Keep Moving Forward .Asia

The Nielsen Company has recently released a study on the usage of social media among Americans. Guess what, the usage has tripled! Interestingly, here’s a chart on the amount of advertising/marketing dollars spent. As you can see, when advertisers are cutting overall marketing budgets, spend on social media marketing has increased for all industries.

While there’s a lot of hype surrounding social media marketing as the new rules of marketing, including written books on social media marketing such as the one written by Tamar Weinberg, there are also skeptics with different views calling social media marketing as the biggest fad.

I believe social media marketing is indeed the next big thing (if it isn’t already) and it’s here to stay for a long time. What might potentially kill social media marketing are those who treat it as a one-way advertising channel, instead of a channel to build relationship, engagement and most importantly, conversations.

What say you?

If you’re interested in learning more about social media marketing, here’s a great book for you to read.

Cheers!

There has been a lot of buzz over the last few years that there will be more and more entrepreneurs in the next 5-10 years. In as early as 2005 in the United States, one in ten people were already involved in some forms of internet businesses or making full time or part time income online. By now, I’m sure the numbers have increased tremendously and you would’ve heard of countless stories of successful digital entrepreneurs, for example:

1. Mark Zuckerberg, the (at time of writing) 25 year old founder and CEO of Facebook
2. Alex Tew, the 21 year old dude who brought you his Million Dollar Home Page back in 2005 (imagine making a million bucks, just by selling pixels in one homepage!)
3. Carl Ocab, the 14 year old Kid Blogger from the Philippines who’s making 4 figures in USD a month, probably 5 figures by the time you read this

The list can go on and on and on…

Why are these digital entrepreneurs become who they are, digital entrepreneurs, and why you should consider becoming one too? I’m sure everyone’s got their own story to tell, here’s what I believe are the top 10 reasons why you (or any other digital entrepreneurs) should start building an income online today, hopefully they’ll give you some food for thoughts:

1. Retiring young and retiring rich
Every once in a while, we get approached by financial planners who’ll map our lives out financially and calculate the income we need to make in order to retire the way we want to. Well, do you like the figures? Here’s something new, digital entrepreneurship, when done right, can actually help you retire younger and much more richer too! Look back at the fine examples above, god, aren’t they young?

2. Financial security
Ever been through a recession from a global financial crisis? Did you know how many careers were destroyed and how high the retrenchment rate was? You know what, digital entrepreneurs are affected too, but a lot of them actually make more money during the recession too! Digital entrepreneurship is not 100% recession proof but it’s 100% safer than a 9-5 retrenchment risk. The funny thing is, many actually turn to digital entrepreneurship AFTER they were retrenched, and they always ask the same question – why didn’t I think of this earlier?
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Successful digital entrepreneurs always, always have certain habits that make they successful, little things here and there that make them so good at building their incomes online. Here’s what I believe are the top 10 most common traits of successful digital entrepreneurs:

1. Knowing how to manage your money.
Most digital entrepreneurs embark on their journey from a small startup with a small budget for setup. Spend only on necessity and don’t splurge it all. Just a quick example, if your setup is an office for 5, then get only the most basic things you need. A normal desk or cubicle functions just as well as a fancy one that costs 3 times more. Spending the extra money on the fancy one doesn’t benefit the business very much now does it? On the other hand, if your employee needs a higher specifications of a laptop in order to work better and faster, then by all means spend that money.

2. Having multiple game plans and knowing when to quit
Digital entrepreneurs don’t invest all their eggs in one basket. They try out certain things, invest a fair amount of time to make it work, evaluate, and decide to continue or call it quits and try other things. It’s good to be persistence but there’s a fine line between calculated persistent efforts versus plain stubbornness. Sometimes, the only way to move forward is to quit and move on, on a different path.
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