Yesterday I met my friend Mike Langton – a veteran Ad Man who c0-founded a leading digital services consultancy.

We had a rather stimulating conversation during which Mike shared his experiences and views of how the face of advertising is changing.

We were on the topic of dealing with clients and how we managed their expectations. In a small country like Singapore, I was lucky to have found sufficient business to grow MediaFreaks from a two man team to a thirty man company today. But managing clients has always been a challenge. No matter how much my company has grown, clients always expect us to give them cheap, fast and good service.

Now here’s a nugget from the conversation we had that I would like to share in this post.

Mike told me how he deals with his clients when discussing costs. Basically he tells his client, “Cheap, fast and good. Pick two!”

I couldn’t help laughing! The concept itself is not original – but the idea of telling your client that is just hilarious.

If you come to think about it, it is really a very funny but ingenious way of telling the clients that they need to be realistic about what they want. If they want something to be cheap, then it has to be at the expense of either speed or quality. If they want something to be delivered fast, then it has to be at the expense of either price or quality. If they want something to be of high quality, then they will have to either pay more or be willing to wait longer.

To sum it up -

Good + Fast = Expensive

Good + Cheap = Slow

Fast + Cheap = Inferior

Indeed, everyone is guilty of wanting service to be cheap, fast and good. I mean, who hasn’t been a client or customer at some point and not been guilty of wanting cheap, fast and good service? Considering the fact that we all really know that these three attributes do not usually co-exist, I guess it is just human nature to try and cut the best possible deal.

So the next time you face a client who is trying really hard, tell him/her what Mike says, “Cheap, fast and good. Pick two!”.

It’s been months since I’ve blogged about making money online.

The good thing is – many things had been accomplished during these past few months. Unfortunately, they took away so much of my time that I was unable to dedicate time to helping people make money on the internet. I’m glad to say that I’ve finally got more free time on my hands and I’m working out a schedule to start blogging about making money online again.

So you might be curious to know what I’ve been up to.

Well first, I’ve completed the production of the massive virtual world for kids called The Travels of Wiglington and Wenks and a series of hidden object games called Carto’s Magic Maps.

My company MediaFreaks helped conceptualized and launched a series of online marketing campaigns to create awareness for Western Digital’s new mascots which we designed and animated.

As we speak, we are wrapping up our production on the animated series Sedo Dog.

Along the way we also did several consulting and animation jobs for various companies. I was also invited to several schools and conferences to give talks. It’s been a ride for sure!

Anyway, like I was saying, now that I’ve got some spare time on hand, I’m going to delve into sharing information on making money online again.

Since the past few months, I’ve managed to increase my online income on autopilot despite outsourcing most of my internet marketing work. I’m rather happy with the results and I look forward to sharing my experiences with you.

Last Friday I received a nice email from Squidoo informing me that I was officially a Giant Squid. (For those of you who don’t know what Squidoo is, it is a community social media website that allows users to create pages (called lenses) for subjects of interest. Lenses are interactive, and can contain Flickr photos, Google maps, blogs, eBay auctions, YouTube videos, and other links. Squidoo is in the top 200 most visited sites in the world, and in the top 50 most viewed in the United States.)

This is how it read.

“We had hundreds of applications this round and really raised the bar in our search for excellence. And you didn’t just meet it; you vaulted over it. Thanks for the wonderful work, leadership, and for believing in what you can do here.

What now? Well, first, celebrate and do a happy dance.

Next: Please read the Giant Squids Handbook, attached to this email as a PDF. It will let you know about all the fun perks and blogs and tools we’ve created just for you. (And it outlines a little of what we expect from you in return. Hint: It’s not much. Just keep up the great work!).

Last: Come say hello at the secret Giant Squid Tips blog (I can’t divulge it because it’s meant to be secret!). This is your central watering hole where we share info and perks and sneak peeks and more. Please bookmark it (or better yet, grab the email newsletter version) so you don’t miss a thing.

We’re really excited to have you in the Giant Squids. We’ve got some cool stuff planned for you over the next few months. Have fun! And thanks for being here.

Your Giant Squid Organizers,
BDKZ (Bonnie), RMS (Robin), GypsyPirate (Patti) & Megan, Editor in Chief of Squidoo”

Let me say that this did not come easy as I wrote 60 over lenses over the span of 1 year while juggling with all my work. But I’ve been rewarded amply with good SEO links, 1 Lens of the Day, several high traffic lenses, a nice monthly paycheck for my efforts and now the Giant Squid status.

What can I say? Squidoo rocks

In case you want to check out my Squidoo profile, here it is.

Many years back I came across what seemed like a very strange website to me at that time. It consisted of a single page, with seemingly endless rows of words describing and selling the merits of a product that claimed to teach me how to make money off the internet.

I had immediately dismissed it as a scam.

After all, online scams were all too common during that time. It wasn’t until much later that I realized the single web page I had dismissed as a scam was probably one of the earliest internet marketing tools in history and what internet marketers call a ’squeeze page’ today. It was also probably a tool that was instrumental to making thousands of dollars, and quite possibly even tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, for the internet marketer who was using it.

A typical "squeeze page"

Years later when I crossed paths with an internet marketing website again, I was searching for ways to drive traffic to Mediafreaks – the website for my tech new media and animation company . During that time I knew absolutely nothing about the world of internet marketing nor traffic driving. I had not even heard of the term ‘internet marketing’!

My Googling brought me to several websites – mostly to blogs discussing internet marketing and traffic driving and web sites selling e-books promising to teach methods to deliver great riches and generous amounts of traffic.

At this point in my life, I was at a stage where my business was doing well and I had disposable income.I was willing to spend on a few info products to see what the hype was about, even though each product cost between $47USD to $147USD. I was curious and eager to procure this knowledge and I whipped out my credit card to make my first purchase – a product called Google Payload by Alex Goad.

Basically Google Payload teaches you how to drive traffic from low cost pay-per-click sites where you pay very little for the traffic to sites that you create embedded with higher paying ads. The concept is sound and simple – buy low, sell high. It made a lot of sense to me at that point and I followed the advice in the book.

I would like to tell you that I made oodles of money through that, but the fact is, I did not. In fact, I even sustained a couple of hundred dollars loss. The reason was – the traffic I was purchasing was not recognized in the higher paying ad network’s eyes, and therefore I did not get paid for the traffic I directed!

I later realized that relevant traffic from natural sources is very important to ad networks.

For example, if you are selling sports shoes on your website and you are catering to US citizens only, then you want visitors that are relevant, i.e. sportsmen from US, because these visitors might convert to customers. Conversely, if your visitors come from China and they are looking for Chinese food recipes, such traffic is useless to you because they will never buy your shoes. Traffic that is relevant to your site and can potentially purchase from you are valuable to you, and this traffic is best described as relevant traffic.

Natural sources are traffic sources that direct traffic to a website in a non-contrived manner. Search engines are probably the best example, because they direct people who are searching for a particular answer to relevant websites that can hopefully address it. You can imagine how frustrated one may be if he searches for a dentist in his area but ends up being directed to a gambling site through a search engine which doesn’t quite function the same way as a search engine. That is an example of an unnatural source because this ’search engine’ has been designed to direct traffic to websites the web master of the ’search engine’ owns as well.

It is not difficult to understand why the ad networks do not respond well to non-relevant traffic from unnatural sources because accepting such low quality traffic would result in low quality conversion for their advertisers and impact their businesses at the end of the day.

Saying all that, Google Payload did teach me a lot, although it certainly did not teach me how to make money off the internet. It taught me how PPC networks work. It taught me how to set up ad accounts and install ads on my websites. It taught me what traffic arbitrage meant. It taught me that you could not make money off the internet using ‘quick and dirty’ methods.

If fact, I felt that this experience helped to build up a positive attitude in my approach towards internet marketing. I was convinced that it was very possible to make money online. After all, didn’t the author of Google Payload – Alex Goad – make oodles of money from this product? During that time, Google Payload was one of the best selling products on Clickbank and going for $77USD, with the back end video product going for $97. The product sold a few thousand copies, so just do your maths!

I will not comment further on Alex and whether Google Payload can teach you how to make money, because there were people who swore that they made money following Alex’s advice. But it’s just that for me, I realized that my personality is more suited to taking a methodical and step-by-step approach to building online businesses. Quick ways to make money like the traffic arbitrage method taught in Google Payload are just not for me.

After Google Payload, I went on to invest in a few more internet marketing info products – products from internet marketers like Michael Cheney, Joel Comm, Dylan Loh, Brad Callen, Yanik Silver and more. And let me just say that these products taught me a whole lot.

I not only learnt how to make money online, I also learnt how to drive traffic to any website I desired.

A few thousand pages and a few months later the results spoke for itself.

It was initially a trickle, I was making only a less than a hundred per month. Then as I perservered and continued putting in more time and effort to build the foundations of my internet businesses, I was making back the money I spent on internet maketing products every single month, and the figures kept increasing.

Today, after years of setting up several streams of online revenue for myself, I’ve finally decided to set up this blog to share my knowledge on internet marketing.

Make no mistake that I do want to create another revenue stream for myself, but more importantly, I have a desire to contribute genuine, tried-and-tested information on making money online and the corresponding knowledge and tools associated with it to folks who are searching for a way out of their low-paying or unfulfilling jobs.

I want you to be able to always trust what I tell you, so there will never be incredulous unproven hype posted here. I will recommend products I have personally read and reviewed, and I will sell useful internet marketing info products I personally author. I will also be contributing only valuable tried-and-tested knowledge on internet marketing to this website. It would be a great achievement for me if I can bring this knowledge to as many folks as possible and show them how to make money online.

Up until now, I am best known for being the founder of Mediafreaks and being a creative entrepreneur.

It is my goal – with the publishing of this first blog post on this website – that I would also soon become known too for being an expert internet marketer.

ALDRIC CHANG | Follow me on Twitter | Be my friend on Facebook
CREATIVE ENTREPRENEUR, INTERNET MARKETING EXPERT, CARTOON PRODUCER, SONGWRITER, MUSIC PRODUCER, VIRTUAL WORLD CREATOR