From the category archives:

Internet Marketing

New About Us Page

by Michael Wong on August 9, 2010

In over 12 years in this industry I have probably visited thousands of About Us pages. It is typically the first page I visit after the homepage, mainly to find out what the site is about, and often to find out whether I should trust the people behind the site.

I have written many ‘About Us’ pages over the years. My last effort was a very long bio that took something like a good ten minutes to read, and that was the edited version. It was a good read (well, at least I thought so), but I have to admit it was way too long, especially for impatient web surfers.

Recently I was inspired to rewrite my About Us page on this blog into something that quickly and effectively informed users what I had achieved in this industry and what I was about. And I feel I have written my best About Us page to date. Well, until the next one anyway.

I broke the page down into four sections:

  1. Section 1 gives a brief summary of who I am and what I have achieved in this industry;
  2. A timeline of what I have achieved in this industry and when;
  3. My guiding principles; and
  4. Books I really enjoyed reading.

I think I could have gotten away with just the first two sections. But I think including my guiding principles and the books I really enjoyed gives people a deeper understanding of who I am and what I am about.

Have you looked at your About Us page lately? Does it is do a good job of selling you and your company?

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JUMBO Keyword: First Month’s Marketing Results

by Michael Wong on May 21, 2009

jumbo-keyword-2001It’s been over six weeks since I launched JUMBOKeyword.com, my free online AdWords tool offering 70+ 1-click Google AdWords, keywords and text editing functions to help you create, manage and edit hundreds, even thousands, of AdWords keywords quickly and easily.

I thought it would be interesting to look back at my first month’s marketing efforts and discuss the results achieved. The stats were provided by Google Analytics.

Time span

April 6 to May 5, 2009

Web Site Statistics (Google Analytics)

Visitors: 52,162
Unique visitors: 44,822
Average time on site: 25 seconds

Fifty-two thousand visitors may sound impressive to some people (or not depending on your point of view), but it’s not really because I paid for most of the traffic. The real test would be when I switch off the paid traffic.

Visitors (125 countries/territories)

United States: 46,692
China: 1,815
United Kingdom: 347
India: 303
Canada: 257
Ireland: 185
Australia: 173
Germany: 124
Indonesia: 104
Turkey: 103

Top Traffic Sources

Direct / None: 15,258
Bravenet: 14,282
Google AdWords: 2,065
Mikes-Marketing-Tools.com: 1,466
StumbleUpon: 4,642
Google (organic): 770
JavaScript-2.com: 78
JohnChow.com: 52
Search (organic): 64
Ask.com: 45
MichaelWong.com: 34
Twitter.com: 26
URLWire.com: 18

Length of Visits

Length of Visit Visits % of visitors
0-10 seconds 43,759 83.89%
11-30 seconds 3,801 7.29%
31-60 seconds 1,587 3.04%
61-180 seconds 1,698 3.26%
181-600 seconds 891 1.71%
601-1,800 seconds 368 0.71%
1,801+ seconds 58 0.11%

We can safely say that a visit between 0-10 seconds means the visitor left the site without using the keyword editor. I would expect the average time on site to increase as I reduce my advertising efforts and rely on repeat visitors.

I am going to list the various marketing and advertising methods I used to promote JUMBO Keyword .com. I provide exact statistics and my thoughts on each method’s effectiveness.

Bravenet Media (Pop-Unders)

bravenet-200I purchased a $500 pop-under campaign with Bravenet Media, which sells advertising for its Bravenet network. I bought advertising on Bravenet because Bravenet had delivered positive return-on-investments on a pay-per-sale offer I promoted last year.

I wanted the campaign to just target U.S. visitors, with a frequency cap of one unique visit per 24 hours. That cost of $6CPM meant I would receive 83,333 impressions or visitors.

The campaign went live on April 17 and wrapped up on May 1, resulting in about 6,000 impressions a day. But when I checked my Google Analytics stats, it registered just 46,580 impressions for the landing page that I gave Bravenet. So in effect I was charged $10.73 CPM, not $6 CPM.

I brought this to the attention of the sales rep, Melanie Peake. She told me that before they attempt to deliver a pop under, they test to see if a user is blocking pop-ups. If they are not, they deliver a pop-under. But if they are, they deliver a floating div - in other words, a pop-up.

All along I thought I was getting 83,333 pop-unders for $500. Now she says I got a mixture of pop-unders and pop-ups. I don’t like pop-ups because they are intrusive and most people simply close pop-ups. I told her that they cannot promise pop-unders and then deliver pop-ups. They are two different products. I would never buy pop-ups for the reason I gave above.

Another thing was that I didn’t understand why Google Analytics didn’t track the pop-up impressions. Melanie told me that floating divs are loaded in iframes, and iframes are not tracked through Google Analytics. Hmm… I’m none the wiser.

Anyway, Melanie did the right thing and offered to deliver an addition 66,226 pop-under impressions, which I gladly accepted. By the way, I forgot to mention that out of all the impressions Bravenet delivered, an impressive 99.54% were from the United States.

It’s difficult to judge whether the campaign was a success or not. It delivered the traffic from the targeted market, the United States. The test will be how many people return to the site.

If you want to try Bravenet Media, I recommend you:

  • insist on receiving only pop-unders - no pop-divs or pop-ups
  • target U.S. visitors only or whatever country you want (non-U.S. visitors should be cheaper)
  • set a frequency cap of one unique visit per 24 hours
  • provide a landing page so you can monitor the quantity and quality of the traffic
  • monitor the traffic with traffic analysis software such as Google Analytics
  • use a tracking ID if you’re promoting a pay-per-lead/sale offer

Google AdWords (Pay Per Click)

google-adwordsGoogle AdWords advertisers are everywhere so I set up two Google AdWords campaigns targeting all languages and all countries.

One campaign was for the Google search and search partners network, while the other was for the content network. The reason why I didn’t combine both the content network and the search networks into one campaign is because I use different keyword formats to target search and content networks, a technique that most affiliate marketing experts recommend.

My keyword categories included AdWords, Google advertising, Google products (GoogleCash, etc.), keywords, and pay per click. I set a max cost-per-click (CPC) of $0.10 and a budget of $10 per day for the content campaign.

I value search traffic higher than content traffic because they are proactively searching for a solution. Hence, I set a higher CPC of $0.20 and a budget of $20 per day for the search campaign.

The Google search and search partners network campaign produced the following results:

Clicks Impressions CTR Avg. CPC Cost Avg. Pos
1,335 329,801 0.40% $0.11 $153.07 5.0

The content network campaign produced these results:

Clicks Impressions CTR Avg. CPC Cost Avg. Pos
3,884 2,719,466 0.14% $0.05 $191.74 4.1

The fact that the content network generated almost three times the clicks for half the cost didn’t surprise me. What surprised me was that virtually no content traffic came from English speaking countries such as the United States, UK, Canada, Australia. They were all from countries like China, Turkey, and Taiwan.

I had made a mistake targeting non-English speaking users. They generally don’t end up being paying customers (for affiliate and advertised products) so the value of that traffic was minimal to say the least.

As a result, I decided to remove all languages except for English, and remove all countries except for nine English speaking countries, including Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Ireland, Malaysia, New Xealand, Singapore, United Kingdom, and the United States.

I also removed Google search partner and just kept Google search traffic to minimize the risk of click fraud and ensure the traffic was of the highest quality. The search campaign click through rate dropped marginally from 0.40% to 0.39%, while the average CPC increased 54% (6 cents) from 11 cents to 17 cents.

The content campaign click through rate dropped by half almost, from 0.14% to 0.08%, while the average CPC dropped from 5 to 4 cents.

StumbleUpon (Targeted Visitors)

stumbleupon-jk-200StumbleUpon is a social booking service where users bookmark sites they ’stumble upon’ and are offered similar sites other users have bookmarked. With over six million users, it is one of the most popular social bookmarking services around.

StumbleUpon users are shown websites in a framed window, so it’s almost as good as a pop-under. Each visitor costs just 5 cents, so it is very cost effective.

I paid $500 into my account and set up two campaigns; one targeting ‘internet-tools’, and the other targeting ‘marketing’. You can choose from 500 categories. I set a maximum of 100 visitors per day, targeting U.S., male only users, between the ages of 18 and 65.

StumbleUpon provide daily visitor stats (last 23 days only), along with the percentage of users who liked or disliked my site. I didn’t take much notice of these stats before until now. I see that in the internet-tools category, I can see 5 liked and 10 disliked ratings. Whereas in the marketing category, there are 56 liked ratings and only 15 users who disliked the tool.

While the internet-tools users are overwhelming negative towards the tool, the marketing crowd were the opposite. The lack of responses, especially positive responses, in the internet-tools category made me realize that I am wasting my time targeting the internet-tools category. Hence, I have paused that campaign.

Google Analytics show that while not every visitor was from the United States, 97.4% of visitors were, which is acceptable. The disturbing statistic is that the average time on site is a mere 3 seconds, which is poor.

I have just paused the internet-tools campaign so that may help improve the average time that StumbleUpon users spend on the site. Although the remaining campaign is targeting users interested in marketing, I think the category is too broad for my AdWords tool. There is no category for AdWords or pay-per-click, so I think I will stop the campaign, which I have just done.

Google SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

I have been doing SEO since the late 90s so I guess I know a thing or two when it comes to SEO. I specialize in optimizing for Google so any rankings I get for Yahoo! or MSN Live are a bonus.

I registered JUMBOKeyword.com in January 23 of this year and launched the site in April 6. In just over 5 weeks, JUMBO Keyword .com has already achieved some decent top 30 search engine rankings.

Keyword Google Yahoo! MSN Live
adwords keyword tool #8 #8 #12
adwords software - #22 -
adwords tool #18 #28 -
google adwords tool #9 #29 #29

Those rankings aren’t generating a great deal of search engine traffic at this time. That should improve when the rankings improve over the coming months. I will explain how I achieved these rankings in a future post (maybe the next post).

Michael Wong .com Blog (Blogging)

michael-wong-site-2001My Michael Wong .com blog has been around for a few years, but I haven’t been much of a blogger and let the site lapse into something I wasn’t too proud of.

With the launch of JUMBO Keyword .com I decided it was time to relaunch my blog. So I have upgraded the design and set myself a schedule of writing at least one quality post per week.

If I can manage more than that I will, but quality posts take time to research and write.

JohnChow.com (Blog Review)

johnchow-200I know the value of bloggers, so I paid for a review at JohnChow.com. The review cost me $500 which is not cheap but I thought it would be a worthwhile investment because John Chow is one of the best known internet marketing blogs around. According to John, his site attracts 200,00 unique visitors and 300,000 page views a month. And it has over 49,000 RSS subscribers.

So I ordered the review via ReviewMe.com on Wednesday. Four days went by before the order was accepted. The review, “One-Click Keyword Editing with Jumbo Keyword“, was posted on John’s site around on Sunday night, around midnight.

The site states that sponsored reviews will receive at least 12 hours as the top front page post. Twelve hours as the top front page post from Sunday midnight to Monday midday isn’t exactly what I call prime time!

The review itself was surprisingly long and includes several screenshots - so far so good. However, upon closer inspection the review is dry and lacks personality. I get the impression that whoever wrote the review had never used AdWords or edited big lists of keywords. And no wonder! The review was not written by John Chow - but a Michael Kwan. A quick Google search reveals a freelance writer by that name. John’s site doesn’t promise he would write the review so I don’t have grounds to complain.

I emailed John and told him that I felt giving my review 12 hours as the top post from Sunday midnight to Monday midday was rather poor timing. And if there was any chance he could leave the review at the top of the homepage for at least 12 ‘business hours’, I would be grateful. John duly obliged. I tip my hat to John for doing the right thing.

Okay, how about the traffic? Well, the review has been out for over 2 weeks now. According to Google Analytics, JohnChow.com has sent a mere 55 visitors. At least they stayed an average of 1 minute 14 seconds, so they’re quality visitors.

Is that it? Yep! I’m afraid so as far as traffic from his site shows. Google Analytics could be lying to me, but I haven’t done anything to upset it lately so I don’t think it is.

So what happened to the 47,000 RSS subscribers? Did all of them miss the article because the review was posted Sunday night? I don’t know. All I know is that Google Analytics recorded just 55 visitors from JohnChow.com. The review shows 26 comments so at least a few people did read the review and commented on it.

One thing I didn’t count on was that John tweeted the blog post to his 27,600 Twitter followers. The tweet lead back to his blog post, not directly to my site. Despite that, it was still a nice surprise. As a result, at least nine of his followers retweeted about JUMBO Keyword .com to their 18,011 followers.

So what are my conclusions? Would I do it all again? Yes, but only because of the tweets. If it weren’t for the tweets, I would say the $500 investment represented terrible value for money.

I would also do things a bit differently. I would request that John write the review. He may not do $500 reviews anymore - but it doesn’t hurt to ask. If John won’t write the review, I would insist that whoever writes it has some experience with AdWords and keyword editing, and that they actually use the tool before writing the review. I would also request they include one or two specific keyword phrases for the links to my site.

I would also insist that the review is posted first thing in the morning, around 11am EST (Eastern Standard Time) to get maximum exposure. I would also choose Tuesday to Thursday, which are always touted as the best days to send out a newsletter. Same with the tweet.

Publicity

I contacted the editors of 23 prominent internet marketing and productivity blogs, 10 search engine and marketing news sites, and an affiliate marketing newsletter about JUMBO Keyword .com.

As far as I am aware, not one has mentioned it so far which is disappointing. Most didn’t even bother to reply. At least Seth Godin responded with, “neato”.

I know an AdWords tool won’t change the world, but I thought it was good enough to warrant a mention in some of those sites. I guess I was mistaken.

Are we getting to the stage where unless a site gets millions in venture capital, or is started by someone well known, or it’s a game changer, it doesn’t break through the noise and get a mention on a prominent blog or news site? Or are we at that stage already?

Twitter (Micro-blogging)

twitterI have known about Twitter for a while but didn’t take much notice until I decided to relaunch my blog. I figured that if I was to allocate some time and effort to the blog, I should also do the same with Twitter. The buzz around Twitter has been building for months and I just couldn’t let the hottest thing since Facebook (which I’m still not a member of) pass me by. I also thought that if I didn’t register @Michael_Wong (some cybersquatter is sitting on @MichaelWong), someone else might register it.

So I signed up and decided to display the tweets on my blog. And once I decided to do that, I couldn’t exactly not tweet. So I did. I soon realized just how powerful Twitter can be. Twitter is like RSS but better. Like RSS, followers have to opt in to follow you, so you can’t get into trouble for spamming. And they can opt out at any time. So there’s no possible way they can complain of spam.

I don’t spam - never have, never will. But I did get into a slight bit of bother a few years back. I built up a mailing list of about 10,000 people but I didn’t email the list for a while. After a few months, I sent out an email and a few people, who had obviously forgotten that they had subscribed to my double opt-in list, complained to my web host and domain registrar, GoDaddy.com.

GoDaddy immediately threatened to disable my MichaelWong.com domain. I think there were 2 complaints out of 10,000 subscribers, but that’s all it takes. That is the domain I use for my main email address so it would have caused a massive headache if it was shut down. I decided not to build another email list. I know all the big marketing experts say it’s essential to build a list. I have left a lot of money on the table by not building a list. But the fact is the trouble just isn’t worth the effort.

Anyway, back to Twitter. The benefits of Twitter include:

  • Anyone can see how many followers a user has
  • Tweeting takes a lot less effort than sending out an email to your list or writing a blog post
  • Users are much more likely to retweet something they like to their followers than send an email to their list or write a post in their blog
  • You can respond to any user without being accused of spam
  • It’s free: email lists can cost a bit to maintain when you have thousands of subscribers. Whether you have 100 or 1 million followers, it’s always free to communicate with them on Twitter.

The results speak for themselves. I had no mentions in blogs or newsletters. But at least 35 Twitter users who liked JUMBO Keyword .com enough that they tweeted about it to their 108,000 followers. I didn’t include John Chow’s 27,600 in that number because I paid for the review.

I think the main downside with Twitter is that users follow so many people and some users tweet so often that there is too much noise. Hence, most tweets just pass users by. Another issue is time. People tweet any time day or night, and unless someone is actively reading every tweet they receive or is following every tweet on their computer or mobile phone, the chances are most tweets just aren’t getting noticed.

Still, I consider Twitter to be a good marketing channel. It gives you the potential to reach a large audience, quickly, for free. SEO and Google AdWords is still the best form of marketing for me. But SEO takes time, and AdWords can cost a bit.

Press Release (URLWire)

urlwire-200Aside from when I sold my last internet company, this is my first press release. I wrote the release and decided to hire Eric Ward of URLWire.com to send out the release. I hired Eric because I’ve known about him since the late 90s. According to his web site, he has been in the industry since 1994 and has announced thousands of web sites including Amazon.com, Microsoft and AOL, to name a few.

Unlike most press release websites, his site really gives you the impression that his contacts/subscribers welcome his announcements. He says he doesn’t just send an email blast to everyone on his list. Instead he selectively emails those contacts that he feels would be interested in your website.

Anyway, I paid $495 for a press release on April 9. For technical reasons, Eric didn’t announce my site until May 5. According to Google Analytics, URLWire has sent just 45 visitors. Google shows 530 web pages mentioning the release but they link back to the announcement in URLWire.com. These seem to be automated news feeds, not write ups.

Conclusion? I would use Eric’s services again, but only if I really had a major news-worthy story to tell. Trying to get mainstream media to take notice of a free AdWords keyword tool without a real story just doesn’t work - at least not for me.

With blogs, Twitter, social bookmarking (Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.), forums and newsletters, news of a great web site will spread like wildfire without having a press release. Journalists and reporters typically hunt down stories on the web nowadays. Ten years from now press releases might be ancient history.

Conclusions

I am glad I tried all those marketing tactics. Some worked better than others. There are many other marketing tactics I didn’t try, including viral marketing, video marketing, submitting articles to article directories, blog commenting, etc. There just aren’t enough hours in the day for me to do everything.

To be frank with you, JUMBO Keyword .com hasn’t taken off anywhere as quickly as I had hoped. I will give it a couple more months before deciding whether it’s worth me putting any more effort into it.

I gave it a fair go (as Aussies here like to say) and learnt some valuable lessons. I hope sharing my experience with you helps you too. Subscribe to my free email updates, RSS feed or follow me on Twitter at @Michael_Wong for more marketing results in the future.

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Success: 38 Software Products & Services I Use to Make a 6-Figure Income Online

by Michael Wong on May 6, 2009

michael-wong-site-200In my effort to share with you everything I have learnt in the last 10 years of making a living online, I share with you the 38 software products and services I use to run my internet business.

I have always used Dell computers running Microsoft Windows since I discovered the internet in 1997.

But then a couple of years ago my hard drive died and I decided it was time to switch to an Apple Mac. I am so glad I did.

The Mac operating system (OS) is much more user friendly and fun to use. Although the Mac OS X crashes every now and then, it crashes far less often than Windows OS.

The main reason I didn’t switch earlier was because I was worried about not being able to run Windows programs. I used to write reviews on internet marketing software for my Mike’s Marketing Tools site, and the majority of marketing software is created for Windows. But with the new Intel based Apple computers, I can have my Mac OS and also run Windows OS for running Windows software. In fact I can do both at the same time.

Because I use an Apple Mac, the majority of the software programs mentioned in this list are for the Mac. Where possible, I have include the Windows equivalent. Even if I don’t list a Windows equivalent, it will give you an idea as to why I use the program. You can go and find a Windows equivalent on software sites like Download.com.

Out of the 38 products and services, 30 are free. The products and services I pay for add up to $757.84, plus recurring payments of $262.95 per month. You can see it clearly doesn’t cost a great deal of money to set up a profitable business online.

I haven’t listed hardware equipment such as a computer, fax/printer, office desk and chair, etc. The cost of those really depend on your budget and taste.

Here are the 38 software programs and services I currently use to make a 6-figure income online:

Advertising Server: OpenX (Free)

openx200For years I have been using an open source advertising server software to serve ads throughout my various web sites. It used to be called phpAdsNew but is now known as OpenX.

OpenX offers all the features you would want from an advertising server, including displaying all types and sizes of ads, targeting, and extensive reporting. The amazing thing about this amazing piece of software is that it’s free!

OpenX is open source, and therefore free, and runs on a server that supports PHP and MySQL or PostgreSQL-configured database.

AdWords Keyword Tool: JUMBO Keyword .com (Free)

jumbo-keyword-200Okay, this is a plug for my latest web site. But I do genuinely use it all the time so I think it’s fair that I include it in this list.

As a full time affiliate marketer and AdWords advertiser I build big lists of keywords using keyword databases such as the Google AdWords Keyword Tool and Wordtracker.

Large keyword lists require a lot of editing and cleaning which is tedious work. For years I have used regular expressions in a text editor to help me clean the keywords. Once the keywords were cleaned, I would use my AdWords Wrapper tool to convert keywords into the various AdWords keyword matching options.

The regular expression functions helped speed up the cleaning process, but I only knew a few functions so it still took too much time and effort. This is why I decided to create JUMBO Keyword .com. It is a free AdWords keyword tool offering 70+ 1-click Google AdWords keyword editing functions.

Now I can edit hundreds, even thousands, of AdWords keywords, as well as convert cleaned keywords into the various AdWords keyword matching options with just a click of the mouse.

Email: Google GMail (Free)

gmail-200I switched over to Google’s GMail in January 2008 after using Eudora for 8 years. I wish I had switched earlier.

GMail is much easier to use than Eudora because it has a nicer user interface and an excellent spam filter. With Eudora, I had to set up all the spam filters and it was a constant struggle keeping up with new spam techniques. I used to have to manually delete hundreds of spam emails a week. With Gmail, only a handful of spam emails appear in my inbox each week.

I also like the fact that (assuming I am logged into GMail) my emails automatically appear in my account and GMail notifies me that I have a new email the moment it arrives. With Eudora, I had to download emails to my computer before I could even filter them. This meant Eudora would download all the spam emails as well, which was a complete waste of time and bandwidth.

Email Back-Up: Apple Mail (Free) / Outlook Express (Free)

mail-200In December 2006, GMail users reported mass email deletions. Rumors were that GMail was hacked using a hole exploit in Firefox 2 - the issues have since been resolved.

Google’s official policy is that once emails are deleted, they are gone forever. So, if you value your emails, I highly recommend you back-up your GMail emails by downloading it to your computer.

I own a Apple Mac and use the Apple Mail program that comes with it. Windows users can use Outlook Express. Google has easy to follow instructions on how to back up your email using your computer’s email software.

FTP: FileZilla (Free)

I use the open source FileZilla FTP software for uploading my web pages to my server. FileZilla is free and runs on Windows XP/Vista, Mac OS X 10.5+, and Linux.

Google AdWords: AdWords Editor (Free)

adwords-editor-200AdWords Editor is a free Google application for managing AdWords ad campaigns. I can download all my accounts (I have a few), mass update campaigns, and re-upload the changes to AdWords.

I still prefer to set up campaigns via the AdWords website. But I use AdWords Editor when I want to make bulk changes (such as updating bids or adding keywords), and also to copy or move a large number of items between ad groups and campaigns.

AdWords Editor is free and runs on Windows 2000/XP/Vista and Mac OS X 10.4+.

Image Editor: Picnik (Free) + Picturesque (Free) / Paint Shop Pro ($69.99)

picnik-200Not being much of an artist, I do as little image editing as I have to. On occasions when I have to edit an image, I used to use Paint Shop Pro (PSP) on my Windows computer. Paint Shop Pro runs on Windows XP/Vista and costs $69.99.

The main reason for using PSP is because I’m cheap and didn’t want to spend $600-700 on Adobe PhotoShop or Illustrator. :-)

I haven’t really found a replacement for PSP on my Mac. But the only graphics editing functions I really use are cropping and resizing thumbnail images. I have been able to replicate those functions using Picnik, a free online photo editing web app.

I also use Picturesque which allows me to quickly and effortlessly add 3D effects, reflections, corner curves, shadows, glows and strokes to any image. You can see of an example of an image created with Picturesque on the JUMBO Keyword .com homepage. Picturesque is free and runs on Mac OS X.

Instant Messenging: Skype (Free) / GMail Chat (Free)

skype-chat-200I use Skype Chat to chat (via instant messaging) to freelancers. Russian and India freelancers are a bit shy about chatting with their voice.

Skype is free and runs on Windows 2000/XP/Vista, Mac OS X 10.3+, Linux, Windows Mobile, and iPhone.

I also use GMail Chat to instant message with my friends who also use GMail.

Internet Connection Monitor: Little Snitch ($29.95)

little-snitch-200Windows users typically have Firewalls, like Norton or ZoneAlarm, installed on their computer. These programs typically monitor your internet connection and notify you if a program, such as spyware, tries to send data from your computer.

Most Mac users, like myself, don’t use firewall software because there is no need. So I use Little Snitch to monitor which programs are sending out data from my Apple Mac. Little Snitch costs $29.95 and runs on Mac OS X 10.4+.

Link Checker: Xenu’s Link Sleuth (Free)

xenu-link-sleuth-200I use Xenu’s Link Sleuth to check my web sites for broken links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts and java applets.

The great thing about Link Sleuth is that it is free. Link Sleuth only works on Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP/Vista.

Local Data Back-Up: Time Machine (Free) + 1 TB Time Capsule ($499)

The Apple Mac OS X comes with Time Machine, a software program that automatically backs up everything on my Mac. I use Time Machine and a 1 Terabyte Time Capsule external hard drive to make local backups of everything.

My Dell computer’s hard drive literally died on me a couple of years ago. I took the hard drive to a data recovery specialist, but even after a week of intensive work they were unable to save the drive or recover any data from it.

Luckily I had backed up everything except for a few months of emails. Learn from my mistake. Back up your computer’s data on another hard drive! Don’t say I didn’t want you.

Long Distance Voice/Video Chat: Skype (Free) / iChat (Free)

I use Skype (and sometimes the Apple Mac’s iChat) to chat with freelancers and friends who live overseas. Skype voice chat requires both parties to have Skype installed on their respective computers. And if both parties have a web cam, we can see each other as we chat.

If you have never tried Skype, I highly recommend that you do. You will be pleasantly surprised by the sound quality. Skype gives you the feeling that the person on the other end is in the same room as you.

I have even had a 3 way chat with my cousins in Hong Kong and England. I was in Australia. The sound quality was excellent, but only if I switched off the video. I felt like they were in the same room as me.

The quality of video picture is excellent when the window is small. But as you expand the window, the quality deteriorates.

Long Distance VOIP Phone Calls: Skype (From ¢2.1/minute)

skypeout-200I use Skype to make cheap international VOIP calls if the person I want to talk to doesn’t have Skype installed or isn’t online. I can call landlines and mobiles from 2.1 cents per minute.

VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) calls are carried over the internet instead of phone lines. The sound quality varies but are generally as good as the sound quality of calls made from standard landline and mobile phones.

Skype also offer two unlimited landline call plans; (1) unlimited calls to a single country for $5.95/month, and (2) unlimited calls to 40 countries for $12.95 per month.

You can also get an online number for friends, family and business colleagues who don’t use Skype. Anyone can dial your online number from any phone or mobile and you take the call on Skype. Skype offers online numbers in over 20 countries so when people call your online number, they only pay the local rate - you don’t pay anything to answer the call.

Music: iTunes (Free)

I love listening to music while I work, especially when I’m doing tedious repetitive stuff like cleaning large numbers of keywords for AdWords campaigns.

I have Apple’s iTunes on my Mac and use it to manage my music collection. I listen to all kinds of music, including Pop, Chinese, Trance and R&B. My favorite album is probably Substance by New Order. It’s wicked!

Online Backup Service: Mozy ($4.95/month) / Carbonite ($54.95/year)

mozy-200Local backup onto an external hard drive is good, but it’s not enough. I also have off-site backup in case something happens to my computer and local backup. I live under a flight path so a plane could land on my home - not likely, but possible! There’s also the threat of fire destroying the hard drives and someone breaking into my home and stealing my computer and backup drive.

It’s better to be safe than sorry, so I back up my data online using Mozy. The great thing thing about Mozy is that it automatically backs up the data in the background on a regular a basis - I don’t have to do anything.

After the initial backup (which can take a few days depending on the amount of data you have), Mozy only backs up files that have been added or changed. So far, I have 94.5 GB of data backed up on Mozy.

Mozy offer unlimited (yes, unlimited!) backup for just $4.95 per month and runs on Windows 2000/XP/Vista, and Mac OS X 10.4+.

A word of warning if you, like me and probably millions of Australian internet users, are on an internet plan with a bandwidth allowance that includes outgoing data. The initial backup can take you over the bandwidth limit allowed on your plan, so you might need to change your plan for a couple of months, or spread the backup over several months if you have a lot of data to back up.

When I had a Windows PC, I used Carbonite to back up my data. I switched to Mozy because Carbonite didn’t work on the Mac when I purchased my Mac. They have since added Mac support. Carbonite costs $54.95 per year and runs on Windows XP/Vista and Mac OS X 10.4+.

Phone/Fax Number: JConnect ($15/month)

jconnect-200Pssst… this is one of my best kept secrets so don’t tell anyone: I have been able to work and live around the world with the help of a JConnect phone and fax number.

I used to live in Los Angeles (L.A.) but moved to Hong Kong and now Australia. Before I left L.A. I set up a JConnect phone and fax number with a local area code (you can choose from over 2,000 cities around the world). So the number looks just like a regular phone number. Whenever someone leaves a voicemail or sends me a fax, JConnect emails me the voicemail/fax.

This, along with my California registered company and mail forwarding address enable me to operate a business out of California, even though I haven’t lived in the United States since 2002. The phone and fax number only costs $15 per month, so it’s very cost effective.

Photo Management: iPhoto (Free) / Picasa (Free)

I use Apple’s iPhoto to organize all the photos on my computer. For Microsoft Windows users, I recommend Google’s Picasa - that’s what I used to use when I had a PC. Picasa is free and runs on XP/Vista, Mac OS X 10.4.9+, and Linux.

Screen Capture: Skitch (Free)

skitch-200The Apple Mac has screen capture functions, but I prefer to use Skitch because it also include some basic functions to edit the screen capture without having to open another graphic editing program. Skitch is free and runs on Mac OS X 10.4.6+.

Server Uptime Monitor: Uptime (Free)

Web hosts typically promise something like 99.9% server uptime. But how can you be sure that your server is working 99.9% of the time? And what about the other 0.1% of the time? 0.1% is 8.76 hours of downtime a year.

This is why I use Uptime to monitor my server to ensure it is working properly. Uptime periodically requests a page from my server and emails me if the site is unreachable. If my server is unreachable, Uptime will continue checking my site until it becomes reachable again, at which point it will email me to let me know my server is back up again.

There have been occasions in the past when my server was inaccessible for long periods. Without Uptime monitoring I would not have known about it. Do you know when your server goes down?

Spreadsheet: Apple iWork Numbers ($79)

Apple iWork Numbers is Apple’s equivalent of Microsoft’s Office Excel. I can import Excel files into Numbers, and export Number files as Excel documents that can be opened and edited with Excel.

Text Editor: Smultron (Free) / EditPlus ($35)

smultron-200I used a text editor to write my HTML pages, make notes, brainstorming and plan my business. There are probably better programs for doing those tasks, but I prefer the simplicity of a text editor. It means I can access all those details from one program.

I used to use EditPlus when I had a Windows PC, but switched to Smultron when I moved to the Apple Mac.

Smultron is free and runs on Mac OS X 10.5+. EditPlus costs $35 and runs on Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista.

Typing Shortcuts: TextExpander ($29.95) / Perfect Keyboard ($19.95)

textexpander-200I respond to a lot of emails, and hand type HTML code - I guess I’m old fashioned. The problem is that I am not trained in touch typing, so I’m relatively slow.

When I had a Windows PC, I used to use Perfect Keyboard to help me retype commonly used email responses and HTML code with just a few keystrokes. I also used it to automatically fix common typos, such as ‘teh’ and ‘can;t’. I switched over to TextExpander when I moved to the Mac.

TextExpander runs on Mac OS X 10.4+, and costs $29.95. Perfect Keyboard runs on Windows 98/Me/NT4/2000/XP/Vista, and costs $19.95.

Web Browsers: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera, Chrome (All free)

firefox-200I use Firefox to surf the web because it offers many add-ons that allow me to customize my browser and help increase productivity.

I also create my own webpages and it is important to make sure they display properly on all popular web browsers. So I also have Internet Explorer, Apple Safari, Opera and Google’s Chrome installed on my computer. All the web browsers are free.

Web Browser (FireFox) Add-ons

There are thousands of add-ons you can install to customize your Firefox browser.

Here are 7 add-ons that I use:

  • 1Password ($39.95) / Roboform ($29.95)

    1password-200As an affiliate marketer I have far too many login usernames and passwords that I care to remember.

    Hence, I use 1Password to manage my login usernames and passwords. Features include password generation and sharing data across web browsers.

    1Password costs $39.95 and runs on Mac OS X 10.4.11+ and Safari 3, Firefox 2/3, Camino 1.5, OmniWeb 5.7, DEVONagent 2.3, and NetNewsWire 3.1. 1Password is also available for iPhone/iPod touch and Palm.

    When I had a Windows PC, I used Roboform to manage my login usernames and passwords. Roboform costs $29.95 and runs on Windows 2000/XP/Server 2003/Vista (all 32-bit versions), IE 6/7/8 and Firefox 2/3.

  • Better Gmail (Free)

    Better GMail lets me customize GMail with options such as show inbox count first, show unread message count in the Favicon tab, add row highlights, attachment icons, filter assistant, show message details, hide chat, hide invite boxes, and hide spam count.

  • CustomizeGoogle (Free)

    customizegoogleCustomizeGoogle offers far too many options to list them all here.

    The main options I use include adding position counter to Google search results, rewrite links to point straight to images in image search results, stream search results, and always secure (https) GMail, Google Calendar, Docs and Spreadsheets.

  • Firesizer (Free)

    firesizerFiresizer lets me resize my web browser window to 640×480, 800×600, or 1024×768 pixels. I can also add custom sizes or remove any of those default sizes.

  • Google Gears (Free)

    Google Gears allows me to continue reading, writing (without losing anything GMail had not auto-saved) and editing emails in GMail even when I can’t access GMail or I am off-line.

    Google Gears is available on Mac OS X 10.4+ (Firefox 1.5+ or Safari 3.1.1+), Windows XP/Vista (Firefox 1.5+ or Internet Explorer 6.0+), Windows Mobile (IE Mobile 5+, Opera Mobile), Linux and Android.

  • Tab Mix Plus (Free)

    Tab Mix Plus enhances the Firefox tabs with all manner of features. You can add duplicate tabs, control tab focus, undo closed tabs and windows, add tab options to the Tab Context Menu, and much more.

  • TableTools (Free)

    TableTools adds options to copy, sort, or filter HTML tables you find on any web page. This helps retain the table structure when I copy and paste them from a web page to a spreadsheet.

Web Hosting: Softlayer (From $258/month)

softlayer-200I have used several web hosts in my 11 years of running an online business. Each has been better than the last. I switched to Softlayer a few years ago at the recommendation of my tech guru, Peter Cooper.

Like most people, I used virtual hosting for the first few years I was online. Virtual hosting is sharing a server with hundreds, even thousands, of other web sites.

As my business grew I decided it was wise to get my own server, otherwise known as a dedicated server. This way I have full control over the server and don’t have the possibility of unscrupulous sites on the same server using up an unfair share of resources and slowing down other sites on the server.

The server I have with Softlayer is an Intel Xeon 3220-Quad Core 2.4GHz processor and 2 GB of RAM, and bandwidth allowance of 2,000 GB. Remember that I got this a few years ago, so you can probably get a faster processor now for the same price.

As soon as I switched to the quad-core (4 core) processor, I immediately noticed a big difference in the response time of my websites. The Marketing Forum Watch page in my Mike’s Marketing Tools site is quite resource intensive and used to take as long as 20 seconds to download on the old server. On the new quad-core server, it only takes a second or two. That’s a huge difference!

The one major downside with having your own server is that you need to know how to set up and maintain the server. I am not a techie so I don’t. Luckily Peter takes care of that side of the business for me.

I pay $258 per month which is a lot of money. I can skimp and save on other parts of my business, but web hosting is not one of them. After all, if my server is down, then I’m not open for business. If I had a real store, I would probably pay tens of thousands per year in rent. If I compare that to what I’m paying for web hosting, I think web hosting is a bargain.

If you have multiple web sites or your site is slow, I recommend looking at upgrading to your own dedicated server, especially one with a multiple-core processor.

Windows Operating System: VMWare Fusion ($79.99) / Parallels ($79.99)

vmware-fusion-200The latest Intel-based Macs allow you to run Windows and Mac applications side-by-side, without rebooting. You can even drag files between the two operating systems.

You accomplish this by creating a virtual machine running Microsoft Windows operating system (OS) inside of your Mac OS.

There are basically two main programs for doing this; VMware Fusion and Parallels. I did a lot of research to find out which is better, but I couldn’t find any conclusive evidence to support one version over the other. Users like both Parallels and VMware Fusion. So I chose VMWare Fusion although I can’t recall why.

Both VMware Fusion and Parallels cost $79.99 and require an Intel Mac, 1GB of RAM, Mac OS X 10.4.11+, and a copy of Microsoft Windows.

Word Processor: Apple iWork Pages ($79)

pages-200Apple iWork Pages is Apple’s equivalent of Microsoft’s Office Word

I can import Word files into Pages, and export Pages files as Word documents that can be opened and edited with Word.

So there you have the 38 software products & services I currently use to make a 6-figure income online.

Here is a recap of all the software products and services:

If you have any comments, tweet me at @Michael_Wong. Thanks!

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Blogging: I Decide to Blog About my JUMBO Keyword .com Marketing Campaign

by Michael Wong on April 7, 2009

bloggingLast night I came up with the idea of blogging about my internet marketing campaign for JUMBO Keyword .com.

I thought it would be interesting to document it so that other people can learn from it. I have always respected other marketers who openly share their marketing tactics and I have learnt a lot from them. So I think it’s time for me to give something back.

I intend to publish every marketing tactic I use and the results they generate - good or bad. I don’t think I want to give away every trade secret, but I will do my best to be as open as I can.

I don’t want to spend a lot of money, maybe a few thousand dollars, so I’ll be using pay-per-click advertising (Google AdWords, YSM, MSN AdCenter, etc.), SEO, press release, and all manner of guerrilla marketing tactics.

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