As is my tradition, I'm writing this blog while sitting in the Qantas club at Melbourne airport. Where am I off to this time? As the title of the blog suggests, I'm traveling to Tokyo, Japan.

It's been a long time since I was last in Japan and I have many fond memories of the amazing country. Last time I was working with the Australian and New Zealand embassies in Tokyo and my wife and I discovered the wonders of Japanese food.

Prior to heading to Japan on my first trip I remember hating seafood......but I discovered that if you don't eat seafood in Japan then you'll basically starve to death. By the end of my trip I found the Japanese have an almost magical love affair with all things that grow in the sea and the way they cook them all up left my mothers style of boiling everything to until it was a soggy mash for dead. So yes, I'm looking forwrard to the food on this trip.

As you would expect, there is a lot of business to be conducted in Japan......and I've found it's largely virgin territory for many in the domain industry. Yes, there are some big domainers that make there home there but I've found there's still a LOT of opportunity.

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How many times have you heard that question? Each day I’m approached by people trying to sell us poor quality traffic, wanting investments for a new venture or monetisation companies that want me to do a lot of work to integrate their system. The problem is….there are only so many hours in the day….

One of the biggest challenges that I have is how to best rank the various opportunities that come across my plate at ParkLogic. Investment opportunities that don’t have any synergy with what else we are doing are easy to dismiss. The tough ones are those that tick all the boxes.

If we went after all of the great opportunities then we wouldn’t get anything done and worse than that, we’d miss the best opportunities. The question is, “How do we rank an opportunity?”

For me to invest any sort of cash the business must be unbelievably good. The reason for this is that I’m never short on ideas to invest my money into. For me to put my hand into my pocket and invest in someone else’s business means their opportunity beats anything that I could potentially come up with.

Living in a country like Australia, it’s often easy to fall into the trap of a first world mindset. We’ve been blessed with so much compared to other people and yet many of us aren’t happy. I’ve found that often the best way to become happier is to spend some time around Easter each year being grateful for what I have rather than what I don’t have.

For instance, the fact that I can turn on a tap and have clean running water puts me ahead of about 50% of the worlds population. When I flush the toilet what’s inside goes away rather than towards me is something I will be eternally grateful to the plumbers of this world.

Being able to go to the supermarket and have a huge selection of produce is nothing short of miraculous. It’s not just, do I want to buy an apple but what type of apple do I want to buy. Having food on the shelves to purchase is an incredible feet of logistics that I am so grateful for.

Getting to a definition of traffic quality is one of those elusive things that’s quite often difficult to pin down. It’s almost like discerning the difference between art and pornography…..you know the difference when you see it.

Advertisers pay huge sums of money for quality traffic and shy away from garbage. The question needs to be asked, “What’s quality?”

Some have answered, that’s easy! It’s real human traffic. I agree that we need to do as much as we can to remove all the automated bots but just having “human” traffic doesn’t necessarily define it from an advertiser’s perspective.

For example, let’s imagine I directed real humans from China to an USA based company’s website. My guess is the US company wouldn’t be too happy with paying for all the Chinese traffic…..why? The traffic didn’t convert for them.

Now we are defining quality as traffic that converts. Strangely, this definition means the risk associated with conversion is pushed back to the traffic provider and not the websiteowner. From our example above, if I’m now only sending US traffic to the US based company then they should be happy…..well, maybe.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been unpacking the traits of truth, trust and learning and how they’ve helped me in my own personal relationships. A good way of thinking about the principles is as the three points of a triangle. In this article I’m going to explore what is in the centre of all of us…..our character.

Many people confuse doing good as their character. Doing good is the result of good character and NOT character in itself. What is character? One dictionary defines good character as:

“The stable and distinctive qualities built into an individual’s life which determine his or her response regardless of circumstances.”

A stable person often has a set of values that form the bedrock of their life. These values determine how they interact with others and how they respond to circumstances. Notice, that I haven’t made a judgement call on what the values are.

Some people have a value of selfishness that results in every interaction they have being focused on benefiting them. From their perspective life is all about accumulating more rather than giving out.