July 24th, 2008

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2008 HSBC Celebration of Light

The HSBC Celebration of Light (originally known as the Symphony of Fire) is a yearly summer fireworks event. This international pyro-musical fireworks competition has attracted the world’s leading fireworks designers and is seen as a highly prestigious event. The fireworks festival creates an exciting arena where spectators can enjoy each country’s representatives unveil their latest techniques and use the most innovative fireworks materials as they compete to be crowned the winner.

Most people coming to the fireworks on English Bay make it an all day event because of the huge amount of people showing up. You need to get there really early in order to get a good spot to view the show. Fortunately for us, we have a friend who lived in a condo that directly over look the fireworks. The Celebration of Light started with a display by Canada. The USA is up on Saturday and China will take the stage next Wednesday. The Grand Finale, with all countries performing, will be held on Saturday August 2nd.

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Written by John Chow on July 24th, 2008 with no comments.
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7 Things That Iceland Taught Me About Being a Better Entrepreneur

What can a volcanic island being torn apart from 78 earthquakes a week, surrounded by cold violent water, with little or no natural resources except geothermal heat offer the tourist or the entrepreneur? Surprisingly, more than you can imagine. Iceland has something to teach us all.

How can you get a financial return from the cold, choppy waters of the North Atlantic? Get a boat and charge tourists $200 to get wet, get sick and maybe see a whale.

How can you get a financial return on food when most fruits and vegetables are imported? Make puffin a speciality and fish a staple. And, of course, charge $100 for a meal.

How do you get a financial return on a lava field that cannot support vegetation or housing? Easy, hire a bulldozer and make a track for quad and dirt bikes and charge $200 per hour to use it.

How do you get a financial return on the glaciers that cover nearly half the country? Another easy solution: allow tourists to snowmobile over them and charge each person $500.

How do you get people to pay this? Smile and give them the best service that they could ever hope for.

7 things that Iceland taught me about being a better entrepreneur:

- The ability to speak more than one language. Widening your audience increases your marketability.

- Putting the customer’s needs above time issues. An hour making a customer happy can encourage great word of mouth. Don’t make a customer unhappy bad publicity travels a lot faster than good publicity.

- Greeting everyone with a smile and then greeting every request (no matter how many) with a smile. Answer your emails promptly and offer more information and help than is expected. That extra attention is the way a smile can be generated across the internet.

- Every effort is taken to make sure that problems are resolved ensuring the customers satisfaction and therefore keeping the sale. So what if it takes longer and you have to give extra. If the customer is paying than you are the one making money.

- The ability to find a financial solution to every situation. There will always be times when you struggle, but remember successful people treat obstacles as learning experiences and opportunities to look in different directions./

- Widen your focus. If you sell domains why not sell hosting and web design. If the products you sell are similar enough you can tap into your existing market base.

- The Icelandic people are proud of who they are and where they come from. They love their country and want you – the tourist or businessman – to love it too. They pride themselves on the academic standards that everyone achieves and the creative way people are encouraged to express themselves. In Iceland the worse thing you can be is like another person. When developing your website learn from these people and be proud of what you sell, be creative in your approach and above all else be unique.

Written by Michael on July 24th, 2008 with no comments.
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Custom Short URLs with D95

Long URLs can be a major pain in the you-know-what, especially when you are confined to just 140 characters in Twitter. As a result, several new URL shortening services have jumped onto the scene, helping you share your blog posts and other random Internet findings in a much more efficient manner.

When John sent this review request over to my e-mail inbox, I automatically assumed that the D95.com URL shortening website was just like all the others out there. What is it about D95 that will make you choose that service over some of the more established and recognized URL shorteners?

Choose Your Own Shortened URL

Yes, there are a lot of URL shorteners out there. If you make use of a Twitter client like Twhirl, you’re probably pretty familiar with these already. Instead of sending over a URL that takes up the entirety of your 140 characters, it’s much easier to send a link that is only 20-25 characters, right? The thing with most of these services is that the shortened URL is automatically generated. You have no real control.

When you make a short URL with D95, you have the opportunity to define your own shortened URL. Other services follow their main domain with a nonsensical string of letters and numbers. Doesn’t it make more sense to have something like http://d95.com/johnchow? It’s just like the redirects that you may use for affiliate links on your website or blog. This is much more personalized.

Completely Masked URLs Too

The other major D95.com feature that you will not find with most other URL shortening websites is that you are able to completely mask the URL. Normally, when you click through on one of those other shortened URLs, you are redirected to another site with the “real” URL in full display. You can still do this with D95, but it’s also possible to keep the shortened URL in the address bar too.

Here is a screenshot of what happens when you go to http://d95.com/btr. You still get directed over to my blog, but the URL in the address bar stays as the D95 shortened one. This stays true even as you navigate around on my blog, checking out different posts and so on.

As you can imagine, this can be pretty useful for affiliate marketers. I can’t say for sure, but I believe that this URL masking works by using an iframe. That seems like it would be the simplest solution.

User Interface, Advertising, and Expansion

When you go to the main homepage for the D95 URL shortening website, you are immediately offered the very simple user interface for shortening just about any URL that you’d like. The only restriction is that you cannot use D95 for “spamming or illegal purposes.” Go ahead and tread that fine line between affiliate marketing and spamming.

As you can see, you first enter the URL that you would like to see shortened. Next, you can enter the custom URL that you would like to use for the D95 shortened URL. This is based on availability, of course, so I imagine that all the single and double-letter URLs will be snatched up pretty quickly. Third, you can choose either to mask or not mask the URL. There is an optional field for your e-mail, but there is no real incentive to using this.

If you would like to offer the D95 URL shortener on your own blog, you can use this web tool code. This might be handy, but I think that D95 would be better off getting a deal with the Twitterific and Twhirl people so that it can be integrated into those Twitter clients.

I’m also not all too sure how D95 can best monetize its free URL shortening website. As it stands, there is a simple 468×60 Google AdSense banner on the main page and that’s about it. It would not be appropriate to have an interstitial ad for all the redirects, because people would get annoyed with that pretty quickly, opting to use a different service instead. If you have any ideas as to how to make money by shortening URLs, let D95 know through the comments below.

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Written by Michael Kwan on July 24th, 2008 with no comments.
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Top Five Market Leverage Offers

If you’ve entered the John Chow Market Leverage Challenge and you’re wondering what offers to promote, then this video featuring the top five money making offers from ML should help you out.

Market Leverage is one of the very few affiliate networks to do weekly video posts. As a matter of fact, I think they’re the only one that does it. No doubt other affiliate networks will follow. After all, video is the future of the Web. In addition to the weekly top five, the videos feature interviews and tips to increase your income from affiliate marketing. They’re quite entertaining to watch and the production quality is very good.