Who’s that tall man?
( I always get that… from friends or colleagues when we chatted on msn.)
Me: ”He’s my boyfriend!”
Colleague: “Oh, so tall!”
Me: “Nah, he’s only 1.8m tall. I’m the one who is short. His head got cut off. Haha…”
Colleague: “Cut off the leg then!”
Me: “I don’t know! MSN messenger automatically cut off the top.”
Nothing is normal between us. The irony is, we are at both sides of the extreme and we need each other to get the balance.
I always love cooking for my guests when they are coming over to the house. Today I invited Hafez and Atiqah to feast on the meals I prepared. I made chicken curry and this dish will be served with basmati rice. To round up the meal, my mom also cooked an indian dish called keema. Keema is a minced beef cooked in curry, potato, tomato, spices and green peas. It is to be eaten with chappati, or it looks like a pancake. Enjoy the pictures!
Previously, I wrote an article about Introduction to Starting Your Own Website – it is much about facilitating your brainstorming process.
As I’ve promised you: Sequence of a visitor’s thought when they arrived at your website.
1. Impression: The very first thing that will please your visitor is basically aesthetics include niceties of design and layout, great color combination and images.
2. Familiarity: After some moments gathering impressions of you, the next thing they look out for is the sense of familiarity of where to start. To make finding way around your site easier, you must plan your navigation bars wisely. Make your menu items highly visible and meaningful. You should also consider naming specific menu items sound familiar to your audience.
E.g. For company selling books: you may consider grouping your products by genre such as Thriller, Romance, Memoir, etc., instead of just “fiction” and “non-fiction”.
3. Navigation: A good home page should act like a magazine cover page. Yeah, That’s what I like to call it. Otherwise why would you buy a magazine? Who wouldn’t want to tear out that plastic bag seal of the magazine that bear these catching words: Inside Special: Top 10 Most Richest Young Entrepreneurs Start-up Secrets Revealed.
Every feature, new additions and highlights that will make an impact to your ROI must be published prominently on the homepage or the landing page of the category. Remember, the rule of thumb that is to catch your audience’s attention and convert them to your customers.
4. Recommendations: Subsequently, when a visitor is happy with the content and information to help them know better about your product there’s likely a chance they will visit your site again. If they’re happy and they knew it, why not also spread the word around – through social bookmarking or forwarding hyperlinks to friends that is!
On a site track: How will you know your visitors came back to your site? Check your website analytic. Through website analytic, you will be able to learn your visitor’s behavior and to determine the success rate of your site. For more info about what website analytic can do to help you with your site, go to Google Conversion University Help. It has all the resources to help your understanding.
This is not your how-to manual. I don’t want to teach you the technicalities of building a website – you can find it in many books out there already written by programming experts. I’m not. This is to share with you some brainstorming activities before you embark on designing your own website.
To many people, a website is to store information – yes you are still right. However, building a website requires proper planning in order to making your life easier when it comes to maintenance. At the end of the day, you want to achieve not only a beautiful site, but also easy to maintain to remain relevant to your visitors at all times.
What are the questions you should ask yourself before you build a website?
Case Study – Examples of good websites:
Tips for a good website:
In my next article I will share with you the sequence of visitor’s thoughts when they arrive at your website. Stay tuned!
My top concerns to everybody. Internet scams can be highly believable. I got this… Facebook friend who posted a link on their account to Google Profusion. Curious, I went to the website to find out more.
The link lead me to a blog page with a header of Internet Success – Real Stories About Real People Making Real Money in Singapore. In it, you’ll see the success story about this lady, Sharon Tan. (Such a cliche name!)
Next, there is an image of her holding the cheque from Google like this:
Now, you’re impressed eh?
Update 12 Dec 2009: The image from then http://www.youronlinesuccessblogs.com/ has been taken out due to website no longer exist.
After this it goes on to tell about how she earned $12,000 a month by posting links on Google bla bla bla… She had a normal day job like you and I. Then one day she got out of job. Due to that, she had a huge credit card debt up to $40,000. Next, she found this Google Profound and this is where the fairy tale starts.
They all sounded mostly the same: Home business. All you need to get started is a computer and internet connection. They used a simple technique to capture your needs and desire. By this, luring you to sign up for it is VERY LIKELY because you are the target audience:
Hmmm… you get the spot on vibe too? If yes, be extremely careful and be smart. Do a bit of research on Google about this Google Profusion thingy. There’s abit of irony here… (hahaha…) but be sure to read brainy articles like this here.
The internet is making everybody more clever but not smart enough. Let’s go back to basics. Just remember these 2 DON’T DOs when it comes to using the internet and you are guaranteed to be safe from virus/hackers, at least:
Do some good deed and let’s remind each other and the people you care about not to fall into this internet scams.
If you still have a day job, keep it.
If you are out of job, go hunt for a REAL job – there’s no such thing as free lunch, mate! Cheers!
I know this sounds crazy… but believe it or not, it’s the most common problem businesses face today.
The top 5 most BORING tweets ever! You will never want to bother:
Sounds familiar? Are these the main reason why your business opened a Twitter account? Worry not, because there’s no right or wrong to doing things strategically. However, you should consider using the AIDA method : Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. Let’s paraphrase the most boring tweets to make them sound more interesting in 140-characters:
Do the revised ‘tweets’ all sound like the five wives and a husband – What, Why, Who, When, Where, How?
The real art to using Twitter relies on your copywriting skills! If you can hone your copywriting skills and use it appropriately on Twitter, you could eventually capture your share of the pie and convert followers to be your customers!
From my previous post, I’ve proven to you that the top 20 Global Twitter raking are mostly taken up by celebrities. What do they have in common? Why people follow them? What makes their lives so interesting to follow?
They have stolen the media limelight in many ways. The common traits that I observed are:
Apart from getting to hear or see on media, people like to hear it PERSONALLY from the real person,the celebrity, of their side of the story. Let me share with you my joy when a member of the estrangedband replied to one of my tweet:
My reaction: GROUPIE. I even attended the Baybeats event to watch them perform live and bought a CD!
Simply put, the 2-way interaction demonstrated above has shown the power of building customer-audience relationship and engaging a customer to connect and support your products and services.
It doesn’t matter whether you are a newly start-up or an established company – everybody deserve a slice of pie (target audience) in the social media networks. What matters is your social media marketing strategy.
But if you really want to learn from celebrities, I would recommend you to follow the pros like RyanSeacrest, KimKardashian, Oprah and TheEllenShow. Cheers!
Oh, btw Miley Cyrus deleted her Twitter account!
Do you have a Twitter account? If no, why not?
I’ve heard from some people who are not getting the hang of Twitter. They say, “Twitter is not for everybody.” Yes? I don’t think so… Let me paraphrase the quote: Twitter is not for every business. Maybe, but WHY NOT?
Before announcing ‘Twitter is not for my business’, let’s list down the most obvious similarity and differences between blogging and micro blogging then analyze further whether you could apply Twitter, as you do with blogging, in your business strategy.
Similarities:
Differences:
Wonder what people use Twitter for and why they are so famous?
Now, let us look at the Top 20 GLOBAL Twitter (celebrities & famous TV personalities). ‘Listen’ to what they are talking about and absorb the conversation.
(Stats shown above are as at October 14, 2009 by TwitterCounter.com.)
Read some useful facts about Twitter here and it is also one of the reason why you should consider using Twitter for your business.
This is sharing a blog post (link below) about a dear friend who appreciates 2 things (of all others) – coffee and me.
Like smoking, you can connect with people with coffee. Learning the art of coffee appreciation is like learning business etiquette – except that it’s consumable and tastes good! Some people drink coffee because it’s like the fuel to start our engine in the morning. Some people are just addicted to the caffeine like tobacco. The art of coffee appreciation is more than just drinking coffee, it is about ENJOYING drinking coffee. When you enjoy drinking coffee, you open up your senses to its factors like taste, body, smell and characteristics. Pair it up with foods that complements these factors. Surprise your senses, take the experience and you’ll look at drinking coffee in a different way…pleasantly!
Who you should go coffee appreciation with:
Where you can go to appreciate coffee:
Lastly, go here to read what my dearest friend, Teeks, wrote about her coffee experience with me.
