Notes From The Tiger’s Cave

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I have just been checking out the Japanese setting on my Twitter account at http://twitter.com/hirohurl and it seems that you get 140 characters to play with. When you type in Japanese you can save space by converting Hiragana phonetic script into Chinese characters (kanji).

I have a twitter widget over on the home page of Grasp-The-Nettle.com and I just checked it after posting a Japanese msg, and sure enough, there was the message in uncorrupted Japanese script.

I can see why twitter is popular in Japan as it is well set up for use on mobile phones, it is short and tweet, so it has a high cutesy-immediacy factor which the Japanese love.

To show how popular Twitter is in Japan, here is a list of social sites, showing the country where each one is most popular:

• Twitter is most popular in Japan.
• MySpace is most popular in the USA.
• Facebook is most popular in Turkey and Canada.
• Friendster and Imeem are most popular in the Philippines.
• LinkedIn is most popular in India.
• LiveJournal is most popular in Singapore.
• Orkut is most popular in Brazil.

Source: royal.pingdom.com/?p=336

Yes, Twitter rocks in Japan!

So much so that Evan Williams, founder of Twitter, has come to Japan for his summer hols to meet the fans and talk about his plans… 

During his chat with a fan who was willing to pay 500 yen a month or about $5, he had this to say about monetizing the service:

Evan Williams: Well, we are not thinking to charge because we think it will cost more to charge. The amount will be earned by charging will be less than the cost to charge it. We have some ideas about monetizing and one of that is to charge for commercial users.

David Hurley

Internet Marketing Strategies

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The Japanese manga comic series Akagi follows the exploits of its eponymous hero at the Japanese mahjong table… 

This obviously affects the way the players play the game and interact with each other. In mahjong you can complete your hand either by collecting the winning tile yourself, or by claiming it off another player when he throws it away. But in a game where you can see three quarters of the tiles you are far less likely to throw a tile that somebody needs, or to go out on a tile that somebody throws…

In short, you have to try to win on your own, while keeping a close eye on the opposition. You become more aware of how the others play the game, and more self-reliant in seeking to win the game with your own resources.

Why Adapting To Transparency Is The Best Internet Marketing Strategy

A similar situation exists on the Internet where the Internet marketing strategy of every single website owner is open to a large degree of scrutiny from other marketers, and where everything that one player does can be seen and imitated by another.Of course, in a few cases of utter brilliance we scratch our heads and wonder, “How the blazes did he do that?” It is as if the player had his hand stacked with a large percentage of non-transparent tiles!!

When developing a viable Internet marketing strategy, you can take advantage of the transparency of the Internet both in researching the best internet marketing strategies and in promoting your own website.

Internet Marketing Research: Don’t Be Afraid To Look Through the Glass Tiles And Read Your Opponent’s Hand!

Google is a wonderful tool in helping you to track down websites that are operating in a similar niche market to your own. What do the top sites look like? What are their Alexa rankings? What insights can you glean from them? DO NOT copy and paste their stuff to your own website, because you will be breaking copyright law - and remember, in a transparent market you will most likely be found out! All the website owner has to do is run a Google search and he or she will be on to your case…

What you can do, however, is learn from your competitor’s website and use what you found as inspiration to help you develop your own unique product.

Turn An Unavoidable Circumstance Into A Money-Spinning Virtue

Seeing as it is inevitable that your opposition will also come and check out your site, it is meet and apposite that you turn an inescapable circumstance into an undeniable virtue.

Seeking to protect your copy with copyright notices is jejune and defunct. Seeking to control your copy by insisting that it stay on your site is downright perverse and obtuse.

The way to take advantage of transparency on the Internet is to give your copy away to all and sundry!

All you have to do is either, add your own link and author info to the bottom of everything you post on your site, and INVITE visitors to copy your page to their site, complete with link and all.

Another way to do this - actually, an even better way - is to go to creativecommons.org, get yourself a Creative Commons Licence and slap it on the bottom of every single page on your site.

Then, when people copy your stuff they will take the CC licence complete with link back to your site with them. It is quite possible that people who read your article on someone else’s site will see the CC licence and take your article and put it on their site…

Also, your page will appear in the Creative Commons listings.All this equals links back to your site, which adds up to more publicity, higher search engine rankings and more traffic. And it didn’t cost you a penny!!

In an upcoming post I’ll talk about some way that you can also try to cloak your online activities… remember, the Akagi mahjong set was only 75% transparent!!.

David Hurley

Internet Marketing Strategies

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If you are a complete beginner when it comes to Internet marketing strategies and are wondering where to begin, my advice would be to build your own Internet marketing strategy around a clearly defined niche market.

If you are wondering how on earth you can choose your niche market, let me tell you my own mini success story, which happened before I had even got around to thinking about what an Internet marketing strategy might involve. I was making money before I had heard of anything like “keyword phrases” or “search engine optimization”!!

I succeeded simply because I tripped over a highly defined, but viable, niche market.OK, to tell the story, I need to track back to September 1990, when I began teaching English at a certain English language school here in Hiroshima.

Japanese Mahjong

In one of my first evening classes one of the students, a certain Mr Noda, asked me what I wanted to do in Japan. I replied that I wanted to play mahjong!

“Oh,” he said, “I can teach you to play…”

And, that was, to borrow a line from the end of Casablanca, “the beginning of a beautiful relationship…” (You can read about our endless mahjong adventures on this blog, if you really really want to!)

Actually, what Mr Noda, and one of his classmates, Mr Yoshimoto, had in mind was a regional variation of Japanese mahjong, called “Sannin-uchi maajan”, or “Japanese Three-Player Mahjong“.

For several years I said that I “ought to write a book about it” since there was no literature in English about the three-player game.

However, being young and dissolute, I much preferred the idea of talking about writing books than actually writing them, preferably while playing mahjong and drinking myself under the table at the same time…

Then the Internet came along!

It proved so much easier to build a website than to write a book! For one thing, mistakes were so much easier to correct after publication that you never had to worry about uploading perfect info from the get-go.

Thus http://japanese-mahjong.com was born!

Having got the rules of the three-player game posted, it then seemed natural to offer some Japanese mahjong sets and accessories. So I teamed up with a local “traditional Japanese games shop” and started to post ads for their sets and accessories on my site.

I never expected to sell anything. I mean, who would buy a Japanese mahjong set from a Japanese supplier and pay Japanese postage rates to get it shipped across the world?

Quite a lot of people apparently!

My website began to show up in searches for things like “Japanese mahjong sets” and people began to buy.

As I say, all this happened before I had any knowledge whatsoever of Internet marketing strategies or keywords and so forth.

In short, I had stumbled upon a nice compact well defined niche market.

So, what does all this tell us?

Firstly, you can make money out of your hobby or passion!

Secondly, you don’t have to be a marketing wizard to succeed online!

Thirdly, if you have a well defined niche market, keywords will crop up naturally and people who are in the market for what you are offering will find your site via the search engines.

David Hurley

Internet Marketing Strategies

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The portrait of Ellen Terry by George Frederic Watts shows her smelling a camellia flower. Notice the pointed leaves, which are nothing like fig leaves at all!

The Japanese word for camellia is tsubaki. The oil from the pods such as the one I plucked from the tree in my student’s garden is used to make hair oil, and the results can be seen in this video, plucked from YouTube!

What else can be said about the Japanese camellia?

The Samurai are said to have disliked camellia flowers because when they fall from the bough they remind them of someone having his head cut off and it sent a shiver down their spines.

The image of falling is associated with the camellia in a haiku by the poet, Bassho, who himself served a Samurai master for a while:

Falling upon earth,

of the camellia

Actually, the camellia was cultivated by some Samurai, and used for decoration in the tea ceremony.

PRIZES

Since nobody got the answer right, it is up to me to ALLOCATE two second prizes to the contributions that I enjoyed most. Very difficult really, with all that chat about quinces, kumqwats and coconuts, but here goes:

Second Prize First Class goes to Charles Boustany for the hilarious suggestion that it might be “dekopon”, which Steve Meyer enjoyed so much on the PPG forum!

Second Prize Second Class goes to Dobson O’Corrical for his inventive imagination.

If you would like me to send you your prize please send me your address via the form on this page: http://grasp-the-nettle.com/contact.html

David Hurley

Internet Marketing Strategies

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One of my English mates here in Hiroshima, Andy Lightfoot, is building up a collection of expensive guitars and has finally got his posterior in gear and posted a video of himself playing some Joy Division baselines…

What do you think? Should I employ Andy to provide the backing music for my website by twanging on a shamisen while I sing about the joys of having a viable internet marketing strategy…??

Gilbert and Sullivan meet Peter Hook…

David Hurley

Internet Marketing Strategies

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A week has passed since I plucked it from a tree, so here is a photo of what it looks like now…

Remember, stop thinking fruit and nuts and you might get onto the right track…

The answer will be unveiled tomorrow…

David H

Affiliate Marketing Strategies

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Wednesday’s Clue:  It was Milton, and NOT me who wrote,

Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree…

I only made a passing allusion to a verse by a Japanese poet who happens to mention a forbidden tree, but at no point have I called that which I plucked therefrom a FRUIT, because, my dear readers, it is NOT a fruit, no, nor is it a nut.

David H

Internet Marketing Strategies

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Here’s another photo to help you identify what it is that I plucked from one of the trees in my lady’s Japanese garden: 

 
If men can touch

even the forbidden sacred tree,

why can I not touch you

simply because you are another’s wife?

Otomo Yasumaro, Manyoshu, vol 4.

David Hurley

Internet Marketing Strategies

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As I arrived at the house of Mrs Tanaka, one of my clients who lives on the outskirts of northern Hiroshima, I noticed in her small front garden a tree laden with what appeared at first glance to be unripe figs.

However, on closer inspection, the leaves of the tree were all wrong - fig leaves are rather luxuriant affairs, but the leaves on this tree were more modest “pointed ovals”.

This was something of a relief as I have heard that it is not polite to talk to virtuous women about figs.

When I heard what it was, I thought I’d pick one, and challenge my community centre students to identify it. Actually, it’s not too difficult a question for the Japanese, and so far when I show the item to my students, there has always been at least one person who recognizes what it is.

Then I wondered whether the dear readers of this here blog might not find it more difficult to come up with the correct answer…

So, here’s a question for all you horticulturalists, sons or daughters of nature, nettle graspers and connoisseurs of Japanese culture.

From what kind of tree did I pluck it?

And (if you get the first question right),

What is it?

Post your responses below as comments to this blog. I will award a FREE COPY of “Stories Connecting Hiroshima and Hawaii” (see previous blog post) to two lucky people…

1. One copy to the first person to supply the correct answer,

and,

2. One copy for the person who supplies my favourite oh-so-wrong-but-plausible (maybe!) answer.

If you win, I will post your copy free of charge by “air freight” to wherever you are - anywhere in the world that has a postal service…

Good luck!

David Hurley

Internet Marketing Strategies

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If I asked you what connects Hawaii and Hiroshima you might turn around and say “Pearl Harbour” at the beginning of the Pacific War and “the A-bomb” at the end, and you would not be wrong!

However, the connections between Hawaii and Hiroshima go back several decades before the war.

The people of Hiroshima, being considered suitably docile by the authorities, were chosen to make up a second wave of Japanese migrant labour that went out and worked the plantations of Hawaii at the end of the 19th century. The first wave of migrants were a troublesome bunch of Tokyoites with too high a regard for their own pedigree to resign themselves to the humble toils of tillage.

Anyway, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour the Japanese population of Hawaii was in put into a very difficult situation. Eventually, the young second generation Japanese men were allowed to enlist in the army and went and fought for America in Italy and France.

However, when they returned to America with their citations and their purple hearts, they still found it difficult to get accepted by the majority population. Eventually, however they secured their rights and benefitted from the free education that they had a right to as veterans of the US armed forces. Many went on to become lawyers and politicians and eventually succeeded in bringing Hawaii fully into the USA.

Masako Unezaki

I recently met a lady called Masako Unezaki who went to Hawaii in 2002 and interviewed 26 Japanese Americans about their experiences during those times.

From the material she gathered she wrote Stories Connecting Hiroshima And Hawaii, which consists of two narratives, “Grandpa, Tell Me the Story” and “A Letter From Grandma in Hawaii”.

Although the characters are fictional, the stories they tell recreate the situation of the Japanese first and second generation immigrants to America and what they went through during the Second World War.

The book is not only an educational look into Japanese-American connections that run deeper than many realize; it is also an excellent language study resource with clear prose in both Japanese and English, laid out side by side for quick and easy comparison.

The book is published by ANT-Hiroshima, in July 2008, and available from my website.

David Hurley

Grasp-The-Nettle.com

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