Posted: 20 Nov 2008 02:57 AM CST

If you have been reading my earlier posts about black swans, you will realise that I’m more influenced by seeing the world as a series of serendipitous events that occur. When these events occur, you either exploit them or be exploited by them. I chose to exploit one of them to learn more about how I could grow my means towards financial freedom.

A Positive Black Swan – Meeting Danny Choo san

I attended a talk by Danny Choo, a globally famous blogger-Otaku-internet-entrepneur-cum-Tokyo-Dancing-Stormtrooper. If this is your first time hearing the term “otaku”, a trip to Wikipedia will help you understand this term. Otaku is a broad term to refer to typically geeky guys who are into anime, manga, 2D gals, (a pinch of eroge or ecchi added) and video games.

This event is a positive black swan because I have been following his website for a year plus now and was influenced by his post on blog monetisation sometime back. His story is a interesting lesson in how you can take advantage of cross-cultural career and lifestyle opportunities. Danny is born to Malaysian parents who settled in the UK where he grew up and he spends his adult life in Tokyo, Japan as an internet entrepeneur after having been a salary-man with Nature, Amazon, Microsoft and finally his own business Mirai Inc.

What I learnt from Danny

The event was held on 19 November 2008 (Wednesday) at 1.30 p.m. at *Scape Youth Park at Somerset. I won’t bore you with the details and here’s the key takeaways that I absorbed. The list is not exhaustive as he spoke on many areas besides those below:

1. Promote Yourself – List Your profile and experience online

This is relevant because the currency on internet is not just dollars and cents but rather credibility and trust. Both are built through experiences, skills and knowledge that you demonstrate through your blog posts and how you present your ideas to the world. Your credibility online is one major factor in determining readership and online brand. In the sea of voices that is the blogosphere, why should yours stand out?

2. Add more links to your posts

Adding links helps you make references to your sources of information but also allows others to know that you blog exists. I scan my blog statistics regularly to see who is linking to my posts and to drop a note to thank them if they are genuine bloggers and not automated scrapers that just rip off content from my blog.

3. Join Creative Commons

The internet works by sharing. Sharing and attribution helps spread knowledge and ideas around. You still retain copyright for your articles and posts but others who reference your work without commercial considerations should be able to make use of how you put together your ideas. I recall my Junior College tutor who told us that there are very few original ideas in the world and everyone basically copies from every one else with some modifications. It’s call scholarship when you attribute your sources but plagiarism when you do not.

4. Quality not Quantity

This is arguably the most challenging issues relating to blogging. Writing original content that is useful, informative or relevant helps you. The deeper you go into a topic or post, the more time and effort you have to spend on it. Thus, between quantity and quality, quality is more critical. Of course, a blog that is updated once a year will hardly draw much traffic unless the content is close to pulitzer prize material.

5. Make your blog and contents discoverable

Writing good quality posts but having no way for your audience to locate and read it is a waste of your ideas and talent. Some basic Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques would help in this regard though Danny thought that you didn’t need to be overly technically-focussed. There are so many SEO stuff to do that even the basics would help.

6. Observe consumer behaviour and tweak

This is something that Tim Ferris of the Four Hour Workweek fame advocates too. In fact, if you read some of Tim’s interviews, he shares that was how he came up with the title of his book about lifestyle design. Danny also exhorts us to analyse our blogs using Google Webmaster Tools as well as Analytics and even to do comparisons with Google Website Optimiser. I’ve learnt more about such tools from Danny and others and use it to try to see how I can improve my blog readership numbers through having more referrals (fivecentstencents.com is better with referrals) or optimising for search engine traffic (singapore-fixed-deposits.com is better with search engine traffic).

7. Make use of Web 2.0 Technologies

Danny also shares how he makes use of Flickr to push users to their sites and how their sites would tend to give him return traffic for those communities who find out about his blog. This is something that I’ve done in a limited way using sgfunds forum as well as hardwarezone forums.

8. Learn and evolve your blog

I could relate to Danny’s point about evolving your blog. “The Black Swan” convinced me that testing and trying out stuff by tinkering is the way to go in growing my means beyond my salary. Testing out stuff and trying out new stuff is how we improve and find out what doesn’t work for our blogs. My blog monetisation efforts have been an evolving project as I started from from blogger and moved my more monetisable blogs to wordpress and using paid hosting services. So far the project has paid back my out of pocket and internet costs though the time-effort spent thus far exceeds the tangible returns for the short-term. In the long-term, I think I will reap the fruits from the investment in understand and applying Web 2.0 technologies in an effort to grow my means.

Love what you do and do what you love

Ultimately, Danny’s point about being passionate rings so true. My blogging efforts would not have been sustainable if I didn’t have a passion for writing and expressing myself online. I do enjoy writing and putting down my thoughts electronically through my blogs. If you do what you love, you’ll tend to do well because your passion about the subject matter shines through.

The part I could sense from Danny was that he genuinely enjoys himself in his internet  business and while what he does is to support his lifestyle, he enjoys it tremendously so work becomes play and play is work.

At the end of the day, for your blogs to be sustainable, you need to have a passion for it. I enjoyed myself at the talk and it was certainly a positive black swan in my quest towards growing my means and ultimately becoming financially free.

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