I’m not sure how long it was implemented, but Paypal now allows you withdraw Paypal funds to Malaysian bank accounts.

In a previous post, I wrote how for me to withdraw my Paypal funds, I needed to register for an Al Rajhi Debit Card to receive Paypal funds as Paypal did not send money directly into Malaysian bank account.

But I’ve recently found out that it seems that they have lifted this rule and are now able to send Paypal funds to Malaysian bank accounts.

In fact if you withdraw more than RM400 at one time, it’s free to withdraw. Less than RM400 is a service fee of RM3.

Refer to the table below for more info:

Or if you’re within you Paypal control panel, click on the ‘Withdraw’ link and you’ll be sent to the same page as seen above.

It’s good to know that Paypal has opened up more of its services to the Malaysian market place, making it easier for those of us who charge and receive money with Paypal to get those funds into our banks.

I’ve recently moved into an office and no longer have the luxury of rolling out of bed and into my office chair.

It now requires me to roll out of bed, get ready, roll into my car and drive on down to my office about 10 minutes away.

Eventually every small business will have to, if not already have done so, move into an office space, to enhance productivity, teamwork and give your clients some place they can come meet you at (your living room doesn’t count as a meeting room).

As I’ve learned, finding someplace right for yourself and your colleagues/ staff is not as easy as it seems.

Hopefully with these tips for getting a small office, you’ll be able to avoid some of the problems I faced when looking for my own one.

Get In Your Car And Drive Around

Most people turn to online portals or the newspapers to find an office to rent, but this may not necessarily yield the best deals.

People who are advertising in newspapers have probably just started looking for a tenant and may still have the patience and the money to leave it empty until the right deal comes along.

Try driving to a neighbourhood where you’d like an office and look around for signs hung/ stuck onto office windows with a real estate agent’s name and phone number.

These places have the best chance of having been empty for a long time – leaving the owner desperate for a tenant and open to lower than market rate prices.

The Higher You Go, The Lower The Cost

My office is located on the very top floor of a block of shop lots and hence has the lowest rent in our block.

Typically, the higher you go, the cheaper the rent becomes because people like convenience and even with a lift, the longer it takes to get to an office, the less people will want to pay for it.

That’s human nature, we’re lazy people at heart.

The Importance Of A Lift

My office has no lift.

As I said earlier, the higher you go, the cheaper your rental becomes.

When we saw that there was no lift, we told ourselves, walking shouldn’t be a problem, it’s good for our health too.

There are a few inherent problems with this statement.

1. Your clients probably don’t want to walk up many flights of stairs
2. When carrying up anything even moderately heavy (like a laptop on your back), it becomes more than a chore – it becomes exercise.
3. Upon reaching the top of your office block, you are sweating as the office air conditioners haven’t been switched on yet.
4. Repeat points 1 – 3 for when you leave the office.

But on the positive side, in this area, offices with no lift access can be as much as 50% cheaper in rent than offices with lifts.

If it’s money you are trying to save, then suck it up, climb the stairs and get buns of steel.
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If you’re subscribed to my newsletter, you would have recently received an email telling you about the new blog installation service we’ve recently added to online business Malaysia.

And only for my newsletter subscribers, you’ll have been told that this service is FREE for a limited time only.

Well I am extending that offer to my readers as well, but this offer is only valid until 11th April 2010.

What Service Are We Offering?

Taken directly from the services page:

Are you new to blogging, want to start a blog now, but don’t have the time to do it yourself?

Or maybe you’ve been blogging using Wordpress.com or Blogspot.com for a while now and you’ve decided to step it up to the next level?

Well with the Install-a-Blog package, we’ll have you up and running in no time at all!

Which is basically an installation service for people who want a brand new blog up and running on their own server, with their own domain.

Click the link below to find out more:

http://onlinebusinessmalaysia.com/services/blog-installation-service-install-a-blog-package/

Remember, you only have till 11th April before the service becomes a paid for service, so make use of this opportunity and find out more today:

The OBM Blog Installation Service

This is a question I received a while ago from one of my readers, Ashley, she asks:

I would like to sell handmade stuff on an online marketplace like Ebay.com and use Paypal to accept payments. If someone from the U.S. buys my product, do I need to pay any taxes (e.g. income, sales, etc.) to the Malaysian government? Would I be considered as a business?

The ‘official’ stand of the Malaysian tax department is that any and all income made by a Malaysian, within Malaysia (as in the money ends up in Malaysia) is by law, taxable.

If you’re not hitting the tax bracket of around RM2000 a month, I don’t think you have to pay tax anyway.

Get Some Tax Advice

However, if you are making more than RM2000/ month from online sales, I would suggest you go see a tax consultant or anybody who does tax for small businesses.

Tell that person roughly how much you make selling goods online and find out from them what your tax deductibles could be.

Will you owe money to the government, or would it be possible to offset your tax by claiming deductibles?

I can’t answer these questions for you, only a qualified tax expert can, so go find one, or ask a friend who owns a business who does their tax for them and make a meeting to go see them.

What Rich Dad Poor Dad Says About Tax

From my understanding of the ‘Rich Dad Poor Dad’ series of books, Robert Kiyosaki is basically telling people, the number 1 reason you should start a business is to save on tax.

Now tax may not be the biggest issue in Malaysia, as our tax brackets don’t go to crazy percentages such as 45% or 48% in foreign countries like USA, UK or Australia, but you can still take some learnings from businesses that operate in those countries.

If you’re holding down a full time job you have to realize that there’s almost no way to run away from tax. In Malaysia especially, there are only a certain set of deductibles you can claim in a year, these would include, books, computers, EPF, insurance etc.

If your salary is medium to high, then there’s no real way to run away from tax, the deductibles will never be enough for you to NOT pay for tax.

However, if you own your own business, it’s a different story entirely.

Everyone has heard that ‘meals’ or ‘cars’ or ‘houses’ are tax deductibles for business men or women and that’s why you see business men with huge wallets full of receipts.

A business person who makes $10,000/ month and an employee who makes $10,000/ month pay a very large difference in taxes at the end of the year, with the employee always losing out.

Tax Is Good

Tax, if used by the government like it should be used for, such as to build roads, schools and hospitals, is a great thing.

I can’t really comment what happens to our tax in Malaysia, but for a business person, the more taxable income you have, well, the more income you have – and that’s not a bad thing right?

Find out what your tax deductibles are and you may not actually owe the government anything, which at even a tax rate of 28%, means you could be making that much more a year in income.

A $10,000/ month employee will essentially only be bringing home $7,200/ month based on the tax figure above.

A $10,000/ month business man/ woman could be taking almost all that amount home.

I hope that answers your question Ashley, as well as anyone else out there who may have had this on their mind.

The bottom line – you have to pay tax for online income. But I think you should register a business and declare it as business income, then find tax deductibles to try and keep as much of that income to yourself as possible.

Keep the questions coming!

- William

Blogging, the new ‘it’ term of the 21st century.

But how do you start a blog? And is it a difficult thing to do?

This post will bring you through the general steps needed in starting up your own blog, and when I say general, I mean general.

Because if I had to write down each and every step, from getting your own domain, to hosting to installing Wordpress and installing a Wordpress theme – this post would be very long indeed.

Identify What You Want To Talk About

It’s all well and good to say, ‘I want to start blogging’ or ‘I’m going to become a blogger’ but what are you really blogging about?

I can tell you from first hand experience that blogging without a purpose will get you nowhere fast.

“I Hate Work and I Had Noodles For Lunch”

Most people start here – they have an opinion, they’d like to share that opinion, so they start a blog and tell people about their opinion.

Their first blog probably has a domain like xanydude.blogspot.com (this is the name of my first blog – seriously) and they share stories about what they had for dinner, why they’re angry at work, why they’re angry at the government and so on.

But truth be told, unless you are a really really interesting person, or you’re a model, politician or some sort of celebrity, this kind of blogging won’t get you anywhere.

After all, it’s your ramblings. Would you expect someone to enjoy reading your diary full of ramblings if you gave it to them?

Then why should they read about your ramblings on a blog?

Know Yourself

This blog aims to teach people how to make money online and if you blog without a purpose, then don’t hope to be able to do that.

Notice how I’ve not mentioned that you CAN’T make money online with a personal blog, it’s just it’s harder – but it can be done.

Firstly, identify why you’re writing on your blog in the first place. If you’re already popular, great – you’re halfway there as it is.

If you’re not, if you’re like everyone else, with a medium sized group of friends, working in a mid-level 9 to 5 job and are starting fresh, then identify what you’re good at.

Let’s face it, everyone is good at something or another.

Some people are good at making people laugh, some people are good at teaching finance, some people are good at drawing/ art. What are YOU good at?

For me? I’m good at writing about things, things like this for example, how to start a blog.

That’s why I started Online Business Malaysia (OBM) – that’s what I was good at. But note, this blog, is NOT a personal blog.

A true personal blog will be someone who blogs about:

• Day to day life
• The experiences they have encountered (such as travelling, holidays, studying etc.)
• Their like/ dislike for the government, work etc.
• Some people make up stories
• But most important of all, it is written with feeling, emotions and in a way that lets your audience relate with you at a personal level

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As one of Malaysia’s most popular bloggers (I refrain from calling him ‘top’ blogger, because traffic-wise, there are some Malaysians who get much more traffic – you just don’t know about them), Kenny Sia has been blogging for the past 5 years and has garnered quite a huge following.

He is a personal blogger through and through blogging about his life, the things he does on a daily basis and especially the jokes and funny things he gets up to.

Some of his most popular posts include parodies of local advertisements and especially posts on politics. He has quite an outspoken opinion on the political joke scene in Malaysia, which I’m quite surprised has not gotten him into trouble actually.

But I must admit some of his older posts are pretty funny, especially the ones on politics. Not quite as controversial as MalaysiaKini but still pretty funny stuff nonetheless.

How Much Traffic Does Kennysia.com Get?

Based on Kenny’s Alexa rank, which over the last year has dropped quite a lot (could be due to his traffic falling, or the average traffic of everything else in the world increasing?) and from some conversations online, it is estimated that Kenny gets at least 10,000 pageviews a day, possibly more, possibly less.

Yes, it’s just a guess, I’m not sure.

But with enough digging I’m sure I could get a more accurate number, for now, it’s still a very healthy amount of traffic.

How Does Kenny Sia Make Money Online?

Kenny makes money online primarily through online advertising. He’s part of the Nuffnang network (What’s the Nuffnang network?) which sends him quite a lot of work.

That’s Timothy I talked about in a previous posts, he’s one of the founders of Nuffnang. As one of the primary bloggers for Nuffnang, Kenny Sia gets requests to do a lot of advertorials or a sponsored blog post.

A friend in the industry has told me that bloggers such as Kenny can command almost RM2000 per advertised post.

He labels his post titles with the words ADV to inform his readers that he has been paid for writing that particular post and so should everyone else who is asked to do the same.

If you look around the rest of his site, especially the top and sides, you will notice he also sells advertising space for people to purchase.

The main ones are for Nuffnang, but the others are a combination of 3^rd party advertising resellers and some direct requests from local companies, such as Exabytes.com.my.

Considering he does roughly 2 to 3 advertorials a month, plus the income he gets from the adverts around his site, conservatively he can do anywhere from RM10,000 to RM20,000 a month, depending how many advertising requests he gets.

How Can His Site Be Improved?

Now be it far from me to tell someone who gets more than 10 times the traffic I get on most of my websites, but I can see some potential for him to capture some of these leads and use this to approach even more advertisers.

Right here where it says ‘Sign In’ I would place an opt-in box for people to join his newsletter, perhaps with an Aweber.com account to catch as many readers as he can. I’m sure with a little effort he could easily get a subscriber base of 20,000 or more readers.

That can be another useful advertising slot to sell to his advertisers, especially with growing popularity of the iPhone and Blackberry here in Malaysia.

More and more people are checking and reading their emails than ever before, just because it’s so fast and convenient to do so now.

For those of you who have just started blogging or maybe you’ve been blogging for a while now, I’m sure you’ve heard of Nuffnang and Adverlets right?

If not, basically they represent Malaysia’s version of Izea, or a middle man between advertisers and you, the blogger.

Nuffnang or Advertlets will on behalf of their community of bloggers, approach companies to do large scale, online advertising campaigns. The two companies will take a cut of the money that they charge to the advertisers (to cover their costs and profit margins) and the remainder will be distributed out to the bloggers in their network (based on performance – i.e. how many clicks or impressions the advert got on your site.).

Nuffnang

The first time I’d ever encountered the founders of Nuffnang was at a seminar organized by Joel Neoh of Youth Asia where they were part of a ‘under 30s’ speaking panel or relatively successful business people.

The 2 founders, Timothy Tiah Ewe Tiam and Cheo Ming Shen, gave a short speech about how they started, what they did and how they came up with the idea in the first place.

I remember that the 2 founders carried themselves very well, were well spoken and seemed quite humble in their accomplishments, which is something I liked about them.

Apparently, Nuffnang is the slang that Ali G uses to speak.

How They Work

The Nuffnang network now includes thousands upon thousands of bloggers, across 4 countries – Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines and Australia.

Their clients include MAS, Nike, Astro and Air Asia amongst many others.

They allow you to sign up and join their network at http://nuffnang.com.my as long as you have more than 20 unique visitors a day and after your site has been reviewed for non-permitted content.

If I’m not mistaken, they don’t allow blogs that contain pornography, MLM, drugs, firearms and other such subject matters.

Once your website has been approved, they will give you some code to place on your site (don’t worry, they’ll tell you how to add it) and as you can see in the images above, these are the locations they’d prefer you place the adverts.

Based on your profile (which you filled in upon joining the network), they will display adverts that they think will suit your audience and your blogging subjects.

For every click on the advert, you’ll get paid. For every 1000 impressions of an advert, you may also get paid – depending on how the campaign works.

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One of the most common questions that I’ve been asked since I’ve started this blog is ‘How do I start an online business?’ and unfortunately there’s no one instant answer, no one magic bullet that I can say to help answer that question.

You see, starting an online business takes a bit of thought and planning, a lot of work and a little bit of luck.

I can help you with the first 2, but luck you’ll have to work out luck for yourself.

What Kind Of Business Are You Starting?

Yes, I know, you said ‘online business’, but an online business is still in essence a normal business and there are a large variety of businesses out there.

· Are you starting a new business selling a physical product or service online?

· Do you already own an existing business and want to bring it online?

· Or maybe you want to start a website that only brings in income online, with no physical product or service, just electronic products or advertising?

Each type of business has its own ways of making money, but when it comes to starting or bringing the business online, they all start the same every time.

Research, research, research.

Depending on which country you live in, the competition you will face from other websites in your niche will vary greatly. If you’re reading this in America, starting a website on making money online, food, cars, insurance, finance or sports is going to bring you face to face with some big players.

If you’re reading this from less internet established countries, such as Malaysia (which you probably are) then there’s still a lot of room to maneuver and get your website into the eyes of the public.

One of the benefits about living in Malaysia is that we have a relatively under-developed internet space, where local businesses still advertise the traditional way (such as brochures, newspaper adverts etc.) and those that start up websites do so with no real purpose, just as an after thought.

Regardless of the country you live in, research is important, as it helps you plan out your strategy, what type of content to publish on your website and even if you should bother starting up in the first place.

Do A Google Search

The first thing you should do is a Google Search on the category that you’ll be starting your business in. For example, if you’re starting a company selling fishing rods, you would google ‘buy fishing rods’ or ‘buy fishing rods online’ or even ‘fishing rod shops [insert country here]’.

Next thing is to see the types of results that you get from the above search. Pay close attention to the main results (on the left hand side) as well as the advertised results (on the right hand side).

Open up the first 5 results from the main results and study them each carefully – you’re looking for the quality of the content, how many pages of content there is, how nicely the website is designed and if possible how often and when was the last update to the content of the site (in the case of a blog).

As an Internet marketer, there are certain tools that I use to help me shorten this process and get a quick picture on how big my competitors are.

SEOQuake

SEOQuake is a free add-on that I have installed on Mozilla Firefox that gives me a range of web statistics on the website that I am currently viewing all in one handy toolbar at the top of my browser window.

SEOQuake allows you to get an instant picture of how big a website is at once glance, using a range of key web traffic/ search engine parameters.

Get yourself the toolbar at http://seoquake.com/ and install it as a Firefox plugin, select ‘SEO Toolbar’ when it asks you which type to install, I find it better than the ‘SEObar’.

NB: Install the SEOQuake toolbar before continuing on this post. It will make it much easier to understand what I am talking about.

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