My feet, after I had it appraised by a running expert, is flat as flat can be when it is lying down. This zero arch situation makes me very susceptible to Plantar Fasciitis, a condition that I’m now trying to correct with maximum stability shoes (there’s a hard rubber bridge in the middle of the shoe that gives me the arch I don’t naturally have).

As squeezed for time as I have been this past year, I had spent a sinful amount of hours shopping for the right shoe. The brand I finally elected to carry me on my journey is Asics. Somehow, I feel safe in their shoes. They costs an arm and a sac though. My running consigliere calls it the Mercedes Benz of shoes.

Yesterday, I discovered something very interesting. The acronym for the latin term “Anima sana in corpore sano” is ASICS. Translated it means, “Healthy Soul in a Healthy Body”

One of the perks of working at AMP Radio Networks is that you get two hot beverages delivered to your desk each day, prepared the way you choose to have it. The woman who makes this happen? Auntie Mallika. And she never gets your drink wrong.

Each day, Auntie Mallika prepares over a hundred cups of tea, coffee or milo. All you need to do is give her your personal mug from home and answer some basic questions she’ll ask you.

1. Would you like a drink in the morning or afternoon or both?
2. Would you like coffee, tea or milo? (You are allowed to pick a different drink for a different time of day)
3. Milk?
4. Level of sweetness.

Over the first few days of receiving your brew, Auntie Mallika will query you on it so she can make the necessary adjustments to get your beverage DNA right. The amazing thing about all this is that she doesn’t take notes. She just stores it all in her head.

There are some house rules. If you are not going to be in, you have to tell Auntie Mallika beforehand. She has the ability to remember multiple dates. So you could just tell her, I won’t be in Monday morning, Thursday afternoon and all of Friday, and she will remember it.

A sea of mugs. Hundreds of drink combinations. Changing schedules. How does she do it? She just does. One face at a time.

~.~.~.~.~

This morning, I had a real bad toothache and had to make a last minute trip to the dentist. I got told off quite badly by Auntie Malika when I got into work–for not informing ahead of time that I would not be in. Picture a large Italian grandmother doling out choice Italian while chasing you with a rolling pin… yeah, it was kinda like that. She even threatened to not make my afternoon drink.

I tried to keep my cheeky smile in, but some of it escaped as I pulled out a birthday cake from the box I was carrying. I got smacked in the arm. She could not believe that someone had remembered. A couple other people happened to be in the pantry at the time, and we sang her a song.

“So auntie… petang ni? Ada kopi?” (So auntie, this afternoon? Got coffee?)

“Ada, ada.”

You should have seen her smile. So glad I was, that on this day, I had remembered the lady who never forgets.

I do what I do because the alternative isn’t one that even deserves consideration. Yes, the mountain I’ve chosen to scale seems an impossible one, but the thing that keeps me going is the thought that I’m only one reader away from making this dream a reality. Here’s looking at you Oprah.  :)

“Commitment is when you plant your seeds and your feet on the same patch,” I used to say. And the day I give up chasing this dream will be the day that I fulfil it.

Tenacious. This here describes not a raging fire.  Just one that refuses to die.

“10 percent science and 90 percent art,” I always say to them. And many are displeased when I break it to them that I can help them with the 10 percent bit.

My marketing plan for Fuel is over a hundred pages long, a conservative estimate actually. To date I’ve put into action 99 percent of what is on there, and I don’t think I’ll ever get to a hundred percent. You see, this marketing plan is a living, breathing and growing organism whose death can only be brought about by my own.  And that is how it needs to be.

Public tastes and habits are in a constant shift, and you’ve got to follow the herd wherever it goes, at least until you become good enough to predict their migratory path and arrive there before they do.

1-year plans do not work where online strategies are concerned. In today’s world, marketing plans that are not amorphous find their way into Darwinian doctrine, a “for e.g” designation ahead of its name.

Many have asked that I share my strategies with them. In fact I was approached by someone two weeks back to start a tech blog, something that I flat out turned down.

“Who’s got that time for that shit?” was the first thought to enter my mind.  And my second thought was… hmmmmm, actually, I had no second thoughts about it. Not until now. I was on Word Press doing some minor edits on stuff, and the text box looked rather inviting.

A video of their very talented dog. A shampoo. A singing video that will be their instant shot to fame. The spread is mind blowing. Everyone has their own lottery ticket, and to find success, each has to be approached differently. The topic of digital marketing is discouragingly broad and deep.  What I’d like to share with you is merely one concept that I employ for myself and for Fuel.

In London, I had the good fortune of learning under one of the best SEO specialists in Europe, and I picked up a lot from him. Google has since changed their algorithm for search many times, and I’ve done my best to keep in step.  The power to influence and dominate search has for a long time been of core importance to businesses worldwide. Yes, its influence has waned with the arrival of social networks, but still, it should not be disregarded.

“Google is my homepage.” I set this as one of the tenets of my marketing strategy about a year and a half back. The goal was to own a fair amount of real estate on Google, especially in areas related to Fuel.

An author is as much a part of his work, as his work is a part of him. Where in the past a book could stand on its own merit, that no longer is the case. We now live in a world where the behind the scenes footage has taken center stage. The public demands it. So despite being a person who’s always been uncomfortable in the limelight, I now found I had no choice but to cast it on myself.

The first thing I secured on Google was my name, Jeremy Chin. This was done by establishing a strong presence online. “Strong presence” can be defined many ways, but only achieved in one; by being relevant.  There are many ways you can cheat Google into thinking you are relevant, but never for long. And once discovered, they will not hesitate to blacklist your ass.

There was a time when you could Google my name and 9 of the top 10 results were related to me. And each time someone stepped into my territory, say through a platform like Vimeo, I would dive in there to dethrone them. Haha, the competitive side of me is revealed. I’ve not, however, kept my tenacity up in this area.

I always knew that me owning my name on Google would not be my shot to fame, but this was important groundwork that had to be laid. In the off chance that someone did want to find me, I wanted to make darn sure that they would.

Today, 90 of the top 100 searches for “Fuel” combined with “Jeremy Chin” yields pages linked to the book. Not to blow my own trumpet, but that is fucking insane, and the only way to achieve stats like these is to first have at least 90 pages out there on Fuel. No easy task I tell ya.

Each day, I have more material that flows from my computer than most multinational corporations. This stream of content make their way onto a whole range of platforms; mainstream ones like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, Pinterest, YouTube, Soundcloud, Vimeo, Zazzle.

On Facebook I have 5 fan pages, each championing different things, but all very relevant to the book. Each is updated daily.

Where websites are concerned, I have a number that are active.

There is jeremychin.com. I’ve not had time to do much with this as far as the book is concerned but I keep this around because I’ve had it for over a decade now, and it is fully indexed by Google. I’ve also got  Fuel’s official website, fueldabook.com

And then there is justjezza.com, my blog site that gives a more intimate look into my head, and possibly the most human of my sites.

Fuelrunning.com is my line of Fuel-branded running merchandise. Thousands of items are available for purchase, each with Fuel branding on it.

The book’s CSR program is represented through ctrlztoday.com, an initiative I kicked into gear not merely to give back, but as a reminder of why I must keep fighting the fight

I chose to offset the disturbing eye-opening images found in Ctrl-Z with something more uplifting, so I created yichalal.info. Yichalal is a word that I used in Fuel. In Amharic, it means “anything is possible”. Fuel in essence is about the power of the human spirit to overcome all obstacles, and the word Yichalal captured that perfectly.

Each day, an image like the ones you see above, finds its way onto the website, each accompanied with text that complement the image. My goal with this project was to own the word ‘yichalal’. It took me 2 weeks to break into the top 20, another month to break into the top 10, and two months to wrestle the top spot from websites that have owned the word for years. There is still some jostling for the top spot, but once I have it securely in my grasp, I intend to flood cyberspace with thousands of these images, and anyone curious to Google the word will find themselves on my site, which also features the book.

All tiny victories in the overall war effort. But I’m on the march. The term ‘Fuel’ + ‘Book’ has also fallen into my hands. I have set my sights on ‘Running’ + ‘Book’.  And one day, I may just be brave enough to take on Amazon and go after ‘Book’. I’m still trying to ascertain if this is ‘crazy’, or if it is ‘some crazy shit’. For now, I say, “Go ahead, bring it”. Yichalal!!!!!

“I am building a fire, and every day I train, I add more fuel. At just the right moment, I light the match.” – Mia Hamm