Image Source: Morning Do, Courtesy Of FreeWine

It’s time to start a new weekend confession. I felt very funny when I saw the following two photos that my old college roommate posted on FaceBook. It totally brought back my memories about my college life. We had so much great time. I just could not believe that my old buddy posted them on Facebook. I lost the photo a long time ago.

Here is another one.

Can you really tell which one is me?

These photos just remind me where I was, who I was and what I have done in my life. It’s now a good time to ask myself new questions.

Where will I be going?

What will I be doing?

Who will I become?

I think I need to take time to update my About page. Regardless what my major was and what I was doing in college, my have moved on to my life. I never regret what I have done in my life. Without those experiences, I won’t be who I am today. It’s just fun to look back and see how far I have gone in my life.

Recently, I have spent a lot of time on the Internet socializing. I am on Twitter, Plurk, FaceBook, StumbleUpOn, LinkedIn, Mixx, Sphinn, Squidoo and many others. I can’t even count. I met too many awesome friends. I know they may not play very important roles on my journey, but they will be those people release my stress as self-motivated entrepreneur. I have a big picture on my Internet Entrepreneur journey, but I have not finalized where exactly I will be going. I know what end result I am expecting. I keep searching for the unique ideas that can make my dream come true. I am a dreamer, but I am also a reality person. I tried as many things as I can and find the best one fit my needs.

I have few projects on my hands and am working on moving forward. I don’t see my success come easily, but I can feel it closer and closer. In the past few weeks, I have done the following stuff.

1. I am still learning Internet Marketing myself. The progress is slow, but it is moving forward. Things like conversion rate, using Google Analytic to track the conversion rate, Goals and traffic source. Finding pre-qualified buyer is also interesting thing for me.

2. I have setup few free online stores to sell stuff and earning commission. They are niche stores and free drop shipping web sites. They all end up with the same challenges I am facing – Internet Marketing. The store requires you to invest time and energy to optimize and promote it. The draw backs of using those BANS (build a niche store) or free drop shipping stores are the low commission. It pays you average 3% to 35% on the items sold without return in 30 days. You are actually at the bottom of the commission food chain. You will have to make a lot of sales to make little money. You will also need to create so many niche sites to accomplish that. So I am back on my focus to do Internet Marketing on my own stores, which earn me the most profit 50%+. This once again proves my e-commerce golden rule.

3. Finding new supplier and drop shipper. I have few blogger friends who are promoting drop shipping or wholesale network, which they don’t use at all. They just want to earn the commission when their friends sign up the program. They don’t realize that building a good relationship with your supplier is one of the most difficult parts to handle your online store. Your shipping cost adds up fast when people order multiple items from different supplier. You also get less profit through those networks, because you are at the bottom of the food chain again.

4. A lesson to learn about competition. Many my blog friends already know that I have a personal happiness project – the happiest blog on earth. I recently discover a copycat site that copies my idea. He is doing almost exactly same thing I do with less features. I have to admit that he is doing a wonderful job to drive traffic to his site. Although I am doing everything I can to promote the site and get attention from the crowd, it’s not good enough to beat him down on traffic. Only time can tell. It’s going to be a good lesson for me to learn how to compete with other sites. This a good lesson for me to learn about Start Last – Finish First!

5. Building my social appearance online. Many people may thing it’s wasting time on Twittering, Plurking and many other social networking, but I believe that it takes time to let people know your existence. This why people attending seminar, conference and local meetup events. By social online and offline, it allows me to collect more information without dig them myself, which is actually saving my time.

I am glad that I don’t have to worry about my financial status so much. My wife work full time to support our living cost. We can still enjoy our weekend and our normal life. We walk around our communities almost every evening.

For those who are still interested in knowing me a little bit more. Here is the post I did a while back. Do you know Terence Chang – 10 things you don’t know about him.