Cyza Sector

We are a human being that started from knowing nothing. We grow older and progressively learn many things along the years. When we are small, our main duty is to study, study and study. Nothing else. Yep, nothing else matter…

But then as we approach adulthood, we began exploring various other areas. We explore new interest, new hobbies, new this and new that. For certain things that we want to establish our expertise, we need somebody to guide, monitor and assist us. Those people, regardless of their field of expertise I regard as my precious mentor. They are like a catalyst, something and somebody that can speed the process of us getting to what we aim for. They will show us which path to take and which to avoid.

My mentors

As some of you know, I’m currently pursuing my Ph.D study in chemical engineering and I have a supervisor  (professor) to guide and maneuver me doing research work, writing technical papers and other research related issues. I also have a co-supervisor in Finland which I refer to once in a while.

At the same time, I am also in my quest to be a professional engineer and I have a mentor who is an experienced professional engineer to guide and help me be one. He works in KL (I work in JB) but that does not matter because I  will always meet him every quarterly to let him assess my performance and give advice. Currently he is in Uzbekistan, managing some civil project there. I will meet him when he is back here.

When I was working as a process engineer few years back, I have my senior executives as my mentor. They will share their experiences, knowledge and skills with me. Oh, I miss those days in the plant.

Besides my professional career mentioned above, I’m deeply and madly in love with the internet. I’m not really a fan of those social sites like Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin. I’m only using them to market my brand and communicate with my networks. I’m more towards blogging (part time blogger) and now slowly learning to try my luck selling some digital product online @ Internet Marketer (IM).

For those 2 co-curricular activities, I also have my own mentor to guide and help when I am in need of their advice. Those are people who have more knowledge and more skills than me. I have few person which I consider mentors when it comes to blogging. We are colleagues but at certain times, they are my blogging mentors.

At the same time, I have another IM mentor who is very kind enough to spend his precious time teaching and guiding me when I’m in need of him. His vast knowledge, experience and success in internet marketing inspires me to be a great IM. I’m making myself to be one. Oh God…please make my journey smooth…

When it comes to gold investment, I have 2 mentors, both who are my younger brothers. They have more comprehension and knowledge in gold related matters. They also have invested massively in gold.

When it comes to financial management and investments, I also have a mentor too. We never went through financial subjects or financial management in school nor university. The most we had is accounting and economics. Hence, it is important to have a financial mentor to help and guide us.

Am I a mentor to others?

Hmmm… I don’t really know how to answer that. There is no official mentorship going on accept for me mentoring my undergraduate student to do research closely related to mine.

I know some people, including my youngest brother, who maybe consider me as their mentor in blogging and internet marketing. Honestly, I don’t consider myself any sort of expert in blogging and Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but when somebody asks about it, I will definitely share. It’s my passion and I love discussing about it. In fact I don’t mind teaching and guiding those who are serious about blogging and SEO with zero charge. No problem at all.

I hope and wish that I’ll be a good mentor to my kids. I want to be a good father and example to them. That’s very important. Every body wants their kids to grow and be good and kind people, responsible and honourable, having good career and so on. We (me and my wife) also wanted that and we need to provide the best education and training for them. No matter how it cost, we will get the money to spend.

You are either a mentee or a mentor

Yes you are. If you are not either a mentee nor a mentor, I’m not sure where do you live and what you are.You might not be chasing for something.You might not have any interest in anything. You might not have a career you want to take care off. Maybe you are have not discovered your passion. Maybe you are not yet establish in what you are doing now.

It’s really something you need to think off.

Yep, think about it.

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p/s: Get my “Teknik Buat Duit RM1000 Sebulan” at GempakNewbie.com.

p/s: Untuk pakej haji, umrah dan ziarah, sila lawati laman ini.

p/s: I managed to get a discount of RM100 for FISH seminar (Financially Independent, Strong and Healthy) if you want to attend to the coaching. If you register early (before 1st October 2010), you can enjoy the price of RM2480-100 = RM2380. After 1st October, the price will be increased to RM2680. I’ll try to check if there is any installment payment. Anybody interested can contact me to get the application form

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I never knew nor imagine the income potential via blogging until I started passively earn money recently. It has been such a beautiful and marvelous experience. Though the income is not as high as some of my part time or full time bloggers counterpart but I’m extremely glad for the blessing God gave me and my family.

When the salary is no longer sufficient to support us (believe me there are times we faced this), the blogging money comes very handy. I just go to the bank and clear, or can I say claim the Google Adsense money. The stronger the US dollar, the better for me, but not good for the country!!! The same goes to other making money opportunities that I’m participating in.

If you are new with blogging and expect to earn money as soon as possible, please don’t dream so. Making money via blogging requires a huge passion and spectacular amount of time for you to build and establish the foundation – just like cooking a huge meal for 500 people as you can see me in the photo up there… For me, it took about 2 years plus to reach my current position and earning. Cooking that curry meat took only 5 hours to complete the thermodynamic process, but the preparation before it must be considered too. I’m not going to stay comfortable at this level but I’m going to work my ass out to another higher level. I’m focusing on some smaller amount of blogs now, some of it is a join venture between me and a friend.

Despite of having and paying for an autoresponder, my time won’t allow me yet to make full use of the automatic making money machine.

Why?

The answer is very simple. “Time” is not on my side. As some of you have known, I’m married, have 3 precious beautiful kids, have a career that I dream off, currently pursuing my Ph.D in Chemical Engineering and also preparing my project paper for my professional engineer status. The time allocated for online blogging and affiliate marketing is minute. That’s fine for me and that’s why I try hard to manage and optimize my time. So, if it’s meant to build an online business, I’ll create and establish a passive one and I know blogging can provide me that financial boost and security (anti recession).

If God spare me some more extra time, I’ll spend it to construct and launch my own affiliate business. I got one in the line but I have not launch it yet. Need to improve few things before it can be officially released. A successful affiliate business will ensure more wealth faster than blogging. Integrating blogging and affiliate marketing will be a complete combination of financial fire power that everybody will want to achieve. Combined, both platform will be semi automatic passive income and that is what all of us should target for.

So, what about you? I’m not sure but I would love to know your plans. I’m not aiming to be a blogger celebrity or a famous affiliate marketer. It’s enough to be an underground person who have thick pockets and invest his money in high performing mutual funds + golds.

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p/s: Get my “Teknik Buat Duit RM1000 Sebulan” at GempakNewbie.com.

Blogging can make money. That’s for sure. Affiliate can make even more money. But the problem is mastering all the skills and techniques to be grow the affiliate business. If you are a regular in Cyza Sector, you’ll notice me mentioning my interest to be involve in internet affiliate business.

Honestly, I must say that, I am struggling to start up my affiliate business. Out of a sudden, I found this program which was just recently launched. It is a speedy way to make money from affiliate business using products from clickbank. After 48 hours analyzing the program and system, I decided to give it a shot. I hope I have luck on this.

Off course there are pro and cons of joining this program.

OK, since I’ve joined this program for about 72 hours already, I’ve test run it a little. I haven’t had the opportunity to spend more time on this as I was stuck with another non-online job.

Pro (Advantage) – in no particular order

• Set up the sites in just 5 minutes. 6 ready made + 29 possible custom made videos ready to be uploaded to youtube.com
• Start begin marketing effort using ready made + custom made video (with your domain) right away.
• Start article marketing right away. 20 articles provided.
• Video tutorial and ebook on how to make videos + other traffic methods are available. Hence making amateur people like me can learn all these available powerful traffic techniques immediately.
• Do NOT need auto-responder.
• NO need to think of auto-responder sequence – as the system will do the job for you.
• NO need to do niche research.
• All we have to do is marketing and wait for the Clickbank income.
• Every month, members will get a new clickbank product on anonymous niche to promote.
• For the first month (now, if you register fast), you’ll get 3 fantastic niches. I’ve begin promoting.
• The system is – I can say Automatic or almost Automatic.

Cons (Disadvantage) – I can see right now 2 cons:

• We promote our site but we cannot collect the email list.
• Possible competition with other members if we don’t market creative enough.

Personal view

For me it is tricky and will take relatively longer time to master the affiliate skills despite of reading and mentoring with Affiliate Gurus. However, to taste international affiliate profit faster, I decided to be a member of this plug and play program. I can easily set up my site in truly 5 minutes. And after 12-15 minutes, I already have 3 powerful niche sites. The next thing for me to do is to brand my video, upload them and do some article marketing. That’s the marketing part. It’s all ready for me. The membership price for founding member is USD29 per month, which I think is reasonable (only for the first batch). I heard today that there are only 12 spots left for this membership price. If I can manage 2 sales a month, the commission is more than enough to cover my fixed monthly membership fees. But, I’m going to target more sales. I’m going to try at least to get USD500 per month for a start. Wish me luck…

If you are interested, you can investigate more by clicking the READY-NICHE-PROFIT below. I’m not asking you to get hold of this program. I’m just sharing what I’m doing now with you. I know, some of you are just like me, wanting to run an affiliate business, but for some reason, stuck somewhere… Good luck…

Example of video that I just re-brand from the membership area to promote my site:

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?

Whether you realize it or not, my posting frequency has slightly drop in this blog. As an indirect result to that, my Alexa ranking has dropped as well. Actually, I have been doing some deep thinking. What is it actually that I want to achieve from my online adventure? What is it that I want to achieve from blogging? Let’s recap my personal short term goal that I set at the end of last year:

1. To have an online income equivalent to my fix monthly salary job. Therefore I can have more money… My online income is presently (at the time I made that entry) accounting only about 14% of my salary. I need to double my effort to ensure I can have both off line and online income. Would that be nice! It’s not easy but it’s not impossible too.

My comment: It’s not easy to be successful in this business. It is possible but I repeat, it is not as easy as it seems. You look at international probloggers like John Chow and Caroline Middlebrook; and local IM like Zul Smartusaha and Team SaifulSham. Do you think those people arrived at their current state just like that. Nope…. They are committed and they worked hard. I’m not sure whether they think they are already successful or not, but surely a lot of us do recognize and would love to be like them. OK, back to me, my situation… Really it is not easy. Often, I found something interesting in a form of video, audio, ebook but I just haven’t had the time to allocate to absorb the information lying beneath it. I hate to say I’m busy… I’m trying to avoid that word. I’m trying to be a little bit positive.
So, what have I been doing for the past few days, or perhaps the past few weeks? Continuous learning… I’ve been listening to the audio and video that I saved in my hard disc. Why? To create a strategy to speed up my online success – to have an online income equivalent to my monthly salary. Is that possible? Can I realize that? Can I achieve that? Short answer is yes. Long answer: it is a matter of my hard work, consistency and perseverance; and it’s a matter of time. However, I have targeted to achieve that goal by the end of this year. It is now almost end April and that leaves me with approximately another 7 months plus to prove myself and my family something. I’m now pressuring myself!

How am I going to do it?

I’m going to expand my pay per click activities, learn some opt-in-list building and slowly involve with some affiliate programs. I’ll try my very best to squeeze my time and energy to work on those lists… And I must not forget to stay FOCUS on what I’m doing. I can’t let other programs or offers distract me. I must discipline myself and stay laser FOCUS. Wish me luck guys…

2. To get myself a decent laptop for my online activities. I’m not looking for something super or marvelous. A decent laptop with a good processor with a 1 Gb RAM or above, hard disc around 80Gb will make me smile. The laptop that I’m currently using belongs to my wife and she need to use it for her work.

My comment: Well, nothing much to comment here. I got one already and I’m using it now. This goal has been achieved.

3. To learn and become well verse in Wordpress, CPanel, Photoshop and creating websites. I really need to master them in order to be successful in the early stage of my online career. I wish there’s a teacher or ‘sifu’ beside me who can teach the techniques and secrets of internet success.

My comment: I haven’t really covered this part yet. I’m still exploring and mastering wordpress. Haven’t really touched CPanel and Photoshop. Still not sure when to learn those stuffs. If there’s a mentor to guide me, I would jump !!!

4. To publish a book (or e-book). I’ve been dreaming to publish a book since my university life. However, I haven’t done so due to time limitations and various other factors. I think this coming year will be a good time for me to push myself publishing a book with my name as the author. It’s not the money that I want; it’s the pleasure of publishing my own book that I’m looking for.

My comment: I’m still working on it. It will be something related to my niche. If I can’t produce an Ebook this year, I may produce a report instead. I’ll be very happy to release a report via an opt-in-list. The most important thing is to work on the article content which has value, real value to my target audience. The draft is in my laptop, off course .

5. To reduce 20% of my weight. I don’t dare to reveal my weight here but this year is a record breaking high. I look ugly in the digital photos taken by my wife. In order to achieve this goal, I need to control my diet and exercise regularly and effectively. Sometimes I just don’t understand why I’m craving to eat every hours!!!

My comment: Hmm… I guess I need to revise the target from 20% to 10%. That will be a more realistic figure, physically and mathematically .

Conclusion

Out of 5 goals, I have online realized one. I have another 4 more to work on. I need to:

1. Stay focus

2. Work consistently

3. Use all the time that I have efficiently and effectively = optimum

What about you?