HTNet - A Notepad of Tech, Business, Science and Self Improvement

Many of us experience running our own web sites through blogging. The first steps are pretty straightforward; register with Blogger or WordPress.com and put our thoughts into writing. Then we learn a few tricks like embedding images and videos into our posts.

Later on, we start to explore other blogs for ideas and inspirations; leaving comments along the way. By this time, we will get comments on our blog posts too… and I’m sure it’s exciting to start getting regular readers on our blogs!

What many people discover next though isn’t as exciting as the first few steps. Some got irritated by the lack of control of their free blog hosting service. Some would like to monetize their content through ads but couldn’t do so as the terms and conditions of their free blog hosting provider doesn’t allow it.

So what’s next? Self hosting is where most people move on to… but who can we trust with our web content? How much is it going to cost?

In this post, I’m going to review the offers made by two of Malaysia’s leading web hosting provider; Exabytes and Shinjiru.

Read the rest of Malaysian Budget Hosting Faceoff: Exabytes vs Shinjiru »

Just found this interesting business news in NYT: IBM Will Reportedly Buy Sun For $7 Billion.

The deal, if it goes through will undeniably make IBM the powerhouse in the server arena. It will also undeniably cause major headaches in streamlining the two companies’ most identifiable products.

Both IBM and Sun have server grade processors in their stables; namely PowerPC and SPARC.

Similarly in the database arena, IBM has DB2 while Sun acquired MySQL just last year.

Of course both companies offer their own flavour of UNIX in the form of Solaris (by Sun) and AIX (IBM).

It will be very interesting to see how the converging process will be rolled out

Update: Apparently the deal now is as dead as a doornail.

One of the biggest finance news last week was AIG’s bonus payment to its execs to the tune of USD$165 million. Nevermind that AIG was essentially bankrupt if not for the rescue package put up by the White House.

Perhaps these people could learn a few lessons from Google’s top executives Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt who each took home salaries of $1 each in 2008.

Photo Credit: adrants

The economy is in a dreadful state. It’s not hard to convince anyone that this is the obvious fact. This fact has been driving companies and businessmen like me crazy! Almost every step forward you take will be pegged back by two or more steps in reverse.

Every day, you check out your sales stats and you’ll say prayers to the Lord if you break even for the day! Why? Because you know that sales is the life force that drives your business to fight tomorrow’s battle.

And how does one push out more sales? Getting more salespersons is one obvious answer. If only it’s that simple! Here are some of the important things you need to consider when employing a salesman:

• Salary
• Medical benefits
• Marketing kit costs
• Cost of time spent in meetings instead of actually selling your products
• Commissions

I feel you pain! But I suggest that you now take a deep breathe before reading the next sentence.

What if I tell you that I can give you access to more than 250,000 salespeople to sell your products online for under $1000? That’s less than an experienced salesman’s monthly salary!

Read the rest of How To Get Thousands Of Salesmen Without Worrying About Salary »

Photo Credit: Steve Wampler

There’s only two ways you can make money out of something; margin or volume. It’s very rare to be able to sell something that has high margin and at great volume. It’s almost always an extreme on either end, and it applies to everything.

Let’s take Google AdSense as an example, we all know that the high earners come from two categories:

1. Owner of a single (or a few) high paying keywords niche
2. Owner of multiple (some even own thousands) generic low paying niches

And you can drill this down even further into two categories:

1. Single (or a few) high traffic web sites
2. Multiple (tens or hundreds) low traffic sites

And as much as it is annoyingly painful to see a few hundred “Get rich with AdSense” ebooks, online courses and miscellaneous crapware on the topic; they all preach the same thing: Go for margin or volume. And if it’s such an easy thing to do, everybody would be AdSense millionaires now, and Google would be close to non-existence.

But what’s the reality?

Read the rest of How To Really Make Money Online Or Offline »