dannychoo.com - Danny Choo : Anime, Figures, Idols, Gundam, Otaku and Events from Japan

dannychoo.com - Danny Choo : Anime, Figures, Idols, Gundam, Otaku and Events from Japan http://www.dannychoo.com dannychoo.com A Day in Tokyo http://www.dannychoo.com/adp/eng/1368/A+Day+in+Tokyo.html

This week we have another variation on the A Week in Tokyo theme. Today we look at my typical day in Tokyo.

The day is last Tuesday. 630AM. The morning starts off with going through the Internets, writing up posts, checking mail and reading your comments. The table is always messy in the morning ^^;

Then its down to check then snail mail - last months cheque from Google for my Adsense earnings arrives.
It only makes sense for me to share my learnings on how I make money online and categorized a few articles under Blogging & Affiliate Tips.

I also have set up Featured Feeds EX for folks to make money through Google Adsense ad placements on this site. If you are interested in Featured feeds - follow the instructions in that article and mail me after at [support at dannychoo dot com] and I will activate your account. Your posts also appear on Otaku.fm too which will also drive more traffic to your site.

I want to share as much traffic and revenue that this site generates and will be adding more features/content to the site so that users can make money or learn to make money online.

I wont be wiring money to users directly however - I'd rather teach people to fish so that they can feed themselves for a lifetime rather than give them 1 fish so that they can feed themselves for a day ^^

The Adsense earnings are much less than my Amazon affiliate earnings though - again the Blogging & Affiliate Tips section has info on making money from Amazons Associate program too.

1030AM. Then its off to Roppongi to meet some folks at a record company - a view from their offices - Roppongi Hills in the background.

1PM. Then its more meetings over lunch. Met up with some folks from Tokyo University. One of the students has a pic of Miss Tokyo University on his mobile - am due to be meeting up with her in May for an event at Todai [東大]. "Todai" means "Tokyo University" in Japanese.

The restaurant only had these masks to represent the men and womens toilets - I had to think about it for a few seconds before deciding which way to turn ^^;

3PM. Then its off to another location in Roppongi for the shooting of this weeks episode of Dance Shuffle with DJ GOW and Nikk.

Doing quite a bit of filming these days and am thinking that I'll need to get hold of some better equipment.

4PM. Then its meeting up with two new idols - Rika Kotera [小寺里佳(こてらりか)] on the left and Akane Monma [門馬あかね(もんまあかね)] on the right.
Both are second year high school students.

Which comes first? Mirai-chans anime, manga, figure or theme song? Find out this year ^^

Grabbing a drink before going to the next location. Tommy Lee is great in the BOSS commercials - especially the Akiba one.

5PM. The next appointment is at Columbia Music. Am working with them on some rather coolsome community stuff at Otorevo.jp.

Being a music company, I occasionally bump into singers in the office - this one is Arisa Tsuji.

8PM. Then its back home for a bit before the next appointment.

Grabbing some sashimi for dinner.

10PM. Then its off by car to Shirokanedai for filming.

10.30PM. Filming location is an Italian restaurant.

Preparing for filming. For some reason there are figures used in the video.

12AM. My first time as director for a video to be released soon - watch this spot to find out more.

Filming finishes at 3.30AM and get home by 4AM.
Next day has meetings starting at 9AM T-T

By Danny Choo on 2008/02/10 06:07 ]]> Sun, 10 Feb 2008 07:07:00 +0900 August 2007 Stats http://www.dannychoo.com/adp/eng/1087/August+2007+Stats.html

Its that time of month again when we take a look at the previous month stats, most popular posts and referrers.

August was slightly down in page views month over month to 9,433,840 (down from 10,091,475) and the average unique daily users was also down to 48,730 from 52,599. If August wasn't a holiday season then I would start to look at why page views and users have been declining.
Some of the things I would look into are...

Down time - were there any outages and if so for how long? How many users were affected? What is causing downtime - network/hardware/software?

I'm changing the UI all the time - at which point of time did page views/users start to decline? Has the new UI affected the ability for users to navigate?

Content - have I started to lean towards a particular type of content? Apart from event coverage time, I do try to keep a balance of content as I know there are many of you who are here for a specific topic - some are here for everything while others are here for Gundam or Figures or Eroge or Idols...
I still have not posted the enterprise booth stuff from the Comike for example because there would be an eroge overload in a short space of time.

Have there been enough IU posts? An Incremental User Post is a post which many people like to talk about and link to - thus bringing in new incremental users. Many users will loose interest in this site over time (known as churn) and it's important to make up for that loss by generating new users - just like any business really.
An example of a IU Post is the Wooden Supercar - generated a ton of traffic.

The above is an example of a healthy site. Notice how after a spike of users, the original traffic goes up from "A" to "B" - the difference is incremental users. The percentage is usually small - about 5-10%. Expecting all new visitors to the site to become incremental users is unrealistic.

The above is an example of an unhealthy site with continued churn. The site generates a buzz which brings in traffic but users dont stay around. The user arrived usually because they clicked on something they liked but why didnt they come back for more?
One of the main reasons is poor discoverability and navigation - the user could not discover anything else that they liked. UI and discoverability improvements to this site contributed to the 100+% incremental growth in traffic since March.

Most users are unlikely to go dig around a site that they visit for the first time so its our job to make it easy for them to discover something that they may like.

I get thousands of users a day through Google. Has Google changed their ranking algorithm? If so then I need to look at the structure of the HTML to see what needs tweaking so that I can get back up in the SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages). Read how a change in the Google ranking algorithm called "Big Daddy" changed how many pages got ranked and indexed.

Etc - will go into that etc some other time ^^

Anyway, back to the post. Most popular posts this month were...

Notable referrers of the month were...

Japan Probe - everything Japan
Figure Review - collection of figure review sites
Gunota - everything Gundam
Moeyo - everything figures
Kirainet - everything Japan
Kotaku - everything games
Akihabara News - exclusive press reviews of gadgets
Antenna - this is the only anime aggregator that will bring you a good amount of traffic
Fulgur-o-blog - figure blog
Rin Rin Ou - Japan neta
Toaruhi - figure site
Char Senyo - Gundam news
Collection DX - figure site
Random Curiosity - anime blog

And many many thanks to everybody else who drove traffic to the site.

I noticed hundreds of member signups when I posted the Dengeki Hime post and I presume it was to use the nosebleed function ^o^
I also noticed that many of you who did sign up also registered a url. Do remember that I am open to sharing dannychoo.com users through the Featured Feeds feature. If you would like a boost in traffic then it makes sense to share.

This month you can expect coverage from the Tokyo Game Show (see last years coverage here), and I will also be heading off to Los Angeles for the Imprint Conference. Also expect a few feature launches too ^^
Once again I would like to thank all of you for your continued support. Domo Arigato!
By Danny Choo on 2007/09/03 23:50 ]]> Tue, 04 Sep 2007 00:50:00 +0900 Discoverability http://www.dannychoo.com/adp/eng/1069/Discoverability.html

Just wanted to run through a few new features recently added to the site and talk about how "discoverability" is just as important as "userbility" when it comes down to web design.

Many talk about userbility for humans and end up with a site that has no userbility whatsoever for a search engine - sites must be designed with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in mind so that one can expect natural traffic from search engines.

Another element that you dont hear much about in web design is "discoverability." As the term suggests, discoverability is a way to design a site so that users can easily discover the content or services that you offer. Folks putting effort in driving traffic to their site via SEO or SEM (Search Engine Marketing) or through advertising need to realize that efforts should also be put into converting the user once they arrive at the site.
"Conversion" in this case means to get that new visitor to buy something (in the case of an EC site) or get them to discover something that will make them want to come back for more.

Here are a few new features which hopefully should help you think about how you can go about organizing your content.

Ajax Tabs

Above: In the middle column you will notice a new set of tabs. Upon clicking on the tab "Figures", the browser will fetch the latest figure posts and load it into that tab without the browser refreshing - this should happen in an instant. This means that you can discover and get to more content from the top page.

The "latest" tab is loaded in the HTML with the index page so searchbots can still see the default content to crawl thus SEO is still enabled. Read up on my Blog Monetization post for more tips on SEO.
Folks who want this script can get it at DynamicDrive - its quite easy to use and appearance is managed by one css file.

Above: after clicking on the "Gundam" tab, the tab will be loaded with the latest Gundam posts in summary format.

In order to do this, before a new post goes live, I kick of a build which generates flat files from the database for each post that appears in any of the tabs. A process within the build then creates another flat file for each category which will be called into each tab. The file for figures lives here.
The link for the above file is accessible from the top page which means that I am creating a new shortcut for a searchbot to reach more content - getting searchbots to reach as much content as possible from the top page within a few branches is crucial.

Header Navigation

The new header is intended not only to be a bit more safer for work, but also enable me to group categories under one image. For example, previously I had a pair of "eyes" for idol videos and another pair of "eyes" for idol photos - these two items are similar and yet competing with each other.

Through my own observation of user behavior, I discovered that a visual representation of a category as a menu item greatly improved click through rates. For example, a picture of Gundam as a menu item converts much better than the text "Gundam." If you want a high click through rate for a particular category then stick an image of a girl on it. This is the reason why we always had an image of a girl on the top page at MSN Japan - Yahoo Japan uses the same tactic too but on different pages.

Related Items

Above: Previously, related items used to be just a text link. I changed that to an icon+title and got a higher click through rate. Now that I have changed the format to a summary and icon, the click through rates for related items have gone up to over 50%.

The idea was to have the items as part of the post where the user continues reading the summary instead of deciding whether to read more just by looking at the title and icon.

And this is for those who fell asleep reading this post. Its by my fave (probably) artist Peko-tan. That site could have blocked access from outside of Japan so if thats the case then get this wallpaper from somewhere here - click on the link at the top of that page.
By Danny Choo on 2007/08/26 23:08 ]]> Mon, 27 Aug 2007 00:08:00 +0900 Featured Feeds EX http://www.dannychoo.com/adp/eng/954/Featured+Feeds+EX.html

Announcing Featured Feeds EX - a program that is aimed at growing the online Otaku Sphere.

As you can see from the above screenshot, the average unique users for July so far has been 52,133 per day and I have already served over 2.5 million page views. I want to make sure that I am sharing these users with fellow Otaku site owners and so have extended my Featured Feeds program that I have been running for about half a year now.

To participate, all you have to do is place my English RSS feed on your index and blog post pages. There are many plugins for wordpress and blogger that enable you to do this.
What I will then do is put your feed in the Featured Feeds page *and* show it randomly on the top index page and across all blog post pages. The feeds that you already see in the Featured Feeds page are of comrades who have already placed my feed on their site.

If you are interested in attracting Japanese readers to your site, you can also place my Japanese RSS feed on your site where upon your feed will be displayed on my Japan top and blog post pages.

Featured Feeds is good for everybody because:-

Due to the volume of visitors to this site, you can expect a decent amount of traffic flowing to your site.
Your feed on this site creates new discoverability of otaku related content for my current readers.
Featured Feeds is great for those who have just started up a new otaku blog/site. It does not matter how many readers you initially have. The point of this program is to share.
You have the potential of making money at the same time.

Once you have placed my RSS feeds on your site, you then have to sign up for a dannychoo.com account and fill out your details including your RSS feed. Then send mail to [support at dannychoo dot com] and let me know your user name. I will then activate your feed. From then on you get to manage your own feed.

Fellow comrades who participate in Featured Feeds also appear on the comrades page and randomly on the top index page. As this is all about sharing, only registered folks who link to dannychoo.com get activated as a comrade (sorry).

Notice to previous Comrade and Featured Feed partners!

I have changed the architecture of the Comrade and FeaturedFeeds to allow you to manage your link/feed yourself. This also means that I dont need to manually manage everything - all I do is activate you ^^;
If you used to be a Comrade and dont see your link anymore, please register your details and then send mail to [support at dannychoo dot com]. The same goes for Featured Feed partners - you need to signup and then register your feed.

If you have already linked to dannychoo.com via a link or feed and dont see your details under the Comrade or Featured Feeds page then just send me mail and let me know your user name.

Why share?

I try to be proactive in sharing my traffic with other fellow comrades and believe that hording traffic is not the way of Web2.0.
We can mutually expect growth through working together because we both cater for a niche category (Japan, Otaku, Anime, Gundam, Figures etc). It is likely that the users we share with each other will become new readers and further grow the Otaku Sphere.

Update: Some partners have registered a feed that cannot be parsed for some reason. Use the Feed tester tool and make sure you register a feed that can be parsed by that tool.
By Danny Choo on 2007/07/10 05:06 ]]> Tue, 10 Jul 2007 06:06:00 +0900 DC Rewards (adsense) http://www.dannychoo.com/adp/eng/844/DC+Rewards+%28adsense%29.html

I have developed a new feature to thank the many blog/site owners who are linking to dannychoo.com. The feature is called DCRewards (Adsense). In a nutshell...

You link to dannychoo.com - links have your DCTag embedded (DCTag=DannyChooTag)
When a Cute User comes from your site via a link which has your DCTag embedded, that Cute Users browser will have a cookie set with your Adsense details which does not expire for *one year*.
This site will refer to the details in the cookie and set *all* Adsense ads on this site with *your* Adsense details.
If that Cute User clicks on any of the ads - *you* get money from Google.
Because this system uses cookies, even if Cute User closes her browser and comes back another day, if she clicks on an Adsense ad, *you* continue to get money.

Its simple to get started - just follow the next few steps.

1.Get your pub id and channel id from your Adsense account

You need an Adsense account - if you do not have one, read and signup from my previous post.
Log into your Adsense account and proceed to create a channel so that you can measure how many impressions/money you are making at dannychoo.com. Once you have done that, proceed to create an ad block - any ad - does not matter. I have highlighted what I need you to register at dannychoo.com - your pub id and channel id - copy *exactly* what you see in your field.

2.Register your details at dannychoo.com.

Login into dannychoo.com and go to edit your profile - you will see two new fields - stick in your Adsense pub id and channel id - dont forget to save changes ^^;

3.Link to dannychoo.com by registering my rss feed.

For those who have registered my feed on your site, register the following RSS feed instead which will embed your DCTag in the links for each post.

http://www.dannychoo.com/rssrewards/eng/?DCTag=yourloginname

Lets take member James as an example. His nick name is "James" and his login is "james". He registered my rss feed on his site Japan Probe as..

http://www.dannychoo.com/rssrewards/eng/?DCTag=james

You can see what it looks like below. Have a look at the status bar - notice that when you hover over any of the headlines that his DCTag (james) is embedded in all the links.

If Cute User clicks on any of those links, her browser will be set with a cookie that lasts for *one year* that contains James's Adsense details. This means that if Cute User clicks on any of the ads on dannychoo.com - James gets money. Even if Cute User closes her browser and comes back and clicks on an ad - James still gets money.

4.Link to dannychoo.com by linking to separate posts.

If you cant register my feed but would still like to make money, you can link to blog posts. When you are logged in, you will see a "RDReward link" on each blog post page - the link will have your DCTag embedded - you must use that link and not the link you see in the address bar of your browser. Right click and copy the link location.

5.Link to dannychoo.com by linking to the top page only.

If you would just like to make money by linking to the top page only, please use the following link. Dont forget to change "yourloginname" to your real login name!

http://www.dannychoo.com/rewards/eng/?DCTag=yourloginname

6.How to confirm it works

Click on a link from your site that has your DCTag embedded. You will notice your Adsense details at the bottom of the page like so...

You can also look at the source of the page where you will see your Adsense details embedded.

7.What else you need to know

Adsense ads do not show up on pages that I have flagged as "adult" or anything that may go against the Adsense guidelines. Even if a user comes from your page and lands on an "adult" flagged page, the users browser is still set with a cookie meaning that if they click around and eventually click on an ad - you get money.

This is cookie based meaning that if a user has disabled or clears their cookies - this wont work.

Current Adsense users can only have up to 3 blocks of ads on their website - linking to dannychoo.com increases their chance of making money.

This feature is not limited to people who are currently linking to me - feel free to use this feature at your leisure.

The best way to make money from this feature is to register my feed on your top and blog post pages just like James has done. Dont forget that I just released the Mirai packs so you can make banners if you wish.

Another way of making money is by posting news that you may find interesting on other online communities that you participate in - the more people that you drive to the site - the more money you will make.

If Cute User clicks through from Dark Mirage's site after visiting from James's site, The Adsense details will be over written with Dark Mirage's Adsense details - Dark Mirage then gets the money from any clicks generated by Cute User.

8.Why is Danny giving away his Adsense earnings?!

For a few reasons. First reason is that my site wouldn't be where it is without the help of folks who are linking to me - they must be rewarded somehow.
I do thank my regular readers too and am thinking of an effective way to give out prizes soon ^^
I am also doing this because I work in the internet and need to try out new things. I have never seen anybody doing this before. Have confirmed with Google whether it was OK to implement something like this and they said it was fine.

9.Will Danny remove this feature if his Adsense earnings drop?

No. I launched this feature knowing that I my earnings will drop but rewarding those who drive traffic to my site is important.
Starting with my Blog Monetization post, I want to help other fellow otaku do well online.

10.Why are users likely to click on ads on this site then eh?

The platform that this site runs on (Nav2.0) is fully optimized to generate relevant ads as explained in that previous Blog Monetization post. Relevant ads displayed along related content leads to a higher conversion rate.
By Danny Choo on 2007/05/14 04:11 ]]> Mon, 14 May 2007 05:11:00 +0900 Mirai PSD File http://www.dannychoo.com/adp/eng/849/Mirai+PSD+File.html

Have a few more posts today but need to dash and will post when I get back in the afternoon but in the meantime...

I noticed that many site owners have pictures of Mirai on their site which really does make me happy. But it also looks like many have had a hard time trying to modify existing images of her. To make it easier, I have prepared two PSD files for you to download. Both files are high res fully layered with transparency. Feel free to use these files as you wish but do provide a linkback and credit dannychoo.com ^^. Also, please remember that these files are distributed along with a Creative Commons License.
You can put her in your header, background, use her as part of your UI, your avatar etc. The sailor outfit file contains all the recent facial expressions and also includes her pink, green, blue, purple uniforms. The swimwear file contains wet, dry and B-chiku layers and a few facial expressions.
I will put screenshots of sites that I spot having Mirai as part of the UI in her page. Both files also contain the dannychoo.com text and square logo. The download links are below and only work for members who have been signed up for more than 7 days.
Below: 20MB Zipped PSD file available here (need to be logged in)

Below: 3.8MB Zipped PSD file available here (need to be logged in)

By Danny Choo on 2007/05/11 23:42 ]]> Sat, 12 May 2007 00:42:00 +0900 Blog Monetization http://www.dannychoo.com/adp/eng/837/Blog+Monetization.html

Regular readers will remember me promising over a year ago to share some of my knowledge of making money online - well here is the beginning of the series and sorry to have kept you waiting.
If the idea of monetization from a blog offends you then please turn back now and please stop sending me hate mail telling me about it!

Today I am going to talk about an affiliate program called Google Adsense. I started off late in the game as I thought that you only get 1 cent per click - not so as I discovered after joining the program. Receiving up to 1.75 USD per click. On a good day I get about 50 USD and make enough from it to pay for all my monthly bills (hosting, telephone, electric, gas yada yada), my monthly mags and a few figures.

What is Adsense?

Google Adsense is a program which displays contextual ads on your website based on the content. For example, If you are writing a figure review, you should have ads automatically show up which are relevant (toy/figure shops etc). Ads show up also based on what Google thinks your site is about. I have a lot of Japan articles which is why a lot of Japan related ads show up. Will give you details on how to sign up for Asdense at the end of this post.

Ad placements/shapes/colors etc

Once you signup for an Adsense account at Google, you login and create blocks of ads which are in the form of Javascript snippets that you place within your HTML. Notice how I dont have any visible borders around my ads and how the colors match my site - this is the best converting combination.
I know some site owners want to distinguish ads from content by leaving the ads in their default colors (includes border) but less people are likely to click on them. Its not a matter of tricking your users - Adsense ads are clearly labeled "Ads by Google" as you can see. If the ads blend in with your site then users can easily make decisions as to whether they want to click or not.
Ads in default colors scream out "I'm an Ad!" and the likelihood of people clicking on them drops significantly. If you still want to make it clear that Adsense is not part of your site content, then maybe you can add a heading above the ads and use colors that blend with your site but the conversion is going to be extremely low and may as well not bother. Even Google mention that borderless ads convert well within their help pages.

Now that you have decided on colors, you need to decide on placement. "Above the fold" is an internet UI expression which means "everything above the status bar at the bottom of the browser" - its the area from the top of the page until the bottom of the browser window (without scrolling down). Everything above the fold is the highest converting real estate you have - you stick more ads up there and you will earn more money.
At one point I used to have 3 blocks of Adsense above the fold - sure I was making a ton of money but the site looked awful! The single row of Adsense that you see at the top of my site is the highest converting block for me.

Your content

Now that you have decided on colors and placement, you need to consider your content - Adsense ads appear automatically and there are no settings to display the ads of your choice. If ads are relevant to your site content then people are likely to click. for example...
Take a look at the screenshot of my post on working in Japan. You can see that most of the ads are Japan related - one of the ads is even entitled "Work in Japan".

In order to achieve this you need to do a few things starting with the title of your post. One of the reasons why I have short titles is because I want relative ads to show up. If I chose a title "My tutorial on looking for work in the land of the rising sun" over "Work in Japan" then the ads that show up will be less relevant. Ultimately its up to you as to how you want to title your posts. Some people say that short titles are un-descriptive but I believe that one can be creative in coming up with short titles that represent the content of the post.

Notice how that Work in Japan page has related Japan posts in the left column. I made the post detail pages so that the Related Posts section is actually related to the page content - same for figures, Gundam posts etc too.
This is because I want a particular page to be as focused as possible on one subject. I dont want too much text about Gundam for example on that Japan post. For a Japan post for example, I try to keep the percentage of text about Japan over 70%. If I have a mix of Japan and Gundam text at a 50/50 ratio then the relevance of the ads drop.

Other tweaks

Now that you have decided on colors and placement, you need to do a few tweaks to your HTML code to ensure that you are getting ads displayed at a high relevance.
Again taking the Work in Japan page as an example - have a look at the source code. You will see that the title of the post is in a H1 tag. Adsense places importance on the text within H1 tags. Only use this once on your pages or you may be penalized for spamming. Make sure the blog software that you are using places your titles in a H1 tag.

Are the titles of your post still looking like" www.somedomain.com/?P=13" ? when it can be looking like "www.somedomain.com/15/working+in+japan/" ? Not only does having the title in your url help to increase the importance of the post title (and therefore help display relevant ads), it also benefits your site in terms of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The better SEO your site is, the higher the rankings are - one of the reasons why figure.fm shows up a lot when you search for figures. There should be options in the blog software that you use to enable you to control what your urls look like.

Adsense Channels

When you create blocks of ads, you can designate channels. A channel is a mean for you to identify which blocks of ads are effective. For example, you want to see whether its worth putting ads within the text of your posts - you think that it will earn more money but also think it may annoy your readers. By using channels, you can see whether people click on that ad - if they dont then remove it.

Sometimes, Adsense cant figure out what your site is about and may display a public service ad (donate to red cross etc) and sometimes may just show up blank leaving a nasty gap in your page. You can over come this by installing piece of Javascript that Google gives you - its hidden in the options which allow you to designate what to show when Adsense cant serve you ads.

Adsense Filters

From time to time, you will see ads appear on your site that you dont particularly want displayed - you can block these domains within your Adsense control panel.

Other things to consider

Here are some tips on running a site but dont necessarily affect Adsense (but are important).

For those thinking of starting a blog, starting off with something niche is good. For me that means Otaku and Japan. If you are starting off and try to cover everything under the sun then it may be difficult for you to gain substantial readership.
Volume of traffic = more revenue. Plain and simple equation. Bloggers who want to keep their site small scale with a small group of regular readers is fine but should not expect to make money from blogging.
Being active in communities and commenting on other peoples blogs will help generate traffic to your site.
The more content that you write, the more it will be picked up by search engines and if your pages are properly SEO'ed then you should expect more and more traffic.
Working with others. Working with other site owners will benefit both parties and in this case I mean sharing traffic. I know some bloggers are not keen on sharing traffic as they think that they will be loosing readers - thats not what the internet is about. The readers choose what they want to read - not the blogger.

Bloggers who are afraid of loosing readers are probably not confident about the quality of their content. Channeling readers to other sites rarely means that they will loose readers. If regular readers like your content then they will come back.
Working with other bloggers has made a huge contribution to the current readership of this site.

Being able to make money from affiliates is not a myth - your passion for your niche category and your focus will enable you to reach your destination like it has helped me.
The most I have ever made through all my affiliate programs is just over 1000 USD per day last December - my next goal is to keep it a steady 1000 by Q4 of this year - nearly there ^^.

Just like me, one of my ex colleagues at Amazon left to start his own company because he had the financial backing from income through his affiliate sites. The ironic thing is that I got him started on affiliating and taught him a lot of the tricks of the trade. He is built like a brick - never gets sick and never sleeps and has been able to build much more affiliate sites than me - resulting in much much more money than I earn! He is also much more focused than me as he does not have scantly clad figures on his desk to distract him ^^;
Seriously, its good to share info with entrepreneurs like him - sharing our methods means that we both benefit.

Google Adsense is actually the lowest generating form of income for me - I make much more money through Amazon associates and other programs such as DTI, Affiliate 2.0, Rakuten Affiliate etc etc - I will be talking about some of these in the future but in the meantime do check out Adsense below.
For those who have not done so before can read my affiliate story.
If you have any affiliate questions - post away and I will be more than happy to help.

So what are you waiting for? Signup for Adsense below.

EDIT: There is now also Featured Feeds - get your feed all across this site and on Otaku.fm.
By Danny Choo on 2007/05/04 00:55 ]]> Fri, 04 May 2007 01:55:00 +0900 Mirai Inc http://www.dannychoo.com/adp/eng/795/Mirai+Inc.html

Taking a wee short break from the TAF2007 for an announcement.
Been waiting many years to announce this. I used to have a sole proprietorship but have finally took the step to incorporate my own company. My sole proprietorship was called "Mirai" meaning "future" because it was the beginning of what I saw to be my future. I decided to keep that name for my company which is known as MIRAI Inc or MIRAI Kabushikigaisha (株式会社).

The company mission is to deliver CGM/SEO platforms and solutions. For those who dont know, CGM stands for "Consumer Generated Media" - more commonly known outside of Japan as UGC or "User Generated Content". The SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. I leave Microsoft next week and become full time Representative Director (less fancy word for CEO) for my company.

Above: An unexpected sketch from Azamiyuko sensei congratulating me on incorporating my company ^^. I'm going to have her color this in. Cute eyes (both pairs).

Deciding on the company mission

I have always been the one to keep my options open and actively speak to recruiters and reach out to others who work in the same industry as me - the internet and media.
I also attend many of the networking events held throughout Tokyo every month. Through these types of activities I have been able to meet an incredible amount of talented entrepreneurs who I share ideas with and have also met many clients.

For me, keeping options open not only meant broadening the amount of opportunity to be gained but also meant to secure other channels of income. More than one channel of income is always a good thing especially when you have expensive figure and gundam hobbies ^^;
Seriously though, relying on one channel of income can be a bad thing. A scenario that I see all the time for example is a talented programmer in an organization gets laid off with his team because of a re-org. That person has a mortgage and a family to feed and now needs to do the milk rounds to secure himself a new job. One channel of income can only go so far if you want more from life and unfortunately this world revolves around money no matter which way you slice or dice it. Money many not be everything but its a sad fact of life.
Job satisfaction does ultimately come before money but for people who dont have any money, having a satisfying job that does not pay is not an option. Money only starts to become irrelevant when one has lots of it.

I mentioned that I have been able to meet a lot of clients over the years. While keeping a full time job at Amazon and Microsoft, I have always done stuff on the side - of course ensuring that it does not interfere or conflict with my full time job ^^;
I used to personally code platforms for my clients but got to a point where I could not manage a full time job at the same time. I sought to hire programmers overseas and have been able to hire teams of talented programmers in Romania, India and China. Hiring locally in Japan didnt make sense due to development costs and the fact that I was only a sole proprietorship at the time.

My affiliate story

Apart from my clients, I have always experimented with affiliate systems and got really serious when I helped with development of Amazon Web Services in Japan. I built the first platform to utilize the service which was used at the official launch press conference.
For those who dont know, affiliate systems are those which enable you to make a commission by introducing products or services of a company to people who visit your website - Amazon associates is a good example. When I first started, I thought to myself that it would be cool if I could earn about 6,000 yen to pay for the phone bill ( I was being optimistic at the time ). But after researching SEO and Apache, before I knew it I was earning more than I made at my full time job...
The extra channel of income through the stuff I do on the web outside of my full time job has not only enabled me to pay for a house and land in Tokyo, but has also enabled me to save enough capital to start my own company. A foreigner in Japan has to have a certain amount of capital in order to get the Business Investor visa.

The extra income is good because I dont need to rely on venture capital or angel investment. One of the reasons why I am leaving a full time job is because I want to be my own boss - taking VC or AI just means that I would have a boss who sits elsewhere - worse still - s/he would own a certain percentage of the company and be breathing down my neck making sure that I make good use of their money and not buy figures ^^; I hear a lot from entrepreneurs who have taken VC and they advise that if you dont need it, dont take it. While many VC startups do well, many go sour because of the involvement of the VC. One ends up trying to produce results at the VCs request instead of being able to focus on what the company originally set out to do.
Another reason why I started a company is because I want to see how far I can go using affiliate income as capital and building the company up from my current client base. Not really interested in somebody owning half of my company.

Why now?

Now or never. I want to die with peace in mind that I lived a life that I wanted to live. For me that has always meant to run my own business doing what I feel most passionate about.
I set a goal many years ago to start my own company by the age of 35 (35 this Nov) - this goal together with the affiliate/client income meant that it was probably the right time to make the step.

Why I will continue to monetize from this site

So apart from building platforms for my clients, I will also be concentrating in monetizing from my current web properties. Some people think that monetizing from blogs is evil which is just a different way to think about it (which is fine).
This site used to be labeled "a broadband experiment" and has been a place for me to experiment with new technologies and at the same time let my friends know that I was alive by posting something every 6 months ^^;
The thought of monetizing from this site seemed totally odd to me. It was a personal blog and not a monetization engine. I implemented some Amazon Web Services code and placed products in the side bar just to have content which refreshed itself. To my surprise, the products started to sell like hot Haruhi's figures off the conveyor belt. I then started to monetize over time with Google Adsense and sponsor placement.This was all before I became a full time otaku and started to write content.

If my site content was crap, I would hesitate about sticking ads all over the place but I do get the impression that you like the content given the amount of daily unique users (currently an average of 12000).

I do try to keep the ads in their place and would never use programs like Text Link Ads on this site which mess with the main text by automatically sticking in ad links everywhere. For those who cant stand the ads, use RSS feeds instead!

My main line of work is the internet and has been for the past 8 years. My company will not only concentrate on CGM/SEO but also monetization through internet technologies - my main role at Microsoft was CGM and monetization.

"A/B test" is a term given to experimenting with different layouts and features before rolling out the full product/feature to thousands of users. For example, I want to roll out a feature but am not sure how it will affect the current traffic or user behavior. In this case, I will show 30% of user sessions the new feature while the remaining 70% will see the site as it was. I can then compare user behavior to measure the effectiveness which could end up positive or negative.

The team that handled these tests at Amazon was the Weblab team and I worked very closely with them before rolling stuff out on my site (at the time being amazon.co.jp ). Google, Yahoo and Ebay also execute A/B tests which is why you will see things differently when logged in at different times/from different computers.
This is another reason why you will see things changing and disappearing on this site too as I have built my own weblab systems. If I had a feature on this site and remove it - its because it didnt convert well.

I want this site to be more than a blog and transition it into an Otaku/Japan portal. I know that there are many out there who prefer personal websites which is fine but among those folks, there are many who constantly send me mail still complaining about the content/layout (I got one this morning lol). Always welcome constructive criticism but *telling* me what content I should/should not write is another thing.
If you do like whats going on around here then I would love you to stick with me - and thank you so much for doing so up until now ^^.

Monetize from Passion

In a previous post, I wrote that one does things best when they are passionate about something - which is why landing oneself in a job which revolves around something one is passionate about is a good thing. Being passionate about something means that you will do well. Being passionate means that you will always find a way and excel at what you do - and being paid at the same time is like an additional plus ^^;
I enjoy being a full time otaku and will continue to bring you coverage of anime, figure, gundam (Gundam Expo April 20th ^^;) game, and idol events. Expect me to continue to write the figure and gundam reviews as well as tips on living in Japan and other Japan topics. Its not the money that motivates me to write - its because I am passionate about these otaku subjects - making money from my interests is a welcome addition. I hope this is OK with you^^;

I never got around to the money making series that I promised you ages ago and will write a post about blog monetization sometime.

Value proposition

So whats the value proposition of Mirai Inc? I mean there are already many web development companies out there doing this sort of stuff already right?
I worked with many teams as a management team member at Amazon - Search, Personalizaton, Supply Chain, Platform Dev, Userbility etc and have gained a deep understanding of building scalable-commerce platforms. I have also done much research into SEO and lead optimization projects on all of Amazons sites resulting in incremental revenue in the millions (USD). The SEO knowledge however has mostly been gained researching into what I needed to do to my personal sites to make money.
I have also been working on building community platforms (CGM) for my clients over the years - many of which have tens of thousands of community members.
I have been having a steady flow of clients over the years - many of whom have been recommended by previous/current satisfied clients.

Many web development companies in Japan screw their clients by charging them for the smallest text change. The platforms I build all have proprietary content management systems which give my clients the flexibility to run the site the way they want without being charged for trivial changes.

Another thing about many Japanese web development companies is that they still build sites the Web1.0 way using tables instead of CSS for layout. To make matters worse, they built sites which only work in IE and dont seem to know much about web standards. All the applications my company builds are cross platform and adhere to web standards.
The combination of my given knowledge in e-commerce, development together with CGM and SEO is the value proposition that I am offering as a business and judging from the amount of clients I have so far, things look good ^^.

Opportunity through informing

So what was all that bragging about? Well many people would see that as bragging and I do get hate mail about it from time to time. But there is a clear difference between bragging and letting people know of your abilities. Lets say I go to a networking event where many people from the internet industry are gathered - they are not going to guess my abilities and will only know if I speak up. A networking event is for people to get together, let each other know of their abilities and explore possibilities of working together.
Through letting people know what my abilities are, I have made many comrades and clients in the industry and recommend that people who are interested in broadening their options do the same. I have also received many contacts and clients from people who have read my profile but have also received a ton of hate mail too @.@. Letting people know of your abilities on your site will open doors to new opportunity but at the same time bring in people who who would rather spend time slagging you off rather than concentrate on fixing their own lives (ouch!)

So I've covered what my company does, why I'm doing it, how I became to decide on the company mission and a few things which helped me get there. Expect to hear more about my start up.

BTW, been so busy with paperwork that I have not had the time to build a site for my new company ^^; Plan to move into offices in the Ebisu/Meguro area in Tokyo before the end of year.
By Danny Choo on 2007/03/26 00:50 ]]> Mon, 26 Mar 2007 01:50:00 +0900 Pagerank Redirect http://www.dannychoo.com/adp/eng/464/Pagerank+Redirect.html

Google Pagerank is an important factor when it comes down to making money on the net. In general, the higher your Pagerank, the higher your results will show up in Google which usually leads to more traffic.

One of the factors that influences Pagerank is the number of incoming links you have to your site. The problem is when you have incoming links like http://www.yourcoolsite.com and http://yourcoolsite.com. What happens over time is that both of these URL's develop Pagerank even though its the same site.

To remedy this situation, you need to implement a 301 permanent redirect when people are brought to your site without the "www" (ie http://yourcoolsite.com). If you are running Apache and have permissions to use .htaccess files, all you have to do is to create a file called ".htaccess" (dont forget the dot at the beginning of the file) and slap in the following (dont forget to change the domain name ;-) and then dump it in your root directory.

ErrorDocument 404 http://www.yourcoolsite.com
RewriteEngine on
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yourcoolsite\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.yourcoolsite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

This will let Google know that http://yourcoolsite.com has been permanently moved and Pagerank should start to accumulate on http://www.yourcoolsite.com. You can try it out ;-)
I don't know how this can be achieved through html but if anybody knows, feel free to chip in.
By Danny Choo on 2006/03/30 11:20 ]]> Thu, 30 Mar 2006 12:20:00 +0900