The Filipino Entrepreneur

One of the most effective and convenient way to handle cash is in the Philippines nowadays is through Globe G-Cash. It’s the closest thing to paypal, credit cards and EPS of BPI express. If you have an online business that caters local customers, I think this is the best option. Compared to all credit card processing companies, paypal is the easiest way and cheapest way to set up your payment processing but if your customers are mostly local, it will eat away a lot of your overhead cost. Because if you are using paypal, it will charge 3.4%+US$0.30 (this is the highest rate) of the amount transferred to your paypal account using credit cards. But even if the transaction is paypal to paypal and if you will transfer your paypal fund to your local bank account, paypal will charge php50 and the local bank will charge php150 for every transaction. This will not be a problem if the amount of your transactions are tens of thousands of pesos because it will compensate the cost. The only problem here is if your customer is using other network like Smart or Sun for example but buying an extra Globe sim won’t hurt your pocket if you are not a Globe user.

If the money involved is very modest, lets say hundreds or a few thousand pesos then the transaction charges is too much. G-Cash can be considered as an electronic wallet and a poor man’s payment processor to accept payments. For example, if you are selling stuffs on ebay, you can accept payment by G-Cash and you can deposit it to your BPI savings or current account using your cellphone. You can also convert GCash to cash or vice versa by going to Globe Business Center or to an accredited GCASH Partner.

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I’m writing this post not because I totally disagree that blogging is the easiest way to have an online presence. Yes it’s true that it’s the easiest way because there are blog site that will host your blog for free like Blogger.com and Wordpress.com. And if you want to be serious on blogging, you can register a domain name and install a wordpress software to build your blog site. Just beware from folks out there that will tell you that it’s “Blogs are officially the easiest, fastest and most pain-less way to start your online business…”

Building business online needs traffic or visitors. But if someone on the net will tell you if you will just buy their book or register on their online classes and promises something like “I will teach you to have tons of traffic on your website or blog site in 3 days etc. etc.” then you should think twice. You know, in my experience, having traffic on your website is the hardest part of building an online presence. Some were very lucky because they chose a niche that they really love to do and many people have interest in that niche. But some did the opposite, they chose a niche which they are not sure they like and thought many people will like that niche, so in turn very few people visit their blog site.

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Media have it’s magic, it will make something awful really nice because of good publicity. It’s really hard to become popular in the internet but in television you can attract a lot of visitors. Maybe that is a quick way for a blogger to become famous by exposing themselves thru those kinds of media and also by using magazines telling all those things that they are so and so famous about their craft.

I didn’t mean all of them are fake but there are some who are really famous like for example Abe Olandes of Yugatech. But there are some who like to show themselves as a hot shot or something which makes people curios and creates some kind of doubt to other bloggers in the blog sphere if those really are famous and if their websites receives lots of traffic and earns a lot of money.

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Thinking of making your website or blog WAP compliant? It looks like it is easier said than done. Imagine, how will you fit the PC monitor screen to a cell phone screen? Those tiny LCD cellphone screen can’t possibly fit in it, that is, if you will put everything in it. If you are using your cell phone to browse non WAP blogs and websites, you can still view the whole page but you have to zoom-in and zoom-out in order for you to read the contents. It’s not possible to load the whole page in a cell phone’s browser because the letters are too tiny and will not show properly. A WAP compliant or mobile website have slim lined(eliminated the non necessary contents) the webpage and just put the important contents in a small mobile website.

If you own a website (a non blog site) with thousands of pages, for example: static html pages, it will take a long time for you to convert all those pages. But if you own a hosted blog, then lucky for you because it will only take you a few minutes just installing a plug-in. This will only work in a hosted Wordpress blog. I don’t know if the free wordpress blog can use plugins because I haven’t tried it. If you like to make your blog WAP compliant, you can download the plugin here. The plugin is created by Alex King and if you are willing to donate, it’s better so we can help our fellow entrepreneur create more wonderful plugins.

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News about the acquisition of Yahoo! by Microsoft is all over the internet and they say that this is due to Bill Gates wanting to compete with Google in online domination. And it will be purchased for US$44 billion dollars approximately. But just looking at the situation, the reason why Yahoo! is shrinking is due to the fact that more than 3/4 of search engine market was already dominated by Google (see Fig 1 below). And even if they merge it will have not much impact on Google. Yes Microsoft dominates the software industry but internet is a different thing. Although Internet explorer is the most popular browser in the world, still, it’s really the people themselves who will decide which search engine to use unless IE browsers have a built in blocking plug-in that will block anything that comes from Google. But that idea will tarnish Microsoft’s reputation and Google will be in a win-win situation.

Fig 1. Read the rest of this entry »