Ask Melvin Ng

Here’s to a brand new year and a brand new blog theme.

Personally I’m not much of a resolution person. That doesn’t mean I don’t set any goals for myself.

2007 really flew past me without much significant event except for my trip to San Francisco for Mike Filsaime’s WIME.

It was probably I was taking things easy, and enjoying my life as it is.

2008 will be DIFFERENT!

Yes, 2008 will be another year where I’ve set very high standards for myself, and I’ll work my butt off to achieve them.

2008 will be the year where I will strike a more balance relationship between health, family and wealth.

I’m giving my health more emphasis instead of taking it for granted. In fact, I’ve already started on it towards the end of 2007 and will kick it up a notch further in 2008.

If everything goes well, I’m hoping to either visit Australia or New Zealand in 2008.

And in 2008, it’ll be the year where I’m scaling my business on a bigger scale by outsourcing more, and only working on projects which allows me to leverage, instead of sucking up my personal time.

So, what’s your plan for 2008? Set yourself some goals, and make sure you stick by them and push yourself. I’m very sure you can do it!

If 2007 was a super year, then make 2008 your best year yet! If 2007 was pretty uneventful, then do a check and balance, and find out what was missing. Find a way to deal with it!

One thing’s for sure…if you 2007 didn’t work out for you, then you need to change whatever it is that you’re doing.

There’s a saying, ‘Practice Makes Perfect’. I hate to be the one to digress…but…

Practice Makes Permanent

If you continue doing whatever that you’ve been doing in 2007, then chances are you won’t be achieving what you want in 2008, unless you do something about it. It might need some fine-tuning, or it might need a major overhaul. Only you will know.

With that said…I’m wishing you a healthy, happy and fulfilling 2008!

I’m beginning to feel sick and tired of all the BIG product launches. Month in month out there’s bound to be some huge launches in the Internet Marketing niche.

It seems the trend nowadays is to create a product, get tons of JV partners to help you launch it, make $xxx,xxx.xx amount of dollars, and then brag about it so that you can be considered a guru.

It seems everyone’s jumping onto the bandwagon, and some have taken things the wrong way.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with product launches per se. In fact, I think it’s a good strategy to generate buzz and build momentum. The problem comes when these are one-off wonders in the sense that once the launch is over, the sales of the product sizzles and dies off.

That’s pretty sad considering the amount of effort put into creating the product.

How do we ‘cure’ this painful death?

We start off by planning the perpetual marketing of the product first, then only should be concentrate on the launch. It takes less effort to continue marketing a product and making continuous sales, than to create a new product and do the launch process all over again.

If you want to study how some of these ‘evergreen’ strategies work, you should check out the following sites and see how they execute their marketing strategies:

Edmund Loh - ResellRightsMastery.com

Gobala Krishnan - Wordpress Adsense System

Ewen Chia - Secret Affiliate Weapon

Aurelius Tjin - CopyAndPasteGraphics.com

Even after the initial launch of their products, sales continue to come everyday because of the marketing strategies put in place by them.

That’s what I call smart marketing.

A couple of weeks ago I had the privilege to play host to 4 of my Internet Marketing buddies from Indonesia and they are….

Dee - He’s a pro at relationship building so much so that he knows more Malaysian IMers than most of us do.

Francis - This guy is really a dynamite. He’s the outsourcing guy when it comes to writing. You can contact him for any writing or re-writing jobs, as well as copywriting.

Semmy and Sugeng - These 2 quiet guys are the Adwords expert and have built a huge income from arbitrage.

We had the privilege of having lunch with Richard Quek together with Steven Wong and Matt Ng

When it was Matt’s turn to play host, he upped the ante and arranged some super duper activities for us. It was also the first time I tried my hands at go-karting.

And the main reason they came to Malaysia was to attend the wedding of Khai and Yuenn.

And here’s a toast to an ever lasting marriage. Congrats to you guys, Khai and Yuenn.   Oh yes, it was the roundtable toast from the Internet Marketing group

That night, to celebrate Edmund’s birthday, Matt graciously organized a Karaoke session. It was a version of ‘wild and wilder’. Bet ya didn’t expect us to be that crazy…haha.

A last one for the album, the Adwords in a Box team, Peng Joon and Matt Ng, together with the birthday boy of the night, Edmund Loh.

In fact, what I really meant is dealing with the reality no matter how bad or crappy it is, because IT IS THE REALITY. You can apply that in your life and your business, but I’m going to discuss that in the context of business.

As I was reading the book, Good To Great, there was this chapter on dealing with the harsh realities of the business world. And I reflected back on what happened to me recently.

Just last Friday, I had my last Google Adsense account being disabled by Google. In fact, it was my fourth and last. The funny thing was, when I told my friend about it, I was actually laughing about the matter.

Well, I could have just complained and whined about it, but I didn’t. In fact I turned it into a positive experience.

I took it as a blessing in disguise that i have one less distraction. I then took my domains and sold them off at SitePoint. I’ve already listed 2, and out of those 2 already sold one for $2,000 in less than 48 hours. I could have sold it for more but I just wanted to get rid of those sites and move on.

Enough said about me. The point I’m stressing is, in business, there will always be uncertainties, and there will always be unfavorable conditions. It’s YOUR DECISION whether to run away from it, or deal with them head on.

In order to be successful, you need to get out of your comfort zone.

If you’re at a crossroad now because you’re confused, feels down, at a lost, or just losing sight of your goal, it’s time to take stock and do a reality check.

• Where are you at right now at this point in your life?
• What do you want to achieve?
• Doing what you’re doing now, would you be able to achieve it?
• If no, you have to change direction no matter how difficult and uncomfortable it is. I know it’s easier to just kid yourself and chug along nicely but it’s not going to bring you nearer to your goal. Don’t do that. You know you deserve better.

  Believe it or not, people actually do stupid things JUST to use an Apple iPhone.

Yes, me got myself an iPhone during my trip to the US. Not only me, Vince and Gobala also bought themselves a set.

We were all pretty excited and looking forward to use it back in Malaysia. Unfortunately, after unlocking the phone, we realized that of all the 3 network providers here, only Digi and Celcom was compatible with iPhone.

The provider that the 3 of us were using, Maxis, was not compatible. We could make calls, but couldn’t receive calls.

What a bummer!

And currently we’re not sure how long it’s going to take for them to fix this compatibility issue. Their customer service were pretty ignorant of the issue.

Anyway, Gobala was the first culprit. He started using his iPhone regardless of the problems with Maxis. Yes, he made himself ‘UNCONTACTABLE’!

Correct me if I’m wrong. You carry a mobile phone for convenience so that friends can contact you easily. If your phone cannot accept calls, then it’s pretty much a DOH!

Yes, he pretty much did a DOH!

Next in line, it was my turn to do a DOH….LOL.

Yes, I started using my iPhone in spite of the problems. But I made sure I was contactable. I bought a Digi Prepaid Pack to be used on my iPhone. Then, I redirected all my calls on my original Maxis number to my Digi number.

How’s that for being vain. The Apple iPhone is just too sexy to leave it unused.

Hey Vince, when are you going to join the DOH club?