Email Interview #11: Ming Chern

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* Start of Interview *

1. Please introduce your name, who you are, which country are you staying in and your area of IM expertise

Hi John and to the rest of your lucky subscribers, a very good day to you all!

My name is Foo Ming Chern and I’m better known as the tofumonkey amongst my friends. I’m a Malaysian by birth but have been living in Singapore ever since very young. I’ve been joking that I’m a fake Malaysian as I know the Singapore roads & places better than Malaysia and stayed in Singapore almost all my life. I have been on internet marketing officially since August 2006.

My expertise in IM is my technical skills in IM and the abilities to impart it to the budding internet entrepreneur. I must admit that I’m not the average all-out Internet Marketer where I peddle all my wares online and earn a full online income. My income basically comes two tracks, online income and offline training. Online being adsense, affiliate marketing and product creation. I also do IM training for individuals and/or groups offline to teach them about Internet Marketing.

2. Share with us your first success in Internet Marketing and how did you do that

I think it’s quite accidental on how I started to have my first success in IM. I started off attending Stuart Tan’s Internet Marketing course and thereafter we formed mastermind groups. Me being the most technical competent person, I ended up teaching the rest of my group mates on how set up shy yes pages, websites and so on, basically the technical elements of Internet Marketing. It was from this experience that I see where my value lies.

During this time, I started my blog on Internet Marketing and blogged about my journey in IM. I keep reminding myself to position myself as the technical coach/trainer. Through my blog, I build a small list and keep in close contact with them.

While I help my list get up to speed on IM, I earned affiliate commissions from recommending hosting, autoresponder software or other products. That’s how I made my first $1000 within 2 months of beginning IM. I know it’s not a lot of money, but this money at that time proved to me that money can be made online, and the internet world is not some mystery to be solved.

To cut the long story short, I identified what I do well and found an angle on how I can provide value. The rest like building a blog/website to collect list is pretty standard, it’s the angle & the value that I can provide that matters.

3. Share with us one obstacle which you have overcome and you have learnt a lot from it

Confusion; this is something you will definitely face when you first begin Internet Marketing or anything else that is new for that matter. I spent 3 months trying to learn IM on my own and decided that I need help as I’m getting nowhere. So I paid Stuart, Ewen Chia & Johan Mok $3000 for a 2 day course and came out even more confused! Ha! But I realized that I knew what I need to learn… The frame of the jigsaw puzzle has been complete, the rest is piecing everything together.

I spent the next 3 months toiling over the computer pouring ebooks after ebooks, visiting forums, participating in mastermind sessions, etc… On the average, I spent 6 hours on weekdays and 12 hours on weekends minimum continuously for 3 months. It was like going through hell, the more I read, the more confused I got.

But like magic, after one fine day, everything made sense and everything clicked together. It was like the dark curtain that has been covering my eyes has been pulled away and voila, there was light. So ladies and gentlemen, if you are feeling confused, this only means that you are learning something new!

Congratulations!

Ever since, I love feeling confused, this means I’m learning something awesome and not being stagnant. Adopt the ultimate success formula, if solution #1 doesn’t work, go for solution #2, #3, #4, #5… Do whatever it takes to make it happen!

Quoting Einstein, Insanity is defined by doing something the same way over & over again and expecting a different result every time. So guys, keep changing tactics if it doesn’t work the same time! You can do it!

4. Share with us one mindset tip you would like to share with others, especially those who find IM hard

It’s definitely having a problem-solving mindset as compared to focus-on-problem mindset. Just couple days ago, I was training a bunch of my students and I offered some solutions to their problems. The thing is, he came up with 101 things that could go wrong before he even attempted step 1.

To me, this is a very dangerous mentality that needs to be conquered before you start anything. There will always be something that can and will crop up to spoil your grand plans. The issue is not to cry over spilled milk, but instead, to focus on coming up with the solution.

As a start, use these words for a change:
• There are no problems; there are only challenges to be conquered.
• This will work, if and only if… (start thinking about solutions)

5. Share with us about the uniqueness of one of your products.

For the longest time, my greatest value was to bring people up to speed in IM from ground zero and after training hundreds of people in Internet Marketing, I found out that the thing that made people quite is not really the business ideas or the marketing angle. It was the technical bits that made people quit.

Let us look at it from this angle: An average person who took up Internet Marketing and decided to blog and promote affiliate products. The very first obstacle is to understand what exactly Internet Marketing is.

Thereafter, he’ll need to purchase his domain name, hosting, change DNS to point to the hosting. Other things include accessing cPanel, understanding WHAT is cPanel, install wordpress via Fantastico or Simple Scripts, uploading and installing new wordpress themes, etc…

Now, there are a lot of new terms and skills to be learnt just by my above-mentioned paragraph. For years, I’ve coached and trained hundreds of people on a one-to-one or by a class-basis on how to do the above.

But I found out that I really love helping/training/coaching people in IM and my current method just takes up too much time and helping too few people. That’s when I decided to bring my service/products online and voila, the birth of my first official online IM product: IMTechMastery.com.

6. One project you are working on right now and you would like my readers to know

My latest project is what I’ve mentioned above: IMTechMastery.com, as this product is pretty unique and ongoing, it’s only going to get better and better with more & more content for everyone.

I definitely envisage it to be the IM library of technical help, suitable for anyone who is not too technically savvy.

As a recap, I would definitely like to keep the competition level even. Too many people I met starting out Internet marketing get stumped by the most mundane things: the technical elements of IM. As a trainer by passion, I really hope & believe that this product will be able to help a lot more people out there. ?

Do check out www.IMTechMastery.com for more details. ?

7. One last tip you want to share with my readers

Stay focused. Focus, focus, focus! In internet marketing, there will always be the next big thing, the next fad, the next million dollar idea that will come & rock your boat. I’ve met with countless examples, including myself, who get distracted with the bright shiny object syndrome (distracted by something really appealing).

The truth is, in the offline world, everything can make money. People have made millions from network marketing, real estate sales, running a training business, selling ‘rojak’ (a famous Singaporean snack). As an example, there is a stall near my place where the owner have been selling rojak for the past 20 years and is very famous for it. He now owns 2 private apartments and drives a Mercedes.

Same goes to online world. People have made millions from adsense, affiliate marketing, CPAs, product creation, online network marketing, etc… There are hundreds or thousands of success stories in every conceivable niche online.

So you see, there will ALWAYS be someone who’s making tons of money doing something else. Do we drop what we have and move on? Have we worked enough on the idea? Have we exhausted every means that we have in our entire being to ensure the success of our idea? The answer is usually a No. It’s because people give up too early, people lose focus, people move on…

Stay focused on your very own million dollar idea and profit from it! You can do it!

I would like to take this chance to thank John for this opportunity to share my views and hopefully increase the chance of success in the Internet Marketing world for your readers. We go many years back and I always love to use you as my favourite success example in my class. You’re an example on how anyone can succeed online! Good luck to your future endeavours!

Till next time people!

Regards,
Ming Chern
www.IMTechMastery.com

* End of Interview *