Ryan Ho's Entrepreneurship Blog

Employment to many people is like a thorn in the flesh, having to report to work, doing things that they do not enjoy, and that is exactly what is happening to majority of the people globally.

Only those who really enjoy their job, are able to out perform and work in areas beyond their designated job scopes, such gives them an edge not only in preparation for the vacancy when the time comes, but also gearing up oneself in terms of being prepared and not get caught off guard when the promotion is announced,  not knowing what to do, and fail to perform in the worse situation and get replaced shortly after.

There are a couple of reasons why being employed is actually better and it helps support not only a person but a family to have a better standard of living.

1: Having a fixed working hours allows the employee/individual to better plan and manage their time after working hours.

2: Being employed means there is a stable income, required as a criteria for an entrepreneur, where funds, capital and cash flow means everything to the business, without it, the business cannot even start, it is like a vehicle without any fuel.

3: By being employed, keeping our minds active, keeping updates to market changes, economic impacts on our lives, it keeps our minds vigilant, may help eliminate depression which actually started due to the patient having too much time to waste and end up thinking about imaginary harmful thoughts that are not beneficial to oneself but also affects their immediate family members having to take turns to look after the patient.

4: Be employed, gives us at least an helpful environment whereby we can identify potential friends, business partners to talk with. As they know what is happening, and so more likely they will understand, and have something in common to chat, this saves the trouble of finding soul-mates or buddies from complete strangers online who may have ill motives posing as a danger to ourselves.

5: A salary is not just helpful to a person, but it allows an individual to support a family and start a family on their own with proper financial planning.

6: It is strongly recommended for individuals who are clueless on their future prospects, at least by following the company’s foot-steps alining in the same direction, they can progress together with the company and earn higher salary if we prove our worth.

7: Certain companies may have excellent staff benefits that includes traveling package as a reward to employees for their hard work,  so this again helps singles who may want to go on a holiday but without any financial abilities to experience different countries, tourist attractions first before they determine if they want to come back again with their family and friends. All done so from company’s pocket, that’s market testing, an excellent way to save money.

8: During the process of employment, it prepares oneself for entrepreneurship from an employee’s perspective, so in future, should they really decide to go solo, they know what policies to implement, and what not to, so as to maintain a happy working environment that only helps the business to grow faster and recruit talented individuals who understand and value the importance of a happy conducive working environment is hard to come by, something like spotting a needle in the deep blue sea. (Nonetheless, it depends on respective individuals passion and interest for different job scopes)

9: It allows aspiring business owners to model after a proven tested working model and implement it in their new business if they existing company refuse to even listen to employees feedback. (The case of why business fail and employees turn competitors; actually it’s being forced to, as employees enjoy doing what they love, but are being denied the room for growth and experimentation, some business owners just don’t get it and they never will)

10: As employees, we are always exposed to many different types of people from all walks of live, and it helps in allowing us to learn and test different methods to deal with customers who may be a difficult client, which adds up to the value creation for both the business, and the employee in company and personal development.

If you are not employed, yet, start looking, but be very patient and keep on searching until you find the right environment that gives you the room for exploring and experimentation.

We can actually be successful by being an employee, but only if the environment is right with minimal office politics and helpful team members with open discussion practices.

If you are wondering why many businesses never grow bigger than they can or may even have failed, the best place to find answers will be in your employment where you learn from the company’s mistakes and make sure you do not repeat them in your own business in future by simply reducing the amount of complaints and unhappiness in the office. If you do not want to be a failure in life, be employed, at least you get to learn something and it may be helpful in the future.

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Friends are people who started off as strangers, to acquaintance, before coming friends, best friends, buddies etc.

But as we grow older, and wiser, our number of friends start to decrease due to change of environment occupation and thus companionship becomes less than important as we all learn the primary importance is money, without it, survivor will be a problem itself.

The rich and poor people all have their own judgement on how to select the friends they choose to hang out with.

As the title suggest, selecting the good friends is important, but maybe only a couple of people will realize this, and more than half the population (poor individuals) never learn nor understand why they need to be picky, choosey when it comes to selecting friends.

Here’s a couple reasons why you (die-die) must know this:

One: Like minded people tend to stick together, and they attract the same people too as well. If you want to be rich, you need to think like a rich, talk, behave, and network with the rich, so one day you will soon be rich.

Two: Your network of friends whom you hang out together often determines your net-worth. It is only natural, and also instinct for man to hang around people on the same level to feel comfortable.

So if you are comfortable hanging out in people earning, entertaining and enjoying themselves with the leisure widely used and patronized majority, than you will remain poor, for happiness blocks a person from moving forward. It is a trap so to speak, that’s why successful individuals are never happy with what they have and always aiming higher. That said, leads us to the phrase “Don’t rest on your laurels”, speaks for itself and gives competitors a chance to overtake the leaders in any niche, something that is tested and proven.

Three: Your results, achievements are directly connected to the network, social circle that you hang out with.

That’s the reason why rich get richer, as they recommend and help each other succeed by helping others, they are helping themselves, having to return favors to each other in future.

The poor on the other hand only takes advantage of each other, and never returns the favor, thus they only get back to worse, it applies even to the intelligent, rich individuals in the wrong crowd will still be broke ultimately.There are only hindrance to each other.  (This happens even in family members living under the same roof, where poor family members would not want you to succeed, because it makes them look stupid not to follow in your path when you success means the people around you are all failures.)

Four: Learn and do the right things, whatever that helps you win, become a champion and succeed in life. It is a route less traveled, since our number of friends are decreasing as we age, grow older, why not start replacing negative with positive friends. The winners takes all, that’s why they always go against the flow where objections are plentiful, and the winner shares credit and rewards with their team-mates. The losers can only take if not fight for whatever is left behind, and never to share anything they get with the others.

In life, we only live once, so do the right thing. Isn’t it what everybody sets out to be successful in our own ways no matter how small or insignificant the success is?

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There are many opportunities all over the world in different forms and disguise, we just have to find the right one and capitalize on it.

From business, investment  to even relationship, volunteering work and learning, there are so many opportunities, we all just need to analyze which one is suitable for ourselves and grab hold of it before anybody takes it away from us.

In investment, there are opportunities happening daily in the stocks, forex trading, options, electronic trading funds (ETFs), bonds and many other financial products to invest in, but to find the right opportunity best suited for ourselves requires more than just a basic understanding of how it works.

There are a couple of points in helping to determine if it is right for us based on our resources and information.

First: How much investment capital do we have? The amount of capital determines the amount of returns we’ll be getting.

Second: If we understand what product the investment is all about, the implications, highest and lowest point of value based on historical data and the trading patten, with who are the investors and speculators. Knowing how big the market is, as well as how many competitors there are, if there is high demand, low supply or vice versa, all of which makes a lot of difference in determine the right time to cash in on the investment and when to exit to maximize returns without even incurring any loss in best case scenario.

Third: Knowing, understanding of the market, the related products tied up if not may pose as a contributing factor in supporting the value of the opportunity that reflects the buy-in price of the investment. When the returns on investments meets up to expectations, having knowledge helps in determine the next higher level of playing field that investors must upgrade to, so as to make with less competitors, but those with deeper pockets, ensuring each investor gets a slightly bigger slice of the pie. Capitalize on the news, predicting the potential changes and reactions to the market and adjust the investment portfolio accordingly.

Fourth: Self-reflection is important to determine is we have the expert knowledge to invest or do we outsource it to a professional investor and not a professional employee that are parked in the stationed in property and insurance companies.

The successful investors always buy and earn their way into getting the right connections to maximize their profits by buying the same investments that the experts are eying on.

The poor investors and speculators only listen and trust their funds to professional employees without professional investment strategies nor experience, nor is it their interest in helping clients get rich, rather they are paid for servicing companies’ clients, so they don’t really care if clients profit or loss as they get something like a small percentage service charge on the funds invested with the company.

Fifth: Timing – There is a saying “It is better to be early than to be late. Better to be late than never” which can be applied to literally almost anything and everything. Knowing when to go in and out, at times even to pause and wait for the next cycle of identical pattern the next week.

Once you have a basic understanding of how to access the opportunity that is/are coming in your direction either directly in your face, beside you, or behind you, than come up with your own check list to check if all the conditions are met before you jump into the opportunity and ride with the wave.

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Risk management is to identify, assess and prioritize risk (both positive and negative) followed by coordination of risk in keeping the damage to the lowest possible if it comes as negative, and maximizing opportunities should it be positive to the business or in any event or projects.

In business, there are a couple of ways where a business entity can minimize their business risk. Via modelling after what other industry best practices are doing. Below are a few time tested, proven by large multi national corporations all over the world, used by banks, financial, property and even politicians.

First: Diversification: Spread out the risk, and reduce your own entity’s or individual risk on your name. >> Financial bankers, consultants always recommend clients to buy multiple types of investment products, so that in the event should a particular market collapse, the client still have other positive markets not tied nor linked to the troublesome market, thus able to still collect positive returns on investments.

Second: Using other people’s money: Heavily used by property developers, business owners seeking investors, and franchise business model. This way, the individual has got no fear of failure, with such mindset, he/she will be able to concentrate on what works and profits the growth of the business, and big businesses really encourage such practice.

Third: Deal and transact with only low if not zero risk clients. That is why insurance companies make lots of money, and they reject non-healthy clients with pre-existing illness that will cause a dent in their profitability. Supported and strongly encouraged by government globally due to high taxes from such entities.

Fourth: Liability Protection: Every single profitable business in the world have their own respective terms and conditions, clauses for clients to agree first before engaging their services, so as to state clearly only certain type of risks will be taken responsible, and not for individual clients actions should they try to outsmart the system by taking actions in their own hands, and push responsibility to the business.

Fifth: Work with only well-behaved clients and business partners who would give them long term business and sales. Which is why businesses also have their own private black-listed clients and business contacts list, and they ask for feedback from each other, so as to protect themselves from any potential harm. Identical to the ideology of parents do not want their kids to be anywhere near if not hanging out with bad company.

Sixth: Identify a place, environment whereby you can repeatedly fail without worries that you can never ever stand on your feet again. So that when you fall down, you can still stand back on your feet, walk away without any serious injury. In other words, it means, learn to fail with only resources that you can afford to fail without putting yourself in deep trouble that will put you out of business permanently.

Cost of failure in internet allows individuals to fail anywhere from fifty to thousand times without any serious loss of financial expense. While real life physical business will hurt the owner in a single attempt if their pockets are not deep enough as it cost at least a quarter of a million to be considered having test and run a real business with an outlet and the proper tools, equipment, staffs and rental all factored in with other considerations too.

Seventh: Hire a expert, or consultant to monitor your trial and error process, so that you know what went wrong, and how to correct it, the last thing entrepreneurs want is to keep testing and get no results, no feedback, so even if they found a winning solution, but don’t know what is the formula to eliminate poor practice. Have the expert or consultant to sign a agreement not to copy or use your business secrets in anyway possible unless he works with you, so you know you are well protected and taken care of.

If you are in employment, it is considered one of the safest place whereby individuals can keep on failing without fear of losing their source of income, as they are still paid regularly.

If you are unemployed, allocate and set aside budget for your daily, and monthly expenses, than use remaining available savings, spread out over six months or a couple of years, divide the fund equally and start your business online, this way greatly reducing your expenses yet allowing you to cast a wider presence with the help of internet.

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In any business, you often see big companies have many departments, especially two departments that seems to share the same job scope when sales is concerned.

They are the Sales and Marketing department followed by the Advertising and Promotion department.

Big companies have both of these departments whereas small businesses only focus on advertising and promotions, this is the primarily reason why most small businesses never ever grow bigger, because they are not copying the best practices in business organizations.

Sales and marketing is actually more like a branding campaign. One that sells a brand, promoting the value, encouraging the loyalty and offering unforgettable customer service experience in giving customers as well as business partners more reasons why they would want to come back to buy from a company that focus on sales and marketing.

Advertising and promotions on the other hand is a quick temporary method to boost sales, generate traffic and create publicity to get people talking about the brand. The focus here is to generate more interest in either a newly launched product or service to clients and giving them more reasons to visit the new business over existing businesses who may not be offering such offers and rebates to attract new leads with hopes of converting them into a customer and try to convert them into long term loyal returning customers with the help of sales and marketing department.

In traditional businesses, only companies with big and deep pockets that goes into millions are able to have both departments in their business to grow the business, this is where the newly start-ups and small medium businesses are unable to compete due to lack of financial ability where they are up against the big boys.

But with search engine marketing, the use of of paid and free search engine listings offers all businesses regardless, big, small, medium or even new/yet to be established businesses an equal opportunity to achieve the same results on the internet using search engine marketing strategies.

Using Google helps business succeed faster than smaller search engines, due to the difference in market share, the amount of exposure it gives to the business both locally and globally at the same time without over spending. At the same time collect specific data and information from clients that traditional offline businesses may even have difficulty collecting feed-backs from their clients.

Search engine marketing results page are actually divided into two categories, which are known only to internet marketers, business owners who are paying money to advertise online, that is unknown to the general public.

Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing is actually what we considered to be of a advertising and promotion campaign, while Search engine optimization (SEO) is considered to be a branding campaign.

PPC is a campaign that gives immediate results that as business owners, investors and retails can easily measure and determine if the returns on investment is worthy and should they continue to advertise on search engines, results given helps businesses determine where their markets are, age group, demographics, race, age group, what kind of browser, user/client search behavior etc.

It gives business a detail report of what exactly are clients searching, and as professional PPC consultants, service providers, it is up to the consultants to provide quality, valuable information to help businesses refine their ads and improve on the conversion so as to help businesses target the right clients. But there are so many self-proclaimed experts online i still are able to see and point out their mistakes with a simple search and look at their paid ad on search engines if they are implementing the correct strategies or not.

SEO on the other hand is a sales and marketing campaign. One that helps business build creditability, value over time in the form of an intangible asset as known in accountants when it comes to balance sheet reporting. It is meant to provider viewers, searchers relevant information related to their immediate words that they are searching for. Google has done an excellent job in refining their algorithm over the past few years, giving us marketers a much more easier life at providing quality content without having to fight for positions in the search engines against those marketers using black hat seo strategies.

Since it is a marketing, branding campaign, it should be, and rightfully be more expensive than the cost of engaging a PPC consultant or service provider, but the irony is that, I see local companies doing the reverse. PPC services are much more expensive than SEO services, such a business landscape and pricing reflects the low level of professional understanding of what search engine marketing is actually about.

Neither do the businesses providing such services care about these things, a point that I observe over the past few years. They just take the clients money, show results, but did not provide suggestions on how they can better improve and help clients earn more money by identifying untapped markets, a skill that as professional consultant or service provider should do, yet there is very little search engine marketers doing what is actually recommended, in fact it is considered a best practice, that many business providers are not offering at this moment.

Should any businesses plan to scale their business locally and globally, they should consider hiring only professionals, and test them in terms of their knowledge, and not based on their clients profile, as clients, they don’t know what they are getting is good or bad.

So the next time if you need help determining if you or your business is in safe hands of a professional, just refer back to this blog entry and test them. You will be surprised that they might not even know these facts. This information is what I took over the years to compare the difference between traditional and online business models, before coming to such a conclusion.

I hope this piece of information helps you in one way or another.

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In every business, it is of the highest importance and priority of the business not to be taken hostage at any point of time. Such is a understood practice that major big enterprises all have their own in-house lawyers, accountants, web designers, marketers to help with growing the business rather than outsourcing it to a third party.

Having an in house talents in charged to handle the business operations is good, but it will cost businesses much more in terms of unnecessary expenses not required. Engaging a third party on a long term contract, freelance basis helps reduce costs, however, businesses never would want to give advertisers, marketers full control of their resources if not the worst case scenario will happen, such as employees running away with clients money, stealing information and selling to competitors for a profit and many others.

In a recent article, it was mentioned that a SEO Firm actually turn its back against a soon-to-be former client, by de-indexing their client’s website presence on Google since the firm is about to lose the business even before the contract expires. Such is a taboo in business practice, very unprofessional.

If you want to avoid such nightmares from happening, there are some simple pointers that you with any other businesses should take note of.

1. Have a contract to protect yourself, your business from any potential liability lost.

2. Make sure you know at least what you are outsourcing, and you can reverse it easily if the outsourcing service providers fail you. Learn from the experts, if you don’t want to be bothered with such issues, hire a consultant to review the work being outsourced, so you know your work are in safe hands.

3. Always check and ensure that you are dealing with professionals, people, business with integrity and ethics, with a clean record.

4. Have your outsourcing service providers reporting back to you and your business-in-charge on what have they done, and what results have they got, regardless of it being good or bad, so that you are kept in the loop, to know what’s working and not, so you can easily replace or undo any chances that you or your business deem neither effective nor helpful to growing the business.

5. Have an auditor to check if they service providers that you are outsourcing to are really doing their jobs, if they are providing sub-standard work. Purposely tell them their work will be audited, this way, they know they cannot screw around with the business. (This way actually is well practiced by multi-national corporations, with accountants having yearly internal and external auditors just so to keep the financial accounts correct, and ensure there is no breach of duties.)

6. Accept and acknowledge the fact that your priority is to grow the business, so outsourcing is a must if it more costly for your business to hire your own in house consultants, employees to do work that actually do not need much work.

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Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is sub divided into organic and paid traffic.

Organic search results is results that appears on search engines for free without any fees needed. Should a website be properly optimized, it will appear on either one if not couple of different search engines. The seo results will actually be found in other different countries local results page as well.

Over the past year or so, i occasionally have clicks and viewers from India, United Kingdom, Canada, Philippines, India, Malaysia, Singapore and United States from time to time. I have just checked as a matter of fact, and my website result was found on page one for those respective countries listed above.

It allowed my own blog to be found on Google in different countries and it is literally free of charge. For business owners, investors who want to increase their business presence both locally and globally, search engine optimization is a must have to be used as a marketing strategy.

It will help local businesses know global demand of their products and services without having to invest in a physical retail store first, by first getting found on different countries search engines, it will help businesses identify potential markets overseas and determine if there is any demand for their products and services based on inquiries to their products and services from viewers’ questions when they contact the service provider.

The only disadvantage of this strategy is that it will require anywhere from seven days to months and years before getting onto page one results based on respective competitive keywords that internet marketers are optimizing for.

Paid traffic, which is commonly known as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a way whereby businesses can buy immediate traffic to their websites in as soon fifteen minutes upon publishing the ad life on google adwords. Most businesses would prefer ppc over seo is primarily due to the return on investment.

PPC has a higher conversion as compared to tradition advertising channels. As such it provides clients the real qualified statistics where business owners can calculate the cost per lead, cost per sale and adjust their marketing budget accordingly. With proper optimization of keywords using broad match, it allows businesses to also identify keywords that advertisers may not think off, thus opening new opportunities and markets that may be untapped by other marketers.

With the results collected based on clicks, it allows users to narrow and refine and edit their keywords accordingly to stop non-performing keywords and focusing only on high click through keywords and ads so as to increase the profitability. Such is a recommended practice by most if not all businesses all over the world, as they focus only on performance basis to reward accordingly.

Following the recent years, social media optimization (SMO) has being once popular, but has reduce slightly too, due to the changes made by Google algorithm to give users more relevant results, thus social media has a slightly lower priority as compared to before. Most ill equipped marketers and businesses are actually captializing on clients ignorance in offering social media marketing services that actually doesn’t really gives them (the businesses) high conversion rates as compared to PPC, due to the nature of smo.

Social media is actually meant to be use as a awareness campaign and create more attention to the business, brand or a new product during its initial launch, and not to be used as marketing. It is only to be used as advertising directly users, readers to get more information from physical retail outlets or from online websites. That’s what it should be used for.

With the growing presence of iPhones, HTC and Android, mobile marketing is on the rise, and it is to be integrated with internet marketing, but there is a catch, if you bundle mobile marketing together with SEO and PPC, businesses should be able to double if not triple their sales depending on the budget businesses allocates on a monthly basis.

Mobile phones have both full website integration features as well as apps for advertising purposes, thus businesses should adopt new trend and help businesses grow. especially small medium businesses with low financial abilities, this is when the small medium enterprises can ride on the wave and grow their business, with minimal advertising cost.

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Search engine optimization (SEO) is a skill that majority of the marketers would find it extremely hard to understand due to the difficult algorithm settings of Google formula where nobody knows exactly the full formulas.

It is a skill that can effective, and be efficient for businesses to grow their web presence without allocating a heavy budget on advertising since seo is a skill, it is a strategy, that is considered trade secret by best business practices, the lesser the people who knows about it, the better it is for the professionals.

It helped me to understand the real basics and importance of running a business. Following the continuous change and improvements of their formula, it is actually better for those individual who learned from the professionals. All that I can say about seo is that, if you apply ethical, honest traditional business skills to online, in terms of website keyword optimization, linking, content publishing,  you should be able to get ranked and being found on Google.

The changes of Google was good, as a matter of fact, it helps weed out poor optimized website results and providing more relevant results pertaining to giving the users of search engines what they want, and not what marketers like grey or black hat seo marketers are trying to do in outsmarting the Google to cash in on any lapse of their formula.

Over the past few years, having played and applied only a single basic seo strategy like only using internal link building to tests what i have learn and made confirmation and prove that it works. It has come to my conclusion that whatever I learn from really works, at least for the past few years, and my mentor has being giving frequent updates that benefits us his students of course.

Learning this skill can indeed make a lot of difference and save lots of advertising expenses if done properly spreading awareness to both local and global markets. Having Pay-Per-Click skill actually doubles the effect of higher conversion, low cost marketing while growing for business clients who engage in our services, it is way much cheaper to pay for qualified leads who are searching for the specified keyword of products and services as compared to traditional advertising of paying for maximal viewership ignoring if they are even interested in the products and services, which are considered waste of time, money and resources into creating of advertisement.

There are so many ppc ads that I have observed in that are poorly optimized, ads showing up for words that they did not optimize for, resulting in higher impressions, lower click through rates due to unrelated keyword optimization by under trained ppc consultants from many companies both locally and globally.

I will take more time and put in more effort to improve and apply seo strategies from now onwards so as to maintain my spot on page one for my own keyword that will help me close more deals in future.

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Following the recent Google Panda updates, my own blog that was found on page one for my name itself has being changing positions for the past few weeks.

From the release and execution of the updates of Google Search Engine Optimization (SEO), in the past, i only need to maintain a few blog post on a per month basis to remain competitive and have my blog search engine results page to be found on page one for google.com.

After the chance, which I need a testing, finding out that it dropped to page two, second spot for couple of days without new content..

Just last week, I managed to climb back up to page one, not the last position of tenth, but on the eighth spot, now after a few days, i’m back on page two for serps.

The chance following google panda update for the google spider crawling rate has being proven that they increase their crawling rate by over fifty percent.

Exact details on how fast they crawl and update, it will be a secret that I myself know. At least now I know how fast and soon i need to give new content to maintain my page one results.

More chances will be tested, as i play around testing the blog entries to test how the updates affects my blog so I have a better idea of how they search engine rates new content.

For more information on specific panda update refer to Tips To Break From Google

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Business is actually a must learn for everybody these days.

Below are the various reasons:

1. It teach us financial accounting, how to deal with money.

2. Selecting and choosing the right people to befriend, so as not to hang out with bad company.

3. Learning prioritizing, differentiating the important tasks from the unproductive, low importance tasks. >> Helps in determine which ones makes us $

4. Forces us to value integrity, honesty vital to any business if we want to make profits >> Shaping a better person

5. Good planning. Helps individuals involved to think long-term, plan ahead and having back-up plans in case the first plan fails you.

6. Happiness >> If we succeed, we share the success by spreading happiness to the people around us, that said, more quality time will be spend with family, friends and love ones, against those employees working over time, making ends meets and still in difficulty.

7. Protection. By which, you learn over time, how to protect yourself, your entity, reputation, products, services from being badmouth, information patent rights, what you should earn, you fight for it. Something that not many adults and parents will teach their kids, yet it is a must learn for those who engage in business regardless of what their markets are.

i am still in the process of learning, continuous upgrading is the only way up. If you want to climb up the ranks, start learning more about business.

Business don’t fail. People fail.

Success is not guaranteed, but without learning guarantees failure.

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