Innovative Entrepreneur - Dominic Lee

Heart Attack Grill - Smart Marketing Twist

Dominic Lee — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 04:58:34 +0000

Take a look at this restaurant, it is AMAZING. I would recommend a whole week a diet before AND after going there.

Throw Away Your IPhone - Nokia N97 Is Here!

Dominic Lee — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 05:30:43 +0000

I’m ditching my Blackberry! This Nokia N97 looks amazing!!

Some Link Love & How To Get Rid Of Bad Google Listings

Dominic Lee — Sat, 30 May 2009 02:09:40 +0000

A funny plumbing commercial

So first of, want to give some link love to my business partner’s new plumbing business Guillen Plumbing . From the reviews that they’re getting from Service Magic, seems like they’re doing a good job so if you happen to be in the Rio Grand Valley area in Texas and have plumbing issues, definitely go ahead and give them a call! =)

On a side note, if you search for “Guillen Plumbing” now on Google, you’ll see that there’s a “rip off report” of a seperate company in Miami called “Guillen Enterprises”. Even though this is a completely different company operating in a completely different area, having such listing on Google next to yours is never a good thing and thus my business partner asked me for advice on how to get rid of it.

Now there’s no real way to “get rid” of a listing on Google, but there are ways to make mutiple pages to outrank it such that it is no longer visible on the first page (or at least on top of the page). I recommended her to create a page on Twitter, youtube, Facebook (fan page) and Squidoo, and give them some links so those pages can outrank the report. It is always good to have multiple listings of various source representing your company when people search for your company’s name, because you get to control what your prospective customers will think of you. If you do a search on Google for “mypopcornmachine” or “Dominic Lee”, you’ll find that almost all of the top page listings belong to me. =)

Be Creative About Monetization

Dominic Lee — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 06:47:12 +0000

“Guru’s Guru” Rich Schefren at one of his seminars

So I listened to a webminar by Russell Brunson and Rich Schefren the other day about ways to monetize an online business. While some may not apply to ecommerce, I jotted down those that do, and I’ll post it here to share.

Some of these ideas I don’t know will work with a Yahoo store, so hopefully developers or vendors here can shred some light on that as well.

Here’s the list:

Send mailing piece with all the packages you send out. You can be either an ad or offers from your own business or you can charge related complementary business to put mailing piece in your package.

Setting up a premium customer club, essentially a frequent customer will automatically become members of this club, at which you will provide better customer service and guarantees (i.e. say you charge restocking fee from regular customer, you don’t for premium customers; 24/7 support…). And you can further monetize it by charging non-frequent customers a fee to be in this club

Cross-selling AFTER order confirmation. Now YStore offers cross selling before finish checkout. The ideal way of doing cross selling is in fact AFTER they have confirmed an order and then you show them you can also get these products for less if they take action NOW. Ideally, they dont have to retype any information, they will just click and charge again combined with their original order.

Check out FreeShipping.com - they offers shipping rebate to customer if they join. You get a commission out of it.

Winbuyer.com - check it out as well, they offers this widget to put on your site and it shows what price is item is selling at at other sites, and you get paid when ppl click on those links. Don’t worry about seeing lower prices, you can set it such that it never shows lower prices.

Sell or offer at transactional emails - supposingly these emails have higher clck thru and open rate than regular marketing emails, so if you make offers there, it’ll be more likely you get sales out of it. Plus there’s no spam filter for that.

Those are couple ideas I have now, if you got any others, please share the wealth! =)

Inspirational Performance - 47 Years Old Susan Boyle

Dominic Lee — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 05:08:40 +0000

Susan Boyle at “Britains Got Talent”

Britains Got Talent 2009 Susan Boyle 47 Year Old Singer

Go check it out and seriously, stop judging a book by its cover and stop being cynical. =)

A Great Blog Post About Personal Finance

Dominic Lee — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 01:47:22 +0000

Just have to share the love.

The Psychology of Automation: Building a Bulletproof Personal-Finance System

(from my favorite author Tim Ferriss - 4 Hour Work Week)

Business Resolutions 2009

Dominic Lee — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 12:25:08 +0000

2008 has been an eventful year for our business. We have grown our sales revenue by over 100% and have acheived our goal in growing sales and providing better customer support through the implementation of a new order management system (Cactus Complete Commerce), provision of live chat, and the addition of a full time agent for phone support.

This year, we’re going to consolidate our business by focusing on the restaurant & concession equipment niche. We hope to continue our growth in sales but our main focus will be to increase our profit margin and no. of product offerings, so we remain competitive in the marketplace. So here you go are our specific plans for 2009:

(Increase Leads)
- Triple the no. of products on the website to 8000
- Triple adwords spending, explore CSE and banner ads
- Start local distribution in China & Hong Kong

(Increase Conversions)
- Outsource pre-sale live chat
- Stream pre-sale questions differently from post-sale support
- Split testing site design

(Increase Margin)
- Increase price by strengthening guarantees and USP

(Increase Customer Expenditure)
- Start email marketing
- Follow up with old customers
- Setup customer support ticketing system

So here they are, lets see how we do by the end of this year. Happy New Year!

Cincinnati OH Day 1-3

Dominic Lee — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 17:21:46 +0000

After a daunting 16 hours of plane ride, I arrived at Cincinnati Ohio on Black Friday, the big shopping day after Thanksgiving. The reason I’m here is for the dealer meeting of Gold Medal Products, one of our largest suppliers, where we’ll be educated about their products and sales plan for 2009.

The hotel we’re staying at is the Sheraton Cincinnati North Hotel – not bad, pretty cozy. I’m actually really surprised that they have cable reception on the TV so I can catch up on my favourite show Keeping Up With The Kardashians. =D

Since the meeting does actually start until Monday, I have the whole weekend exploring the city. I did some shopping at the nearby Tricounty Mall. And I went to some bars and clubs at Downtown Cincinnati as well as Mount Adam.

Here’re some pictures I have taken so far in Cincinnati

I look forward to the actual meeting!

Important Message from Hilary Schneider Regarding Yahoo!/Google Agreement

Dominic Lee — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 01:37:21 +0000

Things are not looking good for Yahoo

Got this email today:

Dear Advertiser,

We wanted to reach out to you directly regarding Google’s decision,
announced earlier today, to terminate the advertising services
agreement that the companies announced in June. Yahoo! continues to
believe in the benefits of the agreement, and is disappointed that
Google has elected to withdraw from the agreement rather than defend
it in court. Google notified Yahoo! of its refusal to move forward
with implementation of the agreement following indication from the
Department of Justice that it would seek to block it, despite Yahoo!’s
proposed revisions to address the DOJ’s and advertisers’ concerns.

While disappointed by this turn of events, we are writing to you to
reaffirm our commitment to working together to drive your advertising
results, and to provide the continued leadership you expect. The fact
is that this deal was incremental to Yahoo!’s product roadmap and does
not change Yahoo!’s commitment to innovation and growth in search.

As you know, Yahoo! has long focused on how to improve the user,
advertiser and publisher experience. We will continue to enable you to
easily connect with the consumers you most want to reach, by creating
a more open, efficient and effective marketplace for advertisers and
publishers. We also plan to continue to provide the cutting-edge
advances in products, platforms and services that the industry needs
and expects, by leading the way in helping advertisers navigate the
converging contextual and search ad markets. Finally, we remain
committed to innovation in anticipating the needs of Yahoo!’s
audiences–one of the largest and most engaged populations of
consumers on the web–by creating the unique context that delivers
results for brand advertisers online.

In short, even in the absence of a commercial agreement with Google,
we intend to become an ever-stronger player in online advertising. Our
certainty on this front comes from the progress we continue to make in
many areas, not the least of which are the significant innovations
we’re making in search. We continually optimize our algorithmic and
sponsored search. In fact, in 2008 alone, we have developed and
launched hundreds of improvements to our search engine, including
index expansions and updates, ranking models and performance tuning.
Each of these features is designed to improve search quality and
deliver a more relevant search experience to our users.

Particularly in this economic climate, identifying and making rich and
deep connections with your target audience is of the utmost
importance. No company is better prepared to help you succeed in that
quest than Yahoo!. In addition to being the largest aggregate
publisher in the U.S., we are #1 or #2 across virtually every key
category, including being #1 in the categories of News, Sports,
Finance and Entertainment, and we’re putting our leadership to work
for you every day.

By offering extensive reach to consumers, breakthrough advances in
technology, simplifying inefficiencies in the advertising process,
putting new and industry-recognized talent in place, and providing
tailored solutions across our network to meet your needs, we are well
prepared to provide you with the most significant return on your
investment.

We are looking forward to continuing to work with you in building your
business. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me or anyone on our
team with your questions, or to discuss your challenges. We’re open to
a productive dialogue with you in the service of continuing our
successful work together.

Warmest Regards,

Hilary Schneider
Executive Vice President, Yahoo! U.S.

Yahoo’s stock will plummet tomorrw and Google’s will rise, mark my word. =)

Real Sarah Palin On SNL

Dominic Lee — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 07:04:51 +0000

Just HAVE to post this, this is too funny.