Melamine in Food

Our company specialise in supplying ingredients to 3 in 1 coffee, non dairy creamer and cereal.  A customer called to demand a guarantee that our ingredients, mainly instant coffee powder and non dairy creamer, were not sourced from China. She also wanted to know what is the allowable limit for melamine in food set by AVA Singapore. The answer is the allowable melamine limit set by AVA is 5ppm, or 5 part per million.

Our creamer supplier from Holland  has in the past weeks issued declaration that they do not source any ingredients from China. Not satisfied with the declaration, our customer demanded us to send non dairy creamer samples to a reputable laboratory for testing. We did as the customer demand and the result was negative ( i.e. melamine was not detected at the level of 0.05ppm. We even went one step further to test the customer’s 3 in 1 coffee, and again melamine was not detected.

As for instant coffee powder, it is made with just pure coffee beans, and high protein in not a what buyers are looking, Therefore, it can safely be consumed with the knowledge that it is free from melamine.

The dust has more or less settled down on the melamine issue. Let’s hope that history will not repeat itself. Touch wood.

Changi-Suvarnabhumi Traffic

Last week my planned four nation business trip was severely disrupted. I was to be traveling to Bangkok and Yangon last Thursday to visit my instant coffee customers. The trips were disrupted due to Bangkok Suvarnabhumi Airport. I then tried to travel to Yangon from Changi Airport, but found all flights to and fro from Yangon were full till December 2oth. Wow, this must be the peak season Yangon travellers.

Meanwhile, some interested facts were uncovered while trying to salvage my four nation trip (Malaysia, Indonesia, Bangkok, and Yangon) originally planned. There are 303 flights a week between Singapore and Bangkok . 2.29 million passengers plied this route in the first ten month of 2008. Whilst 2.1 million and 1.5 million passengers were flying Singapore-Jakarta and Singapore-KL respectively.

According to data compliled by Airport of Thailand, Changi sent 2.9 million passangers to Bangkok.  Changi Airport was the top contributors to Suvarnabhumi Airport. I wonder how much business Changi stands to lose as a result of last week’s disruption. For me, I just hope to be back to Bangkok as soon as the situation allows. Though, my customers and I can communicate via emails and telephone calls, nothing can replace personal touch.

Practical Blog Marketing Workshop

Today I attended a workshop run by an up and coming professional blogger in Singapore : Tan Kian Ann. To say he is up and coming is perhaps an under-statement. Kian Ann has actually arrived. His blog, Blogopreneur.com is ranked No. 1 in Google under the search term : “Blog marketing Singapore”, among 1,400,000 listings in Google. It is even more remarkable when you considered that his blog is only six month old.

The workshop was titled Practical Blog Marketing. Blogs have become a very powerful marketing tools on the internet. Blogs were originally used by individuals to record their personal thoughts, a kind of journal. But blogs have evolved into such a powerful media that even big guns working in big corporations are making use of blogs to reach out to their stakeholders, customers and potential customers. One of the most high profile blogs in Singapore is the one written by Mr Tan Kin Lian, CEO and Director of NTUC Income Insurance Coorperative Limited. His blog name is www.TanKinLian.com.

Practical Blog Marketing was a very comprehensive workshop. It covered wide range of topics including the history of blogs, anatomy of a blog, blog as content management systems, monitoring and tapping of blogosphere, blog optimization, finding blog content, blog marketing and monetizing blogs. All participants were given the opportunity to set up their own blogs, with quite a few plug-ins thrown in to give their blogs professional looks.

Kian Ann has left no stone untrue. Though this was his first workshop, he had given a very good account of himself. I believe Singapore and the world will hear more of this enterprising blogopreneur soon. Check him out!

Home Brew in Singapore

February started very hectically and interestingly. The first day saw me in somehow panic mood as I realised first month of the new year was gone and with little achievement. To make up for the lost time, I started the day very early and was at the office by 7:15 am. I managed to get through quite a lot and made up some ground lost in January.

Our company has recently launched a website to market British made home brew kits in Singapore (www.HomeBrewEmpire.com) and I was looking for ways to market the kits. Through the grapevine I came to know of a gathering at The Pump Room on Thursday night (February 1, 2007). There was a talk organised by a group of home brew enthusiasts. The speaker on the night was Chris White, President of White Labs based in San Diego, California. White Labs Inc. is a leader in pure yeast and fermentation services. Chris gave a talk on the use of yeast in beer brewing and answered some very interesting questions raised by some of the home brewers present. White Labs has a very good website : www.whitelabs.com/beer/homebrew_FAQ.html which covers most of the basic terms and questions on home brew. Our company website, www.HomeBrewEmpire.com, is a good place to start learning about home brewing. One of the home brew enthusiast I met in the meeting was Bill Brehm, his website (www.BillBrehm.com) has some interesting and authentic photos of home brew setting.

This is the first time I met the group and I really enjoyed myself. The setting was superb, the people were friendly and enthusiatic about home brew. I am looking forward to the next gathering with this group of home brew enthusiasts in the near future.

Matt Bacak Training in Singapore

Matt Bacak was in Singapore the last week to train a few fortunate internet entrepreneurs. I was among the lucky ones. The MIT Training last for three days from 4th to 6th January. I have been looking forward to this training since October 2006 when I met Matt in Atlanta. The training was awesome. Over the years I have attended quite a few internet trainings, no one came as close as this one in term of quality and “applicability”.

All MIT participants will have been equipped with enough knowledge and tools to run a successful internet business. Actually we got something better : we got a site up and running by the end of the day. And we got opportunities to network with serious like-minded people who paid S$6288 to attend this seminar. But let tell you that it is worth every single cent.

Briefly, the training covered Internet Millionaire Mindset, a system that Matt personally uses in his day to day running of the his internet business, an insight in how the gurus work. Many tips and references to some of the most pristine websites, and a lot confidential (attendees only) information. Matt even bring his technical support team to ensure all technical issues encountered by the attendees were resolved on the spot, right at the seminar – no fluke, websites were completed there and then, no sometime in the future. I know how invaluable this is as I have attended quite a few seminars before these. The percentage of people that would really do something about what they learnt is very close to nought.

We even had Jo Han Mok as a guest to share some of his well guarded secrets with us.

My website is up and running now and already I have managed quite a few subscribers in a few hours. I was never able to do this previously. Well done Matt, See you at the top!

Internet Business, not Internet Marketing

Yesterday evening my friend Jolly Tan and my mentor Shi Heng Cheong, organized a gathering for some of TIMM and Shi’s SEO workshop past participants. TIMM stands for The Internet Money Machine, and SEO means Search Engine Optimization. The turnout was quite encouraging. Everyone was sharing their insights, lessons learned, and tips and tricks in the meeting.

I was given an opportunity to share with the participants what I had learned from Armand Morin’s Big Seminar 8, held in Atlanta, Georgia, October this year. I guess I was the only person from Singapore who attended the Big Seminar. This seminar featured a faculty of many well-known gurus : Matt Bacak, Alex Mandossian, Dr Mike Ming-Woo, Stephen Pierce, Ryan Deiss, Rich Schefren, Stu Mcleran, Sylvie and Michele Fortins, Jim Edwards and last but not least, Armand Morin, the organizer himself.

It was an amazing event. Three dyas of solid learning, excitement, and networking. Amongst the students were Joel Comm, Tom Kulzer, Rick Raddazt and many experienced internet marketers. Indeed this is a seminar for marketers, not so much for techies. It is also a pre-sales platform for the speakers. All speakers had something to sell, physical product, books, Internet training or boot camps.

Amongst the topics addressed were Internet Strategies and Mind Set (which benefits me the most), Affiliate Marketing, Lead Generation, Outsourcing, Teleseminar, Video technology etc..etc. All in all it was loaded with cutting edge information.

Something subtle actually happened to me for the three days I was there. It was the change of mind set as the result of attending the Big Seminar 8. Whereas before I was looking at Internet marketing from a very opportunistic angle, now I look at Internet as a serious business. I now call my Internet venture Internet Business, not Internet Marketing. Of course, marketing still remain an important part in Internet business. Nevertheless, I now look at all my Internet ventures from point of view of an investor. Meaning, it no longer as simple as register a domain name, put on some websites, set up Ad-sense account, then wait for the windfall. (which hasn’t happen to me yet).

I now evaluate every internet venture as an investor, and asking questions like:

What is the business model? What is the ROI? How long before break even? What are the strategies in place? What is the niche aimed at? What about competitors? What are strengths and weaknesses of the business model? …and so on.

This was part of what I shared with the TIMM and SEO group last night. Stay tune for more………

Matt Bacak in Singapore

I had the good fortune to meet up with Matt Bacak while I was attending the Big Seminar 8 in Atlanta, USA in October 2006. I was really impressed with what he said at the Big Seminar 8 and wanted to participate in the Millionaire Internet Training (M.I.T) program’s he offered at the Big Seminar 8. However, his training was in the US and require physical presence in the US, so I could not participate.

Last weekend, I was at the World Internet Summit in Singapore and was very pleased to meet up with Matt Bacak again. Matt offered his M.I.T program at the World Internet Summit. I noted there was very good response.

Matt Bacak spoke during the World Internet Summit about some powerful, eye-opening staff, instead of the usual run of the mill stories offered by some of the speakers. Quite frankly, there was not a speaker that resonated with me as well as Matt did. I was impressed by him back in Atlanta, and I was more impressed with him when I listened to him the second time in Singapore.

I learnt from his presentation about top six ways to build my list : Blog, Email JV, Articles, Search engine PPC, Advertising with Solo ads, and Press Release. In each of the categories stated, he took pain to either give specific details or illustrate with real life examples.

He also gave tips on specific tip on how to “optimize” out-sourcing such as checking credential of the service provider such as whether he/she has helped any Real client earn more than USD50,000, when outsourcing. In the private conversations I had with him, he also gave me many insightful tips. Likewise, many people who took the trouble to approach him gained a lot of valuable insightful advises from him. Matt is really generous and offer values.