And in conjunction with this web hosting service, we have been experimenting with a few ways to get traffic and conversions, including Google Adwords, Facebook adverts, as well as contacting various group buying websites, such as Groupon Malaysia, mydeal.com.my and also MilkADeal.com.

I’ll go into more specifics about what I did to get featured and the way the deals work (for businesses and customers) in a later post about the overall group buying experience, but today I invite any of my readers to check out the deal at: http://www.milkadeal.com/deals/inside-the-box.

It’s a bigger discount than I normally would give to even my readers, but because of the revenue sharing model (will explain that later), I’ve had to give a 70% discount on 2 of my hosting packages.

The deal will only last another 6 days (at time of writing), so grab it while you can!

When you make that change, from maybe USD to Australian Dollars or any other currency, you’ve essentially participated in a Forex transaction.

When you trade back from the Australian Dollar to the USD, there may have been a slight change in exchange rates over the time you were travelling, it might have increased, it might have decreased.

These fluctuations in exchange rates are what allows you to make money in the Forex market.

What’s so big about the Forex market I hear you ask?

Well if you put it into comparison or perspective, the NYSE, the bid-daddy of stock exchanges, trades roughly $74 Billion a day in volume. This may sound like a lot, but in comparison to the Forex market, it’s barely a drop in the bucket.

The FX marketing trades an unbelievable $4 Trillion a day in volume!

But most people know much more about the NYSE than they’ll ever know about the FX market, since it’s so widely covered on almost every single major news channel on a daily basis, from CNN, CNBC to Bloombery and BBC.

But when it comes to sheer volume traded, you can’t beat Forex.

Check out the graph below to see a comparison in the difference of the most popular stock exchanges around the world:

[Source: Babypips.com]

What Is The Size Of The Forex Market?

Another thing people don’t typically know about the forex market is that unlike the NYSE, or KLCI, which both have physical locations for their activities, the forex market has no central exchange or location.

Known as an ‘Over The Counter’ (OTC) market, or ‘interbank’ market, all forex trading is essentially run completely electronically, through a large network of banks, 24/7, 365 days a year. With no one location, trades can be carried out at all locations around the world and almost at all timezones.

Being one of the largest traded markets in the world by both corporations and individuals alike, trades take place on the OTC market depending on a number of factors, including socio-economic variables, price, reputation etc.

But by far the most traded currency on the forex market, making up almost 85% of all transactions is the US dollar, followed by the Euro at almost 40%, then yen at about 20% and the remainder made up by some other currencies spread across the world.

Something important to keep in mind is that the are always 2 sides of a trade, one side, which is usually the US dollar, and the currency that you are trading to, which can be referred to as a pair.

The Importance Of The US Dollar

The US dollar or USD for short, makes up almost one half of almost every major currency pair on the market, and the major currencies themselves make up 70%+ of all trades. So you can see just how important it is in relation to Forex trading in general.

The USD is said to make up more than half of the world’s entire foreign exchange reserves – just think about that, more than half of the world’s foreign reserves are held in a single currency!

So the USD should be something all would-be Forex traders should pay big attention to.

How Is Forex Traded Upon – About Speculation.

Although most trades on the forex market are done for commercial (such as purchasing of goods) and financial (such as money changers and banks), most of the trades are done based on speculation. That means short term traders are very common, trading on price movements on a day to day basis, or even hour to hour and shorter periods.

That means that the forex market is a highly liquid beast, since there are people willing to trade at almost any specific time of the day, buying and selling currency is possible within a very short period and makes it easy for anyone to get into it.

NB: On the flip side, this also means that not only is it easy to invest, easy for prices to go up (and hence make money), it is also easy for money to be lost. This risk needs to be understood by anyone reading this and if you have a low level of risk tolerance, Forex trading is probably not for you.

There are ways to manage this risk, but inherently you must be prepared to take on the risks for the rewards, so it isn’t for everybody.

How Do You Trade Forex?

There are a variety of ways to trade in foreign currencies, mainly forex spot market, futures, options and exchange-traded funds (ETF). In their simplest form, each of these methods can be understood as:

• Spot Market – Currencies can be traded on the ‘spot’ using the prevailing market price. The simplicity and liquidity of this market and because you can trade all times of the day make it a very popular choice.
• Futures – Similar to futures in stock trading, in forex it works the same, where you can buy or sell contracts on forex prices on a future date. The market is well regulated and information on it is readily available
• Options – This gives the buyer the ‘option’ to buy or sell an asset at a price on the expiry date of the option. If you enact your option, then you have buy or sell your asset at the price determined for the expiration date.
• Exchange Traded Funds (ETF) – These are relatively new to forex and work basically by combining a selection of stocks and currencies, so that traders can have a wider range/ diversified asset classes in their portfolio. However, because stocks are involved, you can’t trade 24 hours a day, you need to follow the exchanges’ opening hours.

This simple introduction was meant to provide you a quick overview of some of the terms and basic knowledge required to start gaining knowledge in the forex market. Our next article will cover topics such as the advantages of Forex and the currencies used in forex.

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But fear not! It’s time for a change!

This time around, I’m going to update the blog on a more regular basis, bringing you more content, newer topics and a few business opportunities as well.

Based on my Google Analytics records and also based on the posts with the most comments, I’ve come up with a list of topics that visitors to OBM seem to be looking for the most:

· How to register a business in Malaysia

· Tax for small business/ online business

· How to incorporate a business (how to setup a Sdn. Bhd.)

· Low cost businesses to start up (offline and online)

· WordPress tips

· Web hosting/ Web Design tips

To do so, I will be doing more joint ventures with other businesses who can help with some of the topics above, such as accounting companies, tax consultants and company secretaries to advise or perhaps bring a service to my readers on setting up their business or even doing business tax.

For making money online, I’ll be bringing you a series of topics on my first joint venture on forex trading with an affiliate marketing twist to it, which I’ll start brining to you over the next few days and few weeks, ending in a real-world training course prepared by my associates.

I’ll also try and bring more affiliate products that you can sell to make a commission on and the best ways to do that.

Wow, sounds like a lot of work on my part!

But it’ll all be worth it as I expand and grow this community, I might add a forum, members section and perhaps even conduct training seminars and workshops.

It’s an exciting time ahead and I can’t wait to share the journey with my growing audience of readers

I will be holding a 2 day online business workshop on the 22nd – 23rd January 2011 at my office in Damansara Heights and am writing this post to give you more details about the 2 day workshop.

A few seats are already taken of the 10 MAXIMUM participants I will be accommodating for the first seminar of 2011 as I would like to keep the groups small and dedicate as much of my efforts on each individual as possible.

It will be a very hands-on class, where I will demonstrate how to use WordPress to blog, how to do SEO, how to use Facebook as well as how to set up a very effective Google Adwords campaign – so please bring your laptop!

What Will You Learn?

I will cover the following topics:

• Introduction to blogging
• Blogging for your business/ blogging as a business
• WordPress
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Monetization strategies
• Generating traffic
• Facebook
• Pay per click advertising (Google Adwords/ Facebook Advertising)
• Outsourcing your work
• Question and answer sessions

What Are My Credentials?

I am the founder of a boutique web design company in Malaysia called Inside The Box Web Services, which amongst many things:

• Created one of Malaysia’s top online food portals, Feedmelah.com! (featured in The Star Newspaper, NTV7, Malay Mail and The Age)
• Started Malaysia’s #1 online business blog, which you are currently reading
• Designed websites for a wide range of clients, from celebrities (Carmen Soo, Elaine Daly) to restaurants (Zang Toi Cafe)
• Search engine optimized every single website of every single client I have ever had
• Developed, run, optimized and tweaked Pay Per Click campaigns for my clients

But most importantly, I have spent thousands and thousands of dollars on learning materials from Internet Marketing courses around the world – which I use to base my teachings from.

I paid the price (literally) so that you wouldn’t have to.

What Are The Details?

The seminar will be held on January 22nd 2011 (Saturday) – January 23rd 2011 (Sunday) and will be held from 9.30 am to 5.30 pm for the Saturday and 9.30 am to 3.00 pm on the Sunday (so that you may enjoy the rest of your weekend).

It will be held at the following address:

Inside The Box Web Services

52-3, Jalan Medan Setia 2 (near Sri Cempaka and CIMB bank),

Plaza Damansara, Bukit Damansara,

50490 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Please contact us if you have any questions.

How Much Does It Cost?

The prices for the course are as follows:

• Workshop Only – RM280
• Workshop + Premium Blog Theme – RM480
• Workshop + Premium Website Theme – RM980

*20% discount for every additional seat purchased using the link above – so bring a friend!

For online banking, please send your fees to the following bank details:

• Bank: Maybank
• A/C Number: 512688103965
• Company Name: Inside The Box Web Services
• Email: william@onlinebusinessmalaysia.com

Please email us a PDF/ copy of the transaction as proof of purchase to the email above.

The future of business is to have a presence on the Internet and I hope that is what I can teach to all my students through my workshops.

I hope to see you there and if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

I haven’t had the time to revisit my materials and update them to cover additional topics, but off the top of my head I’m thinking of giving workshops that cover the following set of topics:

• Blogging as a business
• Blogging for your business
• How SEO works and how to improve your website/ blog’s SEO
• How to setup, monitor and tweak a Google Adwords campaign
• How to setup, monitor and tweak a Facebook Advertising campaign
• Traffic generation techniques

Specifically which topics depends on the group of attendees that come for my seminar/ workshop.

Although my office has space for 20 – 30 people at any one time, I am thinking of keeping my initial group small at first, as I would like to spend as much time with my students as possible – a more hands on approach.

So for the first group, I’m going to try and keep it to less than 10 people.

Pricing

Pricing wise, I’m going to keep it as affordable as possible, with the following set of price points:

• Workshop Only – RM280
• Workshop + Premium Blog Theme – RM480
• Workshop + Premium Website Theme – RM980

More details will be made available later on, but essentially the second and third prices above will include installation of a WordPress blog or WordPress website from a set of premium WordPress themes I have access to.

They can even be partially modified to suit your needs.

Duration

To cover as much as possible, I am considering having my course over a 2 day period, on the Saturday and Sunday of a weekend to be announced, from 10am – 6pm.

Lunch will be included of course

Who’s Interested?

Last but not least, I need to take a count on who would be interested in sitting through a 2 day workshop with me, so please fill in the form below if you would be interested in attending an Internet marketing workshop as described above:

Did I mention lunch was provided?

A Quick Update

So what’s taken up all my time I hear you ask? Well primarily it is all my Web Design projects that I have been doing over the last few months, as this is my primary source of income for my business.

Most of the jobs have come from a combination of referrals through my personal network (not all marketing is done online – important!) and also via this website, as well as my company website.

Other than that, I’ve been revamping Feedmelah.com to become a more lucrative income stream – currently it ranks very high in the local and some regional search engines, gets more than 30,000 visitors a month, but income generated from it is relatively low.

A Client’s Case Study

Over the last few months I have been working on a project for one of the readers of this blog, which is essentially a membership site selling access to a niche online application.

The website can be found at www.protectionrelaytest.com and the idea was conceived by my client, the owner of a newly formed company, Forcast Avenue which targets engineers in the power industry.

A little background – protection relay testing is done by power engineers throughout the world to find the best settings for very heavy duty, very important industrial equipment. However, to do so they need to rely on expensive, bulky testing equipment, which not all engineers or testing companies have access to in bulk.

Protection Relay Test replaces the need for this testing equipment by allowing you to input the same test parameters online as those that you would put on the testing equipment and using a series of formulas he has developed, it will give you the same results as the test equipment, except at the convenience of an online website.

The cost of using the application is only a few USD$ a month which represents barely a fraction of the cost of the testing equipment, which can run into the thousands of dollars, excluding maintenance and electricity usage.

Pay his website a visit to see the end product.

The Power Of Niche Targeting

Targeting a small target market may seem counter intuitive, as most people know the Internet is all about the numbers. But the thing is, the Internet is all about competition and saturation as well.

Take my industry for example, web design. If you do a quick Google search on web design services or web design company, you’ll see just how many people are vying for positions on the search results. It is quickly become a very saturated market, where competition is popping up left, right and centre.

So a niche market can make a lot of sense.

Yes there are less people searching for niche terms, such as protection relay testing above, but at the same time, there are less website competing for these keywords, hence you may actually get a bigger piece of the pie and more visitors/ potential customers.

Cheaper Advertising Costs

Google Adwords costs (and probably Facebook advertising as well) go down when there is less competition. Since Google Adwords works on a bidding system, where the highest bidder gets top spot, niche markets have the advantage of having less bidders.

Less bidders equals lower average costs.

Google Adwords is a great marketing tool that is severely underutilised in Malaysia, but that topic is for another blog post.

So have a good idea but think that it’s too specific? Well with niche marketing/ targeting, it may be more lucrative than you imagined. Anyway, with the power of online businesses, you can always give it a try – if it works, great, if not, it has unlikely broken the bank, so you can try again.

And again and again and again (like me).

Why Having a Website is Good- But Not Enough

While it is easy for online customers to locate a business if they know precisely which company they want to find, it is growing increasingly difficult for businesses to stand out from the millions of company profiles now available on the web.

Bluntly put, now that your business has a website, your competition has become global, and the need to differentiate your online presence has become crucial to your survival and success. The number of visitors your website has every month determines the traffic of your website.

TIP 1: Ultimately, having a website is good, but it will be of no benefit to your business if it has no visitors.

What is the Difference between Organic and Direct Traffic

A clear understanding of how Internet traffic works is crucial. Direct traffic is visits to your web pages that come from people that already know you. While your leverage of free online services such as Facebook, Twitter and blogging platforms are of benefit, they only help you “host” customers you probably already have. Put another way, these platforms will only receive the “direct” traffic of customers who know who you are and how to find you. What you need to capture is the traffic created by search engines and that is called “organic” traffic.

How Do Customers Look for Your Business?

Your potential customers look for companies by typing a service profile into a search engine to see which companies match their needs. The “service profile” is any number of keywords the customer chooses to describe what they hope to find. Your company will be “ranked” alongside any number of companies with similar profiles. Your goal is to increase your search engine “rank.”

TIP 2: The more traffic your website receives, the more often a search engine will place you at the list’s top as a “go to” source for customers.

TIP 3: Attracting Internet traffic involves ensuring that the words customers use to describe their needs appear on your site.

How to Optimize Your Company Website or Blog

Embedding key words that describe what the customer wants to find often is called using “search engine optimized” language, or SEO. Your company’s blog or website must tailor its profile to SEO language. This is not as daunting as it seems.

TIP 4: Writing articles, blog posts or service profiles about what you do using keywords most people use to describe your services will help you gain the traffic you need.

For example, if you run a landscaping company that specializes in caring for maple trees, write articles about proper maple tree care and post it on your blog. Drive traffic to this post by creating links to such posts on Facebook, online community boards, Craig’s list and the like.

Tip 5: If you want your post to rank for a particular keyword, ensure your blog title hosts this keyword.

Search engines use blog titles to form the index of companies a search engine “ranks” according to level of Internet traffic. A strong online presence demands an effective “company portrait,” a strategic use of SEO language, and the intelligence to help search engines help you. Being attentive to these aspects an online presence will reward you with customer interest, and subsequent revenue and growth.

This is a guest post by Alex Papa. Alex often speaks in seminars around the world showing people how to find new business ideas that will help them live the lifestyle they desire. In his blog he also offers a business start-up audio CD course.

What I’ve come to realize as I listen to the cheesy music being blasted out across the mall’s intercom is that if I started my online business career again, I may have done it slightly differently.

That’s easy to say with the benefit of hindsight, but nonetheless, it’s true.

I wouldn’t change many things, just do some of them slightly differently, here are just a few of them:

I Would Have Started With A Non-Personal .com Website

My very first blog that I ever created was a .blogspot.com blog and also it was a blog written in a personal nature, it wasn’t targeting any niche.

Although I’m not saying that personal and lifestyle bloggers can’t make money online, far from it in fact, as I know some pretty famous bloggers who are making quite a lot from their blogs, but for myself, I never should have started a personal blog.

Firstly, I’m not really all that interesting, so thinking that I could monetize a personal blog was definitely an oversight on my part.

For those who don’t know, my first blog was called at xanydude.blogspot.com (it’ll redirect you back here, so don’t bother visiting it) and it was called ‘A Banana vs. The World’.

Secondly, without a niche to target, getting organic traffic was always going to be hard.

If I could have done it again, I would have started a blog about blogging (like this one) and share my entire experience as I learned about blogging, Internet Marketing and web design.

Basically, I would have chosen a specific subject matter and stuck to it, no rambling, just useful content.

I would have also chosen a suitable .com domain name, on my own hosting, with WordPress installed as the CMS.

I Would Have Targeted The Whole World

Choosing onlinebusinessmalaysia.com to target the Malaysian audience has definitely worked out well in terms of Search Engine Optimization, but in terms of generating a large, interactive audience, targeting the world would have been better, albeit much harder.

Having such a specific domain name worked in my favour sometimes and also against me sometimes.

In my favour, it has now become Malaysia’s number 1 online business blog

Working against me, I may have alienated a more worldwide audience, especially from America, UK and Australia, since it seems my website is more targeted to a single country.

Furthermore, this set of audience would have potentially been more open to buying affiliate products or even my own products, had I created any.

I’m not saying that the Malaysian audience place aren’t potential clients, in fact a very large chunk of my income comes from Web Design services to Malaysian businesses, many of which have been to my blog to read about what I do.

If I could start again, maybe I would have bought a .com like WilliamLee.com and targeted a more general audience.

Like I said above, I would have written about blogging from my point of view and would have tried to build a readership base from there onwards. Due to the fact that there are so many people in the Western countries I mentioned above, the size of your newsletter base can grow much faster than if you target only one country.

Also, since they are more comfortable with purchasing products online, there would have been more potential for selling an affiliate product (such as from Clickbank) or develop my own to sell to them.

I Would Have Asked Around For Guest Posting Opportunities

I have yet to do this in Malaysia, but I would definitely have tried to guest post for other people in my niche.

I have read many examples of blogs, that with a combination of guest posting and a constant supply of good quality content, have made bloggers 5 figure salaries in as short as 1 year!

To a lot of my readers, 1 year may sound like an extremely long time, as the general perception is that Internet Marketing is some sort of magic bullet, that overnight will make you a millionaire.

Unfortunately that’s not the case – it’s constant effort, study, work and perseverance that makes you a millionaire, from online or offline businesses alike.

Guest posting is a great way to build a very targeted subscriber base in a very very short amount of time, as you leverage off the traffic of other more established websites.

Of course you would have to give them great content, useful to their audience. After all, why would they feature your writing if it weren’t top notch?

If I could do it again I would have prepared a few 750 – 1000 word articles, broken down into 3 to 5 sub headings and would have written the best possible articles I could think of.

Articles on becoming a better blogger, on pitfalls that I fell into when I blog and other articles that I think bloggers wouldn’t mind featuring on their blogs.

I would have then submit these guest posts to bloggers in my niche who had a medium following, hoping that one of them would feature my post on their blog.

I would have some sort of newsletter on my own blog so that when visitors come to my blog via my guest post, there would be something to entice them to join my newsletter (such as tips or a free e-book).

I would repeat this process at least twice a month, while adding really good content on my own blog, to keep these first time visitors coming back for more.

Now What?

Hindsight is great for spotting some of your mistakes and learning from them so that you don’t fall into the same traps as before, coming out better with each experience learned.

But something you can’t do is change the past, so there’s no point in dwelling on it.

So what am I going to be focusing on for this blog in the coming months? Well here are just a few of the things I’m going to try and cover/ do:

• More tips and information for first time bloggers and online business people in Malaysia to help them get off their feet
• Cover some of the Internet Marketing trends that are still being underutilized in Malaysia and how we should take advantage of them
• Lastly, I will be launching a series of Internet Marketing/ Online Business seminars with some associates of mine in the Internet Marketing industry. I’m going to cover (in depth) information on making money with blogging, making money with web design, online advertising and making money with e-commerce platforms.

If you’re interested in the seminars, sign up for my newsletter and I’ll update you as soon as I have more details on pricing, location and the subjects we are going to cover in our various seminars.