Michael Choi

For the last few days, i’ve been working hard on developing a site called Christmas List Express.

As i’ve been learning so much from Paul Allen about Internet Marketing, I thought “Do you know what? I should try some of the things I’ve learned from Paul and actually apply it in the real business world!” I wanted to do something that would 1) help me learn and apply the internet marketing strategies I’ve learned from Paul, 2) make me some money if possible.

After going through some ideas I had, I was driving to meet my friend Spencer Walker (a friend that’s also taking the Internet Marketing class from BYU). On the way, I thought of how fun it would be if we we were to create a site that helps people with their Christmas shopping. After talking to him a little more, we developed some ideas and put it together. Below is a screenshot of the site (as of today):

What we plan to do is to create a massive newsletter, have some businesses sponsor these newsletters, and with the money generated, donate $1 for each person that joins the newsletter. We hope to help the homeless and children whom want Christmas gifts but just don’t have the money to buy them. Our goal is to raise $10,000 this Christmas through this.

With Christmas List Express, you can:

1. have Christmas List Express do your Christmas shopping for you!
2. submit your christmas list and share it with your friends and families
3. see what other people want for their Christmas
4. join our Christmas newsletter (we’ll be donating $1 for each person that joins)

Our internet marketing strategies are as follows:

1. Google PPC - Do a Google Pay per click campaign on keyword such as ‘Christmas Shopping’, ‘Christmas Wish Lists’, etc. We will focus on getting those who are interested in having us do their Christmas shopping. They will be directed to a landing page where they can submit their information, which automatically sends an email to our sales email (sales@christmaslistexpress.com)
2. Top 10 Funny Lists - We will have the top 10 funny christmas lists submitted from real people. We developed the site so that people can forward the list to their friends and families
3. BYU Daily Universe - We will contact the BYU Daily Universe to see if they would be interested in writing a story for us
4. Carol and BYU Weeks - Our friend Carol offered to either write a story or take a short film coverage on our story
5. Blogging - I will ask some of my friends to blog about our site
6. Jay Leno or David Letterman - We want to submit our funny Christmas lists to them and see if they would be interested in using some of our lists during their talk shows.

There are five ways the site generates revenue:

1. Service Fee - If they want us to do their Christmas shopping, we charge them a service fee for our hours
2. Google Adsense - We put google adsense and when people click on the ad, we make money
3. Amazon Affiliate Program - We allow people to forward each other’s christmas lists and to see the list of items that people want for this year’s Christmas. We also put a direct link to Amazon to purchase these items. Each time the person clicks on the Amazon link and make a purchase, we make 5-7% commission
4. Newsletter - Once we get a lot of people subscribed to our newsletter, we’ll have look for businesses to sponsor our newsletter and put their ad.
5. Sponsors - We will allow businesses to sponsor the site and put a logo and a direct link to their business homepage

I don’t know exactly how Christmas List Express is going to turn out, but I am sure excited to learn from this experience. Learn how Christmas List Express got started.

As a member of the Provo Labs Academy, we had an opportunity this morning to sit in a room with Paul Allen, Ben Crane, Lorri Randle, Chad Ramos, Sonia Thomas, and other members of the Academy.

We had a great brainstorming session! I couldn’t believe how many good ideas were bounced off the table during the meeting. It was simply amazing.

Each person took a turn and talked about the biggest challenge/problem he/she was having and for about 10-20 minutes, other members around the table exchanged ideas that would help the person solve the challenge.

This was not only a good opportunity to get great feedback from great entrepreneurs in the Academy but also it felt good to be able to help other entrepreneurs succeed with their business. I love Provo Labs Academy!

CEDO, the Commission for Economic Development in Orem, is a non-profit organization that provides an office space and mentoring for start up companies and entrepreneurs in the Orem area.

Since a month ago, Joe and I have been receiving mentoring from CEDO and have been using a cubicle there. They have great board members and Brad Whitaker who is the executive director of the organization is extremely helpful. Any entrepreneur who has a good idea but need a little extra motivation should try CEDO. If the business has anything to do with the internet, Provo Labs Academy is also a must stop place for entrepreneurs.

They help out with organizing the business, receiving mentoring from CPA, attorneys, successful businessmen (whom all volunteer for free). By the way, 1-800-Contacts also started at CEDO.

A week ago, our company BoomYEAH joined Provo Labs Academy, an institute headed by Paul Allen.

If you are an entrepreneur and need help learning how to market your business, you must check out the academy. I’ve spent hours trying to teach myself about internet marketing, but I must say I learned more during the last two weeks from the Provo Labs Academy and Paul’s Internet Marketing class at BYU than the past 9 months while starting BoomYEAH.

More than anything, it’s a unique opportunity to get to know Paul Allen and to network with other talented entrepreneurs.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been doing research on various humanitarian organizations to look for some cheap/affordable volunteer opportunities overseas. As I am planning to take a break from my company BoomYEAH (an online yellow page), I wanted to see whether I can do some service while taking a break at the same time.

There were a few sites that cost anywhere from $2000-$3500 for volunteering. Usually, regardless of where you go (Peru, Ecuador, China, India, Thailand, Australia, Italy, etc), the price is about the same. After much research, I finally found an organization that cost only $200-$500! The website is vfp.org (vfp stands for Volunteer for Peace).

If you want to do some humanitarian work, you should definitely check out Volunteer for Peace. They have hundreds of workcamps/projects that you can participate anytime of the year. The one I am thinking about doing is one in China, teaching some students and working at a village called Xinjing.

After buying this domain from Godaddy, installing WordPress, I began to play around with different themes. I also transferred a few blog posts from my previous blog.

It could be quite tricky to install the themes, especially when you want to rearrange the sidebar or change the font style, size, color, etc.

WordPress has a tool where you can manually change the php files and the css files to make it look differently, but for a person that does not know much html/php/css, it could be quite daunting. It took me about two hours to configure my site to look like Paul Allen’s (black title, blue link, three column blog, etc), but I must say it was quite fun.

Although many themes look fancy and stylish, I prefer having a simple blog that’s easy to read (black texts, easy to read font, etc).

Finding websites that can teach you about different areas of internet marketing could be quite frustrating. I’ve spent hours looking for useful websites that could teach me about SEO, pay per click campaigns, viral marketing, etc without much success.

Attending Provo Labs Academy and Paul Allen’s internet marketing class at BYU have changed this. Now, I am spending less and less time trying to do this research myself.

To help all those who are attending Provo Labs Academy or Paul’s internet marketing class keep track of useful websites, I created a Google Writely file.

Creating a Collaborative List of Useful Sites for More Effective Internet Marketing

• Instead of trying to compile a list of useful websites individually, the idea is to collaborate and create this list together!
• When you find a site that is helpful, please add the site address and a brief description to the list
• Feel free to add comments, change/edit the description
• If you are interested in accessing or editing the list, please leave a comment below or send me an email at choim@boomyeah.com

Since I started learning about internet marketing during the last few months, I’ve always been aware of the power of blogging. I just didn’t blog mainly because I was scared to write. Moving to America when I was fourteen, my english isn’t quite perfect and I was scared that someone would catch a lot of errors in my writing…

Well.. after spending a few weeks comtemplating what I should do, I just decided that I shouldn’t be afraid.. that my writing will get better… and who cares anyway what other people will think of me? Instead of thinking about myself, I can see how I can blog about things to benefit others who may be looking for things that I’ve learned in the past, or to give more exposure to those who are doing something worthy.

If you are also scared about blogging, you are not alone. Leave me a note and I will do my best to help you with your blogging.

I spent half a day reading the Google Story written by David Vice. It was quite interesting.

I don’t consider myself a die hard fan of Google, but I must say I was quite impressed with Sean and Larry’s unyielding vision of the company and how they were not willing to compromise their vision from investors, public, wall street, etc.

Sean and Larry taught me that it’s okay to be stubborn, to fight for what you truly believe, and to change incorrect perceptions in the society rather than having the society mold your views that you know are right.

Google succeeded because Sean and Larry had a higher purpose and were not willing to succumb to traditional business ways, and I believe BoomYEAH will also succeed if I keep my value high and make things happen to serve businesses and users.