I was tagged on this meme earlier by Leonard, and he asks me to state 5 reasons – Why do I blog?

Before I go ahead and give my reasons, I think this is really something we all blogger got to think about. Setting up a blog, paying for your webhosting, registering your domain and maintaining the blog requires time and money, and you need to have good reasons for spending that time and money!

Here are my five.

#1 To market my seminars

I think a blog is a consultant/trainer’s dream marketing tool – especially small businesses like mine. Through this blog, I can not only attract search visitors that come in through the keywords I target, but also set myself up with credibility in this area, by regularly posting articles about this business blogging industry.

Being an advocate for business blogging – as you would have seen from many of my posts, and I would love to share that idea with small businesses who want to embrace this form or marketing through my seminars and workshops.

#2 To reinforce and archive what I learn

I love to read, and unfortunately for me (and I think for many other people as well), we don’t retain what we read very well. By taking time to blog it down, you shuffle it again in your memory, so you will tend to remember more of it, 6 months down the road. Besides, even if you don’t, the search box is just in the sidebar, so you can easily recall your older posts and read your own summaries.

#3 To network with other bloggers

Blogging can be a very social activity – it is a place not only to publish, but to network, converse and share ideas with others in the blogosphere. The blogosphere is full of nice and helpful people, people who encourage each other, forgive mistakes made and definitely 100% human. 😛

#4 To learn how to write well

I have to admit, I am not a good salesperson in life. If you ask me to live on job on sales, I might starve to death, at least, for the traditional method of selling – cold calls, meeting up in person, and what they call “transferring enthusiasm”. However, I believe in the Internet. On the Internet, you can sell things without meeting a person. You have more time to think about what you are going to say (or rather, type). On the Internet, what you write can help you make your living, as it has done for many others.

With practise everyday, I can get better with my writing – not the academic writing where you write so objectively and sound like someone who has been buried in piles of research papers. Persuasive writing. Writing that tickles your emotions and get words that can get your hand to reach for your credit card 😉

#5 Its just me

I guess, ultimately, blogging is just “my type of activity” – me. Sitting behind a computer screen and typing away can be one of the activities I enjoy most since young. I love surfing around and reading, I love “living with the computer”, as some of my friends would jokingly put it. So blogging became something natural to me. 🙂

Passing it on

I’ll pass this on to Mike, Darren, Easton, Andrew and Char! Tell me, why do you blog?

Tell me, what is the number on this CAPTCHA?

A CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is supposed to do the job of telling computers and humans apart, to reduce spam by getting the human to read the text in the image and then retype it out in a text box.

But look at the one I was posed with. Can you tell the numbers?

I think this one should be called “CAPTSESE” instead: Completed Automated Public Turing test to Squint Eyes and Spoil Eyesight”

Seriously. I think CAPTCHA programmers and designers need to start thinking about the whole idea behind CAPTCHAs. I don’t know exactly how powerful the bots can be in telling the text within images, but if a human can’t tell the characters behind the image, what is the point?

Some particularly irritating annoyances with CAPTCHAs are:

1. (Like the example above) The text totally blends into the image
2. The image is too small! People are using bigger screens with higher resolutions today, the pixels will be displayed smaller.
3. The phrase is terribly long. I’ve seen 9 character phrases before!
4. The phrase is hard to type, because they don’t use the regular combination of English characters (e.g. how fast can you type “qzwjmp” as opposed to “armeno” ?) Some people are not versed in looking at the screen and typing at the same time. By making the word pronounceable (by including some vowels), you can make the experience better

Man! Google really goes all out. Its providing totally free broadband Internet access to homes through its latest technology.

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… to fool people on April Fools.

A little late for April Fools, but never too late for a laugh.

Two weeks ago, one of my friends whom I met at a seminar introduced me to a business consultant.

Over a cup of coffee, he (the business consultant) proposed that he do a free consultation of my business for me. The session was great – he got me thinking and planning my business for life, and asked me questions like “Where do I see this business doing in 5 years time”, “What are the challenges I may face 10 years down the road”… and things like that.

Basically, I was kinda dumbfounded by the questions – I had no solid plans whatsoever about making this business I am doing into a multi-million dollar fortune 500 company. I figured that what I (and I believe many others in this world) am doing very hard to achieve working everyday is freedom.

Freedom, in terms on financial freedom – the feeling of not needing to worry too much about money, and in terms of time freedom – not being bound by working hours, and the ability to choose if you want to wake up at 7am, or 12 noon.

So anyway, in the session two weeks ago, he painted for me a picture – he drew me steps I need to take to build up this business, so that it will last beyond my generation. It was big! Real big! There were offices and employees and all the organizational stuff and all about putting systems in place, so that I can take a step back and relax.

Needless to say, that plan was inspiring.

It has been two weeks since the day I met up with him, and I was supposed to meet him again today.

But yesterday I gave further thought about the whole thing, and I realised – Hey, this is NOT what I want! I figured that I have my own goals to fulfil, and I shouldn’t be thinking about building multinational corporations when what I really love to do is to work from home.

I told him I will not be meeting up today. It was kinda last minute, and I feel bad for the cancellation, but hey, I would rather spend time working on what I am supposed to work, rather than listen to big woolly plans. I felt better being myself.

Must we all have big dreams? To earn a million dollars and build foundations to feed ten thousand people?

I think not. I think we need to be ourselves.

Last week, Tony shared some pointers about growing home based businesses. In his 2-step assessment approach, he recommended that I will need to answer “What do I really want?”, and “What is my role?”

I guess what I really want is to work at home! Well, I might end up working with a few “employees” to split the work eventually, but I envision that there should be more leverage on technology than people. In fact, if possible, I would like to stay solo, and outsource only when necessary. The sole purpose of the business is passion and to provide for one family. My future family.

That is my dream. My small dream.

And I know this is possible, I know of people who have done so successfully. I need to find the right formula.

Are you working on big dreams because someone else has painted for you? I’m not trying to be a wet blanket here, but really, must we all have big dreams?

At least, that is what my virus scanner told me.

Today I was wanting to be a “regular reader” to some of my sites, so I switched back to Internet Explorer, and I got myself equipped with the Google Toolbar and Alexa Toolbar.

I didn’t have these installed on Firefox, because the SearchStatus add-on could help me tell the Google PageRank and Alexa Traffic Rankings of the sites (which is essentially what I need for each of the toolbars).

To my horror, when I tried to install the Alexa Toolbar, my virus scanner told me that the toolbar comes with Adware! 😯

Now, tell me. Which should I believe – the virus scanner, or Alexa?

I guess I won’t take chances. Out you go, Alexa. I’ll stick to Firefox and SearchStatus. I’d browse happy. 🙂

Interestingly Alexa has a nice little box on the toolbar download page that goes like this:

My oh my… looks like something went wrong somewhere huh.