There comes a time in any business where you really just can’t do all the work yourself – even if you think you can.

With running this blog, Feedmelah.com and finding more projects for my main revenue stream, Web Design, I have decided it is time to take the next step in any business, which is to start building a great team.

So let’s get hiring

Web Designers

The first place I need to fill is that of web designers.

My web design company, as well as all the Internet properties we run are all based on the massively popular Wordpress platform, which any web designer who applies for work must know how to a) design themes with and b) integrate these themes with Wordpress plugins.

For this, you will need to know:

1. PHP based programming
2. How to use, create and setup SQL tables
3. CSS, HTML
4. Graphic Design
5. Cpanel and Linux Web Servers
6. The Wordpress platform
7. Wordpress plugins

If you’re a capable web designer (fresh graduates are encouraged to apply) and have the above capabilities, please get in touch with me at:

william@feedmelah.com

Remember to send your resume along with a list of some of the work you have done.

Why Work For Me?

Everyday I get asked about starting an online business, from traffic tips, registering a business to other very specific things like e-commerce portals and shipping of products overseas.

This blog tries to answer as many of those questions as I can, but it takes time to present all the information in the form of a blog post and have it published.

However, if you work for me, you get to access to all the resources that I have and all the knowledge that I can teach is just a question away.

So while practicing your trade with new and exiting Web Design projects, you’ll also get the chance to learn how about starting online businesses, about Internet Marketing.

Interested?

Email me at: william@feedmelah.com and we’ll talk.

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When you look at the Internet in general, even when you look at King Google, it all boils down to text based searching, browsing and displaying of content to their users.

People think that something as complex as Search Engine Optimization is something only a programmer can do, meta tags, meta descriptions, title tags – these are the terms you usually use with SEO.

But in truth, if you did none of the above, but wrote wonderful posts, in context, that people link back to, that people retweet and shared across all social media, you’d be doing yourself a world of good, much more than the technicality behind SEO.

And so it is that I’ve started to learn more about copywriting, the art of flow, being personal, connecting with your audience through your writing and slowly but surely building your community.

Without words, you could not make a sale, without words, there would be no adverts, no making money online, no websites.

So in a world with so much text, how important do you think it is to you to learn how to write well?

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His question was:

I would like to know if a foreigner can become a Sole Proprietor of a business in Malaysia.

I get lots of conflicting answers to this. Just this morning I had an email from a Secretarial firm, informing me that it is impossible. And yesterday I had a meeting with another firm who told me that it is possible.

Can you please shed some light on this for me?

I recently called my Corporate Secretary, who are doing my business taxes for me to clarify this question.

Sole Proprietor and Partnerships

For foreigners, they can’t setup a simple Sole Proprietor or Partnership in Malaysia. I asked if having 51% or above ownership by a Malaysian or a Bumi Putera would make any difference and they told me that it would not.

The rule is that Foreigners can’t setup a simple business through ROB.

Sdn. Bhd (Private Limited)

However, if a foreigner would like to register a business in Malaysia, they can do so by setting up a Sdn. Bhd. or a private limited company. I am not sure if Malaysia has the simpler LLC (Limited Liability Coroporation) or the Limited Partnership corporation available yet, but a Sdn. Bhd. would be sufficient.

I wrote an article on the pros and cons of a Sdn. Bhd. in an earlier post and taking from that, the minimum requirements are:

• You must have 2 directors
• It doesn’t matter if the directors are from Malaysia or not
• You must declare your starting capital – RM1 per director is enough, so a RM2 company is allowed
• You will need to register through a company secretary – just Google ‘company secretary Malaysia’ and you should get some businesses to help you out

Keep in mind that the registration fee for a Sdn. Bhd. is around RM2000++ depending on your company secretary’s services.

Also, all meetings between the directors are meant to have ‘minutes of the meeting’ and at the end of every year, there are much more documents for accounting and tax purposes than an ROB.

Yes there are more barriers to starting a business in Malaysia as a foreigner, but no, it’s not impossible.

Hope that helps!

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2. Why Start An Online Business In Malaysia? Or Anywhere?
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In any developed country, search engine results will be crowded with advertising, covering any range of topic you can imagine. Dentists? They own websites, they advertise online too. Plumbers? Yup, in other parts of the world they’d be advertising online as well.

And I don’t mean one or two businesses, I mean tens if not hundreds of different businesses are fighting for space on the world’s biggest billboard, Google.

There’s So Much Empty Room

Let’s do a quick example, why don’t we start with a Google search for the term ‘Dentists Malaysia’. This is what we’ll get:

You see the advertising on the top and right of the screen? 2 of the results are from Bangkok, the other is from Singapore and the one that looks like it’s from Malaysia is actually a business directory of dentists in Malaysia.

None of them actually link to a dentist website within Malaysia itself.

I may not know exactly how much money dentists make here, but I’m sure it’s quite a large sum – larger still if they could tap into online advertising.

That’s the problem and a good problem at that, which we have here in Malaysia – people just aren’t’ advertising online.

There’s just so much white space surrounding our search results, white space which should be full of businesses trying to get people to come visit their site, to ask for some information, to make a sale.

But they aren’t.

It’s Cheap, Why Aren’t You Doing It?

One of my pet peeves about regular businesses here is that they are traditionally set in their ways. They’d rather spend thousands on newspaper adverts, magazine adverts and worst of all those brochures that they put under your wind screen wiper.

I’ve seen people drive away in the rain, wind screen wiper on, with the brochure attached being swept across the glass. Is that what you call marketing?

Advertising online, especially in Malaysia, will probably cost you between RM0.1 to RM0.2 per click. So for a measly RM100 you could get anywhere between 1000 to 2000 visitors. Imagine if you used the same RM1000 on online advertising as you did for your brochure – 10,000 guaranteed visitors.

You see, the difference between regular media and search engine marketing is that in regular media, you play by numbers and hope for the best. Your magazine or newspaper may have a readership of 100,000, but how many of them will actually read your advert?

For online advertising, you are guaranteed that not only will they read your advert, they’ll click the link and visit your website too. No click, no charge, it’s as simple as that.

Don’t worry, it’s not too late to start.

Not sure how to go about doing it? Contact me and I’ll see how I can help you out.

Don’t have a website yet? Don’t worry, I know a good web designer as well.

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It’s a win-win situation for both bloggers, with free content for the blog owner who is receiving the guest post, as well as increased traffic from the writer of the guest post.

I must admit that I haven’t done a guest post myself, I’m waiting to launch a more ‘International’ site before I start leveraging on some of the contacts that I have and build from there.

However, I’m open to anyone who would like to guest post on OBM in return for a link back to their website/ blog at the bottom of the article.

Of course I’ve got some requirements for my guest posts, but we’ll discuss that personally later on

If you’re interested in guest posting for Online Business Malaysia, please feel free to contact us and we’ll get back to you shortly.

Thanks and can’t wait to hear from you guys (and gals)!

-William

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3. Starting An Online Business Needs Careful Planning

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.

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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.

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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.

Evaluate Your Landlord And Real Estate Agent Carefully

When trying to get a tenant, a landlord and real estate agent will smile, meet and greet you at your beck and call to try and get you to sign the lease.

Our landlord and agent were like that – it took a total of 3 months to receive our tenancy agreement (which should have taken less than 2 weeks), there were hidden charges and amendments had to be made as he was trying to put legal terms in the agreement to make it harder for us to get out of the contract.

So try this test – make your landlord and agent show you the office a total of 3 to 5 times.

If they answer your calls, are welcoming to bring you to see the office all the time, then you know what levels of commitment and professionalism they have.

If they don’t answer your calls or call you back, keep telling you that other people are interested, are just plain rude – then that tells you a lot about how they will probably be down the line.

Get A Lawyer To Look Through The Tenancy Agreement

Most of us (myself included) is no expert in law and the use of words to form legal structures and contracts.

If you have to pay a bit to have a lawyer go through your tenancy agreement, or you have a friend who is a lawyer who can look at it, then do it.

When a lawyer went through my tenancy agreement, by the subjective nature of the use of words, he found that certain sections can be open to interpretation – not in our favour.

A few tweaks, added sentences and discussions with our landlord, we ended up with a fair agreement that both parties can be happy with.

You don’t want to give your 3 months notice only to find that your agreement says that your security deposit would not be given back to you.

When Looking For Furniture, Try Second Hand Stuff

All our furniture is second hand furniture.

It’s not as bad as you think, it’s clean, comfortable and most importantly, it’s cheap.

You’re trying to keep costs down, so why not get second hand furniture and hire a professional cleaner to come and steam clean everything?

The cleaning may be quite expensive, but overall you would be spending much less than if you had bought everything new.

There are of course many more things you have to take into account, but these few will help you on your way to getting a small office for your business.

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