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.

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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.

Gliterrati

For bloggers who display adverts of Nuffnang exclusively, and don’t display adverts from any other Malaysian competitors (basically they mean Advertlets), then you get higher payouts for adverts, faster payouts, access to competitions and other benefits.

You can still display Google Adsense adverts and adverts from other non-Malaysian advertising resellers.

This ensures that bloggers will stick to being Nuffnang exclusive.

Where’s The Money At?

Well, just like any other form of making money online, traffic and popularity of your website counts.

Payouts for Nuffnang aren’t all that high as they have, according to their website 100,000 blogs on their community.

Whereas Google Adsense (and I’m not saying Google Adsense is all that great in Malaysia anyway) can pay up to RM0.50/ click, imagine how much they would have to pay out if all 100,000 blogs got even a single click:

· 100,000 blogs x RM0.50/click x 1 click = RM50,000 payouts to bloggers

So if you can imagine, CPC (cost per click) amounts are pretty low.

From an inside source, I’ve learned that it costs the advertiser, such as Nike, Adidas, MAS etc. about RM20,000 to run a campaign. So they can’t really afford to pay all that much to each blogger.

The real money is in advertorials.

Bloggers like Kenny Sia get asked to do lots of advertorials, which I’ve found out costs about RM2000 for one blog post.

An advertorial is basically where a company will pay you to write a blog post about a new product/ service/ brand/ promotion that they are doing and publish it on your blog.

It has to be a positive review of the product (most of the time).

But Nuffnang will only give out advertorials upon request of the advertisers, since it is quite a costly activity.

So you need to get your traffic up and yourself/ your blog more in the limelight.

All in all, Nuffnang is a good option to start with, if you run a personal blog, as the advertisements that they send out to their community are more mass-market based.

Give it a try for a while and see how it goes, experimentation is key when you’re running an online business.

Advertlets

Advertlets are the bitter, cross-town rivals (j/k) of Nuffnang and run basically the same operation.

They have a minimum requirement for the bloggers they accept into their community, which is roughly the same as Nuffnang’s. Roughly 20 unique visitors a day and you’re allowed to join the community.

The first time I met the founder, Josh Lim, he was giving a talk at a small blogger’s conference in Jaya 33, on behalf of one of their clients, Kaspersky.

Having not met him personally, I can only judge him based on how he presented to the crowd and unlike the Nuffnang guys, he seemed a bit arrogant. Although they say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, first impressions do count.

Also, things like the note you see above (taken from the ‘competitive comparison’ chart on Advertlets.com) don’t go down well with me. It seems like a smoke screen for bigger, deeper rooted problems.

Lastly, as an Internet marketer, statistics count. See the Alexa rank for both Adverlets and Nuffnang. Notice how Nuffnang has an Alexa rank of around 25,000 compared to Advertlet’s 125,725? That’s quite a large difference in terms of traffic numbers. Easily in the thousands a day.

That’s the rough run down on both Nuffnang and Adverlets. I’ve never really used both to try and make money online, as I feel it’s more targeted to personal/ lifestyle blogs rather than niche ones and you need a more mass market appeal to gain from their adverts.

Also, although I have my opinions about Advertlets and I’ve heard some bad things about then online, they may work better for you than for other people. Converesely, Nuffnang might work better for you.

Just do your research and give them a try. There’s no harm testing and then if it doesn’t work, to move on.

That’s the beauty of having online businesses, the power to choose.

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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…

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I’m not sure if that’s because you’re not meant to ‘retweet’ your own posts and that’s why it’s not increasing, or if I’ve set it up wrong.

Could someone do me a favour and just Tweet or Re-tweet this post so that I can troubleshoot?

If the number increases, great, if not, will have to consider using an alternative method of allowing my readers to re-tweet.

Your help would be greatly appreciated,

Cheers,

-William

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Hybrid – Something having two kinds of components that produce the same or similar results, such as a vehicle powered by both an electric motor and an internal combustion engine as sources of power for the drive train.

Now I’m pretty sure you can’t get the picture of a Toyota Prius out of your head right? Well, I’m not talking about eco-friendly cars, but more so of what happens when you take your marketing, mix it up and go both online and offline.

The typical response to any sort of marketing is for a business owner to go, ‘Hey, I’ve got a new product, it needs a website!’ or ‘Hey I’ve got a new product, let’s try and get it into the newspapers or magazines’.

But that’s not the only option a business owner has.

Focus Your Offline Marketing On Your Online Presence

As a advocate of Internet marketing and having an online presence as a must-do for any and all business owners, my main focus is on a company’s website. The main reason is that with a website, you can pre-sell your product or service by telling them about:

• The benefits of the product
• The cost
• The product’s story

And a host of other bits of juicy information at a much lower cost than doing this solely in a magazine or newspaper.

So how do you go about doing it? Well there are a few ways, but possibly the best is just by asking the journalists in your local newspaper/ magazine if they could feature your new product or service. But specifically by telling them about your spanking new, well designed and useable website that showcases all your product’s benefits and abilities.

Firstly, the Press are always on the lookout for new and fresh content and they’ll be glad for a lead, any lead. Secondly, they’re more likely to drop by your company’s website instead of your office. (I bet you’re regretting not having a website made right about now…)

However, this method works better for some businesses (like my own, where the service is wholly online – Feedmelah.com) or if you have a very interesting product – tech/ health/ lifestyle products seem to generate the most buzz and interest when it comes to the media.

But you never know, so open up your local newspaper(s) and find the section which suits your business the most. You see those reporters email addresses and names? Go ahead, shoot them an email, it doesn’t hurt to ask.

Remind People Online That You’re Famous (well almost)

So maybe you’ve managed to get yourselves in the news using the above method, or maybe you just paid to place and advert (remember to list your website clearly!), but whatever, you’re now in the news! Congratulations!

But don’t stop there, it’s time to tell people that you’re a celebrity… ok that’s not the main point. Getting featured in the news, even if it’s a paid advert (I’ll discuss how to write a good advert in another article), will give you something which is sometimes quite hard to come by, credibility.

Imagine this scenario, John comes up to you and says, ‘Hey I’ve got the newest best gadget in the world, would you be interested?’

An alternative setting, Chris comes up to you and says, ‘Hey I’ve got the newest best gadget in the world, would you be interested? By the way, it was featured in Times magazine and I quote – This product could change your life!’

So which person would you be more drawn to?

Which person seems more credible?

I’m guessing you’re saying Chris, because that’s what my example wanted to demonstrate.

You see, credibility is hard to gain from a stranger who’s just stumbled onto your site for the first time. Sure, you may have a great product and so much so that your previous clients find your business the most credible in their minds. But what about the first timers to encounter you?

Imagine seeing “As seen in Times Magazine” or “As seen in [Insert your local newspaper here]”

So when you’re planning your next advertising campaign, remember to hit multiple bases at once. And ALWAYS, I repeat ALWAYS ask people to take the call to action of heading over to your website, for that is the place where you can persuade, nudge, impress and ultimately make your brand impression onto them.

Here’s to you being in the news,

-William

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It seems that Google is updating it’s Page Ranks in cycles of roughly 2 – 3 month intervals, so start working on your content now, you may get a nice boost in the next update…

Strangely, my Restaurant Directory lost page rank on the home page (down to PR1 from PR2) but the traffic took a surge upwards as can be seen in the screenshot below. Note that the google PR update was roughly the same time as the surge (plus or minus a few days).

The blog section of the website, http://feedmelah.com/blog also maintained a PR of 3. Which means that potentially, some more of the inner pages of the site managed to get PR increases, perhaps from a 0 to a 1?

Hence forcing them up the search engines a precious place or two and bringing in the extra readers.

Google, oh what a Mystery you are.

-William Lee

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Of course a combination of both would be the best, although it will be alot harder to write one of these.

For example, from an SEO point of view, you’d want to write: “How To Drive Traffic Using Articles”, this would give the best long term SEO value for your post as it is exactly what someone might type into Google searching for that information.

From a ‘catchy’ point of view, you may write instead: “Articles Articles, Read All About It!”, ok that wasn’t the best example but you can see what I mean.

SEO works if you’ve already got a good Google Page rank, as posts you write will appear higher up in the Search Ranking on the 1st page.

Writing catchy post titles works if you drive traffic by other means, such as through Twitter, which benefits alot more from short interesting info bytes, such as a catchy title.

If you’ve got tonnes of direct traffic, then it doesn’t really matter, you can lable post titles whatever you want.

For the rest of us, spare a thought about how you phrase your title, SEO or short and snappy, it can make a big difference.

Till next time,

-William Lee

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One useful alternative is the use of Private Label Rights (PLR) articles which can be used to generate content. Please note I used the word ‘generate’ not populate. There’s quite a difference.

If you take the PLR articles and make NO changes to them for your blog or website you probably will, over time, be penalized by Google, Yahoo and MSN and your search engine placement will take a hit because of it.

Basically, they are penalizing you for plagiarizing.

The best way to use PLR articles is to take the content, copy and paste it (for email campaigns – since the search engines don’t track that) and for blogs and websites, rewrite the articles in your own point of view.

You can also use related articles to create e-books or special reports that you can give away as an incentive to joining your site, or even sell off to generate revenue.

So give PLR articles a try, they’ll simplify the content generation process.

-William Lee

p.s. I have a PLR Mega-Pack containing 100,000+ PLR articles that I’m selling at an Ultra-Low price of USD$5.99 for ALL 100,000+ articles, or just USD$1 for each category.

If you’re interested, contact me and I’ll send you a FREE sample of the categories that you’re interested in.

The available categories are listed below:

Arts and Entertainment

· Celebrities

· Humanities

· Humor

· Movies

· Music

· Photography

· Poetry

Business

· Advertising

· Careers

· Customer Service

· Entrepreneurs

· Ethics

· Home Based Business

· Management

· Marketing

· Networking

· Public Relations

· Sales

· Small Business

Computers and Technology

· Communications

· Computer Certification

· Data Recovery

· Games

· Hardware

· Home Entertainment

· Mobile A/V

· Networks

· Software

· Web Development

Fashion

· Clothing

· Jewelry

· Shoes

Finance

· Credit

· Currency Trading

· Debt

· Debt Consolidation

· Fundraising

· Insurance

· Investing

· Leasing

· Loans

· Mortgage

· Mutual Funds

· Personal Finance

· Real Estate

· Stock Market

· Taxes

· Wealth Building

Food and Beverage

· Coffee

· Cooking

· Gourmet

· Recipes

· Wine

Health and Fitness

· Acne

· Alternative Medicine

· Beauty

· Cardio

· Depression

· Diabetes

· Disease and Illness

· Exercise

· Fitness Equipment

· Hair Loss

· Medicine

· Meditation

· Men’s Issues

· Muscle Building

· Nutrition

· Supplements

· Weight Loss

· Women’s Issues

· Yoga

Home and Family

· Babies

· Crafts

· Elderly Care

· Gardening

· Hobbies

· Holidays

· Home Improvement

· Home Security

· Interior Design

· Landscaping

· Parenting

· Pets

· Pregnancy

Internet Business

· Affiliate Programs

· Article Marketing

· Auctions

· Audio-Video Streaming

· Blogging

· Domains

· Ebooks

· Ecommerce

· Email Marketing

· Ezine Marketing

· Ezine Publishing

· Forums

· Internet Marketing

· Podcasts

· PPC Advertising

· RSS

· Security

· SEO

· Site Promotion

· Spam

· Traffic Generation

· Web Design

· Web Hosting

Product Reviews

· Book Reviews

· Consumer Electronics

· Digital Products

· Movie Reviews

· Music Reviews

Recreation and Sports

· Biking

· Extreme

· Fishing

· Gambling and Casinos

· Golf

· Hunting

· Martial Arts

· Running

· Tennis

Reference and Education

· College

· Environmental

· Homeschooling

· K-12 Education

· Language

· Legal

· Philosophy

· Psychology

· Science

· Sociology

· Weather

Self Improvement

· Attraction

· Coaching

· Creativity

· Goal Setting

· Grief

· Happiness

· Innovation

· Inspirational

· Leadership

· Motivation

· Organizing

· Spirituality

· Stress Management

· Success

· Time Management

Society

· Dating

· Divorce

· Marriage

· Politics

· Relationships

· Religion

· Weddings

Travel and Leisure

· Aviation

· Boating

· Cruises

· Destinations

· Outdoors

· Travel Tips

· Vacations

Vehicles

· Boats

· Cars

· Motorcycles

· RVs

· Trucks/ SUVs

Writing and Speaking

· Article Writing

· Book Marketing

· Copywriting

· Public Speaking

· Writing

If you’re interested, contact me and I’ll send you a FREE sample of the categories that you’re interested in.

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