Notes From The Tiger’s Cave

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I don’t care what anybody says, that Mr Aso Taro chap who happens to be a manga fan and, incidentally, The Current Prime Minister Of Japan, is a jolly spiffing all round good egg.

He’s going to give me and all other honorable foreign devils ¥12,000 a head - something like $150 - in cash, no questions asked. We even get to keep our heads attached to our shoulders, I believe. All in the cause of reinvigorating the ailing economy.

By the time we get our mula, early next year, it will probably be worth about $500 and some other fellow will be The Current Prime Minister Of Japan. Whether Mr Aso Taro will get to keep his head or not is another matter.

I heard, the other day, that a lot of immigrant labour is having to pack its bags and leave Japan as the recession has caused a shortage of demand for concrete mixing. Perhaps it is just a cunning plan on the part of the Japanese authorities to save a bit of cash now that Mr Aso Taro has opened the palm of friendship to foreign devils.

Does anybody have any suggestions as to what I should invest my honorable windfall in? I hear that oil is quite cheap these days…

Since I am at last to receive some tangible recognition of services rendered to the Glorious Sons of Nippon of the last decade and a half of Toil in the Orient, I feel it somewhat incumbent upon me that I return the favour and invest my loot in 30 cans of Japanese lager and large it during the plum blossom season…

Seems only right really, and almost rude not to…

Kampai!

Aso Taro, Good Egg, Manga Reader & PM of Japan

read comments (0)

My antique body is aching all over after playing football on Sunday. (Note to my American friends: Yes, I mean FOOTBALL, which you call “soccer”, but since the game was invented by the British, forgive us if we happen to think that it is our prerogative to call it what we like, i.e. FOOTBALL! :razz:)

Despite my advancing years and creaking joints, I still play football in Japan, along with a couple of other British players. The three of us play alongside a fine bunch of Hiroshima University Medical School students, i.e. trainee doctors, who are all young, fit and skillful.

I am the oldest player in our team, now in my mid-forties, while the other two Brits are in their 30s and the Japanese members are barely out of their teens!

Our team is battling for the top spot in the Hiroshima City League “B” Division and on Sunday we were up against the third-placed team, who turned up with just ten men.

However, our boys performance seemed a bit lack-lustre. It was still 0-0 at half time. I was brought on for 20 minutes in the second half and felt that I had contributed somewhat to livening our team up… Perhaps it was just that they had to make an extra effort now that “the old man” had come on. I got a round of applause when I was called off - or perhaps the team were applauding the manager’s decision! :lol:

Anyway, now that the two contributing foreigners were off the pitch we were free to observe our team’s performance, cheer them on and make a few salty observations as the game continued without a goal.

One thing you notice in Japan at all levels of the game is the tendency of many players to touch the ball just once too often when attacking up the wing. This extra-careful approach (so typically Japanese in many ways) gives the defenders an extra split second to cover the cross when it FINALLY comes in and the result is that an opportunity to win has been missed.

APPLICATION

If you are struggling to win with your home based Internet business it might be that you are spending too much time and effort on your ball skills and not enough on whipping the ball into the box. You need to prioritize marketing over design.

Too many newbies think they are working on their business by fiddling with the design and layout of their website, when in fact what they should be doing is building targeted traffic. Something like 70-90% marketing, 30%-10% website and product design might be a good proportion to work with, depending on your circumstances.

Every time you promote your website it is a bit like crossing the ball into the penalty box in football.

Of course, when you do put in a good cross, you want your striker to be there to shoot and score. When it comes to Internet marketing, you need to think like a striker and work on converting visitors into subscribers and customers.

So you must prioritize what to do with that 10%-30% of time you allocate to website and product design. Concentrate on delivering a clear action-inducing message to your visitors. Give them clear directions so that they know what to do next. Give them a good reason to do it and offer them a free incentive to get them to do it now!

We Score! :lol:

Just after the Brits had agreed that Japanese players spend too long on the ball, our sweeping generalization was, well, swept away when our team scored with just five minutes remaining!

They Score!

1-0 up, against 10 players with 5 minutes to go. You would have thought victory was in the bag, but we were up against a well organized and determined group of players. They didn’t give up, whereas our boys went to sleep.

Our central defender gave away the ball in a lazy pass, our left back recovered the ball and made a dreadful back pass to another of their attackers, our goalkeeper saved the shot but did not hold on to the ball, which went round the block again and eventually found its way into the net. 1-1.

APPLICATION

You might have made a sale, but you haven’t won your customer’s loyalty! All the gains you make in your initial sale will be lost if you alienate your customer through complacency or incompetence. Winning a customer is like scoring a goal, but losing a customer is like conceding one.

read comments (0)

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

read comments (0)