Wilson Ng started helping the family business since 9 years old. Since then, he had dreamt to be a successful entrepreneur, one who starts great businesses  ( he has started 7) from scratch with insight, guts and initiative. He keeps his focus on growing the business by creating value-- not on politics, or wasteful distractions. He brings the same focus to community service, teaching, life and family.

This is the main page which contains all postings. The reader can also choose a category: techdrivenlife, on life, on business, quotes, jokes, tidbits & reading reviews.  A new category, EntrepreViews, talks on entrepreneurship and also answer reader's queries.

Pls. check out my new compilation in easy-to-read format the selected business articles of enduring value here.

	Monday, September 26, 2005

Generating Buzz  (tidbits)   (selected articles in bizdrivenlife compiled) One of the best way to market the company is to generate word of mouth. Mostly people will talk about the company or product when the product is exceptionally good or the service is really great. the other way is to do something really out of this world. Here is an apartment in Oxford England that became known when it put a fiber glass through its apartment. source: http://www.ecademy.com/node.php?id=56055 1:11:48 PM     comment []   trackback []

3 Think Days  (On Life )   (selected articles in bizdrivenlife compiled) A few weeks ago, I wrote an article in contemplating whether I would ever be able to afford a 'think week'. This is a twice a year practice of Bill Gates, in which he would seclude himself for one week from his employees, friends and family, and just spend the week in solitude reading, and contemplating. Well, I did it, though only for 3 days- and this is the first day.  In between two events, I was able to squeeze in 3 days in which I have nothing to do -- and I just checked myself in a hotel somewhere beside the river in Canada.  This hotel is a little bit far from shopping centers,  and nobody knows me here.  It has excellent internet facilities, a good health club, and a lot of trails where you can just basically walk, sit down and read, and just enjoy your own self.  The good thing is that there is nothing here to look forward to, except time for yourself to read, think and write.  I just came back from a stroll, and watch the cars zoom past the highway.  I do that everyday for over 20 years ( travel and race to the next stop)  , trying to work out solutions to as many challenges as I can, and gearing myself whether I would be able to hit my goal for the day or for the week, or simply whether I would be able to pacify a disgruntled customer, talk sense to a colleague, or buy something for the kids.  Today, there were no such pressures. It is a great feeling that for a brief period of time, life zooms past you, and you did not have to be in the race.  I watch as people try to beat their next deadline, and go forward to their next appointment, or working themselves up in a hurry to go to the next show, or club.  Sometimes, life just feels almost like a perpetual race that would never end. Today went by even faster, and I know pretty soon, I will be lamenting that this will soon be over.  There are still loads of reading materials, and writing that i want to do, but this time, I am doing my best just to make my own pace.  I will just take in what I can, and let life takes its due time. I may be posting more than usual here on some of the readings, or on some of the things I think about, and it would be great to hear from you as well. I have travelled to dozens of countries and cities trying to admire their best sites, and overwhelming wonders, and during those breaks, it has always been under pressure to buy souvenirs, or take in as much scenery, or a race against time to go to the next stop.  Hopefully, the ultimate luxury, I hope to avail of myself is just to take time off just to listen to your inner beat. It shouldn't be expensive, and it is a little bit of a paradox that we would spend time just to be away from all the friends and family that we worked so hard to live with and have a great time, but why don't you give it a try?   9:43:29 AM     comment []   trackback []

Getting Traffic  (techdrivenlife)   (selected articles in bizdrivenlife compiled)   These are some of my loose recollections of what to do in order to get traffic.  This is just a beginners guide. Many fine articles are available in the web on how to get better traffic. One of the best ways is to put a search on Search Engine Optimization.   What is the purpose of maintaining a website?  Normally, for a business site, to enhance your business.  Nobody wants to be a webmaster of a website where there are no visitors.  Much like opening a store, the more people who visit the better.  Even if it is a personal website, or a personal blog page, you want more people to visit.  That, after all, is the promise of the internet.  With almost a billion people now surfing daily, why can't we even get a hundred visitors to visit us per day?   So things like properly designing a website, making it 'sticky' so people want to return, are important. Of course, one way to get more visitors to visit is to make sure that all your company documents and correspondence carry your web site address, and you advertise or let as many people know as much as possible.  The other is trying to make sure people want to come back – and that is to make sure your website is interesting and up to date.  Who wants to go to the website, when you visit last quarter, and yesterday, it was exactly the same?  That is the reason why merchants change their shop windows every few weeks, or every so often. You want to inform people that you have something new always to offer.   The other way to build up traffic is through search engines. Evidently, over a hundred million engine searches are made everyday, some say even more than two hundred million.  So, being properly listed in search engines, and make sure that when people search the directory they will find you -- much akin as you advertise in the yellow pages .  If you are a computer company in Manila, you want to make sure that when people go to the Manila yellow pages directory, and search for computers, you would come out prominently and visibly.   Currently, there are over a thousand search engines, but estimates that only three search engines handle over 90% of all searches – and that is Google, Yahoo and MSN Search.  So you want to know how to be prominent there.  Let us talk about Google, which is the number 1 search engine currently.   There are 2 ways to do this -- first is you want to get prominent ranking, and second is you want to advertise. When you do a search on google, on let us say, computers, you will find two answers.  First on the left are the websites that google feels is most relevant to your search.  This is not paid , but google ranks you based on the relevance of your website to the person's search.  The right side will also presents some websites that deals with computers, but this time, in the form of advertisements.   Google allows you to advertise your website through www.google.com/adwords.  In here, you choose how you plan to advertise, what kind of keywords you want to bid on ( how much you are willing to pay to be clicked), and other features.   So it goes without saying that if you are willing to pay a lot of money, the higher you get into the advertisers ranking, and the more frequent you will come out. However, you have to pay everytime you come out, or everytime your link is clicked.  This can get very expensive.   If you want free advertising, then what you need to do is to try to work out your site so that it will come out prominently in the ranking.  This is desirable, because of 2 things. First, is most people will not click on advertisements, but rather on the results of the search.  And second of course, is that it does not cost money.  And of course, it is important to be ahead in the search, since most people ( even with thousands of results) will most likely see the first 20 or 30 results only.   For your website to be well ahead in this search will bring enormous new traffic to your site.  Needless to say, there are thousands of debates and thousands of offers in the internet on how to do this. All you have to do is to a search on SEO which is the acronym of Search Engine Optimization, and you will find thousands of theories, and thousands of offerings on how to come out ahead on Google and Other searches.   The way google does this is complex, but there is one thing though that we know for a fact – Google, and now increasingly almost every search engines scour all web sites, and rank them.  The higher your rank, the more higher you go on the search.  And the basic principle is one—your web site will rank higher the more people connect to your site .  This was the fundamental principle the founder of Google, Larry Page and Sergei Bren learned while they were studying in Stanford.  If you have good academic material, you would be cited a lot in academic journals, something like a reference.  The more famous and authoritative your work, the more other writers will quote you.  They brought that to the internet world and therefore rank websites and pages depending on how many sites connect to it.  So, we do know ( but there are many) that the more websites connect to you, the higher your ranking will be.   The way to optimize the ranking is quite complex, but hopefully at least, you know the most important one.  Try to make your websites as well researched, and authoritative as possible, and people who think your website is cool or relevant, will link to you, and that will increase your rankings.   At the end, there is the tricks of the trade, and there is learning the trade.  Designing websites is just like any other activity.  The best way to get people interested in you is to be interested in them. This is another way to get traffic that is increasingly not being recognized.  It is simply to visit and link to other web sites. Visit them, read them, and give them good comments to show that you are interested in their topic. You do that a couple of times, and it is more likely than not that these bloggers will come visiting your site.     1:43:39 AM     comment []   trackback []

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