One of the main reasons people stopped to Blog is because they are easily discourage with the low numbers of views and visitors to their Blog.
I have to confess – I love to see the number of views and number of visitors to my Blog. It gives me some encouragement whenever I see activity on my Blog, although I am aware it is still very new.
I started to write my first two articles on November 17, 2021, i.e., when I officially published the Blog for the public. It is very new, and I am struggling to make the look and feel of the Blog easy to navigate with some content such as my background, books, speaking experience, Blog, YouTube, Podcasts, Projects, and Press Info.
One of the frustrating parts is when I Google the name “Mazlan Abbas Blog,” the website does not even appear in the Google Ranking!
Here’s where many Bloggers would start to get very frustrated and abandon their Blogging activities. In reality (as described by many professional bloggers), it’s very typical, that we will only see the impact after several months!
Below is my traffic stats that showed the ups and downs. The “ups” is because I mainly promoted the posts on my Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter – and Facebook seems to be the highest referrals.
Mazlan Abbas Blog – Views and VisitorsSource of Referrals
Surprisingly my top 3 countries (other than my home country Malaysia) are the United States, India, and Ireland.
Mazlan Abbas Blog – Countries of Readers
Types of Blog Posts
The idea of my Blog is for Personal Blogging – sharing my journey into the world of Entrepreneurship, which mainly referred back to my business Blog called IoT World.
By monitoring the article’s number of views, I will understand what content attracted the readers.
Top be fair, the Blog is still at its infancy stage. It requires constant update with high-quality contents. I will be revisiting this statistics monthly and monitor the progress.
I am now using All-In-One SEO (AISEO) plug-in to help increase the SEO. And I have also followed many tips given by many other veteran Bloggers.
Kindly leave your comments and share your thoughts. I love to hear them.
Finally, we decided to follow our gut feeling and start building our fourth IoT product called Dscover (formerly named D’scover – we will reveal the reason for changing the spelling later).
When we introduced Raqib as a single device solution for tracking (instead of using a Bluetooth smartwatch and a smartphone), we received much feedback that they don’t need the features of monitoring vital health signs.
But in which market is tracking the best suit for this product? Why the need for monitoring an individual in the first place?
In our early customer development process, tracking an individual is critical for safety – especially during travel.
If a person travels in a tour group, he wants to have some freedom on his own. But he also needs to be constantly connected with the group or his tour bus.
In the case of a tour guide responsible for the group, he must ensure the group’s safety, and the travel itinerary must be adhered to and to ensure no one is late or left behind.
If that person is lost, the easiest way is to locate through the mobile app. The app should also have a travel planner feature to organize and share among the tour members.
How Big is the Market
Initially, we targeted the Travel and Tourism market, which was vast and active before the Covid-19 strikes in early 2020.
Below are the statistics of the world’s and Malaysia’s No. of arrivals.
Travel and Tourism Market
However, when travel and tourism were severely affected in 2020 and 2021 by restricted movement orders and banned in traveling, we pivoted our market to a family and friends app.
The IoT Solution
We chose a mobile app as the solution because of the following reasons:
Cheaper because this “IoT” solution uses the individual’s device, i.e., smartphone. GPS is the only sensor needed. The user has paid their connectivity charges (mobile data). The user only needs to download the app and pay for premium features.
Easier to deploy and manage the users (only via the Google Store and App Store)
Dscover
Go-to-Market
The biggest challenge for such a product is that it has become a B2C model whereby the channel to market can be very challenging.
The most accessible marketing channel to reach the users is via Social Media – Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
To conduct targeted ads, we need to identify the users’ demographics – in this case, the family members and friends.
Earlier, we named the product D’scover, but it is complicated for a user to search the app in the App Store because of the unique spelling. Finally, we decided to change the name to Dscover.
In the travel and tourism market earlier, we have a B2B model approaching Travel Agencies and Government, but unfortunately, Covid-19 has a significant impact in this sector.
We have even expanded the market segment to solve the issues of monitoring quarantined patients. However, for some unforeseen reasons, this solution did not get the buy-in from the authorities.
Time to Stop Developing New IoT Products
We asked ourselves, have we done enough marketing and sales before moving into another product? Building a new product can be long and tiring.
All four IoT products have their strengths and weaknesses – which I will be able to share in other Blog articles. It is only the beginning of my IoT Adventure – you may subscribe to the newsletter or the RSS feed.
Favoriot IoT Platform is the third IoT product that we developed. This is the turning point of our business – To IoTise Every Business.
It took us nearly two years to build our first IoT product – Raqib. Mainly because we have so many things to do, and we are very new to this kind of IoT entrepreneurship.
Since Raqib is an end-to-end solution, we need to identify the partner for the hardware since we can’t build the wearable in-house. Furthermore, the devices need to send data and connect to our IoT platform, create a mobile app, and develop a CRM system.
In 2018, we started with a simple trial, and later in 2019, we were able to have our first few customers using the solution during their trip to Hajj.
As per the second IoT product, Favorsense, we built it within a year and quickly introduced it to the market. We received a lot of feedback which we used to improve the solution.
But then, we also realized that we already had our third IoT product, i.e., the IoT middleware itself, while building the rest of the ioT products. Still, we never thought of offering this solution to others. We have begun to get user feedback by allowing users to use it for free until we started charging them in March 2019.
The Problem Statement
When we built our first IoT product, we learned that it is such a massive effort and takes a lot of resources – time and money. The same goes for our second product.
We decided if somehow we could collaborate with others to develop other IoT solutions by using our platform. We thought that the country had many IoT talents ready to build its IoT solutions, and we were wrong!
There are not many takers who can jump straight into the IoT world and build their IoT products. That’s when I realized the country is lacking this kind of talent? Where are they?
I am fortunate to be in many local Universities as their Industrial Advisory Panel or Adjunct Professors. That’s when we realized many of the current syllabi did not cover structured content about IoT. However, many universities are excited to get their students to select the IoT as their Final Year Projects (FYP). Still, unfortunately, many of the students have to learn on their own.
In the industry, they have started to get more interested in how IoT impacts their business but are unsure how to build or deploy their innovative solutions using IoT.
Even the whole ecosystem of IoT in Malaysia is not very strong because there are not many players as yet.
For Favoriot, we see this as an opportunity because our IoT platform can become the enabler to learn IoT and be used in commercial IoT deployment.
How Big is the Market
According to Mordor Intelligence, the IoT market reached $761.4 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach $1.39 trillion by 2026.
There are four (4) components in building end-to-end IoT solutions – Sensors, Connectivity, IoT platforms, and Applications. We have touched a sweet spot, i.e., to become a preferred IoT platform for any IoT deployments.
In 2020, the world was hit by the Covid-19 pandemic, and many industries were affected by the lockdown—the idea of using emerging technologies to solve social distancing issues. Thus, the time for the IoT market to grow is about to begin.
The IoT Solution
The reasons why we want to offer our IoT platform as the third IoT product are as follows:
In every IoT deployment or project, there will be an IoT platform component. The idea is to deploy IoT solutions without involving high cost by using a Cloud-based IoT platform.
We are not able to build and customize to all user requirements.
We want to create a platform where the students can also use in their IoT projects.
This platform also can be used for Laboratory experiments.
Thus, the platform needs to be open and easily used with user-friendly APIs
The middleware comprises security, business rules, and notification engine and supports various protocols such as MQTT, CoAP, and REST.
Offer this as Platform-as-a-Service to allow as many users to subscribe to the platform and create their own innovative IoT applications easily while maintaining the ownership of their data.
Have the ability to charge the user in various subscription Plans such as Free, Beginner, and Developer Plans. Furthermore, we can also have a customized package and make it available on-premise.
Build a Generation-IoT (Favoriot) community that can share and learn each other’s projects and success stories.
Complete documentation, tutorials, GitHub, and forums are made available.
Initially, we started offering the free package to the Universities in early 2019; we noticed not many active users. Many of them use other competitive platforms such as ThingSpeak, ThingsBoard, or Blynk.
We realized that due to the unfamiliarity of the Favoriot platform and not many tutorials regarding the usage, we decided to compile as many use-cases, step-by=step tutorials made by some community members and upload them to our Favoriot YouTube channel.
I take the opportunity to introduce the Favoriot IoT platform in many of the invited talks, conferences, or webinars. Coupled with contests and special offers and bundled with training packages, we have reached more than 115 countries worldwide and more than 5300 users.
We started with users subscribing to the platform themselves, but now we have begun engaging with corporate users by having customized solutions.
Favoriot Worldwide
The Growth Point
We have reached a stage whereby talents who graduated from the Universities are equipped with the knowledge of building IoT projects (and using the Favoriot IoT platform) more structured.
These new talents will become the catalyst for the growth of IoT in Malaysia and other countries around the world.
The IoT Adventure has become more enjoyable than ever!
Your Blog can be considered a “dead” blog if there’s no traffic and no one is reading or aware of them. A lot of bloggers stopped half-way and abandoned their blog when they didn’t see any traffic or activity.
However, in the era of social media, we have many channels to promote our blogs, which includes Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. However, in order to drive tons of traffic, we need to do this the right way. Below are some of the tips and formulas.
Use short and provocative tweets
Include an intriguing quote from post
Include statistics
Make use of #Hashtags creatively
Use @mentions
Retweet mentioned blog content
Ask for a Retweet (or RT)
Use visually appealing images
As a question related to your topic
Tweet about your blog-hosted contest
Promote your tweets
Include a blog link in your bio
Schedule your tweet properly
Include a strong call to action
Tweet the link more than once
Create “Click to Tweets” within your article
Retweet or thank anyone who mentions your Blog
Pin your latest blog post to the top of Twitter Timeline
Not only your Blog will have more traffic, but your own Twitter account can also attract more followers. Your Twitter will be seen to be more engaging with relevant content sharing.
As of today, my Twitter handle @mazlan_abbas has only 4,162 Followers. Let’s see how the tips above impact Mazlan Abbas Blog and my Twitter.
The 18 Twitter Tips that will help to boost your Blog traffic.
I don’t quite recall when exactly I started blogging, but I remember the early days I used to Blog in Blogger.com and have created more than 10 Blog sites. Many of them are no longer active except a few which I normally auto-post from YouTube.
One of my favourite and can be considered as a popular Blog is My Gadget Blog. I started to blog in 2010 and the contents are mainly from my interest in electronic gadgets which I purchased (nothing get sponsored). I love to Jailbreak the iPhone as early as iPhone 3G (but stopped doing that jailbreaking after 2014). May tips are shared among readers and that was the time, the site became very popular.
Stats for My Gadget Blog
After several years of creating and experimenting with different blogs, I finally decided to take seriously and bought a domain name iotworld.co which is the starting point for my entrepreneurship journey into the tech space i.e Internet of Things. It was in 2016, when I started to blog this topic quite seriously. It covers many aspects of IoT including its definition, applications, benefits, challenges, tips, the country’s IoT challenges and many others.
This Blog has partly helped me to be recognised as an IoT Thought Leader. The idea for this blog is quite simple – to help others in their IoT journey. How to prepare themselves with this emerging technology and the impact of business disruption in IR 4.0.
Stats for IoT World Blog
The best thing about this blog, it also provide me with other opportunities to create contents on other social media channels such as YouTube, Podcast and TikTok. Furthermore, it has given more visibility and exposure to get myself invited as Keynote Speaker in conferences, seminar and webinars. Some of the contents of which I have created earlier has been turned into eBooks (Your IoT Journey and IoT Notes) – which I have given the subscribers for free.
This is the first post to indicate the opening and launching of Mazlan Abbas website dated November 17, 2021.
Dr. Mazlan Abbas
I was listening to Pat Flynn podcast and was inspired by his work work on Smart Passive Income. It all started two weeks ago and I have just finished his 22nd Podcast. He had over 500 podcast which he published almost every week.
Although, I have my own Blog called IoT World which I have created many years back, I have always wondered whether I should create my personal website using my name. I checked and noticed the domain mazlanabbas.com was not taken and that’s when I decided today to buy the domain and use WordPress as the hosting site for the Blog.
There’s always pros and cons of having our own name as the domain such as we will not be able to sell this domain name later as compared to niche sites. Furthermore, I have many other things which I would like to share but unable to do that on my IoT World Blog.
I have created many other personal or hobby sites such as:
However, all of them did not have it’s own domain name since it’s a free. And I found it’s difficult to manage multiple sites. Thus, I decided to (as of today) to manage only two sites which I have interest and passion. One for Internet of Things (i.e. IoT World) and the other is this Mazlan Abbas blog.
I will keep on posting the progress of this site as I customised it’s theme and content. As usual, currently this site does not appear in the first page of Google yet when we do a search on “Mazlan Abbas” (which it should). And also no one has yet subscribe to this Blog yet – something which I would like to measure the number of followers too.
