While doing managing my E-Alchemists business, i had a hard time to keep up many different projects. I always had to refer back to my emails, document etc to follow. This make me very fed up at one point of time and i decided to use a project management tool. I came up with the follow requirement that is best for me in my situation.

• It must be a web based application
• Able to access via Android or apple devices
• Can have monthly fees but free is of cause the best
• Able to invite others outside my organisation or customers

I had tested the following project management tools

Microsoft project : only able to use with a laptop, no online version and is expensive

Basecamp: is a great tool and in my point of view is expensive and have limited project if you are on a tight budget.

Trello: Trello is the only one I love and use to run everything we do. Through a very simple drag-and-drop, Boards and Cards system, Trello let’s you collaborate, communicate and monitor workflow with staff, outsourcers, customers – the works. I can’t speak highly enough of it and is the best now i am using and is FREE. Check out Trello and I hope it helps make your business more efficient.

 Check out this Trello video

You can also check the following post on how to use trello

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/the-must-have-project-management-tool-trello

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/using-trello-for-seo-success

I had not been travelling for past 2 years since my wife was pregnant our first 1 kid Cassandra. This trip to Manila was actually planned with the company i am working for currently. It was the Asia Pacific IT Summit, actually is a gathering of all the IT support from different countries to come together to build bonding and of cause to learn from each other. It was also the first time i am in Manila a country where by a lot of MNC company set up their regional DATA Center and office.

Since it was my first trip and it also my first time travelling alone. A bit excited and also scare, but everything went pretty well except when i am going home the airport was terrible! A few things i learned from this trip. I get to learn a lot of different skill set of managing a GLOBAL IT infra. It also the first time i talk to a French and German guys! It WAS awesome talking to them ! Different countries have different style of managing their IT infra, it was my first time to be able to talk to so many guys from Asia pacific countries at one go! Good trip… Learn a lot , play a lot and sleep a lot.

Property Trend In Manila

I had friends who told me to invest in Philippines property and it only cost about $70k to own a studio apartment in the city area. While i am at Manila, i saw a lot of construction of high end condo and it was an eye opening for me because from what i saw is a huge opportunity out there! One thing that concern me is the Philippines infrastructure, it was quite bad actually, but i believe they will improve over the years! I had a great trip and now i am going for my annual national service for 10 days.. see you soon !

When i just started my business, i am using google docs spreadsheet to keep track of all my transaction example my business IN & OUT. There many limitation of what spreadsheet can do, example it can’t issue invoice, track sales, pay attention to overdue invoices, track spending on each service. For accounting you will have a hard time using spreadsheet because there is a lot of data you need to keep in manually. For financial report is even worse! Unless you are super good in excel or you are financial student   that is able to do it in excel or google doc spreadsheet.

If you are like me who is not good in NUMBERS then your business is in trouble! I often neglect the IN & OUT in my first year of business, i always though that by just focusing on bringing in the revenue and the company will be safe! I AM TOTALLY WRONG! In a business is not about closing more sales, you need to watch out your business expenses and where you are spending. For me like a lazy person i don’t really keep track and my business suffered.

For invoicing i am using excel to create and keep track. My business suffered because my way of doing bookkeeping is too manual and often i lose track which customers did pay me and which customers did not.

So i decided to look for an accounting software with the below requirements

• It must be an ONLINE business accounting software
• Need to have Multi user function
• Able to issue online invoice
• Able to keep track expenses and break down into different categories
• Able to keep track of overdue invoices
• Able to generate balance sheet report
• Able to generate report on which business unit bring in the most money
• My budget is about $10 USD per month

I shortlist the below online business accounting software while searching for a solution

• Xero www.xero.com (PAID)
• Fresh Books www.freshbooks.com (PAID)
• Paypal invoicing www.paypal.com (PAID)
• Wave www.waveapps.com (FREE)

Why i selected WAVE

• Is free
• User friendly
• Able to generate many different kind of reports
• Is online and multi user function
• Online invoicing and able to keep track who paid and who is not
• You can tweak the software to your liking example creating the categories you want.

So i decided to manually key in all the PAST DATA, it was a pain for my partner to do it. After keying all the DATA, i was SHOCKED!

Last year i generated 50k revenue for the company without me notice it! Best part now i can easily keep track of which customers owe me money and which are not.

After 3 months of using WAVE

I am now able to track my expenses easily with the report generate from WAVE. I collected money on time from my customers because i now able to keep track. For sales, i am able to see how much revenues generated each month, how much money we collected and the expenses. This is a very important function because i am now able to do budgeting according to our cashflow . A big plus point for WAVE. Check out now !

I was trying to make my SEO analysis to make it more process and document down all the tools i am using, while searching on the internet to look for a template i saw this Annie Cushing Hundreds of Tools For Marketers google docs. The docs broke down by task instead of tools and below is how she organised

The spreadsheet is broken into 14 categories:

• SEO Analysis
• Domain
• Links
• Keyword
• Competitive Analysis
• Tracking
• Social Media
• Spam/Hacking
• Structured Markup
• Developer
• Data Visualization Tools
• Data Sources
• Infographic Submission Sites
• Misc Efficiency Tools

Most of the tools that we use for SEO and all inside.

Link to the google doc

Enjoy!

I know this is a late post, but i had finally finished setting my goal after Chinese new year. Below are the key point of my GOAL in 2013

• Company revenue to cross $100000 mark
• New skill CPA or Email Marketing (aka list building)
• 1 more passive income, i intend to learn CPA or list building to build up this portion
• Turn e-alchemists.com into e-commerce for user to purchase services from my company ( not an easy task )
• Setup up web hosting business unit
• 1 oversea trip with my family
• Spend at least 2 hours quality time daily with my family

Company Revenue Cross $100k

Last year alone i managed to cross $50k by myself, this year with a group of team i should be able to cross 100k. I managed to stabilize the web development business unit last year. The system is up and should be able to run automatically. I bang a lot of wall in order to make this business unit stabilize, but i am glad that is done! With our new business unit web hosting, we will be focusing on 3 core services. SEO Service, Web development and Web Hosting.

New Skill CPA or List Building

I had long heard about good things about CPA and list building, my main focus to learn this new skill is because i wanted to build up my traffic method. Not an easy task but i had already plan and will be doing a lot of reading and research. I even think of finding a mentor to speed up the process. Another reason to choose either 1 skill is because i want to build up something more automatic passive income!

E-Alchemists.com E-commerce

Setting up the web hosting unit meaning people had to purchase web hosting online, hence i will be turning the current website into E-commerce. So that is more automated, i am still doing manually now. Tough job!

Quality time

I intend to spend at least 2 hrs quality time with my family, having a child in the family it is very important you spend time with you child. They grew up so fast and i don’t want to miss any anything, example their first taste of solid food, their first flip etc.

Wish me luck~~~~~

]]> http://joseph-ho.com/my-goal-2013/feed/ 0 http://joseph-ho.com/google-webmaster-how-do-i-know-which-links-to-remove-when-i-get-an-unnatural-links-message/ http://joseph-ho.com/google-webmaster-how-do-i-know-which-links-to-remove-when-i-get-an-unnatural-links-message/#comments Tue, 12 Feb 2013 13:18:00 +0000 Joseph Ho http://joseph-ho.com/?p=2293

I set my GOALS in 2012 as below

• Conduct 2 workshops
• Google analytic certification (fail to achieve)
• Google ad words certification (fail to achieve)
• Moving into new house
• Welcome my daughter that came into my world
• Form a team in E-Alchemists
• Grow at least 50% of E-Alchemists business
• Quit my full time job (i changed job instead)
• 50 Amazon sites to generate passive income (i drop this project)

Now let us take a look at my 2012 milestones

• Conducted 10 workshops and trained more than 250 people in my Secrets to Website Creation and Page 1 Ranking Workshop
• Become a dad on 15 August 2012
• Move into our new HOME
• Found a new job with a better salary and more flexible so that i can have more time on E-Alchemists
• Generated 50K revenue for E-Alchemists (not bad for a one man show)
• Form a team and found a trusted partner with the same vision as me
• Survived my 2nd year of my business

As you can see my milestones above, the most happiest milestone is to welcome my daughter Cassandra to my life together with my wife. Why i said i survived my 2nd year of business? In the past 5 years of my life since 2006, i had closed 8 start up businesses. All 8 start up business closed within 1 year. 2013 will be my 3rd year in E-Alchemists business, usually the first year is all about surviving and also come up with the process, operation and etc. 2nd year is all about GROWTH and maintaining the first year customers. 3rd year will be still GROWTH and maintaining first and second year customers.

I failed to achieve my certification in Google analytic and ad words, i must admit i am lazy! Hence i need to work on this in 2013. I had also FAILED to quit my full time job, i find it hard to quit without a stable income to maintain the family. I had also drop my Amazon projects as i wanted to focus more on E-Alchemist. Indeed by focusing more on E-Alchemists i am able to generate 50k revenue for the year of 2012 which is something not bad for a one man show.

With all these i had ended my 2012 journey! Welcome 2013 and happy new year everyone!

1) Always use less words in your presentation slides.

My first workshop i conducted was last year 2011 June. At that time my presentation slides were FULL OF WORDS and the advise given by Mr Choo Koon Lip, Founder of Forex Asia Academy was to use less words and use more pictures. This allow me to talk more during the workshop. If your presentation are full of words, you will have less people listening to you during the workshop.

2) Always intro yourself and the company

One of the most important lesson I made during the workshop is I intro myself and the company less than 1 min. This mistake I made end up a lot of questions been ask about me and the company. Always give a detail introduction of yourself and the company, this will establish yourself as an expert in that topic.

3) Always ask questions

I noticed if you ask question to the audience and make them participate more during the workshop will create a very good ice breaking and it won’t be so boring throughout the session. Ask question will make them more curious and getting more attention from them. This will make your workshop easier and you have won’t see people falling a sleep.

4) Break every 45 mins

Most people attention can only last for 45 mins! If you are conducting a workshop that lasted for 5 hours like mine, i find it better to give them a toilet break of 5 mins for every 45 mins or 1 hour. This will make them feel refresh and re-gain back their attention.

5) Don’t bother about pronouncing wrong words

I always pronounce the wrong English word during the workshop. However i usually ignore and continue my workshop. What i noticed that, it will be good to use simple english for everyone to understand. Also if you trying to explain a technical term, do use some lay man term for them to easy to understand.

6) Put name card on the registration counter

I noticed a lot of people don’t take my name card during the registration process. After the workshop they usually go back to the registration counter to take my name card before they go. If you provide valuable content to them, they will always want to remember you. For your information i closed quite a number of sales after workshop using this step.

7) Honestly tell your audience if you face technical issue

A lot of thing could happen during the workshop. Example projector not working or laptop stop working. Don’t be stress! Tell them honestly and they will understand. Also announce lunch or toilet break if you face this situation. Rather than they sit down and they wait for you. You might as well use this chance to let them go for a break and when they are back they will have 100% attention.

8) Always duplicate your presentation file

Like i said, a lot of thing could happened. ALWAYS duplicate your presentation material on a thumb drive or email. TRUST me this will save you someday.

9) Sleep early before the day of the workshop

I usually sleep very early before the day of the workshop. This will make me more alert the next morning, i did tried sleeping very late before the day of the workshop. I will end up like a zombie without giving my 100% to the audience.

10) Be yourself

During the presentation always be yourself! This is the last lesson i had learnt and is the most important one. Is useless to be someone else which might not be your style. Just be yourself and invent your own presentation style !