Notes From The Tiger’s Cave

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If you had been a savvy Japanese greengrocer in the late summer of 2008 you might have thought to buy in two or three times as many boxes of bananas than usual, oh and double the price of your bananas at the same time!

Yes, we have no banana[zu]If you had been able to do that you would have made some mula from the banana fad that hit Japan over the autumn.Japan is a nation of food faddists, or fad dieters. Two or three years ago the big fad diet thing was nigari, which is basically concentrated sea water, which is used in the production of bean curd (tofu).

Last year it was something else equally unappetizing.

This year we have bananas - or rather, “yes, we have NO bananas”, because the greengrocers and supermarkets quickly sold out of bananas the morning after some fool of a Japanese singer appeared on television to talk about how much weight she’d lost by scoffing bananas for breakfast.

There was no end to no bananas - at least until about a month later when the fad (but not the fat?) began to dissipate.

What does all this have to offer the Internet marketer by way of a salutary lesson?I checked out the listings on Google.co.jp for the term “banana diet” in Japanese and checked their details in dnscoop.com.

The top three sites all show a marked spike in their Alexa rankings during the height of the banana mania.Here are the results for “banana diet” (in Japanese Hiragana script):

Website	Google	Alexa on November 25 2008	Domain
dietcorn.com/bananadiet/	1	297,680	June 16 2008
ichiban51.com/banana-diet/	2	394,520	November 08 2007
http://www.asabanana.net/	3	98,638	March 10 200

And here are the Alexa ranking graphs for each site, clearly showing the spike in the second half of september:

It will also be noted that the top two sites on Google have now dropped off the Alexa ranking graph (which only has data for the top 100,000 websites). The site which has managed to stay on the chart is the one that is named after the fad: http://asabanana.net. The advantageous domain name is probably what helped promote the website up above the other two at the height of the banana fad - the spike is much bigger for this website.To be honest, I had expected asabanana.net to be the newest site, but in fact it is the oldest site with the most reach across the Internet (probably 99.9 of its visitors being based in Japan).

Each site is monetized in a different way.

Dietcorn.com uses three different sort of Google Adsense ads. It is essentially a Google adsense site. There are three Google ads on every page of the site along with a good quantity of useful info about various healthy food products, but there is no easy site navigation; each page is essentially a stand-alone - in fact the only link back to the homepage is at the very bottom of the page jammed up against the copyright info!

Ichiban51.com links through to a series of health and banana-novelty products which can be purchased on rakuten.co.jp. The links are all via mini-graphics that form a small box at the top of the page. Again, there is no easy way to navigate the rest of the site.

Asabanana.net is monetized via Amazon.co.jp but also has an “omiyage” (souvenir) link. The “souvenirs” turn out to be New Year post cards featuring the website’s “cute” character. They can be freely printed off. From there you can click through to discover more about the artist, and this may well be the whole point of the website. It is by far the nicest of the three sites, and easy to navigate.

It seems, though, that all three sites have missed a golden (yellow?) opportunity to cash in on the brief, barmy, banana boom.What would you have done with any of these sites to turn a fad into a fortune?

David Hurley

Best Internet Marketing Strategies

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.

“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

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

 In one game, called Washizu Mahjong, Akagi has to stake his blood while playing with a Japanese mahjong set in which three quarters of the tiles are made of glass.Playing with transparent mahjong tiles means that the players can follow each other’s moves and see how close they are to winning.

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

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

Quite often, when I pick up my five year old daughter from nursery school, I take her to a local Japanese “sento“, or bath-house.

Bathing is a recreation in Japan. Bath-houses used to be as common as muck, and very good for removing it in the days when Japanese houses resembled shacks and lacked bathing facilities. Sadly, many of these old bath-houses have shut down as the upwardly mobile Japanese began to be able to build and live in modern apartments with all the amenities supplied and now prefer to bathe in private!

However, you can still find quite a few bath-houses dotted around Hiroshima, where I live, and most other towns and cities, and if you want to experience “the real Japan”, popping into one of these places is a good way to do it!

The baths at these places include a piping hot main bath, a jacuzzi bath, maybe some baths with water jets for massaging your tired muscles. Most bath-houses also have a sauna, and cold plunge pool. Some even feature “electric baths” - i.e. hot baths that have a low voltage electric charge running through them to give you a shock as you climb in!

Anyway, last week, when I took my daughter along for a bath, she discovered that she could climb into one of the clothes lockers and once in, she didn’t want to get out again.

In short, my daughter had found her niche!

Next, she wanted me to shut the door and lock it, but I declined that particular request. After all, while it is good to find your own niche, it is not good to be stuck inside it. Some freedom of movement is always advisable because there are plenty of other niches out there that are just waiting for someone to occupy!

Also, had I locked her in and gone and enjoyed my bath in peace, my daughter would have been deprived of her chief delight, namely pouring bowls of freezing cold water of the benighted noddle of her long-suffering father!

If you would like to find out more about finding your niche on the Internet, click here.

David Hurley

Grasp-The-Nettle.com

Waseda University in Tokyo has opened a “virtual campus” in Second Life, a virtual reality game you can play (and make money playing) on the Internet. Waseda University plans to use their virtual campus to “meet” students from Princeton University, USA, which also has a campus set up in Second Life.

Second Life, created by Linden Studios, is set in a virtual world where players interact using avatars. You can go shopping, play games and buy gear that has been designed by others.

You can also offer your own virtual goods and services and offer them for sale in Second Life.

This is where it gets interesting for the Internet marketer.

Since goods and services can be bought and sold, Second Life has a virtual currency called Linden Dollars, which can be exchanged for real dollars, so it is perfectly feasible for people to get paid to play Second Life online!

In fact, in November 2006 the first real-dollar Second Life millionaire was reported in Business Week. Check this link and scroll down.

It certainly beats commuting to work every day!

David Hurley

http://grasp-the-nettle.com 

After a busy day spent at home promoting my Internet marketing start-up business, I like to crack open a can or two of beer in the evening. As I live in Hiroshima, my preferred Japanese beer tends to be Kirin.

However, if my Internet marketing start-up business is to take off like a space rocket, I think I might have to switch to a different brew, namely, Sapporo.

Sapporo Holdings recently announced that it is planning to brew the first “space beer,” using barley grown from grain that was stored on the International Space Station in 2006.

The brewery has enough space grain to brew up to 100 bottles of beer. It is more of a publicity stunt than a commercial enterprise, but the company suggested that in the future, when humans spend long periods of time in space, they might like a cold beer after a space walk.

That’s great, but as there is no gravity I guess they’d have to drink it through a straw, which might not be the best of ideas when you have a space station to run.

I know that after a day spent walking my website or related articles and stuff into as much web-space as possible, I can always do with a drink, preferably poured into a tankard that has spent an hour or so in the freezer.

David Hurley
Want to drink beer while you work? Plug Yourself In To This!

We are in the middle of the rainy season here in Japan right now. The Japanese word for “rainy season” is “tsuyu“, which is made up of two Chinese characters that stand for “plum” and “rain” because the rainy season is also the plum picking season.

One of my oldest students, a cheerful chap in his mid-eighties who drives down from the countryside to attend a two-hour class on Thursday mornings, had been out plum picking in his garden the day before. His forearms were covered in little scratches. I didn’t know plum picking could be such a painful business, but as I said to him,

“Itami nakushite, rieki nashi!“

It is the same with Internet marketing. The plums won’t just fall into your lap. You have to put in some work to harvest them. You have to go through the “pain” of setting up your own website, finding a market, getting together the products, writing some good copy and then getting a targeted audience.

You could compare that process to planting, watering, nurturing and finally climbing the tree and harvesting the plums. You could skip the first three jobs by having someone set up your own website fully loaded with some of the best products available in your chosen niche.

Then all you have to do is go and “get your ladder” (prepare your sales strategy), “climb up the tree” (marketing), and “start harvesting” (sales!) … You may pick up some scratches on the way, but, as I said to my student,

“No pain, no gain!”      

 David Hurley,
http://grasp-the-nettle.com 

Participating in an Internet marketing forum such as Warriorforum.com can be a lot of fun as well as educational!

Pat Brucoli, Support Director of the Plug-In Profit Site (PIPS), and the PIPS Warrior Forum Moderator, started a light-hearted old English-language Haiku thread the other day.The Haiku were error messages said to have been used in Japan to replace “unhelpful Microsoft error messages”. Here’s a sample:

 

Yesterday it worked.
Today it is not working.
Windows is like that.

 

Three things are certain:
Death, taxes and lost data.
Guess which has occurred.

 

You step in the stream,
But the water has moved on.
The page is not here.

 

Having been erased,
The document you’re seeking
Must now be retyped.

 

Serious error.
All short-cuts have disappeared.
Screen. Mind. Both are blank.

The question is, though, are they really haiku? I raised an objection!

 

I’m gonna get tough.
Haiku  needs a season ref.,
like early summer.

and…

What you wrote are Senryu:
You can say what you like
and drop the season. 

Did you notice that the first line of the last “Haiku” (really a Senryu) had an extra syllable? Japanese poets sometimes do it too! There is even a term for it:  jiamari. There are some examples of Japanese Haiku with jiamari here.