Go ahead and take a mini break from work!

Exabytes - a world class web hosting company is organizing a contest in conjunction with Malaysia’s 51st Anniversary of its independence. It’s a really simple contest - all you have to do it count the number of flags and logos in the picture below and create a simple slogan to win a Sony Walkman Video MP3 Player.

Here’s where you can enter the contest. and if you don’t mind, I’d like the nifty MP3 player too. Just remember to include my name (Andrew Shim) and email address (andrewshimatyahoodotcom) in the referrer fields.

Best of luck.

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Kontera was a really good income stream up to December 2007. That’s because something happened in January 2008 that turned Kontera into a wussy of a money trickle. Here’s what happeneed.

I ALWAYS experiment with Adsense ad placements and formats. This is to counter ad blindness as much as it is to optimize Adsense as much as possible. Well in January 2008, I found that the half-banner which once used to perform pretty well on my main Adsense website started to suck major lemons. eCPM was going down the tubes and so was CTR. I decided to kill the half banner and replaced it with the large rectangle format. Now what happened since has really surprised me.

Although purists would crucify me for plastering a whole slab of Adsense on my homepage, that fella has been out performing ALL my ad blocks on ALL pages collectively. The thing is as this is happening, I’ve found that the bounce rate for this page has increased in tandem with the rise in earnings. Obviously people are arriving at this page, seeing this whopper of an ad block and just clicking on it. The sorry victim in all this is Kontera, which I use for all my sub pages.

Now, I expected that earnings from Kontera would dip with the rise in clicks on the large rectangle Adsense block, but it has actually crashed and gone erratic. The chart below shows my daily earnings in the last 2 weeks or so :

What was happening was unbelievable… I was starting to see earnings of 10 cents for 10 clicks or more! Now that’s bad. Where I used to be able to earn an average of 15 to 20 cents per click, I’ve been seeing a major increase in 1 cent or less per clicks the last few months. The peaks you see in the chart above are nothing to brag about. We’re talking about less than $1 here. To illustrate how bad Kontera is performing now, I have only just managed to pass the $100 mark at the end of May 2008. That’s 5 months to reach $100 - an average of $20 per month or 66 cents a day! Since this has been happening over the course of a few months, it is telling me that one or more of the following is true :

• Kontera’s advertiser pool is shrinking - hence the low eCPM and EPC.
• Kontera is somehow able to see my visitors prefer clicking on Adsense so they’re punishing me for giving priority to Adsense (this is a conspiracy theory. I cannot prove it)
• It’s just market forces at play and market forces are saying my site deserves 1 cent clicks.

Now it’s not pride here. I cannot accept the third possibility BECAUSE since deploying the large rectangle Adsense block, my EPC has actually increased by almost 60%. To see if the market as a whole was weakening, I decided to give LinkWorth a try. I’ll talk more about LinkWorth in a separate post later, but in the 3 weeks or so that I’ve been with LinkWorth, I am very pleased with my earnings so far.

So the bottom line is… I am not going to waste my web real estate on Kontera anymore. I’ve been patient enough. Five months is enough I think. Later this week, I’m going to convert all the pages that were once reserved for Kontera to Linkworth.

Thanks for paying for my hotel stay in Genting, but I gotta say Adios Kontera!

Popularity: 19% [?]

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The fuel price hike took me by surprise. I expected a 30 sen increase, not a whopping 78 sen! However, sitting down to take a look at my budget, I thank God that we are still able to swim, although I hope I’m not talking too soon.

How the fuel price increase affects our business
As far as our catering business is concerned, we are expecting prices from our suppliers to shoot up this week. An estimate of 40% increase is not out of the question. The question is how do we act responsibly and increase our price without chasing away our customers. We’ve come up with an approach that might work.

From day one of starting our home catering biz to 31 December 2007, we maintained our price at RM200 per pax per month. Expecting a fuel increase this year, we increased our price to RM220 for new customers who joined us from 01 January 2008 onwards. We maintained our old price for old customers (those who joined before 01 Jan 2007).

Now it looks like our new price of RM220 may not be sufficient to cover the huge increase in fuel price. So, we’ve decided to increase out price to RM240 per pax per month. This is for 3 dishes (one meat, one veggie and one side dish). However, this increase may be too drastic for some of our fixed income customers, so we’ve also decided to offer a budget package from July 01 onwards which will consist of one meat, one veggie and one soup at RM200 per pax per month. In effect, this means that if customers choose to pay the old price, they will have to settle for less. We’re still not soo sure if our new pricing will work out, because it might take about one month for suppliers to increase their prices.

How the fuel price increase affects our family budget
Obviously, there is going to be cost cutting. Thankfully, since my wife and I work full time at home, we have full control over household expenses. The fuel price increase should see our petrol bill go up RM150 per month and our electricity bill by about RM50. We haven’t taken into account other stuff that will obviously be affected by the fuel price increase. So what we’ve decided to do :

• Pay off our remaining credit card debt of about RM4K as soon as possible. Thankfully, if all goes according to the government’s plan, I should be one of the first to receive my fuel subsidy because my road tax is up for renewal on 02 July 2008. I also have a motorbike that has been sitting and collecting dust for about 3 years now that I will sell. This should bring in an additional RM1K - RM1.5K. We’ll then bite the bullet and increase our monthly credit card payment to around RM700 per month. If all goes according to plan, we will clear this our credit card debt in about 4 months.
• Repair, service or clean all our electrical equipment. Clogged fans and refrigerators that aren’t running at optimum performance will be power-guzzlers that eat into our family budget.
• Cut our weekend trips to KL/PJ malls to once per week instead of the current 2-3 times. This should save us around RM100 - RM150 per month in petrol, toll and parking fees.
• Spend more of our evenings doing family things instead of going to the mall. I like enjoying the free aircond at the mall, but this is going to cost more from now on, so better to strip half naked and enjoy a noisy game of badminton with my kids from now on. Or jump into the kiddie pool with them or maybe finally start jogging to lose weight. All in all, those nightly trips to the mall always end up with us spending more on snacks and impulse buying.
• More meals at home. Making sure the family fills up our stomachs at dinner time instead of half-full and then having an excuse to go for supper. Thank God we are in the food business so there is ALWAYS left over from catering that is more than enough to feed us.
• Cut all unnecessary expenses like newspapers (can read it online), weekly trips to the arcade for the kids and soft drinks when we eat out.

There are lots more ways we can cut costs. No we don’t need to go drastic, but we figured it’s a good way to get to grips with the crazy increases we will soon experience all around us. It’s time to “ikat perut” guys. I hope all goes well for you.

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You know… having a blog and not updating it kinda leaves you with a 24 hour guilt trip that just doesn’t go away. Anyone who knows me knows that I am always on the run. It always seems like there are not enough hours in a day.

I run a home based catering business, manage more websites than I can handle in addition to being a driver cum homemaker to my kids… and what do I go and do? I set up an online store… that’s what.

Something had to give while I was scrounging for time to set up my online store, so it was HomeWithAndrew, then my other websites. When I first started working from home, starting an online store was always on the cards. I just never got enough motivation to get myself off off my ass and do it. Bad example to set for a work-at-home Dad. Yeah.

If I had kept to the schedule I set five years ago, I would have already set up 3 online stores. But who can predict the future. I never knew that running the catering business would take up soooo much of my time. It’s a vicious cycle of sorts. The more my catering business grows, the more time I have to put in, which means I spend less time on my online money making. But the original plan was to build my online network to a level where we would NOT have to depend on the catering business.

So why would I go and set up and online store when I already have too much on my plate? Well, it’s part of my strategy to NEVER depend on only ONE or TWO sources of income. My online store is a long-term plan to always diversify.

CoolCat t-shirts is a culmination of everything that I love : art, designing, web development, coding and t-shirts. I’m still learning the ropes, managing my store, but CoolCat t-shirts has brought me full circle. Ever since I was a small boy, I loved drawing on my old t-shirts. When I became a teenager, I would make simple templates and printed one-color designs on t-shirts. I experimented with all sorts of t-shirt printing techniques - even potato prints and t-shirt crayons! Then when I was in secondary school, I learnt the art of making silk-screen blocks, which was so addictive that I started a small t-shirt printing biz with a friend after school. The business didn’t fly. My partner had other plans and she was the one running the business side of things. So my t-shirt dreams were put on hold. Now almost twenty years later, the wonder of the Internet is making me salivate.

From my research, the secret to Cafepress success is patience. That, I have lots of experience. It’s took many years of patient building before my websites started to make substantial money. I plan to set up a few more stores and will probably pass on the designing tasks to my wife and daughter who thankfully share my passion for designing.

Anyway… I’d like to invite you to visit my new online store :

So here I am with my plate overflowing and I’m piling on more. And people say I’m so lucky I don’t have to work so hard. Yeah. Right.

Popularity: 54% [?]

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The Chinese New Year month is terrible for my home catering biz. With most of my customers taking a month or 2 week long break, income from catering during the Chinese New Year is always pathetic.

The first year we were in business - when we didn’t really have a lot of money coming in from my websites - we were on the verge of panic. It was the first time we really felt the effects of the balik kampung exodus. That year, we were left with less than ten customers during the Chinese New Year month. Thank God we were still holding on to our day jobs - albeit part-time.

After 5 years in the home catering business, we’ve come to accept the CNY month income drop as part and parcel of our business. That’s why we’re thankful that our online income keeps things stable.

From day one of being full-time work-at-homers, we decided that we would NOT rely on our online income to sustain our family. There are just too many variables that can swing against your website(s) which will ultimately affect your income. So we work hard and make sure that our home catering business pays the bills and keeps food on the table. Our catering business is also a heck of a lot more predictable than search engine mood swings and their ever changing algorithms. So despite receiving a healthy income from my websites, we ONLY dip into our Google Piggy Bank for the extras during low months like Chinese New Year. Thankfully, December’s Adsense payout was a fat one and came in via Western Union just in time for our CNY shopping.

So like it or not, Google has been putting the “Happy” in “Chinese New Year” for our family the last five years. So I guess what I’m trying to say is this - unless you are prepared for the erratic ups and downs of earning an online income, I strongly suggest you keep your day job and save your income from Adsense, Kontera etc for those rainy days (especially if you have a family).

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