After spending over a month in Kuala Lumpur, I feel I’ve distilled down some of the key ingredients needed to build a portfolio of profitable Internet businesses. This is essentially a blueprint of how to create a mini business incubator.

Here’s the recipe:

1) a few really smart people (including at least one excellent programmer)

2) develop simple ideas

• product ideas are more likely to succeed than Web 2.0 social media/community
• information products and software are best
• work on a few projects
• share learning and assets across projects

3) agile software development

• build projects which can be built within one weekend to 3 months max - the planning stage might be longer, new products are always in the pipeline

4) understand the market

• find a need and fill it, rather than building a product and trying to generate a need - appeal to a specific customer avatar with each product

5) use the psychology of sales

• scarcity, social proof, commitment and consistency, etc. - all from Robert Cialdini (see attached), done properly no salesforce is needed, all sales occur through the Web

6) engineer a strong product launch

• use the techniques outline in the product launch formula 2.0 by Jeff Walker - the root of which comes from Cialdini

7) implement business automation

• automate customer service - for example see the snippets feature of fogbuz

Here are a few more tips:

Repurpose technologies

• Build technologies that can be used across your businesses. For example, a custom shopping cart platform might be useful for all your businesses. Build it once and repurpose it. Often times you’ll find synergies between your existing technologies and the new products you develop.

Focus on niches

• Pick a few niches and focus on developing a basket of products for each niche, this makes it easy to upsell products to existing customers. This strategy will allow you to monetize visitors better than the competition

Yesterday I uploaded v1.0 of my Digg like site for Internet marketing. It’s called Marketing Squeeze. I do hope you’ll stop by to participate. The site highlights worthwhile content of the Internet marketing world. There’s a ton of content on the Net, but what should you bother reading? MarketingSqueeze will help you identify what Internet marketing content is worth your time.

MarketingSqueeze is based on the Pligg opensource CMS system. Pligg allows folks to create Digg like news sites. I thought this would be easy, but since Pligg is still in beta, it’s a bear to use for any non-programmer. I want to thank Ray from Moonrank for fixing an error that had me stumped. Ray’s company does awesome custom work for Pligg. Check them out for your project.

Is MarketingSqueeze like Sphinn?

Well, sorta. Sphinn focuses more on the mainstream Internet marketing world while MarketingSqeeze will weigh more towards the gurus.

Checkout MarketingSqueeze!

I spent this past weekend in Singapore. It was awesome! Many people seem to think the place is boring, but I disagree. Saturday was full of adventures. By early Sunday morning I was finally losing steam.

It must have been around 4:30am when I found a 24 hour PC gaming center. I tried some games, but I’m not a gamer, so I was just getting kicked from the games by other users. I snapped a few pics of the place before I was told by the management to stop. Notice the guys passed out in front of their machines.