Chris Meistre

Next time someone says FU to you, accept it with a smile.  In Chinese, Fu, is a very lucky word.  In fact, it’s the word for LUCK!

Chinese I Ching Coins are very important ingredients in the practise of Feng Shui. It’s a very powerful symbol of abundance.

The coins are round in shape, with a square hole in the center. The circle is used to represent heaven, while the square represents earth.

When used or worn by people, it creates a cosmic trinity of luck. This is Heaven + Earth + Man (or perhaps rather person ). The coin has a Yang side and a Yin side. The Yang side is represented by four Chinese characters. These 4 characters represent the reign of each of the Chinese emperors during a dynasty. On the Yin side of the coin you’ll have 2 characters. Whenever you use these coins, the Yang side will always be facing up.

The most popular coins are the ones that focus on the Ching Dynasty. When compared to the other dynasties, the Ching Dynasty is believed to be the most powerful. All the other dynasties usually fell in less than a century.

The Chinese coins where a creation of the advisors of the emperors and that is why these coins are such powerful representations of wealth, prosperity and endless fortune. They also provide protection against danger and harmful energies.

Coins are sometimes used in groups to activate their power even further. These are in multiples of 3, 6 or 9, and most of the time a red thread is used to bound them together.

The significance of these numbers:
3 – trinity of heaven, earth and mankind
6 – heaven luck
9 – represents the wholeness of the universe

Is this what foreigners are going to wear when they arrive in South Africa?

I read something interesting today. For a long time now I’ve wondered what goal people achieve in order to call themselves millionaires, and more specifically internet millionaires. Normal millionaires I suppose is when you take your assets, deduct your liabilities and then if what you’re left with is more than a million, you’re considered a millionaire.

With Internet businesses, it’s not always as easy. Your website or web application is your asset, but putting a value to it is a bit more difficult.

So how can you measure it?

Consider for a moment how much money you need in the bank to be able to earn R1,000 interest off it per month. You’ll need to have about R150,000 invested to earn R1,000 interest per month. Using that calculation, you’d need to be earning about R7,000 per month to have the equivalent of R1,000,000 in a bank account. That means whenever you go over the R7,000 per month online earning you’re considered an Internet Millionaire.

This might not be the official definition of an Internet Millionaire, but it does put things into perspective!

I read this interesting take on being an Internet Millionaire on Business Warriors, written by Frank Muller.

Too often I’ve seen people get a bee in their bonnet about a product or website they want to promote and just head off and start spending thousands on developing the idea. Once they start marketing their product or idea online, they soon realise there was is no market for the product. The end result is time and money down the drain.

There is an easy way for you to test your product or idea without having to waste months and spend a lot of money first. By making use of Google Adwords you will be able to quickly see if there is:

1. A market for your product
2. What keywords are getting people to your site

If you’re going to start a website, you’ve no doubt started by researching keywords and what type of search volume these keywords have each month. Remember that keyword tools do come with their flaws. I have a website that is ranked at the number 1 spot for a keyword phrase that is supposed to get about 2,800,000 searches a month, yet I only get about 400 visitors a day to my website. That is a click through rate of 0.004%. Fortunately for me I didn’t build a big website and spend lots of time with the hope of getting at least 0.5% click through rate, because I would’ve been very disappointed.

I could’ve spent some time with a Google Adwords campaign and easily saw that the 2,800,000 searches a month is definitely not right. The campaign would show me how many times my ad was displayed for someone searching for the keyword and then how many people clicked on my advert.

For a few minutes of work, I would be able to get a very accurate idea of what the market is like for this specific product. I could then make the call about whether to proceed with the website (if it was getting a lot of traffic) or to just can it (if I wasn’t getting nearly enough traffic).

The other important thing that I would’ve been able to determine is what keywords brings the most visitors to my website. This can help with further research for which keywords the website needs to be optimized for.