Darren Chow Personal Blog

It’s rare that I start a blog post with a blog title that contains zero keywords about article submission and Internet marketing.

You may not be familiar with the “red packet” that you see in the title. Well, let me explain.

Tomorrow is the New Year of the Lunar Calendar. In other words, according to the Chinese Calendar, tomorrow is the first day of the New Year. And all Chinese around the world celebrate this special occasion. If you happen to find yourself in a Chinese setting in the next 2 days, I’m sure you will enjoy the festive cheer -- it’s infectious!

During the New Year, it is Chinese custom to give away red packets. The red packets (also known as “ang bao” in Chinese) are meant to symbolize wealth and prosperity. Married couples are supposed to give away red packets to those who are still single -- mostly children, teenagers, and young adults.

When someone receives a red packet, he or she is usually delighted. There are two reasons for this. Of course, anyone would be happy to be blessed with wealth and prosperity by someone else. But there is another reason -- the red packets contain cash!

The amount of cash in each red packet is not as significant as the thought and intention that goes behind giving the giver. If you are in the privileged position to give away red packets, the amount of cash in the packet may range from $2 to $100. Obviously, you want to give larger amounts to those who are special to you.

For those who are in financial hardship, any amount will do.

Actually, I think that the recipient of the red packet shouldn’t focus too much on how much cash is in the packet. Reason being, all “ang baos” contain an infinite amount of money.

How can that possibly be true?

Well, I’m going to show you.

Today, regardless of whether you are Chinese or not, or whether you are from the States, the UK, Canada, India, etc…I’m going to give you a big virtual “ang bao”. Wealth and prosperity is for everyone.

Here it is.

Okay, this red packet looks a little small. But don’t underestimate the size of the packet. Do you know how much cash this red packet contains?

Infinite.

Yes, it’s true. I’m going to show you why this is true in a moment.

But before we get to the good stuff, let’s get some quick updates out of the way.

A few weeks ago, I invited a few people to try out the blog commenting service that I was developing. Everything turned out well, and here are some of the results.

Niche: Health/Medical -- Approval Rate: 2 / 18 (11.11%)

Niche: Travel -- Approval Rate: 7 / 18 (38.89%)

Niche: Home Improvement -- Approval Rate: 8 / 21 (38.10%)

Niche: Travel (accommodation) -- Approval Rate: 7 / 18 (38.89%)

Niche: Home Improvement -- Approval Rate: 5 / 18 (27.78%)

The results are pretty encouraging. So I’m going to declare the service to be officially launched. If you are interested to learn more about how this works, you can check out the previous blog commenting test results, or visit the commenting service website directly.

Okay, I’m glad that we got that out of the way. Now, for the fun stuff.

As mentioned, I’m going to show you why this virtual “ang bao” that I gave to you contains infinite wealth.

First, you must understand how wealth creation works.

Take a look around you. Everything physical item that you see is a form of product. So how did these products come about? They didn’t just drop from the sky.

All physical items that you see around you right now, began as an idea in someone’s head. I’m sure you’ll agree with me on that. And this idea, when carried out, was turned into a physical product, which you bought, and that’s how the item landed right next to you.

Now what had that got to do with you getting rich? Well, in the process that I just described above, somebody did get rich. But that person is not you. You bought the product, which meant that you handed money to someone else. So the money landed somewhere, with someone else. Somebody did receive money for executing (I’ll discuss more about execution later on) in the process. This person (and those who took part in the various business transactions) all received money for their effort. They got richer.

I hope you are still paying attention here. The process that I’ve described sounded very simple. In fact, it sounded so simple that most people would dismiss it immediately as some “self improvement” or “get rich quick” mambo jumbo. If that happens, then I must say it’s rather unfortunate. You see, the process of wealth creation is supposed to be simple. Human beings make it complicated.

The process is so important, that I think I’m going to repeat it here.

Inspiration => Ideas => Execution => Physical manifestation of ideas => Wealth

If you understand this concept, then you will begin to see that wealth eluded many people because they get stuck somewhere along the process. Where? From my own observations, they get stuck in the IDEA stage.

I’m sure you yourself have been the recipient of tons of ideas, or you have met people with many ideas, but wealth still eluded them. How did that happen?

The fault doesn’t lie with ideas. It’s always a good thing to have ideas. Most people get stuck at the “execution” (the doing) phase. Or worse, some people never get to the execution phase. They have waves and waves of ideas coming to them and they do nothing about them.

Their favorite excuse? “Nah, it’s not going to work.”

That is another way of saying that they don’t believe their ideas will work. Somehow, they have managed to convince themselves that their ideas will fail,  even before they try. Sadly, they have indeed failed -- they have failed themselves by not doing anything with their ideas.

Then there are those who dismiss ideas because they judge the ideas. When an idea comes to them, they tell themselves that it’s a bad idea, so that justifies not doing anything about the ideas.

For these people, the road to infinite wealth lies in transforming their current perspective of ideas. What they think they know about ideas have to change. How do we achieve that?

First, realize that there is no such thing as “good” and “bad” ideas. Good and bad are relative -- they mean different things to different people. The assumption that the idea is bad can be erroneous in the first place. And that’s like giving an idea the death sentence.

So don’t go telling yourself an idea is good or an idea is bad. Ever encountered good ideas that turned out to be a not-so-good idea? Or ever experienced a bad idea that turned out to be a blessing in disguise? I’m sure that happened to everyone at some point. And it’s happening because we label ideas as “good” and “bad”.

To avoid this trap, we must first stop labeling our ideas as “good” or “bad”. Instead of thinking of whether ideas are good or bad, start thinking of whether the ideas work or don’t work.

In other words…

There are no good and bad ideas. There are only ideas that work and don’t work.

- Darren Chow

If you have given some thought about evolution, you know this to be true. Evolution just create, and the creations that work well in the environment continue to thrive. Evolution doesn’t “think” whether something is good or bad before creating. Only human beings do that.

As a human being, how do we know whether an idea will work or not work?

This depends on many factors. Knowledge, life experience, reasoning ability, analysis ability, all plays a part in arriving at the right conclusion.

The problem is, many people are having trouble identifying ideas that work! Why is that so? The answer is simple.

Very often, we don’t identify ideas that work because we place most (if not all) of our attention on ideas that don’t work.

- Darren Chow

How many times have you attended a meeting to discuss about things that don’t work? Then everyone is just trying to fix this and fix that.

My recommendation? Instead of running back and forth trying to fix everything, just focus on the things that do work, and then do it better!

You find that the more you execute, the more experience you have. The more experience you have, the better you become at identifying ideas that do work. Do you know what that means?

That means even if you have no clue about whether an idea is going to work or not, go DO SOMETHING about it!

Of course, you have to be smart about execution. For example, if you are unsure whether an idea will take off or not, it’s wiser to test small first instead of plonking down thousands of investment dollars in the project. Only those with an insatiable ego will do that. That’s the work of a fool, not an entrepreneur. So be wise about how you use your resources.

You can make an infinite amount of money just by focusing on what works. Amazing isn’t it?

Talking about infinite, do you now understand why you are born infinitely rich?

If you don’t, let me explain further. From the above, I hope you can now see that wealth comes from ideas. Then I pose you this question -- Are ideas finite?

You know, within you, that you have an infinite number of ideas. The only resource that is finite is time. So the worse sin you can ever commit, is to waste your most valuable resource -- TIME.

Want more money? Sure, no problem. Just complete the cycle by executing the ideas you have, and then focusing on what works.

Sounds simple? In words, everything is simple. But be mindful that you will encounter formidable challenges along the way. In fact, I guarantee you that the moment you start doing something about your ideas, some problem will come up to stop you.

Now what are you going to do about the problems you face?

At the most basic level, every challenge you face is a test of your faith. Do you waver under tough situations? Or do you steel your will and forge ahead? I certainly wish you choose to be the latter, for those with strong faith will have a higher chance of success.

Let me say this again -- the road to wealth is not supposed to be that easy. If it is, then there is nothing separating the successful from the unsuccessful.

Do you realize what I have just given to you?

I have just given to you the key to unlock the riches that have been lying dormant within you. Yes, infinite wealth.

The “ang bao” that I had just given had to be a virtual one, for no physical red packet can hold the amount of wealth that you already own.

I hope you like this virtual “ang bao” that I had just given to you -- nobody had ever done that before

After the lunar New Year, I have another new and exciting service that will help grow your business -- video marketing. (Yes, it’s finally coming!)

I thought about developing this service for ages, but haven’t figured out how to overcome some of the challenges that stood in the way. Now I think I’ve got it. It’s going to be a 100% original service that is simple to use.

I’ve already done some tests during the past few weeks, and here is a video that I’ve created and posted on numerous popular video sites. It’s about how to format articles properly for higher approval rates. I’ve leave you to enjoy the video….

And of course, let me know what you think by leaving your feedback below. Eh, and no spam please…it’s Chinese New Year you know…

I’ve been designing and testing a new blog commenting service that achieves the following:

Keyword based – Just enter a keyword phrase with each URL that you wish to promote. We will then identify a set of 15 URLs and post comments to these blogs. This means that for every URL that you promote, the blog entries that we post to will be different (i.e. keyword dependent). We avoid the problem of posting to the same blog entries over and over again.

Human written comments – All comments are written by human writers. So that’s 15 comments, for 15 blog entries. All comments are recorded in your account, so you can see the actual comments that we have posted in your account. This is to ensure that we include on-topic comments that are relevant to the post.

URLs recorded – All the blog entries URLs will be recorded in your account, so that you can go back and check if the comments have been approved to gauge the effectiveness of our blog commenting. You can always visit the blogs at a later date to network with the blog owners if you like.

Wouldn’t that be comment spamming?

Please note that if this service is to be launched (if it launches), it wouldn’t be a blog comment spamming service.

A spamming service does the following – use automated software to spam irrelevant comments on hundreds and thousands of blogs. For instance, posting “Good post.” to a thousand blog entries will be considered as spamming.

We don’t do that. We hire human writers to post intelligent comments to blogs that are handpicked (URLs are selected by human beings based on the keywords that you enter). You are also free to network with the blog owners based on the URLs that we have included in your account.

Are the blog URLs DoFollow or NoFollow?

A lot of information has been put out by the Internet marketing community about DoFollow and NoFollow links. The common perception is that the search engines only count DoFollow links. So everyone has been asking for DoFollow blog commenting.

This has been a difficult decision for us because our own tests show that NoFollow links are counted by the search engines as well. How do we know? Well, the links show up in our Webmaster account, and our sites have been ranked (and some have acquired page rank) in the search results.

So rather than go with the flow, we’ve decided to follow what works – participate actively in the blogs, and be rewarded with higher search rankings.

I also noticed that the focus on Dofollow and Nofollow takes the fun out of blog commenting. Blog commenting is never meant solely for SEO purposes. That is why I don’t encourage blog spamming, which arises out of SEO. There has to be a participating element involved, which is why we have chosen human written comments.

Since our test results show that NoFollow links are counted, we are going to go against the flow and include both Dofollow and Nofollow blogs. This may mean an uphill climb for us in terms of marketing, but in the long run, I hope customers can see the value in the work that we do.

Current development stage.

As of now, the prototype of the service has just been developed, but it is far from being a full fledged service. I am able to accomplish all of the above – identify blogs, write comments, and post comments. That’s about it. Right now, that’s good enough as the prototype allows me to test the effectiveness of the service. I can also monitor the approval of the links.

Commercial viability.

I’m having a lot of fun with the prototype, and have yet to decide whether to release it as a service or not. Well, the purpose of this blog entry is to determine the commercial viability of this service. Although I’m convinced that the service will benefit me, I’m not sure if you are convinced as well.

You should stop reading the rest of this post…

• If you are looking for a blog spamming service that will spam hundreds of blogs with irrelevant comments, then obviously this service isn’t for you.
• If you are only looking for high page rank DoFollow blog posts with 100% approval rate.
• If you have a lot of time on your hands and would like to post comments on your own.

Read on if you are looking to hire someone to represent your Company and participate in high quality blogs…

The key challenge when developing this service is to have intelligent blog comments that are relevant and on-topic. As it stands now, there is no software in the market that can read a blog post and then generate an intelligent comment that’s on-topic. So comments will have to be written by a human writer.

To engage a human writer means there is a cost involved. To get a person to sit down, read the blog post, and then write something intelligent can be time consuming. We can hire someone to do that, but how much are we going to pay that person?

So if you are using our blog commenting service, it’s as if you are hiring our staff to post blog comments on your behalf. Of course, we do all the dirty work. All you have to do is to place orders with us.

After doing our sums, we realize that for us to offer this as a commercial service, we have to charge at least $30 for each URL that we promote.

That means for $30, we will identify 15 blog posts that allows blog commenting, and post 15 unique comments on your behalf.

The problem is, I’m not sure if you will find such a deal to be attractive. Of course, you can hire your own staff to do blog commenting. If they can do a better job than we do, for less than $30, then you should hire your own staff.

But if you want to do away with having to hire staff, handling staff, identifying blog entries, writing comments and then posting those comments, AND you don’t mind paying $30, then you may wish to consider hiring us.

So before I take the prototype further and develop this into a full fledge commercial service, I’d like your feedback on this.

Do you think this service will be useful to you?

Send us your feedback by leaving a comment below. If you’d like to send us a private email, use this contact form.

If response is good, we will continue developing the service. If we receive a poor response, we will just continue to use the prototype privately, to promote our own sites.

So let us know what you think. I look forward to hearing from you

Best regards,

Darren Chow

P.S. If you don’t think blog commenting is for you, you can always continue to use our blog posting service.