Time to find time

Sorry guys, I don't have time to give the cost breakdown for my website now since I was out the whole day with my wife and daughter and I need to clear up my laptop for the Forex workshop tomorrow. Hope to blog again after the workshop.

Ronald Kwok

Here click, there click, everywhere click, click

At last, I have learned how to create a link in my Blog so it will be more interactive from now on and you can exercise your clicking finger.

Remeber the autoresponder that I mentioned in my earlier blog? The one that I am using is GetResponse and I am so happy with it that I have joined as an affiliate. There are many autoresponders in the market and you will definitely need one if you do any kind of online business that involves e-mails. If you wish, you can try GetResponse for free. (Pop the champagne!!! This is the very first piece of HTML code that I wrote.)

Now that I've got the HTML out of the way, I'll give you a little history on how I got into the online business. After my retirement about a year ago, I had more time to surf and was attracted by the many ads on how easy it is to make money online. The first online business peview that I attended was by StoresOnLine (alas, no affiliate program) and probably the free lunch advertised made me decide to attend. The free lunch was genuine (I ate real fish and real asparagus) so there is such thing as a free lunch afterall. Since then I have attended several other free previews but there were no more free lunches. I never join any of the folow-up workshops since they were charging quite a bit but I continue to read about the internet business online and offline and dream of having my very own web site.

And then, suddenly, my dream came true! I ran across this PlugInProfitSite (no, his is not an affiliate link, unlike this one) from one of the books, "Earn Money In Retirement" by Jim Green. I went in and I signed up and the result is my very own web-site ProfitNetBusiness. It's like having your name up in lights on Broadway, except nobody came to see. Well, not yet. I did nothing except gave my credit card number and I will give a run-down of the very low starting cost in my future blog.

Remember the work on the SEO for my web site? Well, I have given up for the time being since I never got down to read all the webmaster guides. Instead, I just submitted my URL directly to Google, Yahoo and MSN and prayed. Pray for me, wouldn't you?

Ronald Kwok

http://ronaldkwok.atomicblog.hop.clickbank.net/

Sorry folks, no stocks today

Sorry folks, the free preview I attended last night was not specifically about trading stocks but about trading in general. I was misled or rather I misread the headlines that says "When To Buy A Stock Just Before It Rises" and I thought it was about trading stocks. The talk was given by Conrad Lim from Singapore who got himself out of bankruptcy by trading online.

Compared with Mr.T in the previous night's review, his talk is equally dramatic and even more entertaining. In fact his talk is more down to earth and appeals more to the masses while Mr.T is more highbrow because of their different education backgrounds. His workshop will be about the basics of trading using both fundamental analysis, technical analysis and everything else in between. He talked about doing research and quite a bit about fibonacci series (he has his own version, PHI-bonacci) and candlestick patterns. According to Conrad, you will be able to trade anything (stocks, futures, forex, commodities, etc.) profitably after attending his workshop or as he calls it, tutorial.

How much does it cost? A cool RM4988 (about USD1600) for the 3-day tutorial. A number of people sign up but I did not as I have decided to attend a Trading Forex workshop instead. To date, I have already attended 7 trading workshop previews (all free except for some hefty parking fees in some cases), 3 on Options, 1 on CFD and 3 on Forex in that order. After attending the Options preview, I was so taken up that I bought several books on Options and started reading (but has stopped now). Then came the CFD preview and I see that it is a better option than Options. Luckily, there are very few CFD books in the local market or I would have bought several. Then came Forex and it looks even a better choice. When Mr.T, the lawyer, presented the case for choosing Forex, I reached my verdit - Forex it is and Forex it will be.

I'll be attending the Forex workshop on next Monday and Tuesday. Then there will be a 2-week (paper) trading and practise with online tutorials and on 14 April it'll be the third and last day of the workshop. Will give you more details on this in my blog.

So much for the distractions, now back to my online business. Without realising it, my online business is already one week old and this should call for a celebration. But alas, there is no reason to celebrate since I have yet to opt-in the first prospect, let alone make the first sale. I learned that it will take months before you get your first sale and it is still too early in the game. There are some ads that says "make money immediately", "get sales overnight" or something similar. This is just BS. That reminds me of what Conrad said last night "don't believe everything you read.....". This does not apply to this blog, of course!!

Frankly, after starting the online business (and subsequently starting this blog) I find that I don't have enough time in a day. I have yet to go through all the "getting started" stuff of the affiliate programmes that I have joined and the number of unread e-mails is growing. When they say you only need to spend 15 minutes a day on you business, it is only true when your business is already flying, not at the starting stage. You can do nothing and the business will still run on autopilot but nothing much will happen (or it will take a long, long time). You need to nurture and grow your business. That reminds me, I need to look at SEO for my site.

Ronald Kwok
http://cbpirate.com/s/cbp/ronaldkwok

Trading Forex

The free Forex Trading preview that I attended last night scored several best and worst awards among all the free money making previews that I have attended so far.

1. Worst time management. The preview is suppose to last from 8pm to 10pm. At 11.20pm, it was still going on and they haven't even gone to the details of the Workshop that this is promoting. I left at this stage since my wife was waiting at the hotel lobby and she has already sent a restless SMS to me asking if I was already brainwashed.
2. Most dramatic speaker. The speaker was one Mr. T (can't remember his full name) who is a practising lawyer by profession and a graduate of the Forex workshop. He was so animated that if you just walk in, you might think that you are watching a one-man drama.
3. Most convincing argument. Being a lawyer, he put up a water-tight case for Forex trading as an instrument of choice. He appealed to your logical senses to make a decision and logically, one would conclude that Forex Trading is the way to go.
4. Most honest sale pitch. He said that 90% of new players would probably lose money in the beginning but will improve as they progress and eventually they will make money. Once they pass the learning stage, it will be profits all the way i.e. more +++ than - - -.

Was I convinced? Yes! The points given for Forex trading logically make it superior to all the other online trading instruments. I will present these in my later blogs. But wait, tonight there is another free seminar on and it is about Stocks trading. Stocks? I thought this is already out of favor, what with Options and CFD and now with Forex coming to the fore. So I must give it a hearing tonight as there may be some inside secrets which we may not know. I will give you my findings in tomorow.

Hey, you may ask what has happened to my internet business? Well, it is still running, running on autopilot. That's what online business is all about as you can still do whatever you want to do while it is faithfully running in the background ever ready to capture any interested party. Got to go to my distraction now.

Ronald Kwok
http://cbpirate.com/s/cbp/ronaldkwok

Make money to make money

Today I realised that in online business, you need to spend some money in order to make money if you are really serious about it. There is a Chinese saying, "small wealth not out, big wealth not in". How true!

To get started in internet business seriously, the very minimum you need is your own domain name, your web-site and a hosting company to host your web site. You can do a DIY web-site for free by using the many templates that are available on-line but you cannot run away from buying your own domain name and hosting your web site somewhere if you are serious. You can have free hosting from many of the free-hosting companies but you will not look very professional to your potential customers. Having your own blog, like this one, is also free but it won't get you very far (unless you are a top blogger).

You will also need some supporting services to help run your business. To me, the most essential supporting item is an autoresponder. How else can you achieve "make money 24-hour", "make money in your sleep", "make money while you are on holiday", "make money on autopilot" etc. etc.? The autoresponder makes all this possible. See, while I am happily writing my blog, my autoresponder is quietly waiting for prospects to sign up and will spring into action once somebody opt-in. Alas, it is still waiting, waiting and waiting............. Thank goodness, it never falls asleep.

Part of the reason why it is still waiting is because of traffic, or more specifically the lack of traffic to my site. I can wait for the natural traffic that comes from search engine listing but since my site is still new and not optimesd (still have not read the stuff on SEO, yesterday's post) and this blog is not pulling in any traffic so I can be waiting for a very long time. Meanwhile I have to pay for the hosting fee and the use of the autoresponder on a monthly basis. My TrafficSwarm may not be working well since I have not been clicking frequently enough. So the fastest solution is to advertise and there are plenty of ways to do it on the net. That means there are plenty of ways to part with your money.

I figure I must make some money from my online business first before I can spend the money on ads, but before I can make that money, I must spend some money first. So it becomes that chicken and egg situation. As my web site is not yet making any money, I need to make some money elsewhere.

Since this is all about online financial freedom, the source must be from the net. Luckily there are many other online options where you need not advertise first. Online trading! Over the months, I have seen a lot of ads on making online profits from trading - make 100% monthly, profit daily in only 15 minutes, low risk, guaranteed income, etc. etc. There seems to be mainly in these online trading areas:-

1. Stocks
2. Options
3. CFD (Contracts For Difference) and
4. Forex

So tonight I have signed up to hear all about trading Forex online, for free (the talk, not the trading). Again! You see, I have attended two such talks earlier by different companies (free, of course) and have not yet taken the plunge. This one is by Rapid Merchant Capital Marketing. I will give my findings in tomorrow's blog. Need to catch up on SEO now.

Ronald Kwok
http://ronaldkwok.atomicblog.hop.clickbank.net/

Search for SEO

It's blogging time again. As far as my journey is concerned, it is pretty much status quo. Today I managed to disable the ads that my autoresponder runs in the click-to-comfirm page. Since internet marketing is all about exposure, everybody will try to squeeze in ads wherever possible at the cheapest cost. I am equally guilty as this blog is also an example! Wait till I learn how to embed links; I will then scatter them all over the post.

Well, today I learn that having a web page or a blog published does not get it listed automatically in the search engines. At least not immediately, as I was told that it could take months before you are discovered. Now I know why those web searchers are called crawlers (or are they spiders? Whatever.) OK, there are millions and millions of web pages....... I searched in Google, I searched in Yahoo, I searched in MSN (all using my full address) and could not find my web site or my blog. What a damper.

So I e-mailed for support and got an almost instant reply (about one hour actually, still pretty good.). I need to learn about keywords and search engine guidelines. So this is what they call SEO or Search Engine Optimisation and I was given a long lists of web links for reference in order to understand this art of getting yourself highly ranked in the search engines. Of course, for a fee, this could be all done for you with your web site professionally optimised. The choice is really yours.

Since I did not want to part with my hard earned cash, I decided to do it myself. But first I must go through the mountain of literature on this subject that is available free online. Who knows, after this, I may be able to charge for SEO services and add another item in my line of net business. Wish me luck.

Ronald Kwok
http://cbpirate.com/s/cbp/ronaldkwok

The Link Not Taken

Today is not a very good day for me. First, my favorite EPL (English Premier League) soccer team, Liverpool, lost to Manchester United last night and got thrashed 3-0. Then there is no increase in my opt-in prospect and still no sale. And now looking at my Blog, I do not find any comments and I wonder has anybody read my Blog?


However, I am very optismistic that things will improve. Afterall, there are millions of blogs and thousand of similar looking web site as my own http://www.profitnetbusiness.com/ so why would I expect mine to be picked out? And it is still too early to call it quits and I was never promised that it will bring overnight riches and it is definitely not a get-rich-quick scam.


I am not complaining since my site is running on autopilot and I could just leave it as it is and do nothing about it but pray. But I know to do better, I need to follow the training guide, do more reading and do some tweaking when I am up to it. I must admit I am rather slow on this, heck, I am a newbie so what do you expect? I have only set-up my site for TrafficSwarm yesterday.

You see, there are plenty of distractions along the way and TrafficSwarm is in fact one of the culprits. There are lot of ads on the TrafficSwarm start up page and I just cannot help but click to visit some of these sites. That's it, once you are in, you'll be sucked into a bottomless pit as one link will lead to another; one free gift after another, offers after offers, today-only specials, not-to-be-repeated deals, cheap-sales, etc, etc.

I have lost track to how many links I have submitted my e-mail address and in no time my in-box is bombarded with follow-up e-mails and my hard-disk is filling up with all the free downloads. Thank goodness, you can always unsubscribe but being curious (or is it greedy?) I have not done so yet. So this is what internet marketing is all about and I am learning it first-hand. Luckily, I have resisted the urge to spend my hard-earned cash for these stuff (except for one $6.95 offer, I must support my fellow marketers, isn't it?) The free stuff are genuinely free, but the quality of the contents differ. I have yet to go through all the stuff and I am now suffering from (mis?)information overload. I need a break.

Ronald Kwok
http://ronaldkwok.atomicblog.hop.clickbank.net/

Formula One Malaysia Grand Prix results

Malaysia Sepang Formula 1 Grand Prix just completed. Results:
1. Raikkonen
2. Kubica
3. Kovalainen
4. Trulli
5. Hamilton
6. Heidfeld
7. Webber
8. Alonso

Well, there will be some more distractions later today with the top 4 of the EPL (English Premier League soccer) playing each other.

Ronald Kwok
http://cbpirate.com/s/cbp/ronaldkwok

It's Alive!

Wow, my Blog is alive!
This is an exciting week for me. My first web site came to life on the 19th of March and today this Blog; so now I am in cyberspace. You see, I've just ventured into net business after listening to and seeing all the hype on how you can make money on the internet. Does it really work and will it work for me? So this is the acid test as I will give a day to day account of my progress and I do not know how long it will take.

Well, one must not expect overnight success. Afterall, it has taken the successful net entrepreneurs years before they become established. This I found out to be absolutely true; after my web site has been in orbit for five days, I have not made a single sale and I have only two opt-in prospects. And these two are my own alternative e-mail addresses for testing the autoresponder! Thank goodness, the autoresponder worked as it sent out the right response and is still doing it. But one must stay focussed and be patient and not be distracted along the way.

I must admit this is not easy, what with the F1 Grand Prix going on right now. I must leave now to watch the remaining laps on TV. Stay tuned.

Ronald Kwok
http://cbpirate.com/s/cbp/ronaldkwok