I first learnt about SearchAnyway after reading Google Payload, which is a rubbish eBook if you ask me. I won’t bother with the details of the eBook but most of the tips in the eBook will most likely get you banned with SearchAnyway.

SearchAnyway does not allow traffic from some PPC search engines like:

• Enhance
• Findology
• GoClick
• Looksmart
• Searchfeed

Google Payload recommends using some of these PPC search engines, which is clearly against SearchAnyway’s recommendations. SearchAnyway prefers traffic from 1st-tier PPC search engines, which probably means they like Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN adCenter.

Here’s the official proof straight from SearchAnyway’s publisher screen:

Notice the bold text “Any Affiliate who can send us high-quality 1st-Tier arbitrage traffic for 1 month will have a rev-share increase of 5%, and will receive higher bids from our premium feed“.

The default revenue share is 60% of the click value of their ads. What is cool about SearchAnyway is you can find out the click value of your desired keywords. It’s right on their home page at the “Bid Checker” section. This makes PPC arbitrage so much easier than Google AdSense because with Google, you can’t really know how much Google is going to pay you until you see the actual payouts in your account. Furthermore, Google really hates people this PPC arbitrage thing, therefore it would be very difficult to do it with Google AdWords and Google AdSense.

SearchAnyway has a lot of search engine templates. I am sure you have stumbled upon web sites like these. This is what SearchAnyway specializes in and they have made it easy for their publishers with a lot of nice templates.

I have not tested SearchAnyway yet so I can’t say how good it is for me. I will test it out and let you guys know how it goes.

Tagged As: AdSense, AdWords, Google, Google AdSense, Pay per click, ppc, SearchAnyway, Yahoo! Search Marketing

Categories: Advertising Revenue | No Comments » |

I think John Jonas and I must have been reading the same books. I have read the E-Myth and I am reading the 4-Hour Work Week. I love these books as they are teaching me to free up my life to do the things I want to do. However, I have experienced a lot of problems putting the knowledge from these 2 books into action.

That is where John steps in. He’s done it and he is sharing with us how he did it. I have outsourced work to Singaporeans as well as freelancers online but I have had mixed results. I have had terrible experience with freelancers from India just like John did. Singaporeans are a bit too expensive for me at the moment. John recommends hiring people from the Philippines to work for you full time from their homes for about USD $250 per month, which is a pretty decent wage in the Philippines.

I know for a fact that Filipino maids earn about SGD $360 per month in Singapore, which is about USD $250 per month. Filipino maids are on the higher pay scale of domestic workers in Singapore probably due to their superior English language skills and their higher education. A monthly salary of about SGD $360 in Singapore is still considered quite low but a lot of people are still below the poverty line in Singapore by “western standards”. If you ask me, I would pay USD $350 per month and above because I think that is a fair amount of money by Southeast Asian standards and you should be able to live a pretty good life in most Southeast Asian countries except for Singapore.

John recommends Filipinos because he likes their work ethic and their English language skills. I have no experience with hiring Filipinos but I can tell you this - Most of the Filipinos I know of in my life are great people. My dad rents his apartment to 3 Filipino guys and he says they are his best tenants ever. My parents have hired numerous maids when I was a little kid and the best ones we had were from the Philippines. I just hope that people do not try to pay them as little as possible because it is hard out there in the Philippines where most people are living below the poverty line by “third world standards”.

John Jonas recorded an MP3 about his experiences hiring workers online. I think it has valuable advice and you might find it useful if you are thinking of outsourcing work. At the end of the call, John is pitching his USD $97 per month membership site, which also has a 14 day trial period. Although, I have not joined his membership site, I plan to check it out very soon. If you are already a member, let me know how it is like inside.

Tagged As: Filipinos, freelancers, outsourcing, Southeast Asia

Categories: Internet Marketing | No Comments » |

The Maid Trade by Journeyman Pictures is a very interesting glimpse of the harsh working conditions of some of the foreign domestic workers in my so-called first world country of Singapore.

Pay close attention to the second minute of the video. The trainer in the video pointed to a picture of a dark-skinned man and told the maids in the class not to get a boyfriend like that with some very racist words. I have no idea how this can be allowed to be taught in the maid agencies.

Where else can you pay someone as low as SGD $200 per month to work in your home all day long without any off days? You can even make them sleep on the kitchen floor, underneath the table or any where you please. A lot of maids are not allowed to sit at the same table with their employers or on the sofa, even though their pets can do it. Most of the time, the employers ask their maids to eat their leftover food. We treat them like sub-humans. What’s worse? They are trained to call their female employers “MUM” instead of “Maam”.

I know this because this was how my mum and relatives do it. My mum was very harsh on the maids. My dad would allow day offs and let them sit on the sofa and dining table with us. My older sister used to share a bedroom with one of our maids and it was great but my mum would never allow it at her place. My parents had very different styles of handling maids and they had numerous conflicts because of this. Things became easier for them when they divorced so they could hire their own maids and be free of each other’s differences.

The Singapore government has some stupid rules that push all the responsibility of the maids’ conducts on their employers. Therefore, there are all sorts of fines for the employers if their maids misbehave. That is why the maids are told not to have boyfriends, marry in Singapore or get pregnant in Singapore, which is the main reason why employers do not allow their maids to leave the house. The employers have the right to send the maids back to the agent or straight back to wherever they came from if they break the rules.

The Singapore government charges a heftly maid levy of SGD $265 and above every month, which is paid by the employer. Is it any wonder why they don’t really care about them? They get more money than most of the maids. With over 140000 maids in Singapore, the government gets above SGD $37,100,000 a month, or SGD $445,200,000 a year! This is a big business!

If you ask me, most people don’t need maids. They should spend a few hours per week doing their own house work, cook their own meals, wash the dishes and take care of their own kids. I wish my parents did that because I hardly had any quality time with them when I was growing up.

I just can’t look myself in the mirror if I paid someone about SGD $250 per month to work in my house to do all the things I should do myself. Just because we have no minimum wage laws in Singapore, does not mean I should exploit this situation by hiring a foreign worker who is willing to take ridiculously low wages. This is modern day slavery at its best. We deny them even less of the human rights our government denies us.

This is just the part on domestic workers in Singapore. The situation of the other non-domestic foreign workers is much worse. It is sad that this happens in Singapore and we need to fix this as soon as possible. This is a humuliating disgrace for all Singaporeans.

Tagged As: Domestic worker, Singapore, Wage

Categories: Singapore News | No Comments » |

I will no longer be posting posts about WordPress, web development, web design and search engine optmization on this blog. Instead, I will post them on my new site Maverick Web Creations, which I created to advertise my WordPress services.

Categories: Blog Updates | No Comments » |

I have not caught on the social networking hype of registering on sites like Twitter. I did not want to waste my time on things like Twitter because I am not a person who likes to check out what’s the latest news about other people except for my favourite band, Oasis.

A few weeks ago, I decided to test the status feature of Facebook. I was feeling happy and relieved that this unpleasant house mate of mine was going to move out soon in early August so I added a countdown message that went something like “3 more days to go”. Some of my friends started sending me messages asking me what I was counting down to!

When my house mate moved out, I changed my status message to something like “So long sucker, hope you don’t steal other people’s shampoo and take other people’s stuff in the future!”. A female friend of mine then asked me what caused me to get so upset.

Now I am beginning to understand why sites like Twitter are so popular. Some people just love these one-liners and have to know more. I think I should start using Twitter and some other similar sites like it even though I think they are dumb.

The problem is, I do not wish to login to all of my social networking sites to manually update all my status messages. I stumbled on a WordPress plugin called PingPress.fm that might do the trick. It works with Ping.fm, which is a free service that helps you to update all your social networks at one place. I will test it out and see how it goes.

Tagged As: Facebook, Message, Social network, Social network service, Social-media, Status message, Twitter

Categories: Blogging, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments » |

Every year in Singapore, the government gets someone to release a communist-styled patriotic song. This year’s song is titled “The Singapore Song”.

The line that stuck out for me was “So in this homeland I vow to live and die”. I think they are trying to persuade more Singaporeans to live and die in Singapore, which is a huge problem for them because more and more people are leaving Singapore to live and die elsewhere.

If you compare our songs with the patriotic songs from China, you will see some similarities.

Love my Motherland (爱我中华) is a very popular song in China but the singing style is really old fashioned. Not many people sing like this today. Singapore patriotic songs are modern versions of these songs based on the same formula of brainwashing the population to love the government and country. I remember being forced to learn these songs in school and sing them on national day every year. I just cannot do this any more.

Tagged As: China, Singapore

Categories: Singapore News | No Comments » |

I was surprised how quickly WordPress 2.6 was released. I still have an unresolved bug about the WordPress 2.5 wp_list_pages function. Unfortunately, they did not fix this bug or maybe they don’t plan to.

Back to WordPress 2.6. I am kind of confused by all the features WordPress has to offer. This video from WordPress will show you some of the new features in WordPress 2.6.

Upgrading from WordPress 2.5.1 to WordPress 2.6 was a snap for my blog. If you have not started with WordPress 2.6, now is a great time to start.

Tagged As: Plugin, wordpress

Categories: Blog Updates, Blogging | No Comments » |

Chee Soon Juan and Lee Kuan Yew finally met in court. Lee testified the following in court under oath:

“Your honour, the International Bar Association decided to honour Singapore and hold its annual conference in this city and you [Dr Chee] were given an opportunity to present your case, with your complaint that Singapore lack the rule of law. There were some 3000 lawyers there.

I think they left Singapore with a very different impression from what you have projected because we have a letter from the President of the International Bar Association to the organisers, namely the Law Society of Singapore, how successful the meeting was and how impressed they were by the standards they found to obtain in the judiciary.”

You can find proof of this at SDP’s web site by downloading the MP3 recordings of the court proceedings. Furthermore, IBA confirmed that they never wrote such a letter to Singapore praising our wonderful judiciary. Instead, the IBA came out with a report with 18 recommendations for us to improve our judiary system.

What’s worse, Miss Yeong Yoon Ying, Press Secretary to Minister Mentor, claimed that Chee Soon Juan called the Singapore leaders “murderers, robbers, child molesters” and “rapists.” Totally untrue!

I am glad I do not subscribe to the Straits Times newspaper because I believe it is an absolute waste of my money and paper to read the junk the government prints on it. Reading the Straits Times is an insult to my intelligence because I am supposed to believe the rubbish they write. Without the internet, I would have believed everything Lee Kuan Yew and his press secretary said, just like most Singaporeans.

Tagged As: Chee Soon Juan, Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore, Straits Times

Categories: Singapore News | No Comments » |

Finally! Google has decided to reveal the monthly and yearly searches for every keyword phrase searched on Google.com. I hope there is an API for this so that all the keyword software makers can integrate this into their software as soon as possible.

According to Google AdWords Help Center:

The Approx Search Volume [Previous Month] column shows search volume statistics for the last calendar month. The Approx Avg Search Volume column shows average monthly search volume over a recent 12-month period.

Since Yahoo’s Overture keyword tool is officially dead, this tool is the next best thing at the moment. Google should have done this earlier.

Tagged As: AdWords, Google, Google Advertising Professional, Google search, Search Engines, Searching, Yahoo!, Yahoo! Search Marketing

Categories: Pay Per Click Search Engines, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments » |

In the past week, I have experienced 2 incidents of extremely stupid and bad customer service from 2 eBay sellers.

The first seller to piss me off was bigrockmedia. You would expect an eBay seller with 98000 feedback points to behave smarter but they don’t because their checkout system does not work for people from Singapore.

I won a “Buy it now” auction for a music DVD and I wanted to pay immediately after the auction. However, the ChannelAdvisor.com checkout system does not have Singapore in its country list. I guess this is either the seller’s fault or ChannelAdvisor.com’s fault. I have tried to contact bigrockmedia 3 times but they have not replied to me at all.

The second seller to piss me off was trade4office. This seller is a Power Seller and they should know how to read their emails to check for their orders. In one of their listings for velcros, they said:

So I sent them an email saying:

Their reply was:

First of all, I have emailed them the number of yards of velcro I want. Secondly, they seem to have misread my email to them or something to give me an absurd reply like this with a typo. This proves that they just don’t give a damn about reading and replying to customer emails.

Lessons We Should All Learn From The 2 eBay Sellers Above

1. Don’t make it hard for your customers to pay you money.
2. Don’t turn away customers who want to pay you money by being rude.
3. Read the emails your customers send to you and reply to them promptly and properly.
4. When you make a mistake, admit it, fix it and apologise for it but do not try to ignore the mistake and hope the customer forgets about it.

Common sense stuff if you ask me but lots of people just don’t care enough to apply this stuff.

Categories: eBay | No Comments » |