’t have a minimum contract so
you only pay monthly.

"Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take but by the
moments that take our breath away."

~ Anonymous ~

Admin CP for SS Team VIP Lounge

As usual, updates.
DPForum = 29 posts. Most posting for today is under the Graphic categories (yeah, I love it, so I had a lot of ideas to contribute here). Received authorisation to add links, attach signature, etc. (at last!)
SS VIP lounge: 2 more posts, on a software I found online (actually the new thread I made was to ask either I could share with someone to buy this software. Hehehheheheh USD 59.95 maaaa) and a reply to Syazwan's post. I need to upgrade my signature though. And to try figure out a little bit of this and that at the Admin CP. Oh, did I tell you that Sabri was so generous to upgrade me as the Administrator? Heheheh (kembang hidung)

Your Own Domain

If you are going to try and make a living online, you are going to need a website right? But how are you going to get one? The first step you need to take is to register a Domain Name.

A domain name is what comes after the “http://www.” in any internet address. A domain can have lots of different extensions, such as “.com”, “.ws”, “.net”, “.org” and so on. When choosing your domain name, I would suggest trying to get one that ends in “.com”. After all, a lot of times people will not remember the extension and will just use “.com” as it is the most common one to use. So, if you had www.YourDomain.org, and someone else had www.YourDomain.com, there is a good chance that they could end up typing in the .com address and go to the other site rather than yours. This is NOT good!

If you can’t think of a domain to use just yet, try using your name! It is becoming more and more common place for online marketers to have their own site based on their name or a common username that they have been using for years over the internet (like my "thinktankertwo" - I bought a domain name called thinktankertwo.com last week). On this site they can have links to all their different sites. So even if someone doesn’t know a particular site of yours, but knows your name, they can go to www.YourName.com and read all about you and your products.
So where do you register a domain name? One of the cheapest places to register your domain is www.NameCheap.com and their domains start at about $8.88 per year, or even cheaper if you register them for a longer period of time. So go get yours today!

You Need Momentum

Momentum.

From Dictionary.com...

"A force or speed of movement; impetus, as of a
physical object or course of events: The car
gained momentum going downhill. Her career lost
momentum after two unsuccessful films."

Momentum.

You need it to survive the long journey of IM... of life. For newbies, to get your momentum, you HAVE to start. You have to pass the amount of inertia that drags you behind.

Your first sale. Your amount of traffic to your site. These 2 can be your momentum. ANYTHING can be your momentum, even negative results. You just need to think it that way.

Question Yourself

I had once came accross a quote that sound something like this: Knowledge and information is to be questioned, not received without any argument.

The older educational system and Malaysian mindset were so against this quote mainly because we will be bantered at if we asked too much question. This attitude is by far the worst murderer to intelligence and innovation.

When you received a piece of information, you should question it either it is correct or wrong, is it rellevant or not, does it apply to you, etc. I've always like to question myself these 2 questions when I'm studying or learning something new:

1. "What is..."
2. "What if..."

The "what is" question is the basic of gathering knowledge. You asked a lot of question when you were little, to get to know things. In this case, even the name will help you understand. (Did you know that our beloved prophet Nabi Adam A.S.'s mu'jizat is the name of things in this world? Without that we probably can never understand the things here, can never develop any language, etc.)

Whereas the "what if" questions are what spawn invention. When you're asking yourself "What if I do this? What happened?" You're basically trying on a new way to do things. It is essential in speeding up the learning process because the answers to this question might have already be there even before you asked it. The best part is that since you yourself think it out without the need to be spoon-fed, you understand it by intuition, better.

Quotes to Keep You Going

I'm going to add quotes (hopefully one quote per day) to this blog. The main objective is to keep everyone focus and motivated. And since I'm going to be pretty busy over the month I think I can get away with putting up quotes. Hehehehehe... So here's our first for today:

"Don't be afraid to give up the good to go for the great."

~ John D. Rockefeller ~

Aptly put for new beginners and those who're pondering over whether they should quit they steady job or not.

Busy as a Bee

Hi all!
I received an e-mail from Sabri (SaifulSham's Team) this morning. Quite a long one :D He gave me a name that I should look up to for copywriting job, so I dropped the guy a few lines. The offer sure is tempting but I'm so afraid that I won't have the time for it. Especially this month. Because a friend is getting engaged and that I have to prepare the hantaran (surprise! Apart from having fast fingers to type my articles away, I do have creative fingers afterall ;p) --> I was thinking of setting up an online shop for wedding favours or maybe services for weddings, but thinking of shipping all those bulky gifts scares me off ;)

Anyway that guy's name is Colbert Low. Syia (another SS Team's protege) got her $$ from doing works for this guy. So any newbie interested in copywriting, can just google this guy (you might not get his e-mail though, so I suggest you go to saudagar.com and subscribe to their e-zine to get this info).

DPForum: Up until now I've posted 18 posts.

Today I joined another forum The SSTeam's VIP Lounge. Posted a thread (on reputation) and I think I posted 3 posts there. There are very few people online (mainly coz there are very few protege and the list is building I hope), very few posts. I think the protege are too shy ;p Hopefully I can contributed more there later. But as I wrote just now. I'm going to be busy for another 3 weeks (probably needs to add another 3 weeks after that 'coz my brother's getting married).

Another Reason to Be Your Own Boss

As I've mentioned in several posts back, I'll be assigned to a new position. I received the employment letter late afternoon... guess what? The whole employment letter is so full of b******. I daresay that our old contract is much better than this one. Sigh... you see what happened if you work under a boss EVEN in a giant company such as mine.

So every single students out there, every single working person, start creating your own company! Let's do online businesses!! Forget about earning a fixed amount of money each month doing soooo many things and dealing with a lot of pressure. Let's start earning infinite amount of salary and only then the loadssss of work and pressure will be worthwhile.

By the way, I've posted yet another new gadget review to be approved and posted at IdealGadget. Let's wait for what Mr. Liew said tomorrow morning regarding my previous post :D At DigitalPoint Forum I've managed to post 16 posts altogether (lost count how many for today's posts), it's kinda fun actually and you REALLY get a whole lot of tips on how to do IM there. Oh, did I mentioned that I got ONE GREEN yesterday?? That green is for reputation and there are 15 points altogether. Only my second day after joining in, one green, 16 posts, 5 PMs. Looking good.

I guess the pressure of a lousy salary is pushing me to the limits of IM.

Getting Yourself Updated

Good morning everyone!

Such a lovely Monday morning for those who have to wake up and face the morning traffics and being late on the first day of the week! *sarcastic*

Anyway just to update and log in some tips for new beginner.

Yesterday (Sunday, 4th March 07) I joined a website development workshop by the SaifulSham’s Team. One of the Fast Track course packaged along with the RBDDI Seminar. It is very basic, suitable for beginner (who really know nothing). They’ll teach starting from scratch. Mainly on how to make a sales letter webpage using Microsoft FrontPage. A compilation CD of all the softwares (these are FREE given to you) they used to make an e-book, to generate forms, to create auto responder, etc. are given away.

The workshop is considered slow to some people especially those who had already have the basics of computing, that is why I stressed out the fact that it is suitable for beginner who really know nothing. However there are some small things that a higher level of user can grab as tips to smoothen out their operation.

Most importantly, by attending the workshop I’m able to broaden my network of internet marketers to other fields. Networking is very important especially when you just starting up on something new. Already I’ve found someone to discuss with regarding the project I’m focusing on.

In gist, today's tips is always make a time to learn something new each day. At least an hour or so. Just pure study about IM. You'll never know that even the smallest tips you found could help you to achieve better traffics, etc. NEVER think anything is too simple or too low for your standard of knowledge.

Digital Point Forum

Currently I'm working on a project (result after a month) and this project requires me to sign up with Digital Point Forum. As of today I've posted 1 new thread and 5 posts altogether. I'm hoping to achieved at least 5 posts a day within an hour per day (hey... my time is limited OK... I have a real work in the real world).

That'd be 150 posts by the end of the month. If anybody out there's trying to figure out what I'm doing... track me down at DP Forum, look for 'thinktankertwo'.

To Amirul of Sistem Rahsia, hey man, I wish I'd been thinking of this solution to get $$ from the net when I was your age, thanks for the information and a hell lot of tips and bonuses from your e-book. I'm very sure if you made an affiliate proram, your e-book will sell faster like 'pisang goreng panas'!! Oh, by the way, I'm just 2 km away from you! Hahah..

Part-Time Blogger

Since I'm going to change the content for this blog to internet marketing, I think I need to pursuade my readers on my own achievements and luck in the industry. Hehe... so I'm going to start by what I had achieved so far (which is just a tid bit).

Another reason for the need of 'boasting' about my achievement here is that... I'm a very forgetful person :p I need some sort of a log to what I have done, what I get paid for. Since BLOG is initially for logging things like a diary or a journal, so let's fully utilise it. Besides, human need to look back sometimes to see how far they've gone, what kind of mistakes they've done, etc.

As of today I had finished writing up on a review (supposedly it's a gadget review, but I just cannot restrain myself from writing about something else there, but it is still considered a review). It's on iPhone interface built for pocket PC (PPC). You can view it later once it is approved by the webmaster (hope he will, coz it's certainly out of the context of the site), but you can still check out other gadget reviews by clicking this link! If it is approved, then it's my 6th reviews so far at this site.

What I get from doing these reviews for him? USD 1 per review. Not much?? Eh... it's a start la man... At least I got something out of the internet (unlike you) :p Besides... USD 1 x 3.50 laaa in RM...

I was thinking of revving up my pace on writing the reviews, so if anyone found anything cool to talk about, send me the URL!

Now you wanna know where I hooked on such job? I used to hang out here. Then I came upon an advertisement asking to be a part-time blogger. So I sent an e-mail and later on the person asked me to send a review as an example before he actually signed me up with his site. Basically that's the story and my priceless review on Motorola L6 is what get me the job (thanks to my boyfriend for lending it to me for a week!)

Internet Marketing: IM

Hi everyone! Today I'm going to explain the basic definition of Internet Marketing (IM) since some people REALLY has no idea what it is...

IM is not (just) about opening a store online and selling hard, real physical stuffs over the internet. It's about making $$$ online - LEGITIMATELY.

It's not any MLM program, or get-rich quickly schemes, etc. It's purely how creative you are in utilising the internet to gain money. Not only through pulling people's attention to visit your site and eventually buy your stuff/click your advertisement, but up on how to make $$ without ever needing any blog, website or even initial fundings.

There ARE a lot of ways for you to start earning your pennies on the net and here at ThinkTankerTwo_TheBlog, I'll give you some hints and tips on how to start. Best of all, these tips are FREE! Just make sure you subscribe to this blog (down there on the right) so that you won't miss out on any post of goodies I'm putting up here!

Hope to see you again in the next post! Have a great weekend!

P/s: To all SaifulSham's RBDDI seminar participants who are also joining the Fast Track course in building website, see you tomorrow at 9 am!!

IM: Newbie | Setting a special e-mail account

Dearest all,

I’m going to start from the very beginning, so I apologise if any of you who’re reading this feels that I am going too slow with the tips and all (it’s a newbie section anyway, so buzz off pro!).

What you want to do first is to set up your own e-mail account that you can use for your online business. It is better to have a separate one that you can use just for business purposes because later on you’ll found out that you had subscribe to so many listings that it literally blocked you out of all your personal mails. So better be prepared and start separating your business and personal e-mails.

Oh, make sure that you get a username that is catchy & easy enough to remember and if possible, use the same username of the new e-mail for any access to any forum you joined. This is to create identity and branding. If you're planning to set up a business selling things or services online, it is better if you can plan out what it is and set up a company name - and use the company name for your e-mail account username.

One thing you should do with any e-mail account you use is to put a signature file at the end of it to advertise your business or product. This way you get free advertising with every email you send. If someone gets that email and forwards it to someone else, they too will see your signature file, and soon it can spread virally across the globe. Even if you still didn’t have any business or product to sell you still can advertise your personal blog’s URL, or an affiliate link. If you have never joined any affiliate program, just click here to start joining one!

An email signature should not try and sell the product, it should just give enough information to wet the appetite of the reader so that they will visit the site. Take the time to change your signature right now, so that it will begin working for you immediately.

Hallooo!

Been a long time (1 week??) since I last updated this blog and somehow I've been feeling the pressure hehehe... most probably from the seminar I attended. Such a cool and informative seminar. Altogether it was good although 60% of what was presented I've already know from the information and e-books I gathered and invested in. But those other 40% are priceless and that's what makes it so good.

Congratulations to the SaifulSham's Team!

Now, I'm thinking of turning this blog into a good place to gain information on internet marketing. Something to size up everything on what I've been up to on that part of my hectic schedule. Probably on tips and such but 1st, I need to change my header into something that contain the keywords of things I should focus on... (hint hint).

Oh, by the way... I'll sign the employment letter next Monday (hopefully) and I'll be taking over the Production Services (i.e.: the Syrup Room Manager position who's retiring soon, as an executive). Such a load of responsibilities and I'm already freaking out! Dear friends! I need your support!