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.

There’s nothing like a Sunday with Formula One and some Durian ice cream

We travelled 1 1/2 hours outside of Kuala Lumpur for the 2008 F1 Petronas Malaysian Grand Prix. My Polish friends were very pleased with Robert Kubica’s 2nd place finish.

See a quick video of the race!

Brilliant programmers are working 24/7 on the planet. If you have a real business you can pay a pittance to get yourself out of almost any technology backlog, jam-up, or snafu, without your existing tech team in the office. Of course this doesn’t work in all cases, but increasingly it’s becoming true for most programming work.

There are a few factors at play here which have lowered the bar to make it possible for you to get your project done for less money and time while still maintaining a high standard of quality.

1. Agile Software Development

This covers a bunch of practices which make software development a lot faster. Say goodbye to the 100 page product spec.

Do you realize that programmers are now able to write stories instead of actual code when programming in Ruby on Rails? If there’s a problem in the story they can change course immediately.

2. Open Source Goodness

So many applications can be installed with just a little knowledge. Take this blog for example. It runs on WordPress which requires a database. Now I’m not a programmer, but I installed WordPress, setup the database, and tweaked out the blog.

There are a lot more more open source applications which can be installed just as easily. If an open source solution exists for what you want to build, don’t reinvent the wheel and give the open source solution a shot. I’m launching a Digg style site for online marketing news which is based on an open source content management system. It will cost me $0 to see if I can gain traction.

3. Cost of Programming

A good programmer in San Francisco might make at least $10,000 a month.

A really good programmer in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia makes $1,000 a month or less.

See the difference?

It’s not just India anymore. You can find good programmers in China, Thailand, Malaysia, etc.

There are no more excuses!