Dear readers,

Barack Obama is officially elected the 44th president of United States!

When two political powers clash in a contest to be the most powerful man in the nation, it takes a huge amount of effort to come up top.

Marketers around the world has got to give credit to Obama and his team for the brilliant use of the Internet to give themselves to promote their campaign. This is probably the best case study ever, demostrating the power of the Internet in international marketing.

Here are some examples of how Obama used the Internet to propel himself into presidency, reinventing the way campaigns are run with modern tools.

Updated information, 24/7

People who wanted to know more about Barack Obama were able to find out more about his accomplishments and the policies that he were pushing for in his website. Obama’s website also kept its supporters and the nation updated with the latest happenings of his campaign through streaming videos, photos and blog postings.

Fundraising

Volunteers used Obama’s website to organise over 150,000 campaign-related events over the entire course of the campaign. Over a thousand phone-banking events and online donations helped Obama raise a record-breaking US$600 million fund for his campaign in contributions from more than three million people.

Combat Against Rumors

Like all political campaigns, rumors about politicians are bound to spread like wild fire, be it intentional or not. In a large country such as the United States, it is not an easy task to combat rumors and politicians typically either choose to have a press statement to refute these rumors, or ignore it completely which could be a disastrous move.

Obama again made use of the Internet to combat rumors. The team launched the website, FightTheSmears.com to provide the facts about the rumors about Obama and his campaigns. The website also served long with many other internet action groups to collect and refute rumors as quickly as they come.

Obama’s online initiatives have helped touched the hearts and minds of the nation on a very large and cost-effective scale. This soon-to-be textbook example of empowerment through people and technology goes to show that the Internet is the right way to go for businesses to market themselves.

In recent months, we have seen huge moves of the volatile market in these troubled times. Even commodities such as gold which is considered defensive, have been moving in difference of US$20-50 in many occasions.

The question in the minds of most investors are, how is this crisis going to fare as compared to the previous crash and depression.

Looking at the chart below published by The New York Times, it appears that we are definitely in for a hell-of-a-ride here.

The current financial crisis makes the ‘87 crash look like child’s play.

My opinion is to stay calm by the sidelines and wait. Potentially, I’m seeing more negative downside coming our way before the actual recovery which requires drastic change.

Dear readers,

Let’s face it. Nobody is indispensible to companies!

In such times of uncertainty where even giant corporations suffer in a sea of red in the stock market and dark clouds cover the economy, one has to make contingency plans and create escape routes.

So what are you going to do, should your company collapse or if the top management decides that you are redundant and gives you the sack?

Instead of looking at making money for the short-term, I always advocate to aim at sustainability. That is, having long-term money making plans.

Here’s what I may do for the next three months if I get retrenched.

Expanding clientel in my Webhosting Business
I’ve been running a webhosting business for the past two years and revenue has been consistent. It’s high time that I focus on expanding my clientel to generate more revenue for the business.

Make more money online
My approach to internet marketing has always been passive. Build well-designed websites with good ad placements, that are more or less self-generating in terms of content and visitors. With little or no work needed, passive amounts of income would pay for my bills. With more time in, I could take on a more active approach.

Turn my hobbies into cash cows
Having always been interested in photography, I’ve always been thinking of taking up a full-time photographer role. Having little flair for designing, I’ve also been accepting long-term content management jobs for both static and flash websites.

Yup, so that’s pretty much me. What are your plans?

With the current financial crisis at hand, the last thing Internet Marketers around the world would like to see is a decline in their online profits.

Yesterday, I logged in to my Adsense account to check the amount paid for the clicks generated last month only to realise that the exchange rate between USD and SGD was stated 1.000 : 1!

I googled to check if I was the only ‘victim’ and it seems that other Adsense account holders are also experiencing the similiar problems. Could you imagine the look on the faces of Adsense account holders in India where USD$1 is paid as INR 1 Rs!

I do hope that this is truly a bug and that Google could clarify on this as soon as possible.

I haven’t been posting lately as I have been busy reading up on the movements of the global economy. The ups and downs of corporate giants are so exciting that it’s like watch Batman! We’re not just experiencing a stock market crash or anything like that. It’s apparent that the world is going to be hit by a financial crisis and it won’t get better unless an ocean of money is printed to support the market.

In times of crisis mentioned above, where will you put your money? Under your bed? In the bank? Invest in stocks and bonds? Insurance? Commodities?

Putting your money under your bed is perfectly fine as your money isn’t going anywhere. But neither is it going to grow even if you add water and lots of sunlight. In fact, your money may shrink when inflation sets in and prices go up.

How about putting it in the bank as savings? For sure it’ll grow by an insignificant percentage every year. But what if the bank collapse? If that happens, you will be covered for up to S$20,000 per individual under a scheme by the Singapore Deposit Insurance Corporation. I would think it’s reasonably safe if your savings is less than 20 grand.

What about stocks and bonds? We are seeing the shares plummeting on a daily basis without signs of recovery any time soon. I wouldn’t grab a falling knife with my hard-earned savings and neither should you. As for bonds, we are seeing financial giants collapsing onto one another that we can’t be certain which bond is safe. While investors who are holding to bonds guaranteed by Lehman Brothers are starting to panick, others will be praying that their bonds will survive this financial crisis.

We are seeing one of the insurance giants, AIG loan US$85 billion from Federal Reserve Bank of New York to keep it afloat and local insurance policyholders surrendering their policies at AIA (paying penalties) for fear that their policies will swim with the fishes. We’ll never know who’s the next to fall.

Commodities are down as well, though not as much as other investment instruments like stocks and futures. It is possible that investors are selling off their commodities to fund losses incurred in the stock markets. Conspiracy theories are all over the place about how gold and silver prices are heavily suppressed and manipulated by invisible hands.

Here are my thoughts. Paper assets are getting de-valued and only hard assets will stand. Investors with cash are not going to put them in the stock market (at least not for now) to catch falling knifes until they see any possible signs of recovery. That said, I see investors buying cold hard assets such as properties and physical commodities and forgoing paper assets.

As for me, I’ll be investing in more gold and silver, buying the idea of price manipulations though some of the stocks in my watchlist are looking pretty attractive.

So what are you going to do with your money?

If you’re at Subscribers Night and noticed that I was carrying two copies of Secrets of Ebay Millionaires, I’d probably have mentioned to you that I’m trying to get them autographed by Ben and Stuart and giving a copy away on my blog as a contest prize.

Feel free to give me a holler by leaving a comment at the end of this blog and I’ll check out your websites and see if there’s anything I can help.

Cheers!

Dear readers,

What’s the first thing you must do when you start a new blog?

To me, being unique is the key. So I would say, differentiating yourself from the rest of the bloggers in your niche.

Check out your competition. Find out what are they doing right, and what are they doing wrong. Learn from their blog, and see how you can improve your blog to be above their level.

On a more technical aspect, I try to at least, customise my theme to make my blog look unique. I would also add in widgets and plugins to make my blog more user-friendly and useful to my visitors.

If you have been subscribing to my blog right from the beginning, you would know that I have changed my theme 3 times in the past 12 months. The current theme you are looking at, is an Atomic Blogging theme from Alvin Phang, creator of Atomic Blogging. Using the theme as a foundation, I customise the colour scheme, contents, and added new plugins to make it unique. It does help to be technically savvy in this case.

To my readers out there, be special, be unique, and differentiate yourself from the rest and visitors will come looking for you automatically.

Dear readers,

This morning, a mail came in from TextLinkAds asking me to approve an ad. Turns out, an ad space was on my behalf, to a currency trading website for $5 per month.

Nice little red packet don’t you think?

Dear readers,

Tomorrow is Lunar New Year eve and here’s wishing everyone, Happy Lunar New Year in advance!

I’m not very much of a Lunar New Year guy and I guess most people my age aren’t that traditional as well. I’ll be treating this Lunar New Year holiday as a break from work and just relax, and try to start on my upcoming eBook.

Happy Lunar Year everyone!

Dear readers,

Nowadays, people are working hard to earn as much money as possible. To most people, time and money is probably on two ends of the scale whereby the more money you earn, the lesser time you have. The same for vice versa. My friend who’s a private equities investor is constantly monitoring the markets and the poor guy has less than two hours each day to spend with his family, let alone the shiny, expensive BMW Roadster he has in his garage.

Well that is not always the case. Here are a few tips to increase your income or work productivity without spending more time:

1. Outsource simple tasks so that you can spend more time on the BIG picture.
2. Automate repetitive processes to spend lesser times on them.
3. Manage time effectively by listing out deadlines for tasks that you need to accomplish and sticking to them.
4. Prepare contingency instructions, so that your subordinates or you will know how to react when the plan does not go smoothly and not have to wait for further instructions.
5. Remove the middle man and speak to the person in charge. This reduces miscommunications and you can get feedbacks straight from the people who have the final say.

All in all, these tips are effectively trying to help you spend less time doing insignificant tasks, or waiting for people to get back to you, speak to the right people, and get or give all the instructions you need.

Take me for example. For my shopping portal, OurMall.sg, I’ve automated 90% of the processes that allows my merchants to carry out on their own without my involvement. I’ve outsourced the backend server management to experienced people so that I can focus on generating more sales. Deadlines for all my work are documented in my Google Calendar with email and SMS reminders all configured. Contigency instructions are always given to lessen the amount of communcation needed internally. I always talk to the person-in-charge, bypassing gatekeepers by making sure I know who are the actually people that makes all the decisions.

So what about you? Leave your comments to tell me how you make your work more productive and effective, increasing your income and not reduce your leisure time.

[tags]income, leisure, time, work, productivity, planning[/tags]