With 2008 almost over, here are my predictions of what I feel will happen in internet marketing and social media for 2009:

1. Twitter Will Get Bought Out

Twitter is THE biggest trend on the internet right now and will continue to dominate in 2009. I personally prefer to use Twitter over Facebook for marketing. Twitter is the perfect medium allowing you to communicate and build relationships with your prospects; Facebook is used more for connecting with old friends. If the people over at Twitter know what they’re doing, they can easily transform it into the ultimate human search engine (much more powerful than Mahalo) with real time and relavent sources. I’ve personally witnessed this with Twitscoop. With that being said, if Twitter can’t figure out a way to make money then sooner or later they will get bought out by Google or a major Internet player. They can’t just ask money from VCs forever. Plus, Twitter is such a goldmine that Google will be a fool to pass on this opportunity if they are presented with it.

2. Mobile Applications Will Take-Off

I truly believe mobile apps will become the future of the internet (another reason why Twitter is becoming so successful). But more importantly, mobile apps that can be INTEGRATED across all platforms (yet again why Twitter is so successful). The technology is still very new and flawed so I don’t see it getting THAT big just yet. But 2009 is definitely going to be the year when it takes-off.

3. A New Tool To Help Us With Organization

The internet is overloaded with information. We are already getting information overload – RSS feeds, blogs, email, Twitter, Facebook etc. There needs to be a way to group these information into an organized manner. As Evan Williams (CEO of Twitter) said rightly in this video, right now Twitter is just a mess (when it comes to organizing the information). There needs to be a way to group tweets and filter out your friends in this noisy envirornment. And most importantly, we need friend synchronization – a way to connect all our friends, depending on your preferences, on the different social networking sites (Digg, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn etc) with just one click. Because right now, it’s just so hard to friend with people because they are everywhere. A big market here.

4. Videos – Interactive And Live Streaming

Video will continue to get bigger and bigger. Hopefully with the advancement in technology, we will begin to see more interactive videos (we’re seeing YouTube trying to achive that with their annotation feature) as well as better live streaming (again, we just saw YouTube do that with their recent YouTube Live event) with bigger bandwith.

5. Social Media Continues To Grow

Social media will become an integral part of the marketing campaign for all businesses in the future. Like Evan Williams (CEO of Twitter) said in this video, the future of Twitter is with marketers. e-Commerce, Business To Business will all start entering the social media arena. I wouldn’t be surprise if another social media site like Twitter pops up in 2009.

Your views for 2009? Leave a comment below

Remember the so-called “Google Killer” Cuil.com that launched back in July 2008? The search engine that was suppose to rival Google?

With the end of year approaching, TechCrunch took a look at their current status:

Just like I said back in September, Cuil was just a complete joke and the Google era is far from over

Here’s an interesting video I stumbled across where the CEO of Twitter, Evan Williams, reveals what Twitter’s future would be like:

It’s interesting to see that the future of Twitter’s use is MARKETING. He also hints on the possibility of introducing Groups which will help organize the people you’re following as well as your followers into chunks (something which I need badly). I know TweetDeck offers a similar feature but it’s nowhere near as powerful as the sort of thing Evan talked about introducing.

Happy holidays. Hope you have a prosperous 2009.

Thanks again for being a loyal subscriber

Stanley

There are a lot of myths about being an entrepreneur; most spawned by the media. While some these are true, others are patently false. The following are the top five myths:

Myth #1: Entrepreneurs want money. Period.

A lot of people think entrepreneurs are in it solely for the money. This is true to an extent—fear of poverty, or simply financial insecurity, might well goad anyone to greater heights, and there are some who do it for the cash, but for most people, money is not the be-all and end-all.

A lot of entrepreneurs have ego and/or emotion as their primary motives, many don’t maintain the lavish lifestyles expected of them, and most consider money as a way of keeping score.

Myth #2: My gain, your loss.

People often refer to success in business at the cost of someone else. What they mean, obviously, is that if an entrepreneur is winning, someone somewhere has paid the price. This makes it seem like there has to be a winning and a losing side in every business deal. This is sometimes called the ‘zero-sum game’.

In actual fact, entrepreneurs are creative thinkers. Rather than play for a ‘zero-sum’ result, and contrary to popular supposition, they often try to work out a compromise that means everybody leaves the table satisfied.

Myth #3: The greater the risk, the greater the reward.

A lot of young entrepreneurs, having heard this, accept it as gospel truth. A relationship between risk and reward is complicated and in no way reducible to a simple statement.

Risks in business don’t equalize jumping off a cliff in the dark: knowledge, experience, wisdom hard work and perseverance modify both the ‘risk’ and the ‘reward’.

Myth #4: Entrepreneurs get rich fast.

The rise of ‘dotcom millionaires’ definitely makes it seem like entrepreneurs make a quick buck, but you should remember nothing is as easy as it seems.

You may think that entrepreneurs get extremely rich extremely fast, but a lot of hard work goes into developing the ideas/products that make them rich.

Myth #5: A good business plan is the entrepreneur’s critical roadmap to success.

This has more truth than most of the other myths, as you’re unlikely to be given loans without a solid business plan. However, a loan does not in any way equal good money. Business plans are guidelines, yes, but to succeed, you need a lot more.

Yesterday, I took a random sentence from a recent interview I conducted for my school’s newsletter and posted it on Twitter. Little did I know by today, the quote has spread like wildfire through Twitter and feel it’s worth a place on my blog:

“You can come up with the greatest idea in the world, but if you ultimately don’t take any action, then nothing is going to happen.” – Stanley Tang

Feel free to share.

I was recently giving an interview where I started to talk about the importance of teamwork… I felt the content was so great it was worth a post on my blog. So here we go:

Q: How do you feel about the launch of your first book? What obstacles have you faced during the whole process?

Yeah, I did a book launch at the start of December to promote eMillions hoping to create buzz and hit the best-seller lists. What people don’t realize is that it actually takes tons of hard work for a book launch. It wasn’t just as simple as going, “Let’s do a product launch next week.” It took me around 5 months of preparation for this launch as there were so many moving parts involved (obviously, it would take a lot less than 5 months that I’ve gone through the process).

And the other thing is teamwork. Yes – teamwork. Business is a team sport. It wasn’t just this one 16-year-old kid doing everything – and you can’t possibly do everything – it took a team of around 50 people to execute this launch successfully. The majority of those were joint venture partners promoting the book on their websites and to their followers. There was also my team over at my publisher who handled the technical side of getting the book published and into bookstores. I also had to outsource many of the things which I weren’t as good as or didn’t have time to do (and I would have outsourced even more if I could start all over again), such as graphics and ad copy. Do what you’re best and delegate the rest.

And of course, I got myself a mentor. I wasn’t an expert in the area of book marketing so I got somebody who I could ask for guidance. This is something vitally important to anybody planning to get into business – get a mentor. Pretty much all the successful entrepreneurs in the world had mentors, e.g. Warren Buffett’s mentor was Benjamin Graham. Overall, it definitely wasn’t easy trying to orchestrate and keep touch with so many people all at the same time. And of course, all of these came with a hefty investment.

It was very exhausting and I was under extreme time-constraints, especially during the last two weeks leading up to the book launch. I had very little sleep during this period and it was difficult trying to stay awake in school – especially during Chinese lessons. I tend to find myself able to get more things done efficiently under tight schedules and thrive under pressure. That’s where all the fun and excitement is. So it paid off in the end. The book was very successful and went to #1 on the Amazon best-seller list in four different categories: Small Business, Web Marketing, E-Commerce and Home-Based Business. It’s pretty cool considering that the business category is the most competitive one out of all the others. I guess that now makes me a #1 best-selling author

Just stumbled across this cool site that allows you to flip text upside down – s??? ???l

Pretty cool to see what you can do with it:

Fliptitle.com

I’ve been working NON-STOP on internet marketing for the past 800-somewhat days… (yes 800+ days in a row). I feel it’s time to take a break…

Although to be honest, it’s really that stress and that time-constraint periods that drives me forward. I’m one of those who thrive under pressure. I become this lazy slut as soon as I become relaxed and have nothing to do. I need those projects to motivate me.

But I feel I really do need to take a break. Sooner or later, my body won’t be able to cope with it. So during this 2 week break, I’ll just be resting and the only thing I’ll be doing is conducting a few twitter experiments (been experimenting A LOT with Twitter lately – all on my test accounts because some involve grey/border-line blackhat techniques, hence my test account not my main account). And maybe one or two blog posts. But definitely nothing major which requires me to stay up late nights. Going to be 10pm early sleeps.

I will be coming back in 2009 and start off with a bang

I’ll not be developing any more info products in the internet marketing niche in 2009… frankly because the IM niche is just too small and too “black hat”. I just feel that there’s too much BS and crap going on, many people just ripping people off by teaching them how to rip even more people off… it’s just like this sneaky little circle which I don’t like (there are obviously exceptions) .

So I’m creating a new magic site which I hope to launch in April – ProdigyMagic.com Hopefully, I’m going to do a better job documenting this venture than eMillions and hopefully continue updating my blog and provide you guys with great content.

What I’m currently trying to do is to get in touch with magicians in my school (apparently, there are a lot more than I previously thought), as well as try and get the BEST people (like video production, graphics etc) to get together a TEAM. Remember, business is a team sport.

Last night, I took about 2 hours of my time to whip out a splash page for it while I try and recruit people in my school. Please let me know what your feedbacks are. Thanks