First of all, it’s been a while since my last post with a blog post header image. I took this shot in Flagstaff Arizona. It was a beautiful snow day. I had good time with wife in the mountain for two days. Now it’s new year 2010. It’s time to get back to work, so I can enjoy a new vacation next time.

On Dec 11th, 2009, I post my new direction Trade for a better future. While I was in the mountain enjoying white snow, good things start happening. It’s already a good start of 2010.

In the new year, I will continue my efforts to reach my same old goals left in 2009, but with a newly polished action plan. I will also follow my previous action plan focusing on Consulting – Branding – Marketing – Outsourcing – Investing.

What’s my new action plan?

• My consulting job will keep my hands half full. There is a big project coming that will definitely pay my bill. However, getting my local search marketing project stabilized will make me most profit.
• This blog will soon get a face lift. I have this WordPress theme for years and start disliking it. More and more people will visit this site due to my personal branding strategies. So a better looking and professional site is a must. I will also be more active on social networking and local business networking.
• Partner, Partner and more partners. After building the solid foundation on my project, it’s time to build partnership with other like minded people. There are plenty talented people out there who can speed up my progress and get job done right.
• Buying a new investment house is always on my watch list. The house market in Phoenix AZ seem to get back on track.

After all, my current Google AdSense monthly revenue on one of my site reaches new high. It’s is still not a tremendous passive income source for me, but it’s getting better every month.

Here are the new goals for 2010

• Getting 5+ new customers each month starting January
• Boost 50x traffic before the end of 2010
• Reach 10x Google AdSese revenue before the end of 2010
• Revive online stores before January 31.

Of course, they are a difficult goals, but they are feasible. So follow me on my progress and remember to subscribe to my blog.

The second thing that excites me is the success of Groupon, which is very success in less than a year. Groupon is a web site that offer great daily deals in many cities. It’s all about group buying power locally.

So what does those news mean to me? What am I so exciting about?

There is plenty opportunities!

After receiving many complaints from local business owners who have tried Groupon. I know there is a lot of room for me to create something better. Opportunities is out there for me to grab. The good news is that I already built the foundation. I just need to find the right way to make a difference.

There is one common things that Groupon and Yelp have. User Engagement. Without the user engagement, there won’t be demand. Without the demand, nothing will sell.

I have lost some confidence on some project I am working and also gain on other projects. Only time will tell if I made good or wrong decision.

First all, I am staying in a healthy shape. That’s the most important thing on this journey. Without a healthy body, nothing will last. Recently, I decided to switch lane from Nikon to Canon. Got my new Canon 7D DSLR that comes with the capability to take HD1080 video. Soon I will start posting some video on my YouTube channel.

In the past months, I have spent lots time networking with other people locally. Since my project involved heavily with local business, I have try many ways to reach out. Here are things I have done.

• Radio Station
• Local Fair
• Local Meetup
• Business Networking
• Trade Show, Conference and Expo
• Door to Door
• Cold Calling

Some of the stuff I have done did not work at all. For example, getting interview on Radio Show only brought me one phone call, which is asking me to buy MLM type of supplement juice. I wasted $300 for a 15 minutes interview.

I have tried different approach to reach out to potential customers at conference, business expo and trade show. I end up sending out business cards, flyers and many other marketing materials without any return. So far the only thing works for me is the local business alliance meeting where I got few customers. I have also tried Barter system, which works OK so far. They brought me 5 new customers in the first month.

Don’t get me wrong. The things I have done above did not work well don’t they won’t work well for you. I need to sit back and review the stuff I have done and find out why they don’t work well.

I narrow down to few points.

• Timing – Timing is the #1 key to reach out to your customers. I have a small success on getting some attention on generate traffic through social network (facebook and twitter), but I lost lots time without getting any traffic from the meeting I went or radio show I was on. Why? It’s a bad timing. I was doing the show at afternoon when most people are driving back home without any computer or access to the Internet. They will simply forget what I said and the URL of my web site. It’s the same to the meeting. If the meeting is late night or early morning. People tend to forget me or leave my business card in their pocket for hours or days.
• Audience – This is very import factors that I wasted a lot of time networking. I need to choose my audience more carefully. Talking to the wrong targeted audience is wasting time. They will never buy into my services or are simply not interested in what I am offering.
• Location – I picked few different locations to meet with people and showing them how I can assist them to make their life or business better. I often picked the wrong place that is as loud as coffee shop or business restaurant, where they lost their focus on listening to me. So I start meeting people at quiet hotel lobby or book store where I also have wi-fi access. It turns better. They are listening.

When I started this project, I was not sure if I can make it to the end and not sure if it will works well. I was also wondering the chicken and egg questions. So I offered many free accounts to the customers. On one side, I am losing money helping other businesses to get more businesses. On the other side, I have statistic data and successful testimonial to attract real paid customers. Now there is no more free trial program. Every new customers are paid customers. That’s a great improvement.

Now I am back to the most difficult tasks. Marketing and Sales. Being a software architect in IT industry for too long, I don’t really do well in the Marketing and Sales fields. There are simply too much to learn.

There are also a fear in front of me. I have no idea how much money I should spend to push out my ad campaign and marketing efforts. I have money to spend, but I am certainly afraid of losing them. It’s like wasting $300 for nothing.

Currently, my direction is to hire a top gun sales and marketing guru in the industry. Partner with them and trade for the better results. I am also working on helping other entrepreneur to get their project moving forward with my knowledge in web development and SEO.

I feel shame. I left my online store behind my back and let my partner to run. As far as economy goes, my online store is going down too. I should spend some time to get them back on track.

After all, my life is good. Got my new Canon 7D and took some test shots! I really love what I see so far! Stay tune!

In the past week, I got a lot of things done. Most importantly, I have moved forward on my project. I am so glad that wife will come home next week after a month family trip to Hong Kong. I am kind of missing her. I am also glad that I was able to control myself to work even harder in the past week.

My entrepreneur journey has been rough. It’s not easy for me to jump into the business and marketing circle from the logical IT industry without any frustration and disappointments.

I started joining local business community and start meeting local business people to understand where I stand and how I can facilitate my business with others. Things are NOT always going the way I want, which is totally reasonable. However, I just can’t believe that I am still too naive. I am too new to the brutal business world.

I don’t really feel upset at all, because I can actually see the real world business operation and how to work with other businesses and learn from them. Here is something I have learned.

• Be honest. Tell people the truth about your businesses. Exaggeration doesn’t make your look good in the competition after all.
• Don’t be too naive. Business world is very cold blood in many cases. It’s simply deal or no deal world. Don’t just fall in love with people, who simply just want to be nice.
• Not everyone take it the same way. I am little disappointed by the fact that everyone takes a statement so much differently. Some people look very nice, but can’t take a simple thing. They take it personally or politically.
• There is no enemy in the business world. Everyone is your friend. They either give your a helping hand or simply give you the good example of who you don’t want to be.
• There is no best friend in the business world. Business is business. Best friend may not save your businesses.
• Mind your own business. It doesn’t mean you should not help other people’s business. It means you should take care of your business before taking care of others. If you cannot do your business right, you will be just one of those in the death-pool history book.
• Never say never.  People always change their mind. Situation always changes. Good thing often come at the worst time.

I am so glad that the web site is getting more and more traffic everyday. Even though I have not made any profit yet, it won’t be to far away. Many start-up companies start making profit in 3 to 5 years. I have few more years to join them.

There are too many things to do. Marketing in the traditional way is probably the quickest way for now. I will also apply the AdWords to bring some extra traffic and hopefully get some conversion.

After all, I was not very happy about the programming progress, but I am happy that I reach out and made some connections. Getting real positive feedbacks is priceless.

The past weekend is pretty much a crazy weeks. Since last week, I stop doing any work on the new niche on 30DC. However, I apply all the knowledge I have learned from 30DC to my current project. All I can say about 30DC is that it’s about learning the tools to create the opportunities. To be honest, it’s a lot of work. Just like all the training videos taught us. You have a lot of writing.

Writing is one of the biggest challenges to me. Here are things I have done in one week.

• Finish Billing module and waiting for bank and processor to prove my application
• Create 3 new blogs and 1 new web site to direct traffic to my main site.
• Changed main keywords on main site seem to help the search engine traffic on those keywords.
• Writing more than 12 blog posts and submit many links to one of the directory alias site. Each one is very much unique, but they all direct the traffic back to the main site.
• Update the links from alias sites to main site.
• Submit the web site through traffic-bug dot com, but don’t know what it will bring to the main site. It’s kind of risky move. I don’t even know what those web directories are. Hope they are not bad sources
• Add 2 news testing account to show case the power of the system and the result of SEO. Fortunately, the new page is indexed and show up on Google at top 5 spot in less than 24 hours. It proves my SEO strategies is working.
• Meet wit some new local business owners and help one of them to get their business on track. Glad to help!
• Design the new window sticker. Like it a lot.

Really like to thank iPhone, which saves me huge time on watching the 30DC training videos. I load it on to my iPhone and watch them while working out in the GYM. It makes the work out much more meaningful and not that boring. So I can walk full hour non-stop.

I am very exciting about the coming week. I only have 15 days left to see if I can get 5 more customers register before the end of August. There are certain things that I am no so sure about.

1. Join local chamber of commerce to get list of target customers. I was told by one of the local business owners who said the chamber of commerce did give them many business opportunities. However, I doubt that most of my target customers are chamber of commerce members. Don’t see the point to join chamber of commerce in they are my targeted audience.
2. Print Flyer. Got a quote from the local printing shop about my new window stickers, and flyer. It will cost me $300 for 100 window sticker and $1000+ to print 500 flyers. It’s more than what I expect.
3. Marketing material. Without the proper paper works and material, signing up offline customer is going to be a problem. Also need a eye catching marketing materials for call to action.
4. Press Release. I am little bit hesitate on going this route, but this one seem to be working the best. I am not a good writer, but I got find someone who can edit my writing into a formal one. Otherwise, it will be very embarrass when TV station or news media read my PR. If I had the good PR a months ago, it will probably picked up by the News Station already.

There are things that I have learned and need to adjust my strategies accordingly.

• Local business don’t know and don’t trust Internet. Some of them don’t even have a web site and don’t have Internet access. This is a big barrier for me to reach out to local businesses and to persuade them to take advantage of my site. In this case, doing PPC campaign to find local business customer is not going to work.
• Local business don’t have time to deal with extra work. Many local business are already struggling with their own operation. They don’t have time to work on something on computer, which they are not familiar with. It gives them extra burden.
• I am not too small any more. Been told by a much bigger company that I am too small to work with gave me the motivation to take them down. By looking at the recent traffic and responses on several social network. I don’t feel small at all. Two copycats are already dead. Two competitions are already giving up!
• Give before take. I truly feel the great spirit between local businesses here. After giving out my helping hand, I was referred by one local businesses to many others. Can’t believe I ran out of business card in matter of 2 days.
• Branding your businesses is equally important to brand your name. I am very much surprised about how many people wants to know who is behind the creation of the site. My first intention is to hide my identity behind all these. So no one knows who created such a wonderful solution. I guess I was wrong. People do want to know when, why and how the site was created. They also want to know who was behind the scene, so they can give the person credit. So now my identity is revealed.

Moving on.

Now I have a lot to achieve. Approval of billing process and merchant is just matter of time. To carry on my goal to get 5 new customers signup is going to be a challenge. Need to implement the following things to make it happen.

1. Get the billing process test on production and get it out of my way
2. Design the PDF signup form for offline process. Ask them to fax back to me and process them manually.
3. Get at least one Press Release out on paper and on the Internet
4. List out 40 potential customers. Call and visit their office. Need to have #1 – #3 done before this. Hope to get 5 signup Otherwise, I will miss the goal for August.
5. Contact college students and ask them to try it out. Should have kept a good relationship with the school board since I graduated. Man. Why I did not think about that before?

That’s for now. Let’s see what I have to confess next week!

BTW, if you read my full post, you must be crazy. Are you a stalker? Indeed, I really appreciate your time reading this far. You are unbelievable. I hope you learn something.

I am going to face the real challenges and to catch up what I have left behind. I look back and estimate that I probably wasted 4 months on doing something totally not related to the projects. What a shame!

Now I need to learn how to fly to recover the time I have wasted after my first baby step. I finally back on track and move on to the next level. The billing and payment module integrated with Authorize.NET is finally finished. Now I need to get account and test on Production server.

I believe that I underestimate the time I need to spend on just this module. It’s actually much more complicate than I thought. It’s not because the integration. It’s due to the error handling logic to run recurring billing. I have to do it right to prevent any potential fraud and error message. The actual coding time from start to complete the module is only 4 days. It took me about 2 months to plan out the procedure, rules and consequence. That’s just how I code to make sure my code is bug free. I was very discourage because the complexity of the logic. So I keep postpone and postpone and it has been 2 and half month since I code the first line of the billing code on June 15.

Now I can move on to get merchant account and payment gateway setup. I believe I can start bill customer in matter of a week. That’s a big baby step on this project. I admit that I was a totally lazy ass and jerk on my own journey. I lost focus and spend too much time on social network, link building and other unrelated task such as joining 30DC.

Regarding to 30DC, I would love to continue learning what they are doing and apply that to my current project. The software used in the challenge are very helpful on my SEO improvement. I have made adjustment to my site and have already seen increased traffic.

Back to my confession. Since I missed my one year go, I need to set a new goal. A more realistic goal. I am hoping to get my business going so well a year from now. I have a lot of faith on this one. Focus! Focus! Focus!

Challenges:

• Sales and Marketing – This is the biggest one. I now have a wonderful product doing wonderful thing. How do I sell it?
• Customer Services - I am still the one man shop on this project. I need to continue improve the site and take care of customers at the same time.
• Adding new features – I have so much to add to the sites that will take down competitors one at time. I am no longer chasing those fat rabbits. I will be the leader in the game.

Plans:

• Viral marketing – I really like to create buzz. YourTube, Press Release and TV station are on my list.
• Affiliate marketing - I think creating WIN-WIN situation is a great way to get product sold.
• Social network marketing – Not sure how effective Facebook connect can bring to the project. With over 10+ million users in USA, 5% should make a good start.
• Direct mail - Old fashion marketing can be my plan B.
• Cold Call and Door to Door – This could be a great exercise for me to understand what my customer is looking for. It’s also a fastest way to get feedbacks.

Goals:

• Get 20 pay customers before the end of the year. It means I will have to contact 400+ potential customers to get 5% of them sign up. In other words, I need to get 5 new customers out of 100 decision makers every month before the end of year. I think it’s doable!
• Automate the process and outsource tasks
• Reserve enough budget to move to dedicated server

I think it’s enough for now. Need to get back to work!

Initially, I was not interested. So I did not take the challenge in 2008. I know it’s an very intense training that you have to learn so many thing in 30 days and make real money in 30 days. Why I decided to join?

While my wife in Hong Kong for personal event, I have about 25 days to work solo and get my stuff done without any excuses not to. I really only have 25 days to get all my to-do list finished. There is always things coming up that takes away my time.

My current update:

• I haven’t really got chance to dig into stock to invest. I am watching the stock goes up and down in the past few days and can’t really punch the $ into it.
• The blog network I built for my main projects seems all got Google Indexed. I can see that Google is coming to crawl the site. That’s a good start.
• This blog is back in the PR game. Sent a letter to Google webmaster for re-consider for page ranking. It does works. Now I got PR3 back. There is no more garbage links on this site.
• The first few days on 30DC has taken most of my time to play with their software. Now I can see some benefit by using their software. So I went in and update the main keywords for my project. Hopefully it will gain some organic search engine traffic as well.

After reading a great story about a self-made millionaire on one of the Millionaire forums, I definitely see myself on the same path as the one who made his way up at age 28. Only I am much older. All his hard working pays off in few years. The question is how I can duplicate his success with my own.

Now it’s on Day 5 of the 30DC. It is leading me to where I am not going to. Becoming Internet Marketing experts using article, affiliate programs and so on is not my option. No. That’s too much works for me to make too little money. How are you going to make $20M in 5 years by selling someone else products? No way! You need to have your own products. You need to be the drive, not the passenger.

I am not saying 30DC won’t work for people. Everyone is different. If your goal is to make good extra money (maybe $30K/year), you can definitely do it with the program. However, you may end up creating so many Squidoo lenses, Hubpages and posting so many automated articles to flood the Internet and kill yourself doing that over and over. If you stop, your cash flow stop. That’s no entrepreneur!

To be honest, I already know a lot of stuff in the process to make a web site and optimize web pages, but it took me a lot of time to watching the videos and practice. I decided to lead the training video on to my iPhone and only watch that at Gym. It will save me 2 hours of time to do something more productive.

So I am back on my feet to get my project moving forward. I can see the main keywords have jumped 40% in search engine traffic. I am on the right track. The real challenge goes on. I really need to focus on getting the billing done. Time is ticking!

Here are things I can do to help to focus on my project:

• Stop checking Google AdSense revenue. It eats up my time. I will check once a month from now on.
• No TV
• Exercise 2 hours everyday
• 2 Meals a day – I already lost two pounds in the past week.

My real challenges:

• Time management. Without doing all the stuff wasting time. I should have enough time to focus on my project. If I sleep 6 hours, 2 hours for exercise, and 2 hours for eating lunch, dinner and breakfast, I should still have 14 hours a day to focus on my work. Why can’t I write one piece of code in the past whole week? I need to manage my time better.
• Outsource. I have to invest on Internet Marketing and Sales pitch. There is no way to get a great products out without good marketing strategies. Going to post a local job on Craigslist to see if anyone is willing to take my challenge and turn it into cash.

Image Source: how to pray the japanese way

Wife is in Hong Kong for a month. I guess I have lot’s time to get things move forward. Felt a little lonely without wife on my side.

Let me put my emotion aside and make another weekend confession.

There are few life lessons learned in the past 3 years. Most of them are related to the way I am thinking. It’s not necessary to what I have done in the past 3 years.

• Don’t waste money on buying domains that you will never do anything with it.
  I will just let those domains expired. Wasting hundreds dollars without doing anything with it is simply a stupid act.
• Need to balance between work and life.
  Work hard and play hard has been my guide line for a while. I guess I was playing too hard.
• Include your family members in your entrepreneur roadmap.
  Left your family behind your success or the fortune you made is simply a shame. They are your family and they deserve to be part of your life.
• Believe yourself when no one in the world believes you.
  Well. When your family think you are loser, what would you do to tell them you are not?
• Selfishness is the only true motivation to drive everything forward.
  I believe that we won’t be able to live this long, if we are not selfish. We want to live better because we are selfish. Aren’t we?
• Business is business. Don’t put your emotion into your decision.
  Now, I think emotion is the killer of your success. It changes the point of view when making decision. You often will make wrong decision.
• There is no forever love, but a lie will last forever.
  This is a tough one. When you lost your confidence to someone you love, would you change your mind to love someone else? You never know how long love will last. However, if you lie to someone, it will last forever and hunt you down forever.
• You only have one life and you may die tomorrow. Enjoy your life while you can.
  Life is really short. You never know when you will die, so why not enjoy your life now?

What’s the reality?

1. My supplier no longer offer drop shipping.
2. Making no sales on of my e-stores, since I don’t spend any penny on marketing it. It’s dying.
3. No programming progress – Got distracted by doing some minor projects for SEO and Internet Marketing purpose. No idea if those task will make good return of investment.
4. Wasted $ on buying domains that I have never done anything with it.
5. Still need to deal with insurance for the auto accident earlier this year.
6. Making some money from few web site, but it’s not enough to bring foods to the table.
7. Rely too much on one income source.
8. Spend too much time on planning, writing blog and check web logs.

Time to get back to work. Take actions that I have left behind for so long.

Should I start over again on this blog? Start thinking about start from scratch. Don’t really like the way this blog is going. Too much emotion that don’t bring too much value to anyone. Not even to myself.

Need to rebuild my personal branding. This blog is going nowhere.

Courtesy of macro mano, the other way around

Isn’t this photo look scary? Actually it’s cropped from a very cute photo. You can find it at the bottom of the post.

While hanging out with lovely wife at the shopping mall, I was thinking about what I have done in the past few years since I started my own businesses. There are things that went as I expected, and there are things that did not follow my plan and went with the wrong flow. I have to constantly adjust my pace and direction. I think that’s just the way life is.

However, when we look the things differently, we may get a totally different result. It’s just like the above photo. It will look so much different when you look at it from different angle.

Few days ago, I set new goals on several of my projects. One of the think I always hesitate to do is to enter into the adult life world. Well. Not exactly the adult world in terms of porn or something. It’s about help other living better and happier. I have a domain that I registered a while back and was up with a simple page and survey. Now I am getting pretty weird search engine traffic to the site. I thought I was going to sell the domain and forget about it.

After researching for months and see what other people are doing with that topic. I have a new impression that it will become a hit in the next few years. So I have to do something with it. So I take look at this site from the different angle, I find it has a great demand. A great demand means a great niche. A great niche means a marketable money making machine.

So let’s take a look at the above image from a different angle. I have to warn you that the photo shown below is very cute! When you look at the world up side down, you see a totally different world. Again, If you read my blog of sometime, you know money is important to me, but it’s not everything. By helping other with what you love to do and money will come. So if you are having some difficult about the thing you are doing now, step back for a second and look at it from a different angle. You may find a totally different solution and thing why you were so stupid. Keep a good faith and good things will come.

Photo taken by me.

Can’t believe time goes by. Just start getting my blogging routine back, it’s already a week passed. Isn’t the above photo lovely? I took the phone in San Francisco while attending the Web 2.0 Expo. Me and my wife were walking from the hotel to the fish man market, we saw this old couple. It was a moment of silence. We smile to each other. We know we will still holding our hands and walk together 40 years later.

We just came back from the short long weekend break last week. Now we are thinking to take another longer break for the 4th of July. Work hard and play hard is always our life style, however, be able to enjoy our life with lovely other half for 40 more years is our #1 priority.

To achieve the goal, I think I need to be more aggressive on all my projects that will make substantial amount of passive income. My online store #1 and #2 are going to third and second years. They were affected by slow economy the big time. Now it’s time to get them back on track.

Now I am batting on the SLS projects that means to build the real fortune cookies. There are many tasks I have to finish for the site. In order to keep my life style, I will have to find a better way to handle my work load. Here are the things on my list that I would love to finish very soon.

• Finish payment processing integration. So I can start recurring billing.
• Hire interns to help me on the project
• Finalize marketing and budget plan
• Figure out what affiliate program to integrate
• Hire sales, editor, guest writer, intern, etc
• Find a new supplier for e-store #1
• New Ad Campaign for e-stores #1 and #2
• Start a new adult community and e-store #3
• Start a new portal for a FDA approved drug
• Find guest writer and freelancers to manage the sites
• Invest condo properties in N. Scottsdale
• Cash out and reinvest on other stocks

There is a lot of stuff to accomplish. I have to learn how to outsource myself to other people.

If I give myself 10 more years to accomplish all the dream while keep a good healthy life, I have more than 30 years to enjoy life before someone taking our lovely old couple photo 40 years later.

So here I come!