Ricky’s Online Business Blog

Today I attended the Webmaster Malaysia gathering of the year in The Curve.  I didn’t mingle around much, but managed to talk to two notable dotcom figures for a while.

First of all, I finally met – the famous tech blogger Liew CF of LiewCF.com!  I’ve been following his blog for a while and learning from him.  He started blogging years ago and later his income generated from blog exceeded that of his full time job.  Now he is a full time professional blogger!

He has been earning mainly from Google Adsense.  Though he didn’t reveal how much, the US$ X,000 figure he said aroused much curiosity among the audience.  Though the X figure is a single digit in US Dollar as he said, I do believe it’s a double-digit in Ringgit Malaysia!

He was one of the speakers today and he said it’s his first public talk (really?)  But he has successfully captivated our attention and regaled all of us.  Let’s wish him success and continue to grow from strength to strength!

The second dotcom figure I met is Andy Low of HomeTuitionCare.com.my, a tuition agency business online.  I’m glad that he graduated from University of Malaya (UM) too – same with me!

One might think that his business is a competitor to my NextLevel Tutor Network.  In a loose sense, maybe.  But I think he is not because our business models are different.  He charges tutors commission for each successful tuition assignment, while I charge tutors a fixed fee upon joining.

Even if we are competitors, I still like to get to know him as there may still be things we can do together in the future.  Who knows maybe we may form alliance and harness each other’s strengths to serve our customers?

As one of the speakers mentioned today, such webmaster gathering should be conducted more often.  I have also got some idea on conducting our future gatherings in the Internet Business Fellowship (IBF) later.

Thanks and kudos to the organizer!

Over the recent years, social networking web sites have fast become major going places for Internet users. Ten years ago there were not many people using email as yet. But now if you pick ten youngsters, chances are nine of them are on Friendster! By the way, many adults must be wondering why the younger generation nowadays like to express and publish themselves so much on the Internet!

I joined Friendster rather late in 2004 after being invited by others. Then I joined a couple of others including Facebook. But I tended to brush off these sites as those through which we can get to know friends, boys and girls.  Young people with a lot of free time may enjoy it.  But not so much for those who are busy with work and business.

But my perception started to change after I read about and subsequently joined LinkedIn. It is not for dating boys and girls but for serious professionals and businesspeople to meet one another online. It is one of the best effective networking tools available on the Internet. I find it quite useful to:

• Get to know others in business and profession, even from other industries.
• Meet real people, not those fake profiles on many other social networking web sites.
• Learn about others’ background before meeting up in person.
• Expand your social and professional networks.
• Get to know whom to contact when I want to start a new venture, find out about one company, or enquire for one product or service.
• Get referrals and recommendations from others on you.
• Keep in touch and follow up with those you have met offline.
• Build credibility and reputation online.

Please pay a visit my LinkedIn page at http://www.linkedin.com/in/rickysoo. Million thanks also to those who recommended me on LinkedIn!

I definitely recommend LinkedIn to any serious professional and businesspeople.  Are you not on LinkedIn too?  Why not?

Recently I served in the organizing committee of a grand annual sports event held on Labour Day in Matsushita Sports Complex, Shah Alam. We received compliments that the sports event has been held more smoothly and systematically. However, we didn’t expect much less crowd turned up this year compared to last year.

Anyway, I learned something important that, relationship is equally, if not more, important that the results we strive to achieve, be it in business, office or social work. Through working together in the committee, we not only worked together to achieve our organizational goal, but we also developed friendship and relationship.

As I heard from a speaker before, we can know how many seeds there are in an apple. But we do not know how many apples can come out of one seed. Our relationship with others is like the seed. We may do great things together for now. But without a good relationship, we may not be able to do great things together many times. It is no use that we do great things now but our relationship with colleagues deteriorates as a result of working together.

When I was younger, I tended to go for results no matter what, even at the expense of relationship with others. When working for one company, I remember being a busybody to always give suggestions to reform the business process of the company, to the extent of hurting relationship with others especially my boss. As a result, I lost out in office politics and was nearly fired from the job.

Good relationship is vital in our life. Let’s turn a committee into a community. Let’s turn our office into a fellowship of humans who love and care for one another. Of course, oftentimes we need to start from ourselves first.