UNCONVENTIONAL WORLD RECORDS

tsunamiwang.com sells an e-book and has an affiliate program. Costs RM50.

As expected, the e-book is available on the net as pirated copies…
Initially, it said 30 day money back guaranteed if not 100% satisfied. But in the FAQ section, it says:

Q: Boleh berikan maklumat yang lanjut mengenai jaminan wang di kembalikan?

[pls give more info about the money back guarantee]

A: Ya, saya ada tawarkan jaminan 30 hari duit di kembalikan. Pertamanya, anda perlu buktikan yang anda telah mencuba strategi yang saya ceritakan dan bagaimana dia telah gagal untuk diri anda. Kakitangan saya akan membantu hingga anda dapat mula buat duit. Duit tidak akan dikembalikan untuk apa-apa tujuan lain. Jika anda langsung tidak mahu mencuba, permintaan anda tidak akan dilayan.

[in essence, it says: if you cant prove to me that you at least tried to do what was described in the book, i will not refund your money]

Oo-er…alarm bells are ringing. For goodness sake, a money back guarantee is simply this: money returned to the customer, no questions asked!

Another exchange in the faq sounded very unprofessional to me:

Q: Saya ada jumpa bomoh yang boleh berikan saya nombor yang baik punya. Saya boleh bomohkan sesiapa untuk buat RM1 juta! [I've seen a witchdoctor/shaman who can guarantee that I will become a millionaire.]

A: tak berminat. [not interested]

I mean, it’s too obvious that that shouldn’t even be in the faq. And that is not the only one dodgy question in the faq. There’s more. Go on, read about it yourself.

More damning discussion points at putera.com’

tsunamiwang promotes other unethical methods like hijacking discussion threads at forums, mailing lists, blogs etc and bombarding others with your “message”

[indeed he did, see top of page 79]

According to a discussion thread at bincang.net:

tsunamiwang promotes spamming

[indeed it apparently does, on page 78 where it says "hantar email sebanyak-banyak mungkin" i.e. send as many emails as possible]

tsunamiwang promotes piracy

[indeed it apparently does, on page 57 on the para that saya "software submitters"]

And more daming points in a discussion thread at wangcyber.com.

An alternative view by Hafiz Ismail.

To me, the ideal proposition would be this:

“Here, read my book for free. If you make money, then only you pay me. If you dont make any money, you can throw my book away.”

Impossible to be done? Well, dont u think BSN’s Sijil Simpanan Premium works in a similar way? Put you money on the line, you might win something. If you dont, you take back you money, no questions asked. Of course, they’d have made some profit by investing your money will it’s in their account, but isn’t that what’s called a win-win situation?

Popularity: 1% [?]

The most interesting league in Malaysia is not the football league.

“Sugar King” Robert Kuok Hock Nien is again the nation’s richest, for the third consecutive year, by twice as much as his closest rival, T. Ananda Krishnan.

The wealth of the top 40 individuals was assessed based on the value of their stakes in listed companies as at Jan 20.

According to Malaysian Business, on the whole, more tycoons see their paper wealth decline in 2006, due largely to the lacklustre performance on the KLSE.

The combined wealth of the 40 richest Malaysians increased marginally to RM79.42bil, compared with RM78.23bil a year earlier.

Comments:

Will Sabah’s construction/property tycoon Wong Kwok ever make the list?

Popularity: 2% [?]

I’ve been reading Irfan’s book for a few days now.

His first one is map-of-malaysia.com , selling maps of Malaysia for about RM92 – I wonder how much the same map is sold on the streets of KL. Go over the site and learn.

Another one is of course rahsiainternet.com, selling his RM40 book, sent by PosLaju (cost of book includes poslaju cost)

Another one is ideabubble, but I’m not sure if ideabubble.com is it.

btw, credit card processor worldpay.com costs RM2000 to reg (one time payment). Payments will be channelled direct to your bank a/c. No hassle going to the bank to bankin cheques.

Read what some people discuss about him at putera.com (in Malay).

Popularity: 2% [?]

At Superbowl XL on 5th Feb the Stones performed for 12 minutes during halftime.
You’ve heard the drill before: there are 4 Stones. The youngest Stone is 58. Lead singer/bandleader Mick is 62. Combined age is 246.

I find that extremely funny. Age limit for the 2000 participants allowed to dance on the field was initially set at 45! I mean, that’s only a bit younger than Mr Wood, or is that Mr Watts. Young men deemed less healthy than the haggard looking, 60 plus, grandfatherly-age, Keef?
I thought the Beatles had a more goody-goody image. But the Beatles broke up more than 30 years ago. Moreover, 2 of them are dead. But the Stones, with all the sex, drugs and rocknroll image, are still alive and kicking.

Then, of course, there’s the money.

Their 2006 tour of North America netted them RM615 MILLION worth of tickets. 42 concerts, 1.2 million people. Don’t tell me, yes, but that’s too much for a profession mostly associated with “playing”, rather than “working”.

Needless to say, it’s the most successful US concert tour of all time. Even giants like U2, Celine Dion are left behind.
Mind you, the average ticket price is RM216.

Extra tidbits

• Old timers hog the top 5 in Pollstar’s list: Paul McCartney & Eagles round up the top 5. Actually, they’ve been doing that for years.
• Celine Dion made about RM2 million on each of her 155 dates at Caesar’s Palace. Hmm…that makes Siti Nurhaliza’s reputed RM25,000 per show seem like peanuts.

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Good article, albeit in the Malay language, via shaifulsham.com

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….have joined the ranks of successful Malaysian internet entrepreneurs.

[Patric Chan]

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tips picked up, use your own “risk”:

• put a small picture next to your Adsense ads increases the visability of the ads and the CTR.
• blend the ads with your navigation, same colour, no borders, same background colour as your site etc. Basically so it looks like it belongs to your site.
• try and think where your users will be looking for info, most people wont click on things they think are ads, thats not to say you should disguise them just dont make em stand out like a sore thumb
• the Google horizontal banners work well. You know, the ones where a user clicks and sees a group of ads and then you get paid if they make a *second* click (the first click to Google gets you nothing!). Even with this double-click issue it performs really well (I don’t think I can say how much better then a leaderboard without getting in trouble with the Google Adsense Terms of Service, but lets just say it’s significant). I think this is because the users who click on those ads are rabid—they want a ton of information and they probably visit more then one advertiser’s site.

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These guys did.

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Q: Why choose badminton or squash?

A: It’s twice as difficult as tennis (see bottom of this), but the money is nowhere near big enough.

Justine Henin-Hardenne won USD457,500 as the losing finalist of 2006′s Australian Open. For those who didnt know, it’s a tennis tournament. That’s a freakin’ RM1.7 million! And she didn’t even finish the best of 3 set match, retiring against Amelie Mauresmo.

And I am not even talking about the men’s tournament!

I mean, I make it to a final of a tennis Grand Slam, win or lose I can retire already!

If you think that’s impossible, think Michael Chang’s only Grand Slam triumph – the 1989 French Open.

In stark contrast, the world’s most prestigious badminton title, the All England offered less than RM40,000 to the men’s singles champion in 2006.

And the world’s most prestigious squash tournament, the British Open offered less than RM30,000 to the men’s champion.
Gosh, I think my sports list for my kids would look like this already:

1. soccer [KIV]
2. badminton
3. athletics [KIV]
4. squash
5. swimming
6. hockey
7. rugby
8. bowling
   
9. tennis
10. golf

Popularity: 2% [?]

As Liewcf.com wrote, Aussie Darren Rowse did it within 20 months.

Some things I’ve learnt just by observing:

• Keep separate blogs for different subjects – avoid rojak content [which is what I'm still doing!]. Darren has about 20 blogs, LiewCF 3 (or is it more?).
• Content is king.
• Persevere.
• Being good at English is not necessary, as long as you can be understood.
• You could earn more from Chitika than from Adsense.
• Adsense’s reputation took a beating recently, perhaps Yahoo’s offering is better.

Darren shares the secrets on how he did it, for USD280…
So, forget Irfan Khairi‘s RM40 book (“Secrets of Internet Millionaires Revealed”) or Sen Ze‘s RM68 book “How to Use the Internet to Earn a Massive, Passive Income in Your Pajamas!“??

Popularity: 1% [?]

• The blogs listed here make their meters/counters public. Some chose not to, so they are not in the list.
• Those with >=1,000 unique visitors per day qualify.
• This list is not meant to be exhaustive!
• Conclusions should only be drawn after reading Mack Zul’s take on hits.

Numbers are average unique visitors per day as of today.

South East Asian blogs in English/Malay.

• xiaxue.blogspot.com: sitemeter counter says 15,879.
• kahsoon.com: sitemeter counter says 12,227. Problogging since November 2005.
• paultan.org: sitemeter counter says 11,073.
• jeffooi.com : sitemeter counter says 9,637.
• kennysia.com: siteone counter says 6,784.
• liewcf.com: sitemeter counter says 3,798. Problogger since September 2005. Hit RM1K/mth in May 2005.
• drliew.net: sitemeter counter says 1,431.
• blog.limkitsiang.com: bravenet counter says around 1,000.

discovered by chance:

• adfunk.blogspot.com : extremetracking counter says 1,735.

Read some about, but not quite there yet:

• suanie.net: sitemeter counter says 439.
• mrbrown.com: extremetracking counter says 339.
• kyspeaks.com: sitemeter counter says 415.
• shaolintiger.com: sitemeter counter says 944.

Popularity: 8% [?]

The world is experiencing an incredible surge in rubber prices.

It’s indeed good news for rubber smallholders in Thailand, Indonesia and of course Malaysia, who together produces 90% of the world’s natural rubber.

Check out the daily rubber price list update by the Malaysian Rubber Board (Lembaga Getah Malaysia). Compare prices on different dates. The difference is phenomenal, the growth breathtaking. International rubber price updates (including KL prices) are available at an Indian-based website.
This has never happened before, at least not in the last 40 years.

What a big contrast to the crisis of 1974, where smallholders in Baling, Kedah demonstrated against falling prices.

Consider this price difference from a few years ago to today:

• scrap: 30 sen/kilo to RM3/kilo
• “getah kepingan”: now RM7.50/kilo, projected bullish to RM10/kilo

Rubber smallholders used to be able to earn, daily, RM50 to RM80, now can get up to RM200 per shift (2 shifts per day). That means, weekly (Mon-Fri only): RM1600, and monthly: >RM6000.

Shift 1: 7-11am, can produce up to 50 kg
Shift 2: afternoon

And all these on smallholdings: 2 acre rubber plantations

Why the increase?

- China’s expanding economy

- increase in crude oil prices drove synthetic rubber prices up

No wonder my my cousin and her husband have “offered” to work on our 7-acre rubber plantation, which have stood neglected ever since the Great Fire of 1998 (El Nino).
Perhaps it’s a good idea to join them on weekends, and what better time than the coming long holidays to have a feel of what it’s like to be close to a rubber tree, mosquitoes etc after a long hiatus?

Popularity: 6% [?]

tips via hafizismail.com

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link

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USD10,000 per month.

We’d call that getting on Google’s shadow payroll.

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21-yr-old Alex Tew was so successful with his creation that it deserved a DDOS attack and blackmails.
An idea to finance his studies has generated enough money to cover expenses several times over.

The idea reportedly took a mere 20 minutes. The attributes of the money-making idea he was looking for was:

• simple to setup & understand
• has to have a name to capture the imagination
• something that can be set up quickly
• no physical delivery required

The idea took shape as he wrote some keywords, and 20 minutes later – eureka….let’s sell pixels! Domain name and a basic webhosting package snapped up that very nite.

And as in any business, he started by selling to people close to him – friends and family, the first USD1K in sales.

That was reinvested for more publicity – a press release. More awareness gave more exposure and investors more faith – and it snowballed. More money + more exposure had an exponential growth effect on profits.

It took only 4 months and 2,000 customers to reach the USD1m goal.

Smart move: employed a press officer to generate publicity and sales in the US – he spent a week doing interviews there.

The last 1,000 pixels sold via auction on eBay. The unbelieveable >USD100K (and growing fast) bidding price made it clear that demand has outstripped supply – every businessman’s dream come true.

Alex says critical success factors to his idea are:

• power of word of mouth
• story of a student making a million fascinated the media

His advice to others:

• have faith in your creative mind
• take calculated and affordable risks
• take failure positively – treat it as a learning process

This success has generated another money-making idea: sell the resulting image as poster prints.
Unsurprisingly, has generated copycats, but none are as successful as the original.

His final words brings some comfort for the rest of us:

• internet is still in its early days
• many new inventions and ideas doesnt exist yet

Popularity: 9% [?]

Claims to have earned his first RM1 mil at 25, all from a RM500 investment.
Now goes around “selling” his story and offers to train you to emulate him for RM790 a pop.

The other featured guy in the website is Azizi Ali who says that the best biz is real estate – cos less work but a lot of money in it.

Popularity: 1% [?]