Grand Hyatt Shanghai - The World’s Tallest Hotel

So far, I’ve shown you how cheap Shanghai is to shop and eat. Now it’s time to show you the “To Get Rich Is Glorious” side. Nothing shows the rise of China more than the Pudong side of Shanghai. A little more than a decade ago, Pudong was nothing but rice padi fields. Today, it’s the heart of the financial district and the most expensive piece of real estate in all of China.

Pudong is home to the world’s tallest hotel. The Grand Hyatt Shanghai starts on the 54th floor of the Jim Mao Tower and goes all the way up to the Cloud 9 bar on floor 87 (world’s tallest bar). It’s one of the best hotels in the world. However, the best does not come cheap.

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Written by John Chow on May 17th, 2008 with no comments.
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Three Ways To Have Fun Again With Your Blog

This post was guest blogged by Ryan L. of ClubBlogger.Com.

Let’s be honest here – there is nothing like the excitement of starting and launching a fresh new blog. Those feelings of being bent on taking over the blogosphere (and the world while you’re at it) are hard to top, and any motivated blogger knows the feeling that I’m talking about. I mean seriously, if you weren’t pumped and motivated, you wouldn’t have started a blog in the first place, right?

Let’s fast forward 3 months. It’s Tuesday night, and up until the last week or so, you’ve been steadily posting at least one new article every day, like all good little bloggers should. Except, tonight, you just can’t muster up the energy to write another post. Traffic is down, RSS subscribers are plummeting, and you’ve simply lost that love and feeling of writing a fresh new helpful post for what loyal readers you have left.

Sound familiar?

It happens to the best of bloggers, and from my personal observations and experience, it seems to peak at that 2-3 month mark. At that critical time in your blogs childhood, you typically aren’t seeing much income, if any, and your readership is on the edge of falling off if you don’t come up with something quick. If you can make it past this dreaded speed bump, your chances of success increase greatly – but if you fail to eat that bowl of motivation soup, you’ll likely slump off to the point where you completely give up.

Right now, at the tremendous rate of new blogs popping up, it’s probably safe to say that quite a few of your reading this are at this very important place in time with your blog, and below, we’ll look at three easy ways that you can start having fun again with your blog. Remember, your blog is your baby! And if you’re really serious about making a difference and actually making a name for yourself, you need to try extra hard to get things moving. If this helps just one blogger, my job is done, and the blogging gods will bless me with good fortune. I hope.

1. Have An Awesome Contest

Look, nothing motivates readers more than a good contest. People simply love free stuff, and they especially like free stuff, if said stuff, is cool stuff. Yes, I just used the word stuff in the same sentence 4 times. Seriously though, a lot of contests out in the blogosphere just aren’t “cool” enough, and that’s where you can capitalize. If you’re really, truly serious about running a successful blog, you’ll have to invest some money along the way to get there (unless you’re John Chow!), and there is no better way to do that then give away a bad ass prize. I’m talking Nintendo Wii’s, fancy IPods, or big chunks of cash. When your prize reaches the $200 level, people get interested. Anything above that and you’re really talking some major publicity. Any contests I’ve held on past blogs at that prize level have given me an awesome return on:

RSS Subscribers
Overall Readers
Traffic
Clicks On Contextual Ads

Above all of that, when you buck up and actually give away something worth talking about, it’s a load of fun for you! Seeing the immediate benefits, such as the aspects listed above, is super motivating, and just may be the weight you need to “tip” your blog over the edge. One big contest can set your blog up for a long time to come – especially if you couple that with good content. Give it a shot, and I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.

2. Network With Peer Bloggers

This doesn’t sound as exciting as number one, but trust me, it is. Here’s what you do: Take about an hour or two and compose a list of your favorite blogs that you routinely read, and start gathering contact information. In some cases you may need to use an email address, and other times you’ll have to use a contact form. Either way, start sending out emails introducing yourself. This is truly an amazing way to network and be friendly with fellow bloggers, and believe me; this can lead to all kinds of great benefits.

When you reach out and initiate conversation with other people in your niche, you can build long lasting relationships, which will lead to links to your articles from them, which leads to more traffic to your blog, which leads to more subscribers, and so on. Just imagine making friends with 30-50 bloggers in your niche. Think of the SEO benefits of having relevant sites linking to you on a regular basis? Although this gratification isn’t as immediate as the contest strategy, it’s an important thing to do if you’re serious about making your blog a success in the long run. Spend a day getting in touch, and it may be the best time investment you’ll ever make for your blog.

3. Become A Master Of (insert subject here)

This one, while it sounds more like homework, is actually another fantastic way to build the long term success of your blog. Just take a minute and think of things that you use for your blog every day: plugins, hacks, social communities such as MyBlogLog or Technorati, Twitter, and countless other programs and tools. Seriously, it doesn’t take more than a week of studying and reading to become an expert on most things Web 2.0 related, and by branding yourself as the “go to” guy or gal on a particular subject can do wonders for your blogs reputation, as well as your own personal reputation. When you master a tool, especially an up and coming one such as Twitter, or Facebook – and then you start writing about it, not only will you have droves of interested and eager learners flocking to your site, but you’ll also have a continuous stream of articles that you can write whenever you feel like it. Personally, I think it’s key to become an expert in a specific subject, as we move further into 2008. In order for your blog to succeed, you need to be known for something, and with all the available things you can specialize in, there’s really no reason you can’t establish yourself as the guru of something. Point being with this one, when you make yourself the pro, you’ll always have people to talk to, you’ll start having fun again because you’ll be guiding people who have questions, and you can also start monetizing your expertise by making niche specific recommendations, and it’s really all down hill from there.

I know this is a long one, and there are other ways you can start having fun again with your blog, but the above three are the ones that really stick out in my mind whenever I need a refresher or a boost of confidence. If you’re super motivated about making a success out of your blog, then do two of the above or even better, try all three! I think most experienced bloggers would agree that investing in your blog, whether it be in the form of money or time, can be very rewarding in the short and long term, and when your blog is on the fast track to success, that’s when you have the real fun.

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Written by John Chow on May 16th, 2008 with no comments.
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Having a Korean Lunch in Shanghai

They say when in Rome, do as the Romans do. However, Shanghai is not Rome and having Shanghai food everyday isn’t my idea of culture. We’ve been trying a lot of different restaurants during our stay in Shanghai. With a population of 20 million people, there are thousands upon thousands of restaurants one can try. There are even entire city blocks with nothing but restaurants on them.

That is how we ended up at the Korean BBQ House. It was just one of the restaurants along a restaurant roll. The Chinese name for the place isn’t Korean BBQ House but that’s what it said on the English menu so that’s what I’m going to call it. The food was comparable to the Korean BBQ restaurants back home. The main different is the price and the service. In Shanghai, they have a girl cook the food for you at your table. In Canada, you cook it yourself. As for price. Lunch for 10 came to 550RMB ($78) including drinks. Wish I can get that at home.

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Written by John Chow on May 16th, 2008 with no comments.
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Choose Today to Procrastinate or Succeed

This post was guest blogged by David of http://moneyning.com.

Procrastination is the root cause of many problems. If we give ourselves the chance, we can probably find many excuses not to do a certain thing. Popular excuses include “I will do it later” or “I know it’s important but I don’t have the time right now”. Take John Chow’s call for guest post for instance. We all know it’s beneficial to submit a guest post on an ultra popular blog like JohnChow.com but most of us will put it off and end up missing the chance to be considered either because we never emailed one over or was too late.

Let’s think about this for a minute. Instead of writing a post that will generate a bit of buzz and increase our credibility, we end up not submitting by being lazy. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no saint because I procrastinate also. I almost didn’t submit a post either, as excuses like “I would waste my efforts if John doesn’t get the email” or “what if it’s not good enough and it doesn’t get posted” were running across my brain before I started writing.

Luckily, I did write it because it got published. I will be enjoying the traffic while the rest of the procrastinators will be thinking about the “what ifs”.

Of course, this is just one small example but procrastination affects all of us in so many other ways. From contributing to our retirement accounts to starting to make money online, all we needed to do is get off our lazy buds and do something to have a profound effect in our lives.

All we need is that “can do” attitude that’s in all of us. The mindset that we can figure things out once we get into it. Don’t worry that we don’t know anything because no one else knew everything at the beginning either. Take comfort that the most successful people are not always the smartest people, but the ones that take action. So start now, go create that website and have fun. With passion and the “can do” attitude, knowledge will be learned and results will follow.

We all know what John would be missing if he waited and never started his blog. $30k a month and counting, that’s all.

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Written by John Chow on May 16th, 2008 with no comments.
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Hunting Pandas At The Shanghai Zoo

Today, we headed to the Shanghai Zoo to look for any pandas that may have survived the great rock fight of China. The Shanghai Zoo is an order of magnitude times bigger than the zoo back home at Stanley Park. The zoo is so big that they have cars to drive people from one exhibit to the next.

The Shanghai Zoo is home to hundreds of animals. Pretty much every animal you can think of is here. However, there was only one animal I was interested in. After all, we have unfinished business.

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Written by John Chow on May 15th, 2008 with no comments.
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Empower Your Children To Out-Earn Their Professors

This post was guest blogged by Barbara Ling .

It had to happen. There I was, the calm, cool, self-contained entrepreneur who was happily building several sites simultaneously, writing my profitable blog posts and dashing off the “Why My Son Should Be In Mr. Wrangler’s 2nd Grade Class” when Honorable Eldest Daughter gently removed my brimming coffeecup from the chair, sat down and said in all seriousness, “Mom! Don’t you think I DESERVE an iPhone?”

Figuring that the “Deer in the Headlights” look didn’t quite convey my bemusement, I responded, “Of course you do! And I will be the first person in line to cheer you on when you’ve earned the money to buy it!”

Not being daunted in the least (my kids have the persistence of a Twitterholic who has just spied the latest and greatest Twitter App), she assumed the long-suffering persona of Bambi and assured me that “Oh mom, my allowance doesn’t cover an iPhone!”

Ah hah! Thought I. Here’s a chance to stop the conversation in its tracks! Cleverly pretending to muse upon her woes, I finally said, “Well you know, you can always empower yourself (Mom is big on
empowering, you see, it frees her from being blamed for things like “Gosh Mom, you forgot to set my alarm clock and now I’ve missed finishing (or even starting) my 17 page essay that’s due today!”) and make money on the Internet! Heck, I’ll even walk you through every single step required.” I figured the concept of “using the Internet NOT for watching anime” would be soul-searingly devastating enough she’d back down and let me resume my work.

Oddly enough, she rose to the challenge…and thus was born a brand-spanking new entrepreneur.

And here’s how I did it. If you have children capable of working online, this could be quite profitable for you too!

Step 1.) Consider the source.

Sure, while it’s easy to tell your kids, “Hey kid, go research a targeted audience! Find out the problems that are craving solutions! Write an ebook that sells the solutions! Sell sell sell!”….in reality, that’s not optimal at all. You want their first entrepreneurial adventure to be a success - for that to happen it has to:

Engage their interest
Be easy to do
Be easy to monetize

I settled on blogging for the above reasons. You can blog about anything online, it’s easier than melting ice cream in an oven to find content on a daily basis…AND, due to eBay, it’s easy to monetize as well.

Step 2.) Decide on the project and choose the look/feel

For the reasons stated above, my daughter decided to blog about something she loves - Advanced Calculus and Differential Equations. Okay, no, that’s her mom. She’s blogging about The Sims 2 and The Sims 3 instead.

To blog, one needs a domain name and hosting. GoDaddy offers them cheap, and you can get free hosting at places like http://www.doteasy.com . Sure, she could have put her blog on the Wordpress.com site, but I firmly believe if you’re going to make money, you want to be professional about it.

For the look and feel, I showed her how to research SEO-optimized themes to help with search engine visibility. ‘Course, she was sold instead on how ‘engaging’ a visual theme was. Can’t win ‘em all.

Step 3.) Sign up kid for eBay, Amazon, CJ and Adsense affiliate programs.

These are by far the easiest way to monetize blogs. As you can see on eBay, there are hundreds of Sims items for sale. Amazon.com also offers great deals as well! And don’t forget about t-shirts, coffee cups, other SIM-related games, virtual reality, Second Life, etc.

In almost all cases, you’ll find the same thing regarding your child’s chosen niche as well.

Step 4.) Add the above affiliate programs to the blog template

Many SEO-optimized blogs are also adsense-optimized as well. It only takes a few line-tweakies to change the Adsense to eBay code to Amazon code and back again!

Step 5.) Install the following plugins

Blogs grow by word of mouth, so make it easy for your kid’s blog readership to increase. Add social networking plugins, CommentLuv, and especially anti-spam plugins like BadBehavior, Angsuman’s Referrer Bouncer, Simple Trackback Validation, and Spam Karma. This will help make it easy for people to tell friends about the content they find.

Step 6.) Teach your kid to install a Feedreader and find 20+ related feeds

Blog posts don’t need to be fresh and unique every day - your kid can also pick up on current niche-related news and write his or her impressions about it. Go to Google News and set up a keyword alert, and then proactively search at both Technorati and Boardreader for targeted blogs in the same niche. Have your kid add those feeds to the feedreader.

Step 7.) Blog and Network!

Here’s where your kid starts to actually post. I recommend posting at least once a day until the search engines start to pick it up (my posts are now indexed generally within 10 minutes of publising them).

Once the first posting is complete, encourage your kid to comment at other niche blogs so as to generate a backlink to their personal blog. The more traffic generated and the more visitors that persue the site… the greater the chance of affiliate earnings.

Now, what else can your child blog about? How about targeted niche products on Amazon.com, complete with their affiliate link? Or they can search on Clickbank for niche products (did you know there’s over 26 Clickbank products for World of Warcraft?), contact the authors and ask for a free copy to review (I did that with my World of Warcraft blog). Once reviewed, they can include a direct link to the product with their hoplink used as the URL.

Once they’re comfortable with the whole online adventure, they can add in an optin autoresponder, write up a free report, create an ebook and do any of the other activities we consider normal for
making money online.

The above are some ways you can start your child on the road to making money on the Internet. But! Before you do this, you MUST educate him or her about predators online…and how they must NEVER EVER EVER give out their email addresses, real names, addresses and the like. ‘Matter of fact, I’d recommend having all site email be sent to you first so you can clear out all the porn and other undesirable ickness that comes with the territory.

More resources for kids online safety include:

Kids are no longer restricted to lemonaide stands and Girl Scout Cookies to earn money - give them the self-confidence (and profits!) that come from building, maintaining and growing a world class site. The benefits they’ll receive will far encompass more than mere monetary satisfaction…for a long long time in the future as well.

Written by John Chow on May 15th, 2008 with no comments.
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Shopping in Shanghai

I decided to hit up a regular supermarket to get an idea on what prices are like for normal everyday stuff. Because 99.9% of everything is made in China, prices are generally less expensive here than back home in Canada. Add in the 7 to 1 exchange rate between the Canadian dollar and the Chinise RMB and the prices start to look ridiculous sometimes.

For example, our taxi ride to the Shanghai zoo cost just $3.50. If this was back in Canada, the same ride would have cost $25 plus tip. There is no tipping in China. And then there was the lunch that cost me $1.28. Find out what you get for that by watching the video below.

One thing for sure, if you can cover your housing cost, you can live like a king here on the average Canadian income. That’s something worth thinking about for people living the dot com lifestyle. Because we can work from anywhere in the world, we can select a place where the cost of living is so low, we can live high on the hog. However, the best method is to make so much money that you can live high on the hog in any country.

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Written by John Chow on May 15th, 2008 with no comments.
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Make Your Blog Something To Be Proud Of

This post was guest blogged by Greg Walker of New Poker Affiliate.

Having the title of ‘webmaster’ or ‘Internet marketer’ is something that is going to be of interest to a lot of people. Such is the case that as a webmaster, it’s not uncommon to find friends and family intrigued by your line of work and asking questions to find out more about what you are doing for money… everyone wants to know how to make more money these days. As these conservations progress, you will eventually bump into to question: “Can I take a look at your website(s)?”

Now lets imagine for a second that you are having a real life conversation with someone and you have just ran into this question… how does it make you feel? Are you chomping at the bit to find the nearest computer and show them your site? Or are you feeling a little sheepish and searching furiously through the ‘excuses’ folder in your head to try and avoid showing them your site? The reaction to this simple question will often highlight a lot about your focus as a webmaster.

In my opinion, making a website to be proud of should be the number one goal for any aspiring or current webmaster. I’m not going to lie and say that I’m not driven to work hard to make more and more money each month, but I see the focus of making a website that I am proud of as an essential stepping stone on my way to increasing earnings from my online endeavours, and so should you.

The key point I am trying to put across in this article is that if you can make a website that you are proud of, the chances are your site is going to be successful.

If you are thrilled to show other people your work when asked, it shows that you have taken pride in what you have created, and this will be apparent in the final results of your endeavours. Web browsers love websites that are full of useful content and information, and so if you are making websites to the best of your ability there is little doubt that your visitors will appreciate your efforts, and your site will naturally become more popular (and more profitable if you know what to do with the traffic).

However, if your main focus is to just make money whichever way you can, you are like to be the person that cuts corners looking for the easy way to make money. It’s always easy to spot the people that create sites with the intention of making money before they create something resourceful, and they rarely amount to anything. The people that set out to try and make money with as little effort as possible are doomed to failure from the start.

On the other hand however, if you aspire to create a solid resource that visitors can benefit from, you will have a site that will stick around for a long time, making you money for months and even years to come.

As unfortunate as it is, it’s all too easy to forget about the fact that the content you write for your website today could be helping or entertaining someone tomorrow. It’s easy to just see your visitors as stats rather than real people, and not even realise that the work you have put into your site has proven to be beneficial in some way. But if you can constantly try and remind yourself that the content you are writing or the work you are doing on your site is building a resource that is accessible to people across the world, it makes it far easier to make a website to be proud of.

Each blog post, article, diagram, image, video, design, guide you create is a permanent resource that will help or entertain someone some day.

You can work incredibly hard writing useful content and developing great sites that attract thousands of visitors each month, yet never receive a simple “thank you” for your troubles. However, for those lucky few, that little “thank you for your website, it really helped” email from time to time never fails to put a smile on your face, and a drive to continue to better your site for the next thankful visitor.

Always look to make the best website you can so that you can make yourself feel proud of your achievements at the end of the day. Your profits and rewards may not be instant, but I can guarantee that you work will not be going unnoticed. Take pride in your work, and let your efforts show up in your earnings in months to come.

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Written by John Chow on May 14th, 2008 with no comments.
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The Shanghai Transrapid

We’ve arrived safe and sound in Shanghai. The flight took 12 hours and was pretty uneventful. There is a 15 hour time difference between Vancouver and Shanghai. It’s pretty easy to adjust to if you don’t sleep on the plane. We landed at 5PM Shanghai time (2AM Vancouver time) and just stayed up until 9PM and went to bed and got up at 6AM. Feels like I’m back on normal time now.

We got in from the Shanghai airport via the Shanghai Transrapid. The Transrapid is one of the fastest trains in the world. It has a top speed of 430KM/H and can blast passengers from the Shanghai airport to the city of Shanghai in just 12 minutes. By comparison, if you were to take a car or bus, you can expect the trip to last a full hour. Time is money, right? Enjoy the video.

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Written by John Chow on May 14th, 2008 with no comments.
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Kontera Releases Offcial Wordpress Plugin

The folks over at Kontera has released an official Wordpress plugin. This was something I discussed at length with Kontera during my dinner with them in Ad Tech.

Unlike my TTZ Media network, the installation of the Kontera ad codes requires a user to do more than just copy and past a few lines of text. You’ll need a fair understand of HTML and FTP access to your blog. That’s all changed with the release of the new Plugin. Some of the features include.

Add the ContentLink tag to all your pages in one click
Block ContentLink ads from appearing on particular posts or categories
Determine when ContentLink ads will begin appearing on new posts- you can choose to block ads for a particular number of days
Display ContentLinks only on posts
Display ContentLinks only on comments
Change ContentLinks color

Installation of the plugin is pretty straightforward - just upload to your Wordpress plugins folder and then activate it. Then it’s just a matter of inserting your publisher ID and deciding where you want to context link to show up.

Download WordPress Plugin for WordPress 2.5
Download WordPress Plugin for WordPress 2.0
Sign up for Kontera Contentlink

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