Cyza Sector

I’ve started my TNX project for about one week now. I’ve submitted few blogs and all of the blogs are accepted. However, I still need to improve the blog backlink and pagerank. Thanks to Titan who has been providing me consistent help and support. Honestly, I haven’t get anything yet but it’s ok because I’m ok with it. I know it may take some time before the blog get indexed.

As I’m writing typing this post, I’m watching the live match of Manchester United versus Liverpool at Anfield. Man U is currently 0-1 down.

OK, I just want to ramble a little bit here since my older rambling few months ago.

1. Decided family is my priority

I’ve stressed this in my earlier post but I also need to highlight that I’m going to try my best to provide better attention to my parents and in laws as well. This is very important to develop and maintain a good inter family relationship. Just prepared my son for his examination at school tomorrow. I hope he’ll be serious and do his very best.

2. Tile project

We are going to work on our tile project at our house porch. This project have been delayed for so long. I think now is the right time to settle it once and for all. I’m leaving the style, concept and design of the tiles-decor to my other half. I hope we can complete this project in fortnight.

3. Google Privacy Policy

Wow…I totally forgot to fix this earlier. I just realized about it yesterday. I’ve inserted the policy yesterday night after getting some help and feedback from few online friends which include Azwan, Titan, Hasbul and catzer.

4. Which Camera?

Should I take Nikon D90 or Panasonic DMC-F1. I really fancy the fantastic Nikon D90 but I know for the time being I don’t really have the time to meddle with it. I have other very important priorities to take care first. In the other hand, Panasonic DMC-F1 seems to be an interesting digital camera for me to own. Thanks to Azwan for providing me an idea on this camera.

5. Legoland Johor

Seriously, I’m very eager to be among the first Legoland Theme Park Johor visitor. The Legoland in Iskandar will be the 6th in the world and the 2nd in Asia. Is there any other theme park going to be as happening as this one?

6. My Ph.D status

On going… I’m still in my first semester. I’m targeting to complete them within 3 years. I’m just trying my best to focus it. Pray for my success please .

7. My TNX project

I just started this project, submitted 4 of my english blogs. So far, there are no answer yet. I also just signed up for the members only TNX forum which was set up by Titan. I hope I can earn some dollars monthly from this project.

8. Gold, gold, gold

Want to buy or sell gold. I’m talking real golds. If yes, you can discuss and do business with my borther Budeen. He is now into it and I know if he do something, he does it right, with dignity.

OK, the game just ended and … it was a disaster…damn…

Sometime in this life we have to make some sacrifices. That is life. I’m very grateful to have one happy family. I’m blessed with a great job and the opportunity to further my study in the highest level. What else can I ask more?

I realized I have earlier mentioned about arranging my online activities. But then, I also realize that, I need to prioritize my time with my kids, especially to monitor their studies.

Ikhwan, my active eldest son, is in standard one and require serious attention from us (the parents). He likes to play and go to school. But when it comes to doing homework and studying, he needs somebody to motivate him. That’s when we come in. I’m now committed in spending 1-2 hours every night to ensure he can perform in his study, especially in reading Malaysian and English language, jawi and mathematics. I hope we can prepare him well enough before the final examination next month. We want to see him improve his grade in his examination in both his official school and religious school.

Marsya, 5, our expressive first daughter is very diligent and require less attention in terms of her studies. She’s doing very well in her pre-school and we are trying to bring her up to another level. The only thing is her mood which is sometimes unpredictably annoying.

Alya, 3+, our charming third child, is still very small. We don’t really expect her to study seriously for the time being. We want her to have her own sweet and fun time studying at school.

That’s the current sacrifice I have to make. Maybe I cannot call it sacrifice, but rather define it as responsibility. Before this, I have not really paid sufficient attention to their studies. After work, at night, I only focus on my online activities. But, their future is very important and precious to us. We don’t want to gamble their future. We want the best for them. We want them to excel academically and morally and grow up to be good people with great career. We have to do our best to provide them with the best education and support plus motivation + love.

That’s it. I’ll reduce my online time in order to ensure my kids are doing well. I have to re-arrange my strategy because I have to spend more time thinking and running my ph.d research too.

Oh gosh… when can I relax???

My online time will be roughly around 1 hour every night, I’m guessing… And I must proportion it finely to do all the blogging, affiliate, article marketing, SEO, and other making money online duties…

Please, I seek other almost similar parents to share your experiences with me…

Domain Renewal

Yesterday, i have a little time to spare to renew 3 of my almost expiring domains which I purchased from godaddy.com and cheapdomain.com [2 dot com(s) and 1 dot info]. Earlier, I received renewal notices from both parties to renew my domains or accept the auto renewal process. The auto renewal process is set/agreed when I first register new domains with them. So, instead of auto renewal, I decided to manually renew the 3 domains myself. I clicked the renewal links in the email they sent me. Then, the process was fast and easy. I used paypal for payments to the two large international hosting company.To my surprised, I only have to pay $8.17 per domain (cost of domain renewal = $7.99 + $0.18 (ICANN Fee)). So, in total, the cost of renewal was about $24++ ($8.17 x 3). I’m not sure whether this is the price for earlier + manual renewal. But, I’m happy because I saved some of my paypal cash (rather than paying $10++ per domain renewal).

Why I’m saying this?

Last July, I forgot to renew a domain which I bought from godaddy.com. Luckily, the auto renewal process took place automatically and deducted about $10.67 from my paypal account. That’s better than the company you purchased your domain from did not inform you OR you forgot to renew your domain and the domain is re-directed somewhere else. I’ve experience that before and I lost substantially a lot from that simple mistake.

Bottom line, auto renewal is cool… but, can I say that auto renewal cost slightly more than early manual domain renewal? I’m not sure on this. Anybody have any experience on this?

Conclusion:

I prefer domain auto renewal. It’s safer. I don’t really mind if they if the charge is slightly more as long as if I forgot to renew, my websites and blogs are still running 24/7.

I’m planning a strategy to further improve my online career. I need to really fully focus on certain things and not getting very excited with other opportunities and offers which are abundantly found in the net. I’m no longer enjoying luxurious time as before. I’m now pursuing my ph.d in chemical engineering which demands massive amount of concentration, attention and time. It’s not easy to do research and achieve our targeted goals based on the hypothesis. I’m presently experiencing some difficulties in my experiments and having some some hard time writing technical papers to be published in high impact journals.

Bottom line is I need to balance my time between my study, online activities, engineering practice @ consultation and family for sure. OK, enough about my personal issues. Let’s share some business story.

Offline Business – Homestay business

I’ve spent some time earlier this afternoon chatting with my wife and business partner to expand our homestay business. The demand is surprisingly there and we felt the urgency to add a new house in addition of our main guess house. If you have additional house and if the house is empty or if the rent is not enough to cover your monthly loan payment, converting it as a homestay is a brilliant idea. With perfect marketing and excellent management, you can earn more then you can imagine. Since the BLR rate is currently low, the monthly mortgage will also be low, it seems like a good timing for me to buy a new house. It’s good rather than renting a house as a homestay. In long run, I’ll own extra property. Do you think so?

Offline Business – Car Rent Business

After reviewing and discussing various angles on car renting business, we have thought of not pursuing it. Even we’ve earn handsomely from renting our second car since end of July and used the income for our Raya expenditure/spending, I’m not going to continue it. There will always be a risk and the profit is not as good as running a homestay.

Offline Business – Ceramic Business Club

I’ve join this program early 2009 after being persuaded by my brother. Now, after almost 9 months operating it (not really running it myself because my brother is doing it for me) I’m very happy because we not only get some amount of cash but also do our grocery shopping without bringing any cash. Yes, that’s true. Since Ceramic Business Club set up the shopping mart at Skudai (near Giant Pulai Utama), we shop with very happy face because we get rice, cooking oil, frozen food, snacks, detergent and various other household products from the store just by exchanging it with our shopping points.

Online Activities

Google Adsense

I find this time consuming but rewarding. I know developing adsense websites and blogs can be regarded as having a virtual real estate and earning passive income. However, I haven’t been successful in penetrating my target income, though I’m still cashing out dollars via Western Union on a monthly basis.

Hence, I’m planning to allocate 10% of my online time on Google Adsense website and blog development. I’m rearrange the strategy to boost up my income 100% to the average of what I’m presently earning. Some of the strategies will be:

- creating and developing more niche sites using static websites and wordpress blogs (5% online time).
- marketing those website and blogs using article marketing (3% online time).
- comment marketing (2% online time).

TLA is not that big but it’s helping me to sustain all my online expenditures (domains + hostings) and purchase of ebooks and getting service from others. That’s why I need to have more blogs to earn more from this program. Percentage time allocated – 0.5%.

Revresponse

I’m not sure about the others but this program has been very good contributor for me. If you own good technical, academic or industrial blog/website, I highly recommend you to join Revrespon. Percentage time allocated – 1%.

Blogging

Blogging is for me fun but as I like to write and share. I won’t stop blogging and that’s a fact. It help me connect and communicate with others. Via blogging, I earn some money from Google Adsense, Revresponse, TLA and other make money program (which I do not cover now). Percentage time allocated – 15%.

JBCool.com

This is my baby project that I’m currently running with Azwan. We aim high for this and hope it can be a place where Johorean can refer. Currently jbcool.com is under construction, content addition and soft marketing. Percentage time allocated – 5%.

Autoresponders and Affiliate Business

I’ve made a point to myself that I’m going to get my hands in Affiliate business. As a result, I’ve signed up with norabots, a relatively cheap but reliable auto-responder to kick start my list building and affiliate biz. As a warm up, I’m building my own list in my niche. In future, I’m slowly going to build my own list for other niche, create my own products and sell other peoples product. I’m planning to spend 65% of my online time establishing this new area. Percentage time allocated – 55%.

Others

I’m not going to list other programs or online activities here. I’m just going to flock it into others, which basically means all the other minor programs and activities I’m doing which include TNX, jobamatic, nuffnang, advertlets, indeed.com, blogvertise, smoorty, backlinks, infolinks, facebook, forums etc. Percentage time allocated – 3.5%.

Conclusion

The most important thing I’m sharing here is the planning to spend my online time. I need to be more extra focus on what I’m doing. I have to let go some other important online activities. I only have approximately 10-15 hours a week (and that’s not much). Currently I’m not spending time at all on twitter (marketing) and any social bookmarks etc. I can’t!!! I cannot afford to allocate time for it. As more and more new products regardless free or paid products are introduced daily, I must keep my focus on what I’ve plan. You should too. Maybe you focus better than me?!!!

Any other tips for me…? to be successful online…

Should I JV with others? Should I launch a contest to boost traffic?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process of choosing the most appropriate targeted keyword phrases related to your site and ensuring that this ranks your site or blog highly in search engines. As a result when someone searches for specific phrases or titles it returns your site on tops. It basically involves fine tuning the content of your site along with the HTML and Meta tags as well as appropriate link building process. Mastering SEO is definitely one of the most important aspect for a blogger or internet marketer. It will provide luxurious organic traffic to your site and blog.

At the moment, the most popular search engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN Search Altavista and AOL. All of these search engines keep their methods and ranking algorithms secret for various reasons including to deter spam pages from clogging those results.

A search engine may use hundreds of factors while ranking the listings where the factors themselves and the weight each carries may change continually. Algorithms can differ so widely that a webpage that ranks #1 in a particular search engine could rank #200 in another search engine. However, if you can master this skill, the search page result of your site/blog won’t differ significantly from search engine to search engine. I still remember my early days involvement with my blog. I checked page by page of Google and Yahoo search engine to see whether my blog is listed or not.

If you have a new sites/blogs, you don’t need not “submit” it to search engines in order to be listed. A simple link from a well established site (good traffic, good PR, well indexed) will get the search engines to visit the new site and begin to spider its contents. It can take a few days to even weeks from the referring of a link from such an established site for all the main search engine spiders to commence visiting and indexing the new site.

If you are unable to research and choose keywords and work on your own search engine ranking, you may want to hire someone to work with you on these issues. But this certainly requires some investment. I still recommend and urge you to master this skill. It is very important. For a start you can check out Google Keyword Tool. It will provide you good keyword suggestion and analysis to help you decide on excellent keywords. It’s very simple and straight forward. Try it out and you’ll get better at it.

It has proven to be very successful to me when I adopted SEO in my online and offline business.

Having a normal wordpress blog is dull. Having a wordpress blog with accessories will be create an excellent blog. This accessories is what we call PLUGINS. Wordpress plugins are very important for any wordpress blog. Without wordpress plugin it is tough to get the best out of your wordpress blog.

I’m going to share some of the wordpress plugins that I used. Some of them I used in this blog while some others I used in my other blogs. For a start here are the first 4 wordpress plugin that is quite critical to be better position in the google engineering search engine. Check it out:

1. Top Commentator Widget

Many bloggers manage to successfully draw traffic to their blog by using this very commanding plugin. It displays the top commentators based on day, week, month or any duration preferred. Some bloggers organize top commentator contest to drive traffic and winners may receive various rewards such as t-shirt, voucher, cash etc. This can be easily organized and you’ll receive a flux of traffic from permanent or unique visitors, hence increasing your blog rank.

Download Top Commentator Widget

2. Ajax Comment Posting

Ajax Comment Posting is capable in allowing visitors to make and publish comment very fast and efficient. In just seconds, the new comment will be published without refreshing the browser or the whole page. It saves time and precious bandwidth. Besides that, if your visitors use slow internet dial up connection, they can see their own comment as soon as publishing them without refreshing the page. It’s really quick.

Download Comment Posting Plugin

3. Subscribe To Comment

Let say a visitor needs some clarification about a post in your blog and leaves a question in your comment box. How can we ensure and let the visitor know that his or her question has been answered?

The old fashion way is to bookmark the website or blog at the browser. It needs several clicks to do that. However, when this plugin is activated, a small click box appears under your comment box. If your visitor click this box “Notify me of follow-up comments via e-mail” (shown in the illustration below), whenever somebody answer or response at the comment box, your visitor can automatically received the comment updates via email. It’s very simple yet powerful feature. It makes your visitor being appreciated and come to your blog repeatedly.

Download Subscribe to Comment Plugin

4. Wordpress.com Stats

This plugin requires you to register with Wordpress.com and you’ll be assigned one tracking id called API key. The API key is used to verify your WP stats account and Akismet which is used to fight SPAM. You must use the same API key to activate both plugins. I personally use WP Stat to see and analyzed my visitors. It would not count your own visit and also the search engine bot visit, which means it will only count the actual visitors to your blog. On top of that, it can detect external links that were clicked and also keyword terms for your blog.

Download Wordpress.com Stats Plugin

Ok, that’s it for now. Wait for my next wordpress plugins discovery…

Any comments or plugins to share?