Metric Mail is a free service still at Beta right now, what is so good about it is that rather than going to Google Analytics and look at graphs and statistics that you might not understand, they simply summarize them for you. You will get the important stats at the right panel, while some explanation on your stats.

This is a weekly thing whereby you could download a pdf report for each of your website. So act fast as they might just close their beta soon.

[ Source Malaysian SEO ]

I have been playing Car Town for a week now and find it quite interesting as it is related to cars and modification. It is still a very simple game but is quite fun. Anyhow, I was amazed that they are able to land themselves some advertisers. They are not at the side panel or on top of the game where most people will automatically ignore. But they are in the game themselves.

After I click on the lady saying “Check out the new CR-Z!”, it will prompt me this screen

Prompting for the Honda CR-Z showroom, and as expected, we got into the showroom. And finally the showroom. It is quite a smart idea from the Car Town developer team. A whole new Social Media Marketing and Internet Marketing has been created.

It seems that more and more people are starting their own eCommerce store in Malaysia. One of the reason is due to Facebook as we can see more and more advertisements on Facebook because it could reach a huge amount of audiance simply at no cost (but time to get friends or fans). Social Network Marketing could be done is so many method using Facebook alone, via Status Update, Fan Page, Groups, Pictures and even creating a whole new user simply for Advertisements. I think Fan Page would be sufficient for most because you could allow more than one admin whereby it will be great for companies with a lot of people in the marketing team.

Another reason because of Classifieds and Forum trade like Mudah and Lowyat, trading online becomes more or a norm. This will be good for those who could get their hand on some niche product and open up opportunity for younger entrepreneur since entry cost for online business is very minimal compare to the conventional brick and mortar stores.

What is the cost?

If you are interested to start one, you simply need a domain and hosting. Domain cost around USD10 while a cheap hosting could be as low as USD25/year. While shopping cart script is available free depending on what you want to build. The famous Shopping Cart available Zen Cart, OsCommerce, MagentoCommerce, CubeCart and lots more. Try some out to know their feature and if it meet your needs.

How to Market?
I always like to say “The best website serve no purpose without any visitor”, which is very much true, unless you want to keep something online but not wanting the world to know about it. There is so much method, and more if you could come out some idea of your own. Social Network Marketing is popular among small and big corporation to promote their product and services. While PPC is still popular but requires knowledge in buying the right keywork and having the right setting. There are also other method to be explore like Email Marketing, Social Network Advertisements, Offline Advertisements and much more.

This is quite irritating, as youtube advertisements are actually playing before and after the video you would like to play. This new YouTube ads have no skip buttong, you will have to watch the whole 30 seconds ads.

But this would be a new channel for Internet markerter to buy some advertisements slots, and this would be limited to those who could make video advertisements.

I am currently exploring the use of email marketing as I know that there are a lot of people in the affiliate marketing uses this. I do not intend to use them for affiliate marketing purpose, but just to keep my members updated, so it may be a monthly thing going on. I tend to keep away from email marketing all this while because I kept the perception of it as spam, but then I notice that some online community are sending monthly newsletter which I am keen to get updated. So will give this a try.

First I will need a good software that supports HTML, if you have any software in mind free/paid is fine, as long the price is decent and I can do a trial before purchasing. Currently I am giving these two software a try for free:-

• MailList Controller Free 7.2
• Sendblaster – Limitation but it is withing my needs

If you have any experience in this field, feel free to drop me a comments as I will need help in this as much as possible. I do not want to do this wrong the first time.

Marketing through other sites like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, or Youtube would be consider as Social Network Marketing. SNM is still very new as you can see those sites above are only created few years ago and today, there is more and more people using these channels to promote and advertise their website or products.

Previously I have covered some tips to do some of the Social Network Marketing on Facebook like making pages and having a ads banner on your facebook profile. I have been using them on some of my websites and blogs and some proven to be pretty successful and there is more interaction day by day.

I started using full feeds on my facebook page that I have created, then slowly I do only excerpt rss feed because my final intention is to have visitor to visit my website.

It has been a month and although it is not as high as search engine traffic but I am currently getting 5.67% of my traffic from Facebook alone and as my fan grows, I will actually increase this value / or increase the visitor referred by facebook.

I am doing a trial for Malaysia purchase since I got the advantage of getting supplies of Surgical Face Mask and earn a small margin out of it. Previously I have tried various software for ecommerce. OS Commerce was the first but it has limitation because it is very very hard to edit things, but I still maintain the website with OS Commerce. After that I tried Zen Cart, I think it is better in terms of theme editing, new add on module and admin panel is much better, but still remain a lot similar with OS Commerce. While choosing Zen Cart I have tried Joomla’s Virtuemart and CubeCart but each have its own limitation and I ended up with Zen Cart.

My third experiment on online shopping cart is WordPress E-Commerce, I wanted to try this a long time but did not had the chance until yesterday I setup a WordPress E-Commerce site to sell only 2 items, which is the highly demanded Surgical Face Mask. Although I will not recomend this plugin for a full fledge e-commerce site whereby you have a lot of item because the order handling, receipt, invoice and quite a lot of features in a normal shopping cart is not there. Nevertheless, I like the fact that it is using WordPress, and I am very comfortable with adding more plugin to make it search engine friendly.

My first 2 E-commerce site had fail, although not making lost since I could still make the money to pay for the domain renewal. This is my third, and purposely built on top of my 4 years old Classifieds to gain credibility. So if you are interested to purchase some 3-ply face mask or surgical mask.

Get them here: Surgical Face Mask

This is simply an application whereby you could add a custom box. In this custom profile you could add your own banner promoting your website, fan page, groups, or even write a message. Previously I have covered how you can create a facebook fan page, and this would be a great tool to promote your fan page.

Simply go add custom profile box as your facebook application. You will even get a WYSIWYG text box to write your own message there. There is also different type of fonts to choose from. The only down side is that the box title always remains as “custom profile box”. You custom box will look something like this:-

As you can see, I am always promoting my Malaysia Classifieds as I am competing with large companies with 5-6 digits budget that is competing with me, so I am always trying to take the first step in doing Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization for my site. Hopefully I will win this challenge.

My first Facebook Pages was actually created by accident. It ended up pretty good as a method to do Marketing via Facebook. The main reason is that you could collect fans and admin them over at the page. Rather than creating a whole new facebook profile, whereby you will need to have a saperate login.

Publicise Feeds

With pages, your feeds are published at the page where user login. This is also the page where everyone tries to keep up with their friends status update. As you can see from the screenshot below.

Message to all fan with just one click

Compare to having another profile, you will need to type the username one by one. What if you have more than 100 friends, or if you have 1000 friends. Are you going to send one by one? With pages, you can just send message to all fan.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

On top of all that, your page is indexed by Google. Search for Malaysia Classifieds Listing, you will see my page third on Google. And it actually have a PageRank with it too (although mine is not high).

I believe the three reason on top is more than enough to have you creating your very first Facebook Page and to market your website right after this.

I have actually succesfully done this by making a Malaysia Classifieds Facebook Page whereby friends could add them as Fan. (you should too if you want classifieds updates on your facebook). So far, I had 147 fan, which is not bad, and I will be expecting more to join. So here is how you can make your own Facebook Page.

Go to Application on the bottom left corner, look for “Ads and Pages”

Click Pages

Then you will come to a blank pages if you have not created one before, click on the “Create Page” on top right corner. Then you continue with the name of your pages.

Now you have you own Facebook Pages. But you are not done yet, because you want to use it to market your feed. And here is how you can add your feed into Facebook Page. Look for the Edit Page on the left panel below the image.

Scroll down, then look for notes, click edit.

Here is the magic that will import your rss feeds into your facebook pages.

You should know the rest after this, there is only 2 steps left, one to write your feed and another to confirm.

It is recommended to at least include some information on your facebook page, also a picture would be decent too.

I have actually encounter some problem getting pagerank for my Malaysia Top 100 List because some website are having different pagerank for www (http://www.domain.com) and without www  (http://domain.com). Tried doing the script for hours and for a break I decided to do a logo for those who are in the Top 100 list.

So here is the banner to be added into your blog:-

I am okay okay only with designing, so bear with me.

Here is the code to add this logo to your blog:-

<a href="http://www.riceblogger.com/top-100-malaysian-blogs/" alt="Malaysia Top 100 Blogs"><img src="http://www.riceblogger.com/rice/malaysia-blogs-160.gif"></a>


It is a 160px width logo that would fit into quite a lot of sidebars, if needed you can download them and edit it to the needed size.

If you like to make money online, this is actually what you should think of rather than following others by making money by blogging. I have actually tried taking a business that is already doing under the brick and motar method. Then convert it into online business. That business actually makes more money in terms of time spend to make a certain money. Of course this business will most probably limited to Malaysia geographical region but you still could sell service that has no boundary right?

The beauty of this business is that people actually look for you rather than you looking for your customer. It is all about Internet Marketing. Currently, it is easy to do that because you will be the pioneer and getting the strong keyword before anyone else. You will have to try the long tail keyword or the long tail market. For example, trying to sell watch, used car, insurance, fishing equipment or any other deals you could make with the retailer. Or maybe you could sell Swine Flu Mask right now.

Finding the right product to sell will be the crucial first step. Because you will have to think if there is competitor, if there is demand, if someone would purchase this online, if someone would search for this product online, if you are ready to sell this product, if you are doing marketing online/offline and a lot of other questions that will be similar to starting a business offline.

Similar to make money blogging, it is not an easy task and majority of people would actually quite before they see any result, but for those who persisted and work harder than the rest would actually see the pot of gold at the end of mountain.

If you have something that would work, you can let me know, and we could do a join venture on the product too .