Today will be my first day at ST701:
I will be marketing STjobs, one of four online classified sites under ST701. The other three are STCars, STClassified and STProperty.
I am new to the online classified industry, but I am looking forward to work with my new bosses and teammates to face up to the challenges ahead.
Hello and a very good morning from ST701. 🙂
Today is my last day working at omy.sg.
I have been with omy.sg for close to seven years. I joined the team before it was even launched in September 2007. Click here to read through all the projects and experiences I shared with the omy.sg team.
I was there when we launched our first TV commercial. Yes, we had one at the very beginning:
I was there when we launched the first Singapore Blog Awards and the first Singapore Entertainment Awards.
I was there when we hosted Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong during the launch of CLing, a Chinese learning portal, co-developed together with Business China.
I was there when we set up the omy Blog Club and developed it to what it is today with a strong, vibrant community of over 3,000 registered bloggers.
I was there when we ventured into mobile and tablet platforms, launching the Fong Fei Fei commemorative e-book and the Vice Ring Probe mobile news magazine app.
There are more exciting projects upcoming at omy.sg. We have to constantly innovate in order to survive as the industry is constantly evolving. I would love to be a part of all these, but the journey ends here for now.
I am thankful for all the opportunities given to me by my wonderful bosses at omy.sg, my supervisor, Kuan Fung, and our big boss, Chim Kang.
I am thankful to all my colleagues, new and old for the great support they have given me, especially when I have to constantly trouble them with many last minute marketing projects. Janet in particular for having to support so much of my work whenever I am absent.
I am thankful to all the external partners, sponsors and advertisers I have worked with for omy.sg. Thank you for supporting us and do continue to shower your support for the omy.sg team.
It is bye bye for now as I am being transferred to market another website within the Singapore Press Holdings group.
I will still continue to watch omy.sg grow, but this time, as a blogger, as part of the omy Blog Club and as a news reader.
Adieus. 🙂
It is about time.
With traffic growth and higher exposure, I am getting way too much blogging invites and requests that I can handle alone.
I tried to search for a regular guest contributor to collaborate with on this blog, but it is hard to find the perfect fit.
In the end, who else knows my personality and blogging style better than my wife, Rachel Chan?
Actually, she has written posts on this blog previously, but without proper attribution. You can read all of Rachel’s post on Alvinology.com here.
A quick introduction on Rachel:
Rachel has nearly a decade of experience as a print journalist for my paper (English)and Straits Times Life! and has also worked as a news producer for Mediacorp Channel 8.
Rachel has since made a career switch into education to spend more time with her young son and young Alvinology, Asher Lim and is a guest contributor to this blog.
With a stronger writing background than Alvinology, you can clearly differentiate her blog posts from Alvinology’s from the use of difficult and obscure vocabulary and more words than visuals. 
Recently, I was the moderator for a panel discussion on blogging for leisure versus blogging for profit.
The session featured four prominent bloggers from Singapore and was attended by more than 70 bloggers and media professionals. It was held as a prelude to the sixth-annual Singapore Blog Awards, a successful social media campaign we have been running at omy.sg, billed as the biggest social media event in Singapore.
What struck me after the forum discussion and chatting with the bloggers in attendance was the fact that many bloggers were seeking the elixir to instant online traffic.
Bloggers, just like newspaper publishers, are hungry for traffic. Whether the primary motivation for blogging is profit-driven or for leisure, what everyone wants are readers and eyeballs.
I am a relatively successful blogger myself who enjoys reasonably good traffic and fame outside of my work. The current president of Singapore thinks I am influential enough to invite me for a luncheon during his presidential campaign as a candidate. I get dozens of media invites daily, addressed to my personal blog.
How did I build up my blog traffic?
I used my personal blog, alvinology.com, as a platform to test content and find out what attracts Singaporean readers online.
I am going to share five simple, quick and dirty tricks to get Web traffic fast, based on my observation of Singaporean readers (and I believe universally online readers should replicate the same reading pattern with globalisation):
1. Sex sells.
I am not just referring to porn, but sexy news on celebrities or ordinary folks’ leaked sex crimes or sordid stories. The Internet is where readers thrive on traditional tabloid news, but in an uninhibited frontier.
2. Lists sell.
Top 10 lists give high Web traffic. People are lazy and tend to search for terms like “Best Restaurants in London” when they are looking for a place to eat.
Building a large log of such evergreen listing content bumps up your traffic with a fixed base.
3. Images sell.
Online attention is really short. I find that peppering blog posts with photos and videos, making your content more visually arresting, helps vastly to garner readers.
4. Real “breaking news” sells.
I am not referring to “breaking news” that every single news publisher is writing about at the same time. What I am referring to is genuinely breaking news, whereby you are the first and only content provider of a piece of news for at least an hour after your story has gone viral.
Media publishers tend to use the term “breaking news” too liberally.
5. Niche content sells.
One of the most-read blog posts I have written is a simple article on how to unsubscribe from an unpopular army magazine that all conscripted Singaporean males have been “opted in” for. This is very niche content and my blog post might be one of the only sources of information about this topic.
There you go, now you know my secrets (which are not really rocket science).
I practice what I preach. In fact, I have just used item No. 2 to market this article.
We have all read horror stories of diva bloggers misbehaving, demanding fees from restaurants for positive paid reviews, bringing along many friends to eat for free at food tasting, among many other complaints. Likewise, there are positive stories of bloggers who spend considerable efforts maintaining and crafting quality entries on their blogs out of interest rather than for commercial gains.
With the advent of social media and digital media, more and more brands are looking to working with and engaging bloggers for their campaigns and publicity.
Where do bloggers strike the balance? How should brands leverage on this trend? Why not hear it from the bloggers themselves?
As a prelude to the launch of the 6th Singapore Blog Awards this year in April, the team at omy.sg organised a causal sharing and networking session with a panel of prominent bloggers in Singapore. I was the moderator for the panel discussion.
Joining me in the discussion were bloggers, Daniel Ang, Peter Breitkreutz, Grace Tan and Christine Ng.
Check out the full video recording below if you missed the event:
Personally, I think the panelist did a great job and were candid with their replies. If there were more time, we could have gone deeper into the topic and stir up more controversy.
The conclusion I draw is regardless of your motive for blogging, a common arduous task is how to grow your readers base or get yourself noticed by organisations and people that matters.
One shortcut is of course to join a blog awards (shamelessly plugging for the Singapore Blog Awards).
To find out more about the 6th Singapore Blog Awards this year, bookmark this link to the official website. Coming soon in a few days time. 🙂
A L V I N O L O G Y 