So I decided to start playing golf. Recently, my wife and I signup golf class. We should have done this a long time ago.

Where am I now?

To be honest, I am far from success! My two online stores recently got hacked twice in two weeks. Nothing is outrage at the moment, but the admin password were changed and locked me out. It also doesn’t generate the expect income. So I should either shut them down once for all. My newest project to help local business is getting stronger. Although it’s hard to get local business to pay me, I do get more potential customers interested in using my services to gain the search engine ranking and long term exposures on social network.

Where am I going?

Last month, I discovered the power and the gold mind of using Facebook social search. After implementing the strategy to my website, I can see the referral traffic from Facebook has jumped 970% comparing last month. This is a significant change to the search engine landscape. With the proper implementation, a local business can get FREE traffic from Facebook to their website with just one click.

At the moment of this writing, many customers took my suggestion and recommendations and start seeing the traffic boost from Facebook. It is still too early to tell how Facebook want to use the massive information for their own good.

So my plan is to continue dig into Facebook Graph API and implement custom app to help local business getting massive exposures from Facebook and increase click through rate and conversion rate.

Lately, I also dig into creating custom fan page and landing page to see how people interact with it. That’s the silver mine from my perspective. Many local company start charging for customize fan page and newsletter. It’s an inevitable trend. Gonna catch up with that too.

I encourage my readers to follow me on my personal Fan page.

To have a better success, I can’t simply ignore the fact that people wants to know who I am, what I do and how I can become an example for other people to follow. I was thinking to hide behind the scene. Now I have to make changes.

Here are my next moves:

• Consulting – I will be offering consulting services (like always in the past 15 years) to help local business optimize their Internet appearance and get more exposures. Help local business setup and optimize their Google Local Listing, Yahoo Local listing, Bing local listing, and many other free local business resources such as Yelp, MerchantCircle, Yellopage, SuperPage, etc.
• Branding – I will start seriously branding what I have done and my personal image. I can run, but I can’t hide. So I will just be straight out of the cave. It’s better to be known as an entrepreneur than an mystery CEO. I have learned many things from the Club Entrepreneur Network founder Peter Burns, who has been a role model to me in the Entrepreneur World.
• Marketing – I have the best product out there, but it won’t make me a penny without a great marketing plan. There must be ways to create buzz and generate demand to the good use. Marketing is the #1 factors to a great success. Period!
• Outsourcing – I am tired doing everything like the rest of struggling entrepreneurs did. No one can do everything. Outsourcing tasks to really talented people is the out way to get me out of my own business bottleneck.
• Investing – I heave hard many time that the best recession prove money maker is to become the lender. Using the money in your hands to bring you more money is the true smart ways to not just survive the slow economy, but also to be on top of the food chain.

It’s almost the end of 2009. Things is going as planned at very slow pace. It’s time for setting new pace and goals.

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.

Investing on high profitable items seem to be very risky to me. I was really hesitate to do anything, so I don’t lose anything. It turns out I don’t gain anything either. The more I read about successful entrepreneur stories, the more I believe they are risk takers.

I am not saying I am not a risk taker. In the past, I have taken risk to become paratrooper and special force ranger. I was almost die in the training camp. However, Taking a huge risk to spend huge amount of money is a big mental challenge to me, I am so afraid of losing all the hard working money, just like most old generation did.

Risks to take:

• Forget about leaving money in the bank to earn 3% interest rate and worry about bank to close or FDIC protection. Need to invest on rental properties to get higher return.
• Back in the Stock game.
• Creating mass blog network on Blogger.com with automatically generated content through API to support my main projects. Not so sure about the end result of SEO.
• Hire employee. This is one big step for me. Without outsourcing my task to other people, I become the bottle neck of the project. I am also killing myself the same time.
• Spend more $ on hiring marketing expert. It may cost much more, but it will have better chance to generate better return.

I know this for a long time. Taking risk requires a lot of work on research and analysis. That’s also my problem too. The more I research the more I got scare off and end up doing nothing.

Project Status Update:

• The main project is slowly moving forward. Haven’t not finish the billing module that I should have done 2 months ago. In other words, no billing means no revenue and no profit.
• Created 51 blogs on Blogger.com and link to each other. Start pulling content automatically and manually.
• Got a neighbor interested in helping me sell the service, so he can earn extra income
• My e-stores don’t have any sales in the past two months. Shame on me. I haven’t done anything with it.
• AdSense revenue increases month by month.

Yesterday, I finally got up and sold my old GPS device on Craigslist. I was afraid of that no one will buy the old device, since many new models are out there. My wife was mad at me for doing nothing to make changed around the house. Now. She is in Hong Kong for a month. I have a lot of time to catch up what I have left behind.

I was surprised how easy and quick to sell stuff on Craigslist. My GPS was sold within few hours. Why I did not sell this 6 months ago? I would have sold that for much higher price. What a waste. Now I have so many things need to post for sale.

Finally I truly see why I have not been so successful in the past 3 years, since I start my own journey. Not taking risks will get me no where.

An action may have a huge risk, but no action means no chance to succeed.

Are you afraid of taking risk like I did? What do you do to conquer your fear?

Image Source: Sepia Porsche #1 Courtesy Of: DavidHT

Does this image seem familiar to you? I have a post about my fastLane plan on August 6th, 2008. It’s almost a year since I had such idea. I have to admit that my fastlane plan isn’t going very fast.

On September 8th, 2008, I post what I have learned for the first 30 days after I had a plan. What about 300 days later now?

Forget about other projects I am working on, and let me just focus on the fastlane plan. I was going to make a million net profit in matter of one year. Looks like I only have 2 more months to reach the goal. So you may ask me how much I have made so far on this project?

My answer will be a negative number. After all the expenses (not including the time and effort), I have made nothing in my pocket. What a shame!

Let me review what I have done in the past 10 months and I will show you why I haven’t reached my goal yet.

What’s right?

Ever since I had the plan on day one, my head could not stop spinning. I started planning the core business rule for the project. I got so exciting about the potential outcome and profit the project can bring. So I did many right things to get this project going.

• Take action - This is the first step to move my ass forward on the fastlane. I started taking action since day one and I was moving very fast. I picked the programming platform and started design the database structure and implement the business rules and requirements into the system. FACT: The database structure and business rules is defined in matter of a week.
• Pick the right platform – I am so glad that I am the developer myself. I don’t need to go over the hassle to hire developers and project manager to handle all the spec and timeline of the project. I control my schedule and create my own program. I know it’s not going to be the perfect solution, but I pick Apache + MySQL 5 + PHP4 + CodeIgniter as the system platform to start with. It costs nothing to start with. And it will be scalable in the future. FACT: It took me about 2 months to fully familiar with the CodeIgniter PHP framework.
• Think big! Start Small! – I started the project from scratch since day one. The biggest motivation to me is the potential outcome of the project. The project itself isn’t that big and difficult, but it has the potential to bring more than what I expect and the project itself is expendable to other countries. FACT: There are article and blog talking about the same idea and have shown the trend of the similar projects.
• SEO the right way – SEO is one of the most important pieces of the project. Without the right SEO practice, the result won’t be good. I spent two days to nail down the domain and get hosting site with temporary home page up and running. I start building back links and creating the blog for the project. In fact, the site is ranked PR3 in matter of 2 months. FACT: It turns out the site is on top 5 spot of many high price keywords on Google, Yahoo, AOL and MSN. Google is the #1 organic traffic source.
• Outsource – Even I had computer graphic master degree and are very good at Photoshop, I don’t think I will be able to create the best logo design. FACT: I got the logo from 99designs.com for about $210.
• Social Branding – This is one of the most interesting and fun thing to do for the project. You can easily find the foot print of this project on Facebook fan page, Twitter account, blog network, friendfeed, business directory and many other sites. FACT: Twitter is the #3 traffic resources.

What’s wrong?

It looks like I am doing all the right things and moving forward at fast paces. When I turn around and evaluate the progress 8 months after the day one, I believe that I am driving the school bus on the fastlane. It’s too heavy and too slow. I am not saying all the things I’ve done above are wrong. I am saying that I may need a different vehicle, which is smaller and more flexible.

• Research – My guts told me that I pick the right market and niche to begin with. After 8 months development and research, I realized that I am in the crowded market place. There are so many web sites built since 1998 with even better team and much more budget. Don’t get me wrong, it did not upset me because of the crowded niche. FACT: What upset me is the technology and features used in my project. I can do even better if I know what other company are doing.
• Budget Planning – One of the biggest barrier for this project is that I have no clue on how to plan the budget, expense and profit. Leaning to be a really entrepreneur requires a lot of skills in planning the expenses and profits. I want every thing done cheap but in good quality. FACT: I end up spending too much time doing something to save few hundreds here and there, but slow down the progress that can potential bring me thousands. I need to learn how to spend few hundreds and make few thousands without doing all the work myself.
• Vision of Profit – This is one of the biggest mistake when I started the project. I thought my plan is so perfect that I can easily make 1 million net profit in matter of one year. It’s actually more complicate than I expect. FACT: I was looking at the wrong way to calculate the profit. I need to include the current economy, the competition, and the reality into my vision of profit.
• Efficiency – I know from my heart that I can code faster than anyone I know. So my project can move much faster than hiring the programmers. However, I have been working very hard day and night since day one. I forgot that my goal of this project is to give myself financial freedom and a much enjoyable life style. I need to balance my life while still achieve my goal. FACT: I end up getting very exhausted and did not code anything and making any progress for 3 months. Now I am far behind my schedule.
• Get Ready – I can’t believe that I have the guts to outsource my logo design, but don’t have the guts to outsource my marketing and advertising campaign. I have the fear that if I did not finish the billing features, I won’t be able to make real profit. I will end up lose money. FACT: I end up having no advertisement, no marketing and making no profit at all. Nothing will be ready! However, if you don’t do anything, nothing will be done either.

Getting There!

I feel great while writing this post, because I can clearly see why I have not reach my goal on my fastlane. My project is few months behind my original plan, but there are some evidences that I will do very well if I get rid of those wrong doings.

• Copy cats – I have seem many copy cats visiting my site. They visited every single pages, signed up fake account, play with all the features and even clone my idea. It means I am on the right track.
• Competition – Ever since I started my fastlane project, there are over 30 new sites up and running in the same niches. There are tons of new economy reports and articles showing the trend. Competition is good for me, because I know I can do better and faster than other competitors.
• Organic Traffic - Since my SEO is working, more and more organic search engine traffic are on their way to my site. It’s a good sign that I can out perform other very big sites without paying a penny on PPC.
• Real customers – Even though I have not fully implement the billing features, I have received many real customers that are very happy enjoying the free services. People are actually using my site to make their life easier and happier.
• Passive Income – Even though I am making no profit at the moment, the hosting cost is already even out. The AdSense have since generating a small passive income every month.

Are you on your fastlane? What vehicle are you driving? Are you driving the school bus like I did? List your wrong doings will help you improve your pace and move forward. Share that with me, so I can learn from you too.

Image Source: If you believe in fate and destiny… (211)

I feel the need to write down something, so I can release all the stress from my shoulder and move on to the next step. It’s been 8 months since I had the idea of my last project. I have been working very hard to move the project forward. Of course, things is not always follow your plan. It’s going slow, but stable.

Few days ago, a nice neighbor asked me how do I feel about working from home for over 3 years now. My only answer is to have a good faith on whatever you are doing and keep motivating yourself to move forward.

Flickr has been a great resource for me to release my stress. I love taking photos and also love to see what other people do. Looking at other people’s photos give me a inside view from other people’s eyes. I found the above photo. I have to crop it to make it fit into the post. You can find the original photo at If you believe in fate and destiny… (211).

After reviewing some of the photo I took in San Francisco, I had a post about 40 years later. I think my priority has changed a little bid. It’s not about making hard working million dollars, but about sharing the great love for another 40 to 50 years. The shift of my priority won’t change my schedule of my project. In stead, it will make me rethink my working strategies. Release out my duty to other people will save my time and release more stress.

I have good faith that I am on the right track after seeing the following Startup School 08 video presented by the creator of Ruby on Rail – David.

This is a great video that every startup entrepreneur should take a look at it. I have no doubt that my latest project is exactly what he is talking about. If you are starting your new company or new entrepreneur adventure, this video may give you some great inspiration.

Keep a good faith! Good things will come!

OK! It’s been a long time since my last blog post months ago in January after a trip to Texas. I have to confess that the Internet Entrepreneur Journey is never easy to me. Ever since I quit my full time job, I have been on and off on many projects. The positive thing is that I am getting closer and closer to what I am looking for.

So I have to take a short break. We went to Hilton Resorts in Tucson AZ. It was a very nice short 3 days weekend. No computer, no cell phone! What a real life!

So where am I up to these days?

First of all, let’s see what I have on my hands. Since I quite my job in 2006, I took 7 months off traveling between Taiwan, Hong Kong and China. I finally settled down again and started something with a friend of mine. Now there are two dedicated ecommerce stores running. There are few other high end cookware, digital camera stores hosted on third party sites. I also host few other blogs. Finally, I started a new project last years in August 2008 to help local business and local residents saving money. If you look around, you will find what I am talking about.

How was I doing? To be honest, all of the site I am running did generate passive income, but they are few hundred dollars here or there. They are covering my cost of hosting, but they are not enough to cover my expensive long term travel plan. Yes. I did make some money, but that is not close to huge money that I can show off here.

Keep plan A going. Since economy is so slow, my ecommerce stores is going slow. Who is going to buy luxury or unnecessary items whey losing their jobs or becoming homeless? I will keep plan A going for another years.

Plan B has born. Plan B always sounds better than plan A. This time, I don’t put profit first. It’s not about making me rich quick any more. I am going to help other people first. Less has learned from the other blogs, which has nothing to do with my journey. It’s all about the readers. These kind of sites did generate better results. So plan B is all about helping other people first.

How do I do now? I have to say that plan B is already making profit even it’s not fully implemented. I have the plan B idea since August 2008. It took me almost half year to development the foundation. It’s still not completed done, but it has generate a small revenue at the moment. Again, it’s not about how to get rich quick. It’s about helping other people first. If I can help other people reach their goals, I bet they are willing to pay me for the result.

Where am I going? It’s time to take plan B out of Beta. Gotta get the payment processing module finished so I can start charging the services I offered to the customers. Without the payment process, nothing will become real.

To be continued … I promise!

I am so glad that I was able to make a guest post about my cruise trip to Mexico on Debo Hobo dot Com – Travel Entrepreneur. It is about how you can take a short cruise trip to Mexico while saving some money and enjoy your life. We often have so many excuses not to fairly treat ourselves, but we also forgot that we should give a fair treat to our families. Taking families on to a fun cruise trip to Mexico is one of the best way to get your family spirit together. It helps put yourself back together and move forward on your life, journey and make your own destiny.

Not a while ago, I post my cruise journey to Mexico, where my Internet Entrepreneur Journey continues.

That was a follow up post about my cruise journey to Mexico in 2006 before quitting my job, where my Internet Entrepreneur Journey Begins.

It has been an up and down journey in the past two years. I would not say that I am very successful in what I am doing for the past two years, but I admit that I have done a lot of good things and have made many mistakes. I don’t feel like sailing alone, since I have my wife’s support. I, however, need to adjust my paces frequently and make sure I don’t get lazy and lost my focus on goals.

Life is not just about making a good living online. It also involves taking good care of your families mentally and physically. I often forgot the reasons, the causes and the facts that I can start my entrepreneur journey without any financial concerns. The hard working and dedication on making our life easier in the past 10 – 20 years have made who we are today. Making our life easier for the next 40 years is the challenge and the goals.

I am so glad that I worked so hard in the past, so I can enjoy my life, start my own journey and define my destiny. Now it’s time to continue my own legend and make a new milestone.

If you are someone like me, who wants to make their life easier, you should take time to give yourself and mostly your families a fairly treat. Take them somewhere nice. Have your happy life, start your journey and define your own destiny.

Do you like the photos I took? One way to remind my progress on my journey is to review my photos from time to time. It helps me to remember my goals and what I have missed in my life.

There are few things that you can do to share your journey with me.

• Social Networking with me on Facebook
• Follow me on Twitter
• See what I see on Flickr

This is one of the very nice restored antique car photo I took this morning at the 25th annual Toys for Tot’s event at Wickenburg, Arizona. It was a cloudy and cool day to hang out with car fans. I have to admit that I am not a big antique car fan, but my wife and I had good time to take photos of them with my digital camera.

I got an email just at the last moment after we got back from hiking at Lost Dutchman Trail. My friend told me to drop by with unwrapped new toys to give out to other poor kids as part of the event. I dropped the toys at the places that many other car fans or antique car owners meet. We all head out to Wickenburg at about 9.00AM.

The above photo shows 3 cars in front of me, which are part of the event. My wife took the photo.

I was told by my friend that there are about 566 cars there to compete for the grand prize. My friend is one of the top reputable automobile appraisal in Arizona. He is one of the four judges for the contest. I took many car photos and meet some cool friends.

The oldest car at the event is 1922. I could not even name the car myself. However, there are many cool cars stored by the talented owners with very interesting creative mind.

One really funny one is the Jack In The Box Head in the car. No matter where I move, it is always looking at me. That is funny.

As much as I love taking photos of cars, I was there for good cause. To give away gift to poor kids for the great holiday and take the enjoyment in. I was really exciting that how many people showing up and fulling up the gift truck. I even saw some little girls handing the gift to the toy collector. That is what this event is all about – To educate our off-springs to help the people who needs help.

I left the event before they pick the contest winner. I was told that the 30 foot long trailer are filled up with toys to the roof. It was filling up very quickly in just few hours. The guy who collects the toys did awesome job. I appreciate what he has done to help making this event a successful one. He has done that again since 1990.

More toys are collected and filled up on the pretty Ford Truck.

While driving back to home, I realize what we have done today is exactly what other successful entrepreneurs did. They give out something good to others before taking in something meaningful for themselves. I would love to do something like that again.

If you would like to see more photos of cars I took. Feel free to visit the following link on Flickr.

Wickenburg AZ – Toys for Tot’s – Auto Show

If you were reading my blog few days ago, you know that I went on a cruise trip to Mexico and visited one of the best vacation heaven- Cabo San Lucas (photos) – The land’s end where the journey begins!

My wife was set free after her company went under.  We decided to take a week break to the place we visited 2 years ago in 2006. Why we decided to visit the same place again? Cabo San Lucas is the place that inspired me to quit my job two years ago. Now, I want to get more inspiration and continue my journey at the same place.

The first photo was taken few days ago. It looks a lot of different than the second one, which was taken in April 2006. You can see the little tiny beach (Lover’s beach) has changed. There are a lot of stuff changed at Cabo San Lucas in the past two years. So did my journey.

First of all, I had great time! That’s the most important thing for this trip. I enjoyed. We all enjoyed. If you really like to take a cruise vacation at west coast, I totally recommends CARNIVAL PRIDE. It will take you from Long Beach, CA to the following beautiful places.

• Puerto Vallarta, Mexico
• Mazatlan, Mexico
• Cabo San Lucas, Mexico

I also saw so many dolphins and whale at horizon line. It makes this trip even more valuable. So what have inspired me on this trip?

Let’s face it!

We all know that economy is very slow now. Many of my friends just recently got laid off or lost their job. Regardless what their financial conditions are, they have to face one fact that they are still living in much better condition than the rest of the people on earth.

On the ship, there are over 900 crew members from 57 countries. Most of them are making only US$600 a month. They work about 14 hours a day, 7 days a week and straight 7 months without a day off. If they get sick on the ship, they will stay at their room without any pay.

Photo: The crew members on stage. The captain is speaking.

Stop complaining!

Comparing to the crew members on the ship, our living conditions are much better. They try to save every pennies to feed their families, while we are waiting for government to bail out our own mistakes. When we were in Mexico, we saw many poor people begging for money by selling US$1.00 souvenirs. They took their young children with them. The kid was leaning how to make living on the street, while our kids were playing XBox and watching DVD.

Photo: A little kid is learning how to sell the $1.00 toys to make living.

Photo: Hiding under the shade. A family making living on the street.

Take off your shoes!

If you are someone like me, you put yourself into other people’s shoes. You try to think the the way they think. I say that we take off our shoes and think with your bare foot. Pretend that you have nothing left. What will you do to start from scratch? The best part is that you have nothing. So you have nothing to lose.

Appreciation!

Although we spent money on vacation, we are still normal human-beings. We appreciate all the crew members, who work so hard to make our vacation memorable. We should appreciate that the bad economy give us a new opportunity to change our life style, change the way we spend money and change the way we predict our future. We should appreciate everything that not many people in other countries have the same fortune.

First thing first!

As far as economy goes, I don’t think we will see DOT COM era anytime soon. So the first priority is to save money before making money! Let’s assume that we will spend less as part of our life style improvement. We will eat healthier and eat less. If you are not sure how to get start, you should take a look at Justin’s experiment – 7 Days Without Spending A Dime and read my comment there.

When we have extra left, we will start helping the people around us. By helping other, it gives us chance to appreciate what other people did to help us.

Move on!

My journey is to help other people improve their business and create win-win situation for business owners and consumers. I think I am on the right track. I love helping other people, which is my passion. I truly believe that money will come after that. So let’s move forward on our journey and make the best changes in our life!