Short Interview With Borneo Post

Justin from Borneo Post rang me up 2 weeks ago wanted to arrange for an interview on my internet business venture. Of course I happily acceptted the interview invitation. The short interview was featured on the front page of Borneo Post Business section on Valentine’s Day. The online version can be found here at Borneo Post website.

Do NOT forget to check back the blog in a week time for the free ebook on Make Money Online with Flippa!!

How To Make A Living Selling Websites – 6 Figures Income !

I know I have not updated the blog for a while because I have been busy setting up my Engineering Consulting firm. But I promise I will be giving you a big Red Packet or Bonus in a week or two time. I will be sharing with you how you can make your living selling websites online at Flippa!

Make sure you check back in a week time and I can assure you that it will be a good new year gift for anyone who download it! Most important it is FREE for my readers. Check out one of my sales last year:

So remember to check back the blog in a week time for the ebook !!

5 Stars Ecommerce Site FREE for You

For those of you who are into e-commerce and don’t know about SolidShops yet, it is time for you to look at it seriously! SolidShops is an extremely user friendly hosted e-commerce platform for web designers and their clients. Individual who is keen to build their own site using SolidShops, this is one of the best platform you should check out.

Way too often, open source software like Magento or OScommerce disappoints when it comes to user friendliness, not to mention creating themes. On top of that you’re stuck for hours uploading and patching files to finally realize you still have to take care of backups and encrypted payments. One important features of SolidShops is that it is very easy to manage your product.

With SolidShops you can have a secure store up and running in just minutes, even on Facebook. That’s right: SolidShops also supports building out unique Facebook stores which can be customized to your liking by using custom HTML and CSS.

SolidShops is also optimised for your mobile phone. You can check orders on the go, anytime, anywhere. Never miss an order anymore!

Popular payment methods like PayPal, Google Checkout, Authorize.net, Ogone and others can be set up in no time.

SolidShops is giving away 5 one year licenses to their platform for free, exclusively to AddyKho readers.

To enter this contest, write down why you want a SolidShops store by posting a comment on https://www.facebook.com/solidshops (mentioning you are reader of AddyKho). Want to beef up your chances of winning? Then upload a short creative video explaining why you want a SolidShops store. Upload the video on www.facebook.com/solidshops. SolidShops wi’ll pick out the winners by November 31 2011.

So DO NOT wait! Go and grab yourself a 1 year FREE ecommerce site now! 1 Year FREE with SolidShops for 5 readers of Addy Kho!!

SaleHoo Launches SaleHoo Stores: Quick, Clean Stores that Get Results!

The team at SaleHoo.com, the same people behind the wholesale supplier directory with over 8,000 verified suppliers, have just released SaleHoo Stores, their new e-Commerce solution that can get you up and running on your own website in just minutes.

If you are looking to expand your online selling ventures beyond eBay, or have ever thought about selling on your own website, then here are three reasons why you should give it a try:

1. It’s quick to setup. With SaleHoo Stores, there is no time wasted spent fussing over technical details. You can setup your store in just minutes and get your products online and ready for buyers in no time.

I understand that A LOT of e-Commerce solution providers say the exact same thing, but the guys at SaleHoo actually mean it. To prove just how fast it is, they have made this short 5 minute video on setting up your SaleHoo Store.

Take a look at it below:

2. SaleHoo Stores are clean and modern. Forget ugly e-Commerce websites with unsightly fonts and difficult navigation. SaleHoo Stores were built by web usability experts who study how web users interact with websites, then create websites and web stores that mimic that behavior.

This results in websites that are more intuitive and natural for users, which makes them stay on your site longer, and purchase more items from you.

Another great thing about SaleHoo Stores is that you can choose from a number of Store themes to make your Store stand out and attract the right audience. Here are a couple of examples of themes you can use:

Best of all, changing your SaleHoo Store’s theme and color variations is fast and easy. With just two clicks of a mouse, you can instantly update your Store with no technical knowledge required.

3. SaleHoo Stores get results! For all website owners, getting sufficient traffic to your site is a crucial determining factor in whether or not your store will be a success. With this in mind, SaleHoo Stores come optimized for search engines with their search-engine-friendly development and page order.

What’s more, setting your on-page optimization is easy. There is no fussy HTML coding involved – it’s as easy as writing an eBay listing title!

Right now, when you sign up to SaleHoo Stores, you will get a FREE video training course on search engine optimization called SaleHoo Stores Traffic Training. This course has been crafted by SEO expert Mark Ling who shows you everything you need to know, with step-by-step instructions, how to get your website ranking on the first page of Google and turbo boost your sales!

Special limited time offer!

In addition to your free copy of SaleHoo Stores Traffic Training, right now you can also get your hands on a free one-year membership to SaleHoo! Your SaleHoo membership gives you instant, unlimited access to their directory of over 8,000 verified, legitimate suppliers as well as the SaleHoo Research Lab, a market research tool that allows you to unearth hot selling markets. A SaleHoo membership normally costs $67 per year, but it’s yours free, for a limited time, when you purchase sign up to SaleHoo Stores.

And as if that wasn’t exceptional value enough, SaleHoo is currently offering a Premium Store package at the price of a Standard SaleHoo package, making now the best time possible to get started.

Your SaleHoo Store also comes with a full 60-day money back guarantee, so you can try SaleHoo Stores with no risk. If you are not completely satisfied, you can get a full refund, with no questions asked.

Head over to SaleHoo Stores now to make the most of this amazing offer!

P.S Remember you get the SaleHoo Stores Traffic Training video course FREE along with a free membership to SaleHoo and the supplier directory!

P.P.S The 60 day money back guarantee makes SaleHoo Stores the low-risk option for getting your very own store setup!

How Selling on Your Own Website Can Increase Online Drop Shipping Sales

Drop shipping is every eBay seller’s dream! If you aren’t familiar with the process of drop shipping, it involves the supplier (wholesaler or manufacturer, for example) shipping the item directly to your buyer.  This bypasses you having to purchase or store items you wish to sell.

The major benefit here is the risk that drop shipping eliminates: Sellers who drop ship items to their buyers do not have to risk buying a bulk lot of items from a supplier and hope that they will sell.

Instead, you will only pay for what you actually sell and side-step the risk associated with buying items in bulk which may or may not sell.

Why drop shipping on eBay and other marketplaces is hard-hitting

The drop shipping dream can be a tough reality on eBay. In a marketplace where price is everything, unless you are the only seller offering the product(s) you are drop shipping, you will have a tough time selling them.

This is simply because when you drop ship, you can’t get the best rock-bottom wholesale prices that your competitors can. In order for suppliers to cover the cost of drop shipping, processing individual orders and shipping them to buyers, they have to add $2-$5 on to the cost of every item.

This means when you drop ship items, you will find it difficult to compete with other sellers who are buying the same items, but are buying in huge bulk which gets them rock-bottom prices, undercutting the drop shipping model.

Another issue that you might face when drop shipping on eBay is slack performance from the supplier. Your buyer might have to wait 2 weeks for their item to be delivered by the supplier which is unacceptable by eBay standards.

The problem here is that it’s not your supplier who takes the blame for the slow delivery – it’s you.

In many cases, eBay sellers have received negative feedback as a result of suppliers not delivering items in a reasonable timeframe. If you get too many negative feedback scores, your listings won’t rank as well in search results, your sales will plummet and you could even have your account closed by eBay.

Can drop shipping items on your own website offset these drawback of using a drop shipper? Yes!

How selling on your own website can increase your drop shipping sales

While drop shipping on eBay is not a viable option for many sellers, due to the heavy competition there, drop shipping from your own website is a surefire way to increase sales, and your overall margins, on each sale. Here’s how:

The elimination of customer’s price-checking

When you sell on your own website, it’s a lot harder for buyers to do price checking like they do when they buy on eBay, where they can flick between different listings instantly and find the cheapest deal.

On your own website, however, you can increase your prices by a few dollars and still see consistent sales because so few buyers will perform price checks and hunt out the best deal by comparing your prices to products available elsewhere.

The end of negative feedback

Customer service standards on eBay are extremely strict. eBay’s push towards providing buyers with a hassle-free retail experience has put a lot of pressure on sellers. And when, as mentioned above, suppliers deliver items late, sellers suffer with negative feedback ratings.

When you sell on your own website, there are no feedback systems and complicated DSR scorings. Instead, you can choose your own delivery times and service standards and, as long as you are open about these, your buyers will be happy.

While many eBay sellers believe that building your own website is difficult and time-consuming, this isn’t the case. There are many affordable options for store builders and e-Commerce software now that require no HTML or programming knowledge in order for you to build your own online store fast and without a huge investment.

Do you drop ship items on eBay? What has your experience been and do you think selling on your own site would be beneficial? Share your thoughts below!

About the Author: Alice Delore is an education specialist for SaleHoo.com, an online community of over 95,000 online sellers and retailers. Their product range consists of an online selling course, ecommerce software and their flagship product, a wholesale directory.

Check out SaleHoo Now!

Looking for Air Swimmers in Malaysia or Singapore or at Your very Own Country?

You and I are probably looking for the same gadget – Air Swimmers after coming across the Air Swimmers Youtube video recently.

I am always attracted easily by interesting big boy gadgets. I believe this lovely Air Swimmers will just amaze anyone, be it adult or small kid. But what really caught my attention or trigger my brain cell  is the way how business should be done – make good use of online media or means to market your product. If you are from Malaysia or Singapore, you can also purchase this wonder toy from Flying Fish Malaysia.

The youtube videos created by Air Swimmers have generated a tsunami online. Within a short 1 month plus, the video has already been viewed nearly 3 mil times. The youtube video has helped bringing tons of visitors to the Air Swimmers site. At one point, the traffic just basically overloaded the server and crashed the site! So if you have a bit of business sense, you should know that the money is rolling in to their bank account!

The video has created a buzz online and therefore generated a lots of visitors (money) to their site. If you are running a business online or offline, video marketing is something you should consider investing in. Guess what… I already starting to think of what the keywords ‘Air Swimmers in Malaysia‘ or ‘Air Swimmers in Singapore‘ can do for me

One last thing, if you want to make more money, your brain has to move fast: Angry Bird Air Swimmer!!  Check out the soon to be released Angry Bird Air Swimmer below:

Top 5 SEO Smartphone Apps

Recently a glut of smartphone apps have appeared that are designed to help SEO specialists work more efficiently. Five apps stand above the crowd in terms of ease of use and functionality: Analytics App, Website SEO Audit, SEM Calculator, SEO Pro, and Ego.

Analytics App

Analytics App, by Inblosam LLC, is intended to provide detailed information from Google Analytics in a format that is natural for the iPhone. Unlike the other apps on the list, it supports Google Analytics’s Advanced Segmentation features. This allows users to quickly sort through huge sets of analytical data to understand what’s really important to them. It can generate 55 different reports, displaying up to 100 rows of data at a time. It also includes a “Dashboard Report” feature that provides an overall view of the Google Analytics information for a given site, as well as a “Today” report that only takes into account the information Google collected for that day. Analytics App allows the user to register multiple logins and accounts on the same iOS device. It creates a secure connection directly to Google that ensures the data stays safe. It connects to Google using either WiFi, a good mobile broadband connection, or Edge. Inblosam claims their Analytics App is easier than looking the information up in a desktop browser, and many times they are correct.

Website SEO Audit

Unlike Analytics App, Website SEO Audit is not meant just to measure current SEO performance, but to explain it. It analyzes a given website for a number of SEO-related factors: its Google® PageRank, the number of backlinks and indexed pages it includes, the relevancy of its meta tags, and how long it takes to load each page. It even analyzes the HTML’s heading tags and image alt tags for their relevancy to the website’s purpose. It includes some Google Analytics data as well, although not nearly as extensively as Inblosam’s Analytics App. Data created from Website SEO Audit can be saved within the app for later.

SEM Calculator

The SEM Calculator from By E-String Technologies Inc. is intended to help plan SEO and web advertising operations. It features multiple calculators for equations SEO specialists commonly use. For example, it can calculate whether a CPM or CPA ad purchase would be more effective under given website use circumstances. For SEO specialists who also advertise through Google Adwords, Yahoo!, or MSN, this is a convenient and dependable way to plan advertising based on information provided by Analytics App.

SEO Pro

SEO Pro by Benjamin Spiegel combines several SEO functionalities into one package. First, it can monitor the page rank of any website on several different engines: it supports Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Yahoo Inlinks, Yahoo Indexed, and Compete.com Rank. It also searches Digg to see how many times the site has been posted there. Like Website SEO Audit, it can show a site’s meta tags. It also supports the iPhone 4′s Retina screen, but requires a strong mobile broadband connection.

Ego

Ego, in contrast to the aforementioned apps, is heavily based around analysis of social media sites. It can give website stats on services such as RSS feeds, Mint, Tumblr, Twitter, and Vimeo which is important to have a really good mobile broadband connection. As social media sites become more and more important in managing web presence, Ego’s ability to monitor social media will help SEO specialists plan their SEO strategies. Ego also provides Google Analytics data, as Analytics App and SEO Pro do.

While these apps may not completely change the way one does SEO, they do make things easier when on the go and elsewhere. They provide common SEO functionality in convenient and intuitive packages.

Ruben Corbo is a writer for the website Broadband Expert where you can find internet service providers in your area and compare prices on different deals for your mobile broadband needs.

Offline Marketing Boosts Up Online Income

It is always good to leave your PC and go out for a walk. Staying in front of PC will make your brain ‘smaller’. It is good to gather new ideas and fresh air outside the virtual world.

I have been running few online businesses and all the marketing are done online- PPC, SEO, Forum posting..any strategy you can think of online Only recently I tried out some offline marketing for my online business. To my surprise, the sales go through the roof!

But again, you must know your ‘targeted’ customer before you jump into it. For example, if you want to target the college or university students, you may want to offer them something related to latest gadget like ipad, iphone etc. There is no point to offer them something they do not have interest at all. Here I have few tips to share if you want to complement your online business with offline marketing (all the while I have been asking offline business to go online but now I am asking online business to go offline too !):

1. If you are college or university student, you can always hand out leaflet to students or advertise in your uni or college’s notice boards. Make sure you  have your university or college name in the advertisement to make it looks a bit more official and make the students think it is for them ONLY.

2. University or college students always have plenty of edges. You can always come in the classroom or lecture theater 5 mins earlier and leave your advertisement leaflets on  the tables of the students. No one actually knows who is the mastermind behind all this You friends may take away your leaflet or they may leave behind and students from the next class will see your ads too!

3. There are always many colleges or universities cluster together in one area. So if there are 30K students in your university, imaging the amount of traffics you will get if you implement the same strategy in other universities (you can always engage your friend or students in other uni to help you out in this).

4. Don’t worry if you are no more a student How I wish I were! You can also engage students to distribute for you in their colleges or universities. There are many students willing to help you out for some pocket money. Please check out the sample of the ad template that I have created:

Simple Ad Template

5. Another simple and common way is flyer distribution. We are all familiar with this. The flyers can come with newspapers or by itself. There are many companies offering this service in town. All you have to do is to google for flyer distribution service in your city. Normally the one come with newspaper will be slightly more costly. Of course the price also differs if you go for colour printing. If you are based in Kuala Lumpur, you can try out SBS Print, Flyers King Or NewsPaper Insertion. However, please bear in mind that you may not see instant result with flyers because it takes time for people to get familiar with your flyers. Sometimes it takes few distributions to see the real impact of flyers distribution. Normally the flyer distributor will do the printing service too. This makes the life easy for us! For example, I am now based in Kuching, but I can always engage the KL company to do the printing and flyer distribution for me. Most of them will help with the artwork also upon request.

6. Some other offline advertising options are also available: newspaper, magazine, bunting, banner, words of mouth , poster, etc.

7. Joint venture with other offline businesses that share the same interest or niche with you. Those offline shops are more than happy to help promoting your online business if you offer them a win win partnership. For example, they can help to distribute your leaflets to their customers and in return, you can help to advertise their offline business in your website. Thіѕ іѕ an important offline marketing аррrοасh that саn hеlр уοu become profitable in your online business by enabling уοu to reach the VERY targeted customers that уοu сοuld not reach before.

Last but not least, some minor but important things you should take note when you are preparing your ad. Double check the artwork and write up carefully before send for printing:
1. Spelling
2. Address
3. Quantity
4. Size
5. Telephone Number and etc.
Otherwise the flyer distributor or printing company will tell you -*No claims entertained there after.

So, if you want to grow your business, especially those products with potential of repeated sales, you should consider investing in offline marketing too!

Say Good Bye to My 5 Year-old Business

Time flies! My partners and I have been running a lodging house in Kuching, Sarawak- Pinnacles Lodge Kuching, for more than 5 years. We all believe it is time for us to sell off our business after so ‘long’ in this industry. Why did I say long!? Long because it is a very competitive business and long because of the lack of support from government in Tourism Industry! So you would not like to stay too long in the industry if you are not happy with the red tapes and also monetary return (it is pity to see the number of tourist coming to Kuching as compared to Sabah).

Lobby At Pinnacles Lodge Kuching

When we first started, there were around 3 or 4 lodging houses or hostel or B&B, whatever you want to call it, in town only. But after 5 years in the business, there are easily 30 lodging houses in town. Some of them come and go… and we are blessed that we  still survive! We have learnt a lot in this industry and we have seen many different kinds of people- good and bad, honest and dishonest, fussy and unfastidious, male, female and transgender (you know what I mean)…

Anyway, the whole business is sold to the new owner! The Pinnacles Kuching is no longer my baby

Along the years, our business benefited a lot from online exposure. That is something one should not overlook-integrate or compliment offline business with online exposure!! Especially the  business in service industry. The lodging house website: http://www.pinnacleskuching.com, ranks pretty well in Google Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) for most of the important keywords related to the business. For example:

Kuching Backpacker – No 1

Kuching Backpacker Hostel – No 1

Budget Traveller Kuching – No 1

Kuching Lodge – No 2

Kuching Budget Hotel – No 2

etc….

I must say that those keywords are really not competitive at all. They are very easy to rank for if you know how to do it. You can stay on top even without any Offpage SEO. With some twists on the Onpage SEO, you  can rank well in Google. So what is the implication when you see that Pinnacles Lodge website is ranked on top of Google? ==> Money right! When Pinnacles Lodge is ranked well in Google, we are getting online room reservation while many others are not. If you own a hotel or lodging house and your website is nowhere to be seen on the 1st page of Google, it is very unlikely that you will be getting online booking. It is the fact that one will go and search online for their accommodation before they go traveling.

So if you are running an offline business, try to brainstorm to see how can the online exposure helps in your business. It is not surprise that your online income may end up more than your offline’s one day. Last but not least, good luck to the new owner of Pinnacles Lodge and you are lucky to inherit a good website  which ranks very well in Google from us

What is Google Traffic for UngCat ?

A friend of mine, UngCat, who is a newbie in internet marketing sent me a sketch on “Google Traffic”. She is learning how to drive Google traffics to the website. As a beginner, she is taking it slowly and COOL….

As you can see from her sketch, she is cycling peacefully…slowly driving Google traffics to her site:) Good sketch UngCat!! The sketch totally depicting her mind.

Ungcat is the site owner of AllAboutBorneo.com. All About Borneo is a site newly set up to promote the island of Borneo.