About Leon Ho

Leon’s background is in IT, HR and Management and has worked at Red Hat. These skills led him to create his own company Stepcase, which acts as an umbrella for both (Stepcase) Lifehack and Stepcase Apps. Leon was also featured in Business Week’s Top Young Asian Entrepreneurs.

I could have profiled anyone working in Web2.0 who happens to be based in HK/China. But with the Asian economy growing rapidly especially in China, investors are tuning to the energy and innovation of the Asian market and especially to the generation of young, tech- and business-savvy Asians (who also set long term goals)…such as Leon.

Lifehack

Lifehack is the sort of site I wished I designed. Founded in 2005 it’s a blog on productivity and personal development, which became #40 most popular blog in the world. I’m always searching for answers to questions, even exact deep search on Google doesn’t work most of the time. I personally can’t stay with one subject at one time, so a site like this has many articles on varied subjects.

I think there’s many ways someone could copy the idea of Lifehack and be successful. Just search for answers to questions on Search Engines, if they don’t appear or you feel you could do a better job in answering questions…then create an article about it. I think the viral impact of your article, as well as getting it searched and indexed means you can get instant popularity. The problem being is that you’re in competition with huge site’s like Lifehack who publish daily and have a huge amount of authors to deliver fresh content!

An example of a recent interview explains this:
” Why did you start up Lifehack.org, and what is the secret to your blog’s success?

I like to find and read content related to productivity and lifehacks. I usually spend one hour daily reading books and articles on the Internet. I think if I properly use time to find good content, those pointers will save people time as well. So that’s how lifehack.org was born – with a motivation of sharing good content and pointers. Secret? I probably don’t have one to its current status, but I do think constantly publishing good content daily is a major factor to the blog’s growth. As long as I remember, lifehack.org has at least one post every weekday since it was started two years ago.”

Stepcase

Stepcase is the parent company of Lifehack and is a productivity solution company; Stepcase’s Lifehack.org is a blog that delivers content for people who seek improvements in their everyday life; and Stepcase Apps, which is in development, is an online software platform for helping people further on their organization.

Conclusion

Looking at the amount of articles he wrote for Lifehack, it seems from 2006 onwards he was writing one or two articles a day! This amount of fresh content, with titles such as ” 99 Email Security and Productivity Tips” to ” How to be Interesting” would always attract attention and led to a large number of visitors and referrals.

Revenue is earnt from advertising on the site and Google Adsense, so perhaps there is potential to earn more with sponsored posts or using other affiliate related programs. However, I feel the site wasn’t made just to make a profit but to share valuable information to it’s readers…which isn’t a bad thing. As for Asian specific adverts, there are none. I guess it doesn’t matter where you are based since readers come from all over the world…

Best Blogs Asia.

Soso Search

Launched in 2006, the translation of Soso means “search search”. Tencent also own QQ, the most established Instant Messenger in China so the combination of QQ and it’s Soso search engine, means alot of eyes view alot of content that the site offers. The layout of the site is similar to Yahoo search results and the SERPs look similar to Google’s. The site is a Chinese partner of Google and uses it’s Adwords technology. One of the site’s features is its encyclopedia and Soso Ask which will be in direct competition with Baidu’s Zhidao answer service in China.

Example of Soso in Action

Tencent Search Marketing

They recently launched a pay-per-click (PPC) ad auction system called Tencent Search Marketing. There is no campaign or ad group levels as keywords and ads are the two major features in the system’s structure. Adverts are on the bottom, top and right side of the organic search results, where Adwords ads are at the bottom of each page.

Their auction system uses CTR and CPC to determine ad ranking, minimum bid for keywords is RMB 0.30, there is no control over daily budget, split testing isn’t possible and the search volume seems lower than with Baidu or Google.

Create a Tencent Search Marketing Account

You need to signup with https://tg.qq.com/ in order to create an account.

Best Blogs Asia.