This will be a long and messy post… I will write whatever comes into my mind in random.

I received another 2 email requests during the weekend; and guess what, they won’t get a reply because a simple reason… they forgot to mention my name.

At my contact page I wrote that I replied to all emails… well, not exactly. These days there are lots of emails in disguise that are made to harvest email addresses for spam etc. once you replied ‘they’ will not that it is an active email address and will continue to spam it.

Use my name when contacting me

The best way to differentiate between a genuine email and a spam mail is the greetings. Just say “Hi Jee” and I will know that it’s a human being writing to me and not some spam bots. Besides it’s the polite thing to do to start a contact with greetings using the person’s name.

If someone is lazy enough to not find my name from my blog… don’t expect me to reply.

So, how much money am I making?

I used to work freelance in various projects… about a year ago I started building more websites of my own, which I aim to provide me passive income.

I am not going to tell anyone the exact figure that I am making online… I didn’t even tell my mum, let alone friends and strangers. What I can say is that I am not rich, and my income is decent enough to replace a normal job.

Do note that this blog is making peanuts only… enough to pay some bills perhaps. You need some better themed blogs to make serious money; personal blogs don’t perform well in this matter.

Know your goal

Don’t get over-excited with the dollar sign… newbies need to have a goal to start their venture into making online. How much do you want to make? Why do you want to do it online than to work in other conventional methods? How much time and investment are you willing to put it to your venture?

It is not easy

It is not difficult to make money online; it is not easy as well. You will need lots of time to learn, test and adapt. Besides if your primarily idea is to make money from blogging, you need time to write as well.

Out of the thousands of bloggers monetizing their blog, I bet that less than 100 are making a decent level of income (at least matching their offline job) from blogging.

Don’t start a blog to make money

There are difference between starting a blog and monetize it; and to start a blog to monetize it. You have to know what is your primarily plan… which is more important… your blog or the money?

If you don’t care about your blog… and the only thing you want from your blog is your money… don’t blog. You are wasting your time.

Find your topic and niche

Find a good topic that you have interest in (even better if you are really good with the topic)… do some research on the growth potential, monetization value and competition.

Join some forums and read more useful articles before starting your blog.

Quite often the success of your blog is already determined by the topic you choose… SEO and other promotion methods are to fulfill your blog potential; it cannot go beyond the limit of your topic if you chose the wrong topic to start with.

Read the right stuff

Read and learn, but make sure you are reading from the right person… what I mean is if you want to make money online, read from some one that is actually making some good money.

There are numerous Malaysian ‘how to make money online’ blogs that started in recent months, and the irony thing is that most of them are making close to zero dollar everyday… why learn from them?

So make sure you read from the right source… in fact, don’t believe in everything I write here, I could be wrong in some stuff.

Be patient and enjoy yourself

Continue to learn and implement, be patient… don’t expect anything to happen within the first 6 months.

Enjoy yourself as well… if you find that it’s not enjoyable, quit blogging.

Be thankful

I have actually read complaints from newbies that experience webmasters aren’t helpful and don’t want to share their secrets. I even received an email calling me selfish for not willing to share more than the basic.

Point is… why should we share our secrets with someone we don’t even know?

Besides, even the basics would work if a person follows the rules correctly. Be thankful that someone is willing to share just the basic.

Seriously, how did this dude manage to become our deputy minister?

See what other bloggers said…
Malaysia Considers Registering Local Bloggers
Bloggers may have to register
Malaysian bloggers may have to register
The Frog and the Blog
Blog Registration?
Move to register bloggers in Malaysia
Get those damn lying bloggers
Pointless for bloggers to register
Proof that our country needs smarter people in the government
Pendaftaran blogger

James Yeang has an interview with both of the founders, pretty good read, kudos to James.

After visiting their websites, I found some questions and ideas about the 2 networks; here is my review for both projects. (I don’t know both of the founder in person, thus no bias intended)

Company Mission

Company mission is the first thing I look for; from their about page (Advertlets and Nuffnang), I can’t find enough details to know where the companies are heading.

I mean I am not sure what future could I have as both a publisher and an advertiser with both company. What should I expect to get in the next 6 months? 1 year? 2 years?

Company Name

Advertlets can be related with advertising, but I am not sure what Nuffnang means. Advertlets also have the advantage of sorting by alphabetical order… it’s common practice that we name an A before a N (Advertlets vs Nuffnang, but rarely Nuffnang vs Advertlets).

Nuffnang does have one advantage though, I made no mistake typing in their URL; while for Advertlets, I made countless attempts before making the right one (my typos: advertlest, adverlest, adverlets, advertles etc).

Company Design

Advertlets seemed more professional, while nuffnang more funky perhaps. In my opinion, it’s about business in the end, so it’s better to have a more professional layout; I preferred Advertlets in this case.

Not sure about the users’ interface, I am not ready to register with both networks yet.

Company Contacts

Email and phone support is available on both sides. Advertlets seemed to be missing their address though… any good reasons for that?

I will send an email to both and see how’s the response time, and perhaps get them to share their view on some issues here.

From a Blogger’s Perspective

How much money am I going to make?

I think at the beginning both networks will need a bit of incondition support from some bloggers to kick-start their network. I don’t mind giving them a try even though it means less income for a while.

The question in the end is however… How much money could I make with them? What is the potential? Should I expect anything in RMx,xxx or RMxxx or RMxx or what? I know it depends on visitors and targeting etc… at least they could give a rough idea on estimated CPM perhaps.

What are the advertisers that we are expecting? Fellow bloggers? Large brands like TM or Maxis? Local stores like a pub or restaurant? Online biz or MLMs?

From an Advertiser’s Perspective

What are the formats of my ads? CPC? CPM? Text? Graphics? Videos? Polls? What are the size?

Advertlets… how am I supposed to make payment?

Nuffnang… get a credit card merchant account ASAP.

Miscellaneous

Build a support forum. You need to make communications easier between you and your bloggers/advertisers; and I believe some bloggers are eager to share their ideas as well.

Advertlets… what’s happening to the URL? It give funny signs like #@. Also, I can’t seem to find the Terms of Service (Tos)…

Nuffnang have some serious typos with their website. Also there’s inconsistency in the usage of RM and $, rather confusing actually.

————

I understand that both networks are still in beta, and I can see some progresses; but I think they need to show more urgency in making it works though. Good luck.

Here is a video of the lunar eclipse (thanks to awecz), a bit shaky but pretty cool…

There are a few dozens (if not hundreds) of lunar eclipse on YouTube, make a search if interested.

A great love song will at least require the same passion, and perhaps works better than novels… “First Love” (~ Utada Hikaru)…

The idea of using “Melayu Boleh” as the keyword is probably that the term Melayu Boleh is frequently searched, but the search results often returned with porn related websites.

There are some setbacks for the Melayu Boleh challenge though, as the deadline is just a month away from the announcement… so it’s not feasible to work on a new website or domain.

In the end it’s likely that a large existing website; or a website with the term Melayu Boleh in the URL will win the challenge.

Also because the top prize money is just RM100, it’s not a good idea to buy links and pay for other SEO implementations.

I am not sure about their rules, but I guess I am not a member of the forum, and thus not eligible for the contest… anyhow I would like to know how well I can do with the keyword.

I am thinking of a few tips that will help contestants to improve ranking for Melayu Boleh…

1. More Melayu Boleh related contents… we need more posts and pages about Melayu Boleh to supplement each post. At at least 3-6 good post about Melayu Boleh during this period.

2. Set a subfolder or category for Melayu Boleh… it will be difficult to rank well with a new domain or subdomain in a month time. So, make a subfolder or category and write at least half a dozen of Melayu Boleh post with that.

3. Online SEO tactics – like keywords in title, keyword density etc.

4. Work in a group – work in a group and inter-link each other specifically to each others’ post for Melayu Boleh.

5. Timing, focus on the last few weeks – sometimes a new post or page will rank well on search engine despite the website not being highly optimized. Some people call it New Content Syndrome where it’s a temporarily glitch from search engines… so push a few Melayu Boleh posts on the last week of the challenge, you might just get lucky.

Credits to Adam for the lead, good luck with the challenge Adam.

[Via Hemmy]

I do like reading food blogs though, here is a list of Malaysia food blogs that I read occasionally, perhaps you will find it useful as well…

* :: || Life of A Food Lover || :: *
backSteetGlutton
EatingAsia
eatinout
KampungboyCitygal
kyspeaks.com – Eat, Pimp, Animate, Draw, I am Fun!
masak-masak
The Malaysian Food Review

Carry on reading if you are interested to learn a bit about SEO, and perhaps learn to increase your blog traffic; else just ignore this.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the skills and techniques to boost a web page to ranked well in Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP) or position; which in terms will bring in traffic.

SEO consultancy with great reputation could charge 5 figures USD for a SEO campaign (sometimes includes branding and PR), while most SEO service will be charging nothing less than thousands of dollars.

In Malaysia there are a few SEO service provider as well, which are charging a few thousand Ringgits for their Search Engine Optimization service.

What I want to test with this post is to see how good these Malaysia SEO companies are. If at the end of this experiment (7-14 days perhaps), my post can ranked high in Google Search Engine for keywords like “Malaysia SEO” and “Malaysia SEO service,” that probably shows that Malaysia SEO companies are not good enough and not worth paying for their optimization service.

Otherwise it should show that those Malaysia SEO companies know what they are doing, for at least ranking high in Google with their own keywords.

Let me know if you would like to learn more about Search Engine Optimization, I shall share some SEO tips which I know… not claiming myself as an SEO expert though.

The website claimed that they are “the world first website for copyrighted movies absolutely free.” The launching of the website was reported by tonnes of China media, so they could be probably offering legal downloads as claimed.

The catch from the downloads is that advertisement has been slotted in between, so it’s very much like seeing movies on TV rather than in cinemas; the advertisement are probably funding the copyrights for those movies I guess.

Good thing is that the movies are quite new, and some of the China produced movies are not shown in Malaysia at all. I’ve seen some English movies at the download list, but the website is in Chinese.

Haven’t download any movies yet myself; the Streamyx connection has been horrible for the past few days, will try to download a couple of movies when I got the chance.