Not your typical Costco – or is it?

Posted by

3

Costco TaiwanA surefire way for me to break the monthly budget is to go to Costco! Taiwan is now blessed (or cursed) with five branches, including a newly opened one in TaiChung County.

I’ve been a member for a few years now, and an advocate since I discovered their hotdogs a few years earlier! Of course, having a car makes shopping there much easier, and more expensive.

Today, somehow we managed to drop nearly NT$5500 on stuff for the home and the business. Such necessities included 12 bagels, 24 tubes of glue, several books, 2 picture frames (for my old calendar), 2 large bags of Coffee (unavailable at such good prices anywhere else), gluesticks, and a bunch of other nicknacks.

During the course of shopping, I decided to photograph some things you couldn’t find in your typical Costco in Main Street, USA. So here they are! Can you identify them?

P1000798

P1000799

P1000801

P1000802

P1000803

No prizes for guessing correctly what they are! Does your neighborhood Costco stock these products or brands? Apologies for the photography!

Saturday’s News: Payperpost Campaigns, FaceBook, Forbes and NT$

Posted by

1

This week’s been quite an odd week for InvestorBlogger (and me!). It started off with me sitting under an A/C on a cold evening after an unusually warm day. Of course, the next day, I started to feel ‘blah!’… turns out I had probably a viral infection! That has kept me hacking away like a 20-a-day smoker over the last few days! I managed to struggle on, until yesterday when a class of eight 2nd-grade boys was almost too much!

PayPerPost Generates Interest

campaign2

Apart from that, I did find time to run my second campaign with PayPerPost. (See the graphic!). I ran it on a Friday, which may not have been the best decision. But I did note an improvement in the quality of the posts after making several tweaks to the language of the post: including a note that I would award tacks on the quality of the posting, and that I would review every post personally.

I was quite horrified by the first post in the first campaign, but the problems have been rectified and overall, I would say that the campaign was a good success. Did it produce any additional traffic? Well, one produced the lion’s share of traffic, but there were seven visitors so far, and over 450 views of the articles. These are the short term results, there will be an additional SEO benefit, and future traffic as well when articles are broadly syndicated and read.

There are some changes I would still make to the next campaign: first, I’d include an image for visual impact, second, I’d try to time it with an announcement, and third I’d definitely rectify the title of the posts problem.

Updated Feed: New Feeds included in the new feed

I’ve managed to find some additional feeds for my favorite Make Money RSS Feeds, which I’ve just added to the download file, but there are still two empty slots… So I’m looking for more suggestions, just drop a suggestion in the contacts page, and I’ll check it out.

top feeds OPML overview

If you’re puzzled who’s in this download, what are you waiting for? There are seventeen, yes 17, great bloggers with lots of things to say about Investing, Tech, Making Money Online, etc.! It’s all great stuff! If you use even 50% of the bloggers suggestions, you’ll be a richer man or woman than Croesus! And it’s free! So if you don’t enjoy the download, I’ll give you double your money back!

IP Rights vs. FaceBook

Yesterday one of my friends ran this great article on FaceBook and your IP Rights. It’s well worth reading if you use FaceBook or syndicate any content there with your permission, or plan to. Here’s a juicy quote:

Facebook forces you to grant it the same rights as you would if you uploaded the content to their servers. In other words, they can change, modify and sell the work without requiring the consent of the creator.

Do read the article. Though my own photos aren’t valuable like Craig’s, I’d like to know that I still have 100% control over where, how and when they appear. This is why I host my photos largely on my own sites, if at all. I don’t think I have the quality yet to show off commercially.

But still they are MY photos. Not Facebook’s. Speak about overarching TOS. If you are going to use FaceBook, limit your photos to very low quality pictures that can’t be used commercially, but look okay on a screen that size. If you don’t upload high quality images, you will not find them being used. So use your commonsense. Just as you wouldn’t walk down the street wearing your finest gold watch for all to see, dressed to the nine’s in your DAKS suit, etc.. so you should remember that being on FaceBook is akin to walking in public, and you can be robbed IP-wise in a number of ways. So don’t wear your finest!

Forbes’ New Billionaires: New Wealth vs. Traditional Industries

And in more general news, Forbes published a new list of Billionaires with some interesting changes. The developing world is beginning to create new wealth, and many of the wealthy-to-be will knock the socks off the old world wealth by the staggering size and speed with which their wealth was accumulated. More interesting, though, was how traditional businesses were overcoming tech wealth as tech fortunes sagged, and more diversified interests did well. Take a look at the latest billionaire’s report on Forbes.

Other changes include the number of billionaires who do not reside in their country of citizenship. But, in Taiwan, there were seven wealthy individuals, all of whom live here: Tsai Hong-tu & family; Terry Gou; YC Wang & family; Tsai Wan-Tsai & family; Douglas Hsu; Tsai Eng Meng; and Barry Lam.

NT$: Inflation vs. Exports

Also, recent weakness in the US$ vs the NT$ has meant a nearly 5% improvement for our undervalued currency here. This largely is the result of the current government keeping the currency weak as a way to increase exports and fend off competition from China. But the direct result has been that increasing commodity prices in many areas has resulted in inflationary pressure in Taiwan on many everyday products and commodities. Most recently, eggs jumped by more than 10% in a few days; flour has gone up hugely, etc.. The government is now strengthening the currency to ease inflationary pressure amid popular demand just before the presidential election on March 22nd. It’s going to be good for a number of reasons, though, as most commodities are priced in US$.

Advertising Your Blog: My First Campaign On Payperpost

Posted by

6

I never thought I would be running a campaign on PayPerPost. But I had already given up a free $100 advertising bonus before, without much thought. Yesterday I checked my advertiser account, and found that there was a $100 incentive to advertise on PayPerPost. So I decided to split the money into three campaigns initially. The last being funded with my own cash, partly.

So what did the campaign teach me? Well, let’s look at what the campaign I created was. It’s always a good idea to think clearly about the opp before you begin.

Opportunity Description:

Check out the blog. Write a buzz type post about InvestorBlogger.
Create a link to one post in the archives (you can search the archives and find something worth commenting on) as well as a link to the main page.  Feel free to disclose this post as you wish. PR is not required, but your blog must be listed in Technorati (must have the Technorati badge).

 I chose to pay for a 50-word buzz type posting. I kept the requirements as simple as I could: a Minimum Tack of 3 Required, Any PR/RR, Location open, categories fairly open, and a positive type buzz. I only offered $5.00 because I felt it was an easy opportunity to write up.

This cost a total of $38.75 or so. In return for this I received five posts by the time I woke up this morning from the following sites: InvesterBlogger, Investorblogger, Learn What it Takes, Guide to Better Blogging, and InvesterBlogger Tips. Out of the five posts, three were excellent to well-written, one was bare minimum, and one failed miserably because it didn’t meet the basic conditions, didn’t link as required, wasn’t listed as required, and mispelled the blog’s name.

In addition to the posts that were made, the five posts were read 168 times; and one of the blogs generated four visits to InvestorBlogger Dot Com, in less than 24 hours.  I didn’t expect much from this campaign at all, because it was my first.

 On the Upside

  • It was completed very quickly by the bloggers at PayPerPost. In fact, it was completed within 12 hours.
  • Three of the posts were very nicely done. And one was acceptable.
  • The posts generated traffic amongst their own readers, and four clickthroughs. That’s a 2.4% rate of conversions, all from one blog article.
  • Increased Technorati Ranking a little.

 On the Downside

  • I wasn’t able to effectively control the actual quality of the content this time.
  • I was shocked that two of the posts just included the name of the blog in the title, were done in such an obvious haste, and spelled the name wrongly, in the title!
  • Worse, though, there was no easy way to warn that the post was insufficient, I had to raise a flag about the post.
  • The marketplace model is kind of at odds with the requirements that each opp is vetted and each submission is rejected. Each of these steps slows down the process as I had to wait two days before being approved. Then each post had to be approved, too.

Improving My Campaign

So I added a tack recommendation table on how I’d vote on the opps. I also widened some scopes to include more bloggers of a better rating. Let’s see how it goes.

Overall, I’ve been surprised at how the system actually works. As a blogger, being on the other side of the fence really helps me to see what is wrong, what advertisers are really looking for, and how to do better as a blogger when working for a particular advertiser. As an advertiser, it’s fairly easy to set up a campaign, but the interface is still slow at times, and dumb at other. In that respect, it’s the same for the bloggers.