Learn Indonesian at BintangBahasa.com

Hi again!!  Still working on this podcast and RSS feed stuff.  Making some headway though.  I think I have the XML file making and editing sorted out.  (Poderator.com was helpful) and opened an account for Bintang Bahasa at ClickCaster.com which also seems pretty good.

Here’s the audio link from ClickCaster.  Let’s see if it works here.

It worked on blogger, so let’s see if it shows (above) this time.

Learn a Foreign Language – It can be fun!

Learning a foreign language doesn’t have to be a painful experience.  I know, all of us who ever tried in high school or another time have painful memories and almost zero ability at the end of it. Well, it doesn’t have to be that way.

I’m currently working on French and Russian and Japanese, so to help others follow in my path, I’ve started a website: languagelearningonline.org It’s brand new but I’ve been involved in foreign language learning for several years now and have had a lot of success teaching people English and Indonesian.

I’ve also spent quite a bit of time searching the internet for good sites, and unfortunately haven’t found very many.  Lots of them claim to have ‘revolutionary new methods’ but when you really look at it, it’s not much different from all the rest and the student is still left struggling much of the time.

I’ll continue this post shortly, but wanted to first get the news out.  More soon.

Set up your RSS Feed and Podcast

As with everything on the internet and with computers.  Once you’ve learned how, it’s easy.  Until then, it’s frustratingly confusing and time consuming.

So, we’re setting up a podcast and rss feed for audio files to learn Indonesian.  I used RunStream to set up a feed, and they have some good stuff, but it seems they limit free accounts to just 3 posts.  I also discoverd SpringWidgets which is very cool.  And now I’m trying to set up my podcast at PodcastAlley.  They say copy the following at publish it, so here goes nothin’.

<a href=”http://www.podcastalley.com/”> My Podcast Alley feed!</a> {pca-43478a218039fd77194829da5fc68399}

ciao for now,

Brian

Here’s a Great Audio Widget to add to your website.

The other day I came across a great widget for combining rss feeds (text, audio and video) and they have some other interesting widgets.

I don’t know if I can add the widget here or not.  In Blogger it’s possible by inserting the code into a text box in the sidebar.  Or you can set it to your blog at Blogger or Worpress and others directly from SpringWidget.  Anyway, I’ll copy the code below and see what happens.  You can see a sample of it at my site for learning Indonesian: learnindonesian.org

<!-- SpringWidgets | Learn Indonesian - Basic Audio Files (#61907) | HTML | Generated on 10/12/2008 --><object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowNetworking="all" allowScriptAccess="always" allowFullScreen="true" height="418" width="200" id="springwidgets_61907" align="middle" data="http://downloads.thespringbox.com/web/wrapper.php?file=61907.sbw" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=8,0,0,0"><param name="allowNetworking" value="all" /><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" /><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><param name="movie" value="http://downloads.thespringbox.com/web/wrapper.php?file=61907.sbw" /><param name="flashvars" value="param_param=http%3A%2F%2Frunstream.com%2Ffeed%2Ff%2F1612%2Ft%2Fall%2F&param_compactView=-1&param_blurbLength=512&param_style_borderColor=0x000000&param_style_brandUrl=http%3A%2F%2Flearnindonesian.org%2Fbali-dancer-blue-ocean2.JPG" /><param name="quality" value="high" /><param name="wmode" value="transparent" /><param name="bgColor" value="0x000000" /><embed bgColor="0x000000" allowNetworking="all" allowFullScreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" src="http://downloads.thespringbox.com/web/wrapper.php?file=61907.sbw" flashvars="param_param=http%3A%2F%2Frunstream.com%2Ffeed%2Ff%2F1612%2Ft%2Fall%2F&param_compactView=-1&param_blurbLength=512&param_style_borderColor=0x000000&param_style_brandUrl=http%3A%2F%2Flearnindonesian.org%2Fbali-dancer-blue-ocean2.JPG" quality="high" name="springwidgets_61907" wmode="transparent" width="200" height="418" align="middle" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"></embed></object><div style="font:11px/12px arial;width:200px;"><a href="http://www.springwidgets.com/widgets/view/61907/?param_param=http%3A%2F%2Frunstream.com%2Ffeed%2Ff%2F1612%2Ft%2Fall%2F&param_compactView=-1&param_blurbLength=512&param_style_borderColor=0x000000&param_style_brandUrl=http%3A%2F%2Flearnindonesian.org%2Fbali-dancer-blue-ocean2.JPG&width=200&height=400" target="_blank">Get this widget!</a></div>


So, there’s the code and I’ll publish it now to see what it looks like, then I’ll try one directly from springwidgets.

cheers, Brian

Get indexed by Google in less than 24 hours with WordPress

I will keep this posting short because there’s nothing much to say.  If you have a new site and want to get it indexed by Google just write about it in your WordPress blog, give a link to it and voila – you’ll be listed in less than 24 hours.

I’ve done it for a couple of my sites: 5plus5team.com and more recently learnindonesian.org and it works every time.  Oops, it didn’t work now for my learnindonesian.org site.  This web blog gets listed in less than 24 hours, but it didn’t follow the link this time.  Don’t know why.  I’ll let you know when they do find my site, and if anybody has any other simple tips I’d love to hear them.

So, it’s time to put this issue to rest. Don’t pay for any service, don’t make any submission to Google or any other search engine, just write a quick introduction to your site and you’re done. You’ll be listed by Google in less than 24 hours.

Ciao,

Brian

Update: October 15, 2008

Okay, I’ve been following this for a week now, and I’m more than a little confused, but it’s all working okay.  For several days, I still wasn’t listed, even for ‘learnindonesian.org’, and my AdSense was showing on the page either.  Then yesterday I happened to check ‘learn indonesian online’, to check the ranking for our original site bintangbahasa.com.  It was still ranked in the 40’s (46) and listed just below it was my new website learnindonesian.org (50).  Go figure.  I then checked some other searches and for ‘learn indonesia audio’ we were 15th.  Wow, cool!  Our older site was ranked 24th.

I then checked ‘learn indonesian’ which is what we want to get a good ranking for.  BintangBahasa.com is still somewhere in the 100+ range, and my new site (learnindonesian.org) was ranked 36.  Super cool!  In just a week!

Now, I think one of the key factors to getting a good ranking was this blog (1 article) and my Blogger blog (1 article) and most importantly an rss audio feed.  I looked at several and chose runstream.com.  It seems really good.

A day later, I redid my AdSense code and it’s showing up now, but it still says ‘inactive’.  And my ranking, just a day later, has moved from 15 to 51, and 50 to 23, and 36 to 48.

I have no idea what Google is doing, but it will be interesting to follow for a while and see what happens.  They still have a long way to go in improving the quality of their search results in order to provide good results that provide the information that users want, but it’s a tough job with so many people trying to make money with parked domains, intermediary pages, etc.

Hopefully, one day, we can clean up or at least avoid the garbage which is constantly building up on the web.

Anyway, to get indexed and ranked quickly for your new website, right a blog article, do a rss feed, and have some good content.  Next I’ll try it for a very competitive search ‘learn English’.

Till then, Brian

Learn Indonesian (or any language) quickly and easily.

Learning a foreign language can and should be a fun and pleasant experience. Unfortunately, in most cases, people find it a daunting and frustrating experience with minimal or poor results.  Why is that?

Well, it’s because the method used by almost all books, schools and teachers isn’t effective.  It’s like trying to force a square peg in a round hole.  It just doesn’t work!

So what’s the solution?  Well, if you’ve every tried to learn a new language, you already know the solution.  You already know what you need as a student.  The problem is, you have no idea where or how to get what you need!

Well, now you do. This is a problem I’ve been working on for several years now, and I’ve approached it completely from the ’stupid’ student’s perspective.  I have a terrible memory for names or new words in a foreign language.  I can be told a name or the meaning of a new word, and seconds later I will have forgotten.

I’ve also approached it from the perspective of an engineer seeing a problem, analyzing it, and coming up with a solution.  As such, I was free from any bias or baggage aquired by learning how to teach a foreign language.  Similarly I gained a lot of experience teaching English, but with no bias or baggage about how it should be done.

When teaching English I was typically stuck in a situation using material which was bordering on useless, so I usually tossed it to the side and just started teaching in my own way, my own style; gradually discovering what worked and what didn’t.

I eventually decided to make a program for learning Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) based on “what I wish I had had when I was a student”.  I also included my general ideas on intuitive learning, ‘left logical brain’ versus ‘right creative brain’, etc.  The results were amazing.  The speed at which students learned Indonesian was amazing even for me.

For those of you who don’t know, Indonesian is perhaps the easiest language in the world to learn because of it’s relatively simple grammar and it’s flexibility in word order.  Still, the improvement over other methods and my own learning of Indonesian years before was really quite incredible.

One example in particular was with a Japanese lady who had been living in Indonesia at that time for about 8 months.  She saw me playing with the kids one time and asked me if I could teach her daughter English.  I said sure, I love teaching kids.  She then asked if I could teach her English.  Again, I said I’d be happy to.

We were talking in English and she was often struggling to express herself and sometimes she would use a word in Indonesian when she couldn’t think of the word in English.  I asked her if she spoke Indonesian and she replied, “No, I don’t like Indonesian.”

I was surprised, since it’s such an easy language to learn.  Certainly much easier than English.  She was insistent; she didn’t like Indonesian and didn’t want to learn it; even though she was going to be living there for 5 years!

Okay, no problem, and we arranged a time for her to start learning English.  After her third lesson she said she’d like to try my Indonesian program.  Hehehe…. I guess she saw a big difference in how I was teaching and decided to give it a try.

During the second lesson; just reading the basic dialogues and working on her pronunciation; she started saying, “Ahhh….!!!”  The light was finally coming on.  I also discovered that she had already had 25 private lessons for learning Indonesian!  After 8 months and 25 lessons, she couldn’t speak Indonesian and didn’t like the language or want to learn it.  Now, during the second lesson with me, she was finally ‘getting it’.  She was finally understanding the new language.

All I could do was laugh.  It’s sad but funny.  To have had so much difficulty, and now to find it so easy.

Square peg, round hole.  If you give the student a round peg they won’t have any more problems trying to put it in the hole.

If you like to see more of our material for learning Indonesian, please visit our websites: BintangBahasa.com and LearnIndonesian.org. (Don’t know why the link wouldn’t work with learnindonesian.org)

And selamat belajar!  (Best of luck learning!)

Brian

5plus5team.com

GDI is almost a scam, and here’s the catch.

For all of you out there who are trying hard to promote GDI and develop your business, sorry, I don’t want to rain on your parade, but the simple fact is, GDI (Global Domains International) is a mediocre product at best.

First of all, what is it? It’s domain hosting for $10 a month with a multi-level marketing scheme that pays you back $1 for every person under you for 5 levels.

Okay, that in itself is legitimate, and although any network marketing scheme is an immediate turn-off to many, for others, it’s a reasonably attractive opportunity.

Much better hosting is easily available from many, many providers for less than $10 per month. I searched through many of them and finally decided that PowWeb and Bluehost are cream of the crop.

The one aspect that kept me looking deeper into GDI was the $100 bonus for signing up 5 new members in a week.

Now, with only a slight thought outside the box, you can see that you could pay for 5 new members, that way giving them a free month to test it out further, and then collect the $100 bonus. You paid $50 and got back $100.

Everyone I asked said that yes, the bonus is legitimate and they do pay it. And there are many individuals and groups paying the first month for people.

What nobody told me and what makes it a scam, or at least deceptive marketing, is that in order to get the $100 bonus, you first have to buy 10 DVDs for promoting GDI.

That’s $29.50, so you’re still in the plus, but then you have to add on the shipping and handling. Lots of people play the “shipping and handling game” to send you ‘free e-books’, etc. Come on, if it’s really free just give me the download link!

The killer for everyone living outside the U.S. is the fee charged to send you the DVDs. For anyone in Romania where my friend lives and is trying hard to develop his GDI business, the cost is $162!

As he says, “So, I would need 10 people in the same week only to pay off my investment. And then I will be in profit.”

He then replied to my email in which I fumed about GDI: “I knew about that from the beginning, but I couldn’t imagine that the delivery fees are so exaggerate. Lucky me that some days ago I tried to make a “sample order” to see how it goes. And then I was shocked when I saw those 162$!!! I mean it’s like you want to buy a bicycle with 200$ and it cost you 1300$. Prefer to walk in that case, don’t you?”

Definitely! I prefer to walk. That’s the problem with all these ‘special deals’. There’s ALWAYS a catch.

If you want to try GDI, go ahead, some people have had success with it, but many more haven’t. I just want you and everyone else to know as much of the truth as I’ve been able to find.

I double checked with my Romanian friend, and it’s a one-time-only purchase requirement, so to get future bonuses, there’s no need to buy more CDs. Hmmm…, so I offered him a solution. He could have the CDs delivered to my uncle who lives in Florida, thus saving the delivery cost since he doesn’t really need or want the CDs anyway.

Anyway, I won’t be doing anything with GDI, but I am thankful that I stumbled on them in the first place, because it gave inspiration to my idea of how to REALLY help people get started on the internet and do it honestly and fairly, with no catches.

As most of you have learned already, you only ever get a limited amount for free. That said, some places like WordPress give an amazing amount with fantastic quality all for free, and I’d like to know their secret.

The fact is however, that everyone needs money to live, and that includes WordPress and all the people who blog at WordPress and design templates and widgets and everything else. It’s a fantastic community.

Now what if you created a similar community but with the intention of helping “newbies” get started on the internet, totally for free, and helping each other (and the “newbies” as they move on to “toddlers”) to make some money doing whatever it is we love doing? Sound like a cool concept?

It’s a cooperative, or a kibbutz, or a team. It’s neighbours helping neighbours. It’s a community where we all go to work each day and if you need help or advice from an IT guy, a lawyer, a doctor, a dentist, a Mongolian spider expert, or whatever, you just ask! We’re all part of the same community or team.

Everyone in the community has earned the trust of several others, so that trust is easily passed on to the entire community. If anyone betrays that trust, they’re quickly told to shape up or ship out.

If nobody has the specific information you’re looking for, then you go to Google and wherever else to find what you’re looking for, and the next time anyone else is looking for similar information, you’re the one they’re going to contact, b ecause they trust you.

Anyway, all that’s material for other blogs. This blog was simply to make people aware of the ‘scam’ in GDI.

Hope that was helpful,

Best regards,

Brian

PS. If you want to have a look at our new baby, 5plus5team.com, you’re most welcome to come visit us.

PSPS.  5plus5 is still in diapers and hasn’t progressed anywhere yet, but you’re welcome to come visit and I’ll update this note once it’s ‘walking’.

How do people REALLY make money on the internet? – Part 2

Hi again, I’m finally back after a rather long adventure to discover more about how people really do make money on the web.  There really is a mind-boggling array of ‘easy money’ options out there and I have a really hard time believing any of them.  I plan to check out a few of them later, but first let’s settle the question of GDI, Global Domains International.

I eventually decided to join but because of difficulties signing up with a debit card in Indonesia it was never completed. Likewise with PayPal, it can be very frustrating to complete the sign up procedures and get it working if you don’t live in the U.S.  (Go to my next blog to discover why I think GDI is a scam!)

As a result, I continued looking at other options and ultimately decided that something similar but more focused on providing something of genuine value to members was needed.  GDI is basically just a hosting company with a very mediocre product.  They have a unique marketing concept but it’s all about selling sites and not about helping people set up their own internet business.

If you’re just looking for hosting services, there are many good options available; better than GDI, and you can sign up as an affiliate and make money also.  GDI isn’t bad, but it’s a hard sell to most people. All my friends and family immediately said “sounds like a scam” and “be careful”.

It’s not a scam and could be good, but my final conclusion is that it’s not worth the bother.

(As I mentioned above, I since discovered the ‘catch’ with their $100 bonus payment.  It can cost you nearly $200 to get the bonus because of their ‘conditions’! Read more in my next blog.)

In my searching I also found a site that is completely focused on helping you build an internet business.  It’s called Site Build It.  It looks quite good and is probably worth the $299 per year cost, but I’ve already decided to do my own thing. (5plus5)

I also found a good website with quite a bit of information: www.2createawebsite.com

So let’s answer a slightly different question first: Can you (and I) make money on the internet?  The answer to that is most definitely yes.  As with any business that’s your own, and just ask anybody, if you calculate the time invested and the money earned, you will probably be earning less than minimum wage.

Really, I have a friend who’s a chiropractor.  He’s very good and has his own practice which does very well.  When you add up all the time for doing the books, washing, seminars, etc, etc, etc, it’s not really that profitable.  But, he earns a good living and he has a genuine passion for what he does, and that’s all that really matters.

So if you simply want to make money, and make easy money, then the internet is not the place.  You may get lucky, but for most people it would be a losing proposition.

If you have something you love, be it a hobby, sport, stock trading, reading, music, … anything, then you can pour your time and enthusiasm into a web site and with a few simple things like adsense and some affiliate links you can make money, and as time goes by, you might make quite a lot of money.

So definitely, you can make money on the internet, and the easiest ‘how’ is with AdSense and ‘affiliate marketing’.  But PLEASE, if you’re not a marketer by nature, don’t try and pretend to be one!!  Virtually all affiliate marketing programs encourage you to set up autoresponders, chase hundreds, if not thousands of leads, etc.  To my mind that is SPAM and a waste of my time and energy.  I would hate to be doing that.

I absolutely believe you don’t have to do that.  That’s why I came up with the concept of 5plus5.  All you really need are 5 people connected to you.  Even 1 or 2 is enough.  And then 5 (or 2) connected to them and so on.  Very quickly you have a large network.  And if it’s genuine, honest and providing value at each connection, then it’s like the wave in the movie Pay It Forward.  It can really be a magical thing.

So is there such a thing?  I never found it, so we’re going to start it.  Once I finally got all my ideas sorted out, it was extremely simple (and obvious), and it was essentially exactly how I got started on the internet nearly 2 years ago.  (Wow!! Time flies!)

A friend of mine has a small website and offered to help me get my website for learning Indonesian started.  He had oodles of unused space on his site and he knew the basics of setting up a site.  He helped me get started, we set up a simple site, I continued learning about html, continued making more material, continued learning, continued my off-line business of teaching Indonesian and English.

Not quite a year after we started, we decided ‘move out of his house’ and we got our own hosting for the language learning site.  On New Year’s Day 2008, I happened to check Google for “learn Indonesian online with free audio”.  We were number 1!!!  I was over the moon.  I hadn’t checked in a long time and had been checking that search for French, Russian and Japanese, looking for material for me to study with (and not finding much that was really, really good… another story).

Let me tell you, to be number one in the world for anything is a really cool feeling!  After that we moved up and down the results but I didn’t care, I’d had my moment of glory and I had confidence that we would continue to grow.

Then I learned how to set up AdSense, made a few pennies there, but we decided we didn’t like having the ads and it wasn’t worth the money.  Using AdSense is good but if you have a genuine product to sell you might not want to bother.

I later stumbled across a Russian blog that had searched the web and was recommending sites to learn Indonesian.  They listed 5 sites, and we were number one, and the comment was ‘not bad’, which for non-native English speakers who may not know, it actually means ‘good’.

The internet opens up the world to you and that is the most amazing thing about it.

Then in March we got our first sale!  To a guy in Italy, and then a guy in Russia.  We had had the PayPal “buy an introductory package” since we started the site, but actually the package was only just then almost ready.  To date, we’ve now had four sales, people are very happy with the product; we know the competition; we’ve learned our way around the internet and we know that things will simply get better and better.

A long story to make a simple point.  I now want to help several friends, say 5, start their internet business and they can share on my hosting and I will teach them everything I know.  They will continue learning and will soon be teaching me (and the others in our ‘team’) things that they’ve discovered.

They will then do the same for 5 friends (or more, or less).  Now we have 31 people on our team.  Then they’ll do it for 5 friends and we’ll jump to 156 team members.

If we introduce new friends at a rate of 5 per month.  (I do 5 then, then next month they introduce 5, then the next month they each introduce 5, etc)  In 6 months we’ll have nearly 20,000 people on our team.  That’s a great team sharing resources and helping each other.  And every single one of them will be making money on the internet.  Every single one of them will be making a profit.  For me, that’s just really, really cool.

And the next month when the new members each introduce 5 more, your team has grown to nearly 100,000 people.  It’s the ‘magic’ growth that hotmail, yahoo, Google, YouTube, MySpace, etc all experienced only this time it’s us; it’s us the members who are the company, and it’s us the team who get to share the profits.

Stay tuned….  This could be a very, very interesting tale, and 5plus5team.com is about to be born any day now.

Proud father,
Brian

PS. 5plus5team.com was ‘born’ on Thursday August 28, at 03:15:43 AM, weighing in at 5.78 kb.

Trust me, it really was like having a new baby! And since this was my first ever hosting on my own, I had (and still have) a LOT to learn. And guess who gets to follow in my footsteps and learn the easy way?  You.   Ciao, ciao…

How do people REALLY make money on the internet?

This is a question that has been tumbling around in my head for quite some time, and I’m sure the same question has tumbled around in many peoples’ heads many, many times. How do people, and in particular everyday people like you and me, make money on the internet?

How do free sites like WordPress and YouTube and others make money? I mean, let’s face it, they have to be making money somewhere otherwise they couldn’t survive. Sure, it could be pure ‘charity’ or ‘goodwill’ but at the end of the day, everybody needs to earn enough money to put food on the table and keep a roof over their head.

I started a website about a year ago, diving straight in without knowing anything about html programming or anything. It’s a website for learning Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian language) and also English and other languages. We’re selling a product, but are there other ways to make money with a website (or blog, or whatever)?

I added Google AdSense earlier this year and it was cool to see my first 10 cents! Yeah, big deal, but still, kinda cool. Meanwhile I get lots of crap email about Affiliate Marketing and many other schemes (scams?) for making money on the internet. So where’s the truth in all of it? How do you make money on the internet?

Well, here’s what I’ve learned so far. It seems that some sites do make good revenue from Google AdSense, but I think you need a lot of traffic for that. Google AdWords, where you pay for advertising, looks like shark infested waters, and you’d better be a clever little piranha if you want to make money, and not lose a whole bunch of money.

It was interesting reading yesterday about YouTube at WikiPedia:

YouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. YouTube was created in mid-February 2005 by three former PayPal employees.^[1] The San Bruno-based service uses Adobe Flash technology to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips and music videos, as well as amateur content such as videoblogging and short original videos. In October 2006, Google Inc. announced that it had reached a deal to acquire the company for US$1.65 billion in Google stock. The deal closed on November 13, 2006.^[2]

As of Q1 2008, YouTube is not profitable, with its revenues being noted as “immaterial” by Google in a regulatory filing.^[4] Its bandwidth costs are estimated at approximately $1 million a day.^[4] It is estimated that in 2007, YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000, and that around ten hours of video are uploaded every minute.

Hey, we all know that many of the big guys are LOSING big money on the internet and in many other industries (except for the oil and gas industry which is making silly, silly money these days!)

So, how ’bout us everyday, jeans and t-shirts kinda people. How do we make money on the internet? And have a good time doing it!! There’s no point in doing anything if it’s “just for the money”. You have to enjoy doing it, and if you can earn money doing it, great, all the better.

I mean, look at the guys at WordPress…. now that’s a group of t-shirt guys if I’ve ever seen one! They’re giving all of us some great stuff, and it’s all for free. So what’s their secret. Actually, they’re extremely open about it all, and it’s not much of a secret. I’m new here to WordPress so I don’t know exactly how they manage to pay all the bills.

Back to the original question, How do you and I and anybody else make money on the internet? It doesn’t have to be a fortune (but that would be nice). Does anybody out there have some simple advice for people? I’m by no means an expert, but I am learning, and I come from a fresh, unbiased perspective, so I’m also often able to see things in a different way than others who “can’t see the forest for the trees”.

Recently I’ve come across two interesting prospects: GDI (Global Domains International) and Pay it Forward 4 Profits. I haven’t signed up for either yet, still testing the water. (Don’t want to be a guppy in shark and piranha infested waters!) Do any of you have experience(s) with these groups?

Glad to be a part of a cool group here at WordPress and looking forward to getting to know ‘everyone’.

cheers,

Brian99

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