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.

But as I’ve said many times to many people, an online business is run and should be run like a real business – and a real business needs careful planning before you start, or you may very likely be doomed, doomed I tell you!

An Idea Is Not A Plan

Ideas are the birth places of all great businesses, the more the better I always say.

But an idea written down on a piece of napkin, or a simple sitemap you’ve drawn in excel does not constitute a plan.

I recently had a meeting with some prospects who wanted to do a website, quite a large one and with quite a good idea behind it too, but I noticed something which, without having experienced it myself, I may not have known if I was in their position.

They did not have a detailed enough plan/ strategy.

They had a general idea of what to do and how they wanted their website to work, but it wasn’t specific enough.

It must have been the strangest thing hearing a web designer you might want to hire pick at the weaknesses of their idea and overall strategy.

But like I said to them, I was you, I did the same thing and here’s how I would have done it better.

Identify Where Your Revenue Will Come From

With my first major project, I was convinced the money would rain from the sky, that my target audience would willingly open their cheque books, sign their name and let me fill in the rest.

But this is planet earth, money doesn’t grow on trees, in fact money was in low supply from the businesses who I thought would invest in my maiden idea.

I never really thought, hey, if I was them, would I invest in this website, is it something I would normally do?

And the simple answer was NO, it’s not something I would invest in.

It wasn’t because my website didn’t have something to offer, in fact in terms of publicity and traffic, we got much more than you would expect in our first year, it’s just that the people we were targeting were not ready to spend money on an online portal just yet.

But by this point, it’s hard to change the ‘feel’ and branding of your site to target it to other segments who might have the money to spend.

It’s not impossible, it’s just it’ll take more time, resources and even more money to move it in the direction it should have started with in the first place.

So make it easier on yourself, start by walking in the right direction and you’ll definitely get where you want to go much faster.

‘Spreading The Word’ Is Much Harder Than You Think

Another one of my first mistakes was thinking that marketing was going to be a breeze, that once people heard of my brand new site, word of mouth would do the rest.

Well with some restaurants in Malaysia, that definitely is the case, but with a website, you’ll have to do a bit more.

The highest source of traffic we received when we first started was from our friends and through Facebook.

We put the link of every new post we published onto Facebook and we asked our friends to tell other people about it.

But there’s only so much that your friends can do, unless your site is something really special, or maybe you have 5000 friends (well then you wouldn’t really need my advice on marketing would you?) there’ll come a point when the traffic will start to plateau out.

It’s at this point you’ll want to move on to plan B of your marketing strategy, maybe it’s online advertising, maybe it’s guest posting, maybe it’s article writing.

What plan B I heard you say?

Before you begin, you must think of your marketing plan, how much it will cost you, what are the best avenues to reach your target audience and many other things.

Too often, people think (myself included) that the product is good enough that it’ll market itself, which is probably what leads to many new blogs and website shutting down much faster than they should have.

Marketing, marketing, marketing. It’s so important I had to say it 3 times.

Getting There Will Take Time.

To this same group of friends I told – getting really well known is going to take time, possibly 9months to 1 year, especially if you’re not going to invest in online advertising.

For a blog which is constantly updated, maybe between 3 to 5 times a week, it will still take time to get high enough up the search engines to get noticed by bigger businesses (advertisers, people looking for consulting etc.).

This is where most bloggers give up – they’ve been grinding out post after post after post, with maybe a few dollars made in adsense revenue, maybe an affiliate sale or two, but they’re still not making the ‘big bucks’ like they thought they would.

This is when most blogger throw in the towel, where they call it a day.

This is the most important time to not give up.

If you’ve managed to blog for over a year on a specific subject matter and your posts are good, then you’ve just got to suck it up and keep doing it to you get noticed.

Maybe a big blog will pick up your article?

Maybe a business will hire you for consulting because they googled some information and your site was one of the first they saw?

Maybes only possible if you’re still at it, trying to reach your goal of maintaining a successful online business.

For the guys who this story is based on – next time we talk I know you’ll have more details (they told me they would) and hopefully I can build you the website of your dreams (and also the website that you’ve planned and carefully thought out).

For the rest of you, a) plan, b) where’s the money at? c) think about marketing and d) never give up.

It may not be as simple as I make it sound, but it definitely won’t be as hard as jumping in head-first will be 6 months from now.

I know, I’ve been there.

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.

Taking the above example, let’s have a look at the results I get in Google if I type in ‘buy fishing rods’:

The first thing you want to take notice of is how many advertisers there are for this market you are targeting. In the case of fishing rods, there are quite a lot, with the 3 slots above the search results completely taken and also about 8 adverts down the right hand side.

You’ll next want to look at how many web pages there are for this search term. You can find that at the top right side, where it says ‘Results 1 – 10 of about …’. For fishing rods, this is also quite high.

Last thing you’ll want to look at are the statistics that SEOQuake should have populated for your search terms.

Do you see all the numbers under the search results? These are the ones that I typically look at and what they represent:

• (Google Symbol) PR: This represents the Google Page Rank and is a number between 1 and 10 on how ‘authoratative’ Google has calculated this web page to be. The higher the number the higher a webpage typically appears in Google’s results
  • If most of the links are PR:3 and below, you have a good shot of penetrating the top 10 of Google’s search results for this keyword
• (Alexa Symbol – looks like a big letter a) Rank: This number ranks your website on how it has calculated you are in the entire world. It takes your moving average of visitors over a few months and gives you a number. The lower the rank, the more traffic a website typically gets.
• I look for Alexa ranks above 100,000 for the top 3 results. That means you would be competing with slightly smaller businesses than if you were going after websites with Alexa rank less than 100,000 as some of these websites can get thousands of visitors a day.

Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool

The second tool I would use to test whether a target market is feasible or not is to use the Google Keyword tool. This tool is usually used by Google’s Adword users, to find out how many competitors a given keyword has.

Go to: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

And type in your search term. For our example, again we’ll type in ‘buy fishing rods’ and see what it gets. You might want to type in a more general term such as ‘fishing rods’ to get more suggestions.



In our case, it looks like there aren’t that many local searches for buy fishing rods, but lots of searches for the more generic term ‘fishing rods’. Also, it looks like there is lots of competition for almost every search, except ‘fishing fly rods’.

If you scroll down the list, you’ll probably be able to find keywords with a lot less competition as well. It would be a good idea to write down these keywords for future use.

So What Does All This Information Mean?

In our case study for fishing rods, it looks like there are lots of competitors and advertisers who you would be going up against if you entered this market. Also, the Google PR for some of the links on the front page are as high as 4 and their Alexa ranks are typically lower than 100,000.

You would then have 2 options

1. Don’t enter the fishing rods market at all and try some other market, as you will be facing some very stiff competition

2. Be more specific – instead of just fishing rods, you could target people who are looking for the less competitive keywords, such as ‘fishing fly rods’, ‘fly fishing rod reel’ etc.

NB: I personally would not enter this market. Too much work and headache for too little gain.

But for your market, there may be a lot more room to maneuver, more chance at getting a piece of the pie as they say it.

Just remember, do your research first and you’ll probably save yourself a big headache later on.

And that’s how your start an online business. The next steps come in a later series of posts…

You Can Start an Online Business From Home

Unlike most other types of businesses, an online business can be started not only form home, but part time as well. You don’t have to give up that 9 – 5 job that you are secure with, you can just do things after work, from the comforts of your home.

It allows you to add to your revenue and who knows, maybe one day it’ll be so successful you’ll be able to do it full time? But that’s not for all people, so take it slow, try starting simple, like a blog, or a small ebay site.

There’s no hurry, the internet will be around for some time to come.

You Can Save On Taxes (Cause You Don’t Need To Pay Tax)

OK, this statement is a little controversial, as here in Malaysia, the tax law is a bit grey in terms of internet businesses. On top of that, with some shoddy departments, there are plenty of businesses who don’t pay their taxes even when they should.

I did send an email to the tax department to see if an internet business should pay tax or not, and in their reply they said we have to declare all money made as taxable income. But I suspect that this is not the case when you get a cheque in the mail from Google etc.

It’s almost like asking you to declare tax if your Dad who works in another country sends you a birthday card with a cheque in it. Would you?

I need to find out more about this as I’m going to be doing a lot of internet marketing and when I make money (hopefully) I need to see if I have to pay tax.

If anybody has any ideas on this, please do leave a comment and let me know.

It’s Fun

Let’s face it, outside of work, we may not hang out or socialize with all that many people. You may have lost touch with your old school friends, or they might just be in other parts of the country or even the world.

With Internet Marketing (such as this blog) you get to interact with people who share similar interests with you. You get to talk to people around the world about things that you feel passionate about, what could be better than that?

So why not start a blog, an ebay site or something easy like that? You may end up liking it and making some good money too. Who knows?

Let me know how it goes,

-William Lee

p/s: subscribe to my feed if you could!

[Photos from Flickr - Paladin27, curious_spider, KarolusLinus]