Notes From The Tiger’s Cave

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“I cannot stress enough that in my experience the martial arts are not about rituals, belts, hierarchies, and kata (which look like dance routines), though these may all be paths that lead to effective skills. They’re about releasing your inner motor skill and awareness ability in a practical way.” Brendan Reen, inventor of boxerballs

Some people find the most difficult thing about setting up a home-based Internet business is coping with numerous different tasks and sources of information. One newbie Internet marketer recently emailed me to say that he felt like a lump of raw meat in a shark infested ocean…

I know what he means!

The key, however, is to train yourself and improve your skills. Like a good boxer or martial artist, you will need to dedicate yourself everyday to learning and applying your skills. You do not have to be a genius or a techno-geek to succeed.

One common error that newbies fall into is spending too much time and effort building the perfect website. The second error is, once it is built, to spend far too much time tweaking it and fiddling with it.

Instead, you need to be working on traffic building and on converting that traffic to sales. There are several key traffic building techniques you will need to master: blogging, article writing and distributing, social networking, forum participation, pay-per-click, traffic exchanges, classified ads, to name some of the main methods.

At the same time you will need to learn how to optimize your website, fill it with useful content that pre-sells your visitors on your product or service. You will need to learn how to build a list and market to it via a good autoresponder service.

Those are some of the key skills you will need to target and master in order to succeed online. None of the skills require anything more than average intelligence. They do require you to apply yourself, just like a martial artist or boxer in training, you will need to focus on the targets and get better at hitting them!

David Hurley

Best Internet Marketing Strategies

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Japanese Prime Minister Fukuda’s sudden resignation has unexpectedly turned him into a potential super hero…

It all happened during his resignation interview when a reporter from the Chugoku Shimbun suggested that he had often seemed rather detached from the job. Fukuda, not noted for emotional outbursts, told the reporter that he (Fukuda) was able to view things objectively, unlike him (the benighted reporter). Fukuda said:

 Anata to wa chigaun desu!

I am different from you! 

This statement passes in Japan for a “strongly worded declaration” that reveals deep emotional agitation (as can be seen from the video clip)… The quotation has won Fukuda nationwide notoriety and has perhaps made him more popular now, despite his surprise resignation, than at any time during his brief premiership…

Suddenly, Fukuda has found his Unique Selling Proposition, a vital component of any marketing campaign… yet it seems as if he found it by accident, at the one split second in his life when he pulled back the curtain and showed a bit of real emotion… just a few minutes after announcing that he was throwing in the towel…

Moral: Find your Unique Selling Proposition and use it to brand your product and yourself from Day 1 of your campaign (e.g. like Prime Minister Koizumi).

On second thoughts, maybe Fukuda was doing just that; selling us his USP on Day 1 of his new job as Non-PM!

David H

Grasp-The-Nettle.com

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Today’s blog post comes to you courtesy of health and diet expert Kelley Herring, who writes about the health benefits of some key ingredients that are used in Japanese sushi dishes, such as wakame seaweed, ginger, wasabi (Japanese green horseradish), and wild salmon.

Over to you, Kelley!

Looking to power up your plate with antioxidants? Look to rolls. Sushi rolls, that is.
These small bites are big on age-defying antioxidants from several traditional Asian ingredients. Here are the top four:

Wasabi. True wasabi - Wasabia japonica - is a member of the cruciferous family of vegetables (which also includes broccoli and watercress). Packed with powerful cancer-fighting nutrients called isothiocyanates, wasabi helps to stimulate the detoxification enzymes in your liver that disarm free radicals and carcinogens.

Pickled ginger. Ginger ranks an amazing 14,840 on the ORAC scale. That’s more than double the antioxidant capacity of blueberries. Ginger is also a potent anti-inflammatory agent, thanks to gingerols - natural COX-2 inhibitors.

Wakame. Addicted to seaweed salad? That’s a good thing. It’s loaded with a pigment called fucoxanthin, a strong free-radical fighter and metabolism booster.

Wild salmon. Expect to pay about $1 more per roll when you request wild salmon for your sushi or sashimi. With its rich, buttery taste, this is a must. Not only will you avoid harmful contaminants found in farmed salmon, you’ll get a healthy dose of the “carotenoid king”: astaxanthin. This nutrient gives wild salmon its brilliant color, and is considered one of the most effective antioxidants known.

[Ed. Note: Eating healthy doesn’t have to be boring. Nor does it mean avoiding your favorite foods - like sushi. Just make good choices when it comes to what you eat, and you can live a long and healthy life. Find more simple ideas about how to feel better and live longer here.
And talk about a healthy food that tastes fantastic… nutrition expert Kelley Herring has developed a chocolate cake so rich and delicious that you won’t believe it’s good for you. Learn more here.]

This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, the Internet’s most popular health, wealth, and success e-zine. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com.

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With Japanese obesity regulations coming into effect, how much more can the poor, benighted Japanese salaryman take?

As if it were not enough that a common or garden salaryman had to endure a sexless marriage, a two hour commute on a packed train, ten hours of kow-towing to superiors, a couple of hours of unpaid overtime spent going through the motions of working because the boss is still in the office, an enforced drinking session with colleagues, a two hour commute back home on a train full of fellow drunkards, a wife who prepares supper with a chilly outward show of dutifulness while he smokes a cigarette, watches t.v. and falls asleep on the floor, as if, as I say, all that were not enough, things have just got worse for the Japanese salaryman…

Hey Mr salaryman, the Japanese government has just introduced an intrusive new law that requires you to get your belly fat under control! If the total expanse of your waist cannot be encompassed by 84 cm of the measuring tape you have just three months to get your fat lard butt into shape! Fail again and you will have to go through SIX MONTHS of “health re-education“…

On these measurements, more than half of Japanese salarymen will be considered “overweight”.

And you, Miss Office Lady, don’t think you are exempt, with all your lunchtime restaurant and postprandial coffee and cake binges with your chums! If your belly fat causes the government tape measure to spread around your corpulence to the extent of 88cm, you too will be rounded up and sent to the slimming gulag for a dose of re-education.

Hidoi desu ne!

It seems that the Japanese government has jumped on the latest slimming fad and is putting its credibility on the line by passing an incredibly intrusive piece of legislation even as NEW EVIDENCE published in the British medical journal, The Lancet (huzzah!), suggests that large waistlines are NOT a key predictor of MS, cardio-vascular disease, diabetes or late night cravings…:shock:

The question is, though, what causes someone like a Japanese salaryman to put up with so many intrusions into and claims upon his private life? Surely he would be better off setting up a home based business of his own?

A couple of problems arise here… One is TIME. Having committed himself to the salaryman way of life, finding time away from the company to develop his own projects is exceptionally difficult. The other problem is that, even if a salaryman could discipline himself to focus on building a home based business, he would be faced with the prospect of working in his wife’s domain… Even if the salaryman himself were keen to become a work from home Internet marketer, his wife may thoroughly dislike the idea of having her husband at home all day, intruding into her private domain and social life…

For the office lady, the prospects may be brighter when it comes to working at home on the Internet because she is almost always single, and often lives alone in a rented apartment. If she can be self-motivated, she might well find the time to succeed with an online business while holding down her company job.In Japan today there are plenty of examples of women working at home on the Internet and enjoying an independent, financially healthy life.

The great advantage of working from home on the Internet in Japan is that you are far less bothered by intrusive government legislation that seeks to control the way that people live, usually by taking away or regulating their pleasures.

David Hurley

Internet marketing strategies

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Now that September has arrived, summer holidays (natsu yasumi) are over, the kids are back at school, and summer is pretty much at an end here in Japan, at least in the minds of the people.

No matter that I have had to turn the air conditioner back on today, after a brief lull in the heat during late August… In Japan the march of the seasons is dictated by the calendar and if the calendar says that summer has finished then summer has jolly well finished and you can put on your winter uniforms and grin and bear it… (not that the Japanese are a race of grinners) …

This is a bit late, I know, seeing as how summer has finished (despite the fact that the heat and humidity continues…), but I just came across an article that offers a good insight into what Japan is like in the summer months for the Japanese. If you imagine it is all beaches, barbecues and beer, you really have not quite “got” the Japanese summer at all!

Here is an extract from the article, by Kaori Shoji, which was first published in the Japan Times, and which emphasizes that Japanese summer is NOT all fun and games! Far from it!

“Japanese summers are tinged with a shadow of darkness and from a very early age we learn that natsuyasumi (summer vacation time) is not simply about fun and games in the sun.

“In addition to the frequent o-soshiki (funerals) there’s o-shusenkinenbi (the anniversary that marks Japan’s surrender in WWII) on August 15, preceded by the genbaku kinenbi (the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) on August 6 and 9, respectively. Shusenkinenbi is also a day when many schools have the tokobi (going to school day), when schools demand that the students drop whatever they may be doing elsewhere, grab their schoolbags and come to school.”

The rest of the article can be read on this blog by Howard W. French.

David Hurley
Grasp-The-Nettle.com

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