Personal Blog of Carl Pei

I have worked with Meizu related material this entire day, and it feels pretty good!

• miniOne Website. I never got down to using the domain I bought for the Meizu M8, so today I finally wrote a bit and filled the page with some content and ads this morning. James approached me after a few hours and asked if he could do a logo for the page. I thought “Why not?” so he made one, which is currently at use on the site. To be honest, I didn’t think he would do such a good job. So if you need a logo made cheap, check his service first.
• Meizu Me Contest. A contest has been initiated on Meizu Me for owners of old Meizu models to win the new Meizu M3 by taking a photograph of their players. This is the second time during the entire course of the eight or so months of Meizu Me history that the prize for a contest was an actual player. It feels even better that no one except for “moi” is sponsoring the prize.

There is also more Meizu stuff in the works. I will announce later if the outcome is good.

I have been using AdSense for around 8 months now and have never liked it. Most of all, I don’t like the idea that I would be making someone else rich by working, and especially if this “someone else” was one of the largest corporations in the world; Google. I would complain that Google was ripping me off as I barely got any earnings and had insanely low click through rates. I pitied and blamed myself for running a forum (forums are known for low click through rates) instead of something else.

A while ago, I tried my luck with proxies, it went better at first, but after a while the earnings also started to fall. This was understandable for me, since proxies required nowhere near the effort and dedication needed for a normal, legitimate website. Seeing my earnings decrease, I got mad and tweaked the AdSense placements on Meizu Me before going to sleep on Thursday.

This morning, I got a pleasant surprise when I logged into AdSense, I had $12.14 in earnings on Friday! This is pretty much for me, as it means that I would earn around $360 USD monthly with AdSense alone if I could keep it up, and I am not worried too much about keeping it up. I am working on some mini-sites, have a new design in mind for Meizu Me and also have a much more positive attitude towards AdSense.

The increase in earnings is not all due to some optimization done on Meizu Me, but also because I have been actively working on some other sites, one which was recently featured on a popular gadget blog.

This instance reminds me of a scene in American History X, where the young Nazi leader gets asked if he ever tried to do anything about his situation rather than complaining, blaming or hating others. He answered no and started to cry.

Basically, what I’m trying to say is: Before complaining or blaming others for your situation, actively and genuinely try to change it.

I registered a couple of Meizu domains a while back.

Today, I finally decided to do something with one of them so I wrote a few pages of content, made a quick layout and finally slapped some images and ads onto the pages. You can find the result at Meizu-MusicCard.info. It looks pretty good to me and I must say that I’m a little proud of it.

I made it for three purposes:

1. Revenue. This type of dedicated page on a product receives OK revenue I have heard. Much better than that of similar forums anyway. I like the integration of the ads and expect a high click-through rate once the site stats to get some traffic.
2. Search Engine Placement. I made the site as search engine friendly as possible. Although, I am relatively new to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) but now, a couple of hours after I made the site, I can already see some changes to be made to improve SEO. I will keep them in the back of my head for now.
3. Improve My Other Site. One of the main reasons to why this was created is to improve my main site; Meizu Me. I hope to receive a lot from hits from this one to Meizu Me, making it grow even larger and also earn a bit of money so I can reduce the amount of advertisements on Meizu Me.

I have submitted the site to around 100 web directories. It took some time, but let’s hope it will be worth it.

Fingers crossed.

If you do not plan to live in the forest or under a rock in the future, read this book. If you read less than one book a year, make it this one. Heck, if you never read books (like me) - get the audiobook.

How to Win Friends & Influence People is a classic book written in 1936 by Dale Carnegie. It is split up in four parts (Fundamental Techniques in Handling People, Six Ways to Make People Like You, Twelve Ways to Win People to Your Way of Thinking and Nine Ways to Change People Without Giving Offense or Arousing Resentment) with a lot of sub topics.

People skills. That’s the most important skill of today, and one that is becoming more and more important as the global community continues to integrate. Goods and services will be so cheap in the future that the only good (non-humiliating / backbreaking) jobs left for Westerners are that of the creative type. By that I mean jobs in Advertising, Architecture, Design, Intellectual Property, Art and the like. The old ways of “work hard go pro” will not work. Genius is required, and people skills are a part of genius.

If this got you interested in the book, you will be happy to hear that I am going to walk you through the book here on my blog. Part for part, topic for topic. So stay tuned for the next HTWFAIP post!

As old people say, “It was better before.”

A new phenomenon in Stockholm is for the free newspapers to hire people to hand out newspapers at hotspots with many people such as train stations, shopping malls and such. There are three competing free newspapers. The people who actually take the job are mostly students or other people belonging to economically weak groups in society.

In the morning, I take the bus to the “communal center”, and then walk to the train station. During this 2 minute walk, I get hounded every morning by these people. Although you avoid them like the plague, they still manage to shove the papers in your face, and when you show no interest, they follow you walking backwards forcing you to witness their poor mouth hygiene. The second they see someone without their newspaper in their hands, their eyes shimmer as they immediately begin to walk towards you.

Avoiding these guys is an art. It’s also like an arcade game, “avoid the hobos”. By now, I have more or less mastered it.

To prevail, follow one or more of these simple tips:

• Look angry.
• Look busy.
• Look the other way.
• Hide your hands inside your jacket pockets.
• NEVER EVER make eye contact.
• If all else fails and they start to approach you, shake head vigorously for 4 seconds.
• If you have the effort, take one each of the newspapers and make them visible.