All New, All Fresh, All Exciting!

Sen Ze’s New Internet Business Talk

"Digital Heaven"

"Apple Inc. Made USD4,000,000,000.00
(USD4 BILLION!) Selling Downloadable Songs On Its Web Site From 2003 - 2007.

"Discover How YOU Can Be A Small Apple Within Days, On Your Way To Selling Hundreds Or Thousands Of Your Own In-Demand Downloadable Products (Not Songs) For Up To USD300 Each, On Auto-Pilot…

"Discover Also How Your Own Downloadable Products Can Be Created For You For Free And With Little Or No Effort In Just Minutes (Sometimes Instantly!), Even If You’re A Complete Dummy…

"…And You Can Finally Start Making Lots Of US Dollars In Your Pajamas - Like Me!"

 

Date:   Wednesday 2nd April 2008
Time:   7.15pm - 9.30pm 
Venue:   All Net Profits Center, No.12A, Jalan SS 21/58, Damansara Utama, Petaling Jaya. It’s opposite the Damansara Uptown 1 Building. 

You MUST SMS or e-mail to book your seat, as there are LIMITED seats available!

E-Mail: elaine@senze.com

SMS Type <Your Name> <No. of people attending> <Date of Talk> and send it to: 016-9854 852

If we’re full, we’ll let you know via return SMS. If we don’t SMS you, your booking IS confirmed.
 
Cost: FREE

Why Digital Downloadable Products?

Apple started selling songs through downloads at its web site at iTunes.com in 2003, at USD0.99 each. By the end of 2007, it had sold over 4 BILLION downloads, making sales of US$4 BILLION.

By selling downloadable digital products, Apple has no stocking or delivery costs, no store personnel to hire, and no physical stores to open. It saves many millions of dollars in cost this way, which all translate into immediate profits for Apple!

The marketing and selling of its songs can also happen automatically, without any human involvement (except for its customers keying in their credit card numbers on its web site).

Would you like to be like Apple too?

Well, I’ve been doing business like a small Apple, FOR YEARS - right here in Malaysia.

I sell my own downloadable digital products on my web sites (not songs), that are priced at USD9.97 all the way up to USD297. I have sold THOUSANDS of them, earning me hundreds of thousands of US dollars in the process.

It isn’t easy to come up with an idea for a product, and then create it, and then set up a web site to sell it, and then market it - especially if you’re not technically trained.

Until now.

My brand-new talk called "Digital Heaven" will show you how ANYBODY (yes, even complete dummies) can have an Internet Business going within DAYS, selling a downloadable product of their own to a hungry market willing to pay them lots of US Dollars in return!

So yes, I’ll show you what YOU can do to quickly create YOUR OWN Digital Product within minutes from scratch, and then set up a Killer Sales Letter quickly to sell it (this can be done within minutes!), and then get people to market your web site within days to a hungry crowd of buyers.

You’ll then discover how simple it can be - and what you’ve been missing out on all this while (hint: LOTS of money!).

Check out the details below - and do follow the instructions strictly if you want to attend this FREE Talk where I reveal some of my deepest, innermost secrets to profiting wildly from the Internet that nobody else can tell you - guaranteed.

Sen Ze
Internet Entrepreneur/Coach
Author of the following best-sellers:

"How To Use The Internet To Earn US Dollars In Your Pajamas"
"How To Use The Internet To Earn A Massive, Passive Income In Your Pajamas"
"Sen Ze’s Mini-Encyclopedia Of Low-Cost, High-Profit Internet Business Models"
"The AirAsia Story"

LINK: http://www.senze.com/talk/

from Get Rich Slowly by J.D.

 

Yesterday I attended a workshop in San Francisco devoted to personal finance and personal finance tools. This gathering — sponsored by Strands, Expensr, and NetworthIQ — brought together a handful of bloggers to discuss the financial challenges our readers face, and the things they’re looking for in a personal finance tool. (Thus my question on Thursday.)

 

Though I’m interested to see what sort of application these three companies eventually produce, the highlight of the event for me was meeting some of my colleagues for the first time. I’m impressed. On the whole, personal finance bloggers are a smart and funny bunch with a genuine passion for the topic. Attendees included:

 

• Cap from Stop Buying Crap

   

• SVB from The Digerati Life

   

• Sam from Getting Finances Done

   

• James from DINKS Personal Finance

   

• John from Queercents

   

• Lazy Man from Lazy Man and Money

   

• Jeffrey from Saving Advice

   

• Flexo from Consumerism Commentary

   

• Jim from Blueprint for Financial Prosperity

   

• J.D. from Get Rich Slowly

   

For eight hours, we talked about money and how we use it. I took notes. Here’s a very rough summary of the topics we discussed.

 

Reporting from the trenches
Most of us use Quicken or some home-brewed money-management system to track our money. Cap from Stop Buying Crap has tried all of the tools, both web-based and desktop. It’s one of his hobbies. Which is his favorite? “I don’t need a money-management tool,” he said. “Pencil and paper, Excel — that’s pretty much how I roll.” This echoes a lot of what you folks told me on Thursday.

 

SVB from The Digerati Life doesn’t track her expenses in detail. “It’s like a black box,” she said. “I just have one category for expenses, and I don’t bother to break them down any further than that.” She doesn’t have to. She knows that she never spends frivolously, and that she has enough money to cover what she buys. She’s less interested in a tool to track her current habits, and more interested in something that can help her plan for her future.

 

Jim at Blueprint for Financial Prosperity noted that current personal finance tools allow users to track what has happened in the past. He’d like a tool that can help users decide what to do next based on their life circumstances. James from DINKS Personal Finance agreed. “It would be great to see a personal finance tool that contained the wisdom of a textbook,” he said. This is a fascinating concept — imagine Quicken with built-in advice about home equity loans or lessons on the magic of compound interest!

 

We wanted tools that can help us get ahead, that can help us with our future. But is this because we’re a group of people who have our present under control? Are we representative of the population at large? We’ve all managed to overcome our mistakes, and have now begun building wealth.

 

“As your net worth increases, the marginal value of a dollar decreases,” said Jeffrey from Saving Advice. That is, as you save more, each additional dollar you earn makes up a smaller portion of your overall wealth. Also, your psychological approach to money changes as your situation changes. A good tool needs to account for these factors. We don’t want a tool that is one-size-fits-all.

 

As we’ve learned to control our money, many of us have moved from cash-based finances to plastic-based finances because they allow us to more easily track our spending. “I don’t budget,” added Jeffrey. “I’ve just gotten to the point where I don’t spend money.”

 

Seasons of life
As the discussion developed, it became clear that there’s no current tool that accounts for the natural “life-cycle” of personal finance. Most people seem to follow a sort of progression, starting with a heavy debt-load as young adults, saving in mid-life, and planning for retirement at the end of a career. Most people don’t know how to prepare for each phase. We make mistakes. “Out in the world, there are terms and conditions you don’t know about,” said Cap from Stop Buying Crap.

 

Sam from Getting Finances Done noted that a lot of personal finance is about relationships. It’s not about the nuts and bolts of saving and spending, but about how we interact with our spouses and friends. It’s about psychology. Because of this, there’s only so much that any financial tool will be able to help with. A tool that helps you track your spending isn’t going to solve marital problems that are causing money woes.

 

“Finance is a tool for goal achievement,” James said. He believes that it’s important to define your goals and values so that you know why you’re saving and investing. I agree.

 

Finally, Flexo from Consumerism Commentary observed that many of the workshop participants had experienced a trigger event that led to a financial epiphany. We did dumb things when we were young, and then something happened to cause us to change direction, and to begin caring about how we spent our money. “How do we reach people with smart personal finance information before they get into trouble?” Flexo asked. “How do we prevent the massive debt?”

 

It’s a great question. We couldn’t find a great answer. Until you’ve reached rock bottom, you’re probably not ready to listen to financial advice.

 

The business of blogging
With so many personal finance bloggers in one place, the conversation naturally turned to the business of blogging. We exchanged tips and tricks. I learned a couple of ways to increase subscribers, and hope that I was able to help others move toward their goals, too. Listening to all of these great personal finance bloggers, some common threads emerged.

 

• We all feel fortunate to be where we are today.

   

• We’re grateful for the help we’ve received from other personal finance bloggers and from our readers. (”My readers are amazing,” a couple bloggers told me. Maybe so, but the readers at Get Rich Slowly are the best!)

   

• We’ve all spent a tremendous amount of time building our sites. “I don’t think new bloggers understand how much time is involved,” I said. Others admitted that they, too, treat their sites like a full-time job.

   

• We all work toward goals, and we stick with it even when we don’t have the time or the interest. “A lot of being successful is just being stubborn,” said Jeffrey.

   

“No one ever says, ‘When I grow up, I want to become a blogger.’ You don’t do it for the money,” said Jim from Blueprint for Financial Prosperity. “The real value of blogging is the social interaction, both with readers and with other writers.” He’s right.

 

Personal finance as personal development
I came away from this workshop with a renewed appreciation that personal finance isn’t just about money. Personal finance is really about personal development, about having a good life while growing toward your goals. It’s about a holistic approach to life. Personal finance is about money, sure, but it’s also about emotions and how you choose to spend your time.

DiGi.Com Bhd CEO Morten Lundal gives a reminder of some basic management concepts that are often not practised.

MANAGEMENT as a profession is a relatively new phenomenon; at least this is true for business management. In relation to established notions like “the nation” or “the family” or “the school”, it’s just at an infant stage.

Current management thinking is surrounded by all kinds of strong beliefs which we assume are normal. This could be because we don’t know better or we haven’t made an effort to increase our awareness beyond the natural stage.

In addition to being new, management is actually a serious thing. It is not purely in leading the pursuit of value creation but really in affecting the quality of life of many human beings working in this very modern and imperfect framework called a “business organisation”. And I will claim that most managers or perhaps all of us, are exercising management with a very narrow and immature mindset.

So, I will attempt something absolutely hopeless. I will, in the space of this short column, go through some painfully basic management concepts and see whether they need to be revitalised.

Ninety-seven percent of you will read and say, “Ah, this is so basic and I know this stuff.” But maybe three out of 100 (and I’m writing for you guys) will stop for a second and think, “Well, of course I know this, but when I think about it?”.

I’m going to call this (a bit ironically) 10 basic basics of management:

·Set clear expectations. Employee surveys often cite lack of clear expectations as the prime reason for lack of motivation.

Many managers hesitate to be too clear in setting expectations and over-elaborate human resource systems just add more barriers, not support. Do it simple, do it often, but do it.

·Give frequent feedback. When your bosses don’t give you frequent and honest feedback, they are either ignoring their responsibility or they have given up on you, neither of which is very good.

Annual feedback sessions are so archaic; it should rather be frequent, relevant and constructive. Personal development creates motivation and quality feedback is a large part of how we develop.

l Be generous. Narrow-minded and stingy people are everywhere, including in business management. It is just that they influence so many people when they also are decision-makers. I think all of us need an occasional self-reminder to let the inconsequential imperfections just flow by without too much fanfare and to take on slightly over-large glasses when you are assessing what’s good and bad.

A generous environment spurs motivation, stinginess just does not. I feel this personally. If a management is stingy towards me, I’m stingy in return. If a management is generous towards me, I’m generous back. Simple but powerful psychology basics.

·Be supportive. As a manager you are put in place not just to direct but to support. Think about it: as a manager you don’t sell or produce very much, but you give direction to those who do. But the manager has been given a privileged role that entails certain powers.

Use that power to support your people. Try it today. No, not tomorrow. Right now. Walk over to your subordinates and ask them for three things you can do to help them in their ambition. You might be surprised.

·Don’t get too involved. You might think you are better than “they” are in solving a certain problem, but “they” will never evolve if you keep doing it for them. True for parents, true for managers.

·Develop your people. Best practice would be a conscious, continuous, constructive habit of trying to develop yourself as a self-aware manager, whilst also developing your subordinates further on their personal progress. This might be best practice, but I don’t think it is general practice and it should be.

·Lead happy meetings. Just because it’s a professional and serious meeting, it doesn’t need to be boring. Yes, the meeting chair has a responsibility to focus the meeting and to drive it to a clear end result, but also to do it in a way that creates involvement, engagement and commitment. A meeting should not draw energy but create energy.

·Focus on results, not activities. Oh so simple, oh so hard. If managers (and boards of directors) focused more on the results, and less on their subordinates’ process and activities (and number of hours?), business life would be a better place for all.

l Be open minded, never defensive. Defensiveness creates office politics and silos and the silent strangling of opposing viewpoints.

Top managers must be open-minded in practice, seek new viewpoints, change their own viewpoints, when called for, and never see a personal attack in a professional argument.

·Walk the walk, talk the talk. Yes, the organisation is hearing what you are saying (so clear and engaging communication is key), but they are watching even more what you are doing as a manager.

And even the smallest action becomes a symbol for how “they” perceive “you” as actually being, versus how you would like ideally to be perceived.

Both the smallest and largest leaders need to be aware not only of their talk but also their walk.

If you are not in business, looking at this list, you might say, “Hey, this is just common sense.” You’re right, it is. But if you are in a company, and you look at your bosses and their bosses, are they really adhering to it?

Are you? If yes, fine … good that it’s being done because it is really just basic common sense and decency.

But you may be one of the many who are subjected to unaware or dysfunctional management.

Maybe it’s time for revisiting and revitalising the basics of management again.

Management might be an immature science, but that should not be an excuse, just an inspiration.

ref: http://biz.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2008/3/17/business/20641272&sec=business