Monthly Archives: August 2008

business, Consultancy, development

How to Set Up Your Own Social Networking Site

There are some key factors that one will need to consider if they want t set up their own networking site. This is best explained by the Night Rider comparison. Face book has managed to amass over 6,000 people that are interested in the eighties Hit TV show Night Rider. It has its own Night Rider page. When the original star of the program, David Hasselhoff, heard about this, he decided to start his own net working site and cash in on the shows staying popularity.

What does this teach us about networking?

1. If you are a member of a group or share a passion, you can start own Networking site. A group of people with similar interest is an important ingredient in setting up Networking site.
2. If you lead this by setting up such a site, you can than reap the rewards and/or advertising and related products.

I do see many more companies setting up there own networks where you can interact with the company. As the value to social networking is in the people. Why would any company want to source that out? Especially considering that software is readily available for such endeavours. What sites can you imagine?

Consultancy, Starting your business, Websites

Work At Home, How To Choose A Home Based Business And Make Money

With rising costs of living, employee downsizing, corporate layoffs, constantly increasing gas prices and long commutes to work, more and more people find it now necessary to find a work at home job or to start a home based business. A vast majority of these individuals turn to the internet for their work at home salvation. There are literally thousands of work at home and home based business opportunities out there on the World Wide Web but of course all that glitters is not gold. Upwards of 90% of the marketed home based businesses I would say are scams. These are schemes designed with the sole purpose of making the individual marketing the product to you rich, while you are left holding the bag as it were. Having said this however there are many legitimate home based business opportunities on the internet. The problem then is weeding out the good from the bad. Unfortunately this is a matter if trial and error and a LOT of research.

Finding legitimate opportunities to make money from home can become an extremely time consuming and ultimately a very expensive undertaking. There are a few things one must look for when searching for a legitimate work at home job or home based business opportunity. Any aspiring web entrepreneur must look for these important factors before selecting any work at home business opportunity, work at home job or affiliate program.

The first thing you should do is to review their standing with the various Business Regulation Agencies such as the Better Business Bureau. You should check on any complaints that may have been filed by consumers and whether or not it was satisfactorily resolved. In most cases this can be done online at the agencies web site.

They must have very good products and or services to promote. No matter their claims, if no one finds it useful no one will buy. On this note beware of any “opportunity” where you have to buy-in before you know exactly what you will be getting for you hard earned cash. As you can imagine there are many of these out there with a slick sales letter but absolutely no mention of what the product or service is.

There must be a reliable support system in place with training and good leadership. Any program that just hands you the material and expects you to just figure it out on your own isn’t worth your time and money.

Paychecks should be sent out on time and at least once per month. Some home based business opportunities make you wait until your account reaches a preset limit before you get paid. Others let you choose your own limit and or frequency, you be the judge of what is acceptable for your individual needs.

Longevity is most important, so they should have been in business for at least three years. The scammers and con-artist usually cannot stick around this long with any individual program. They pack up and leave to return with something new. If a company is around this long on the internet I would say they must be doing something good.

I must also add here a simple rule to follow; if it sounds too good to be true it probably isn’t. We’ve all seen those ads with claims such as you can make $8,000 a day or in a few hours, just a little common sense goes a long way with these. While I’m not saying that it’s impossible to make thousands of dollars a day, it’s impractical to think it will just happen over night.

Any home based business venture you get into will take time and effort; there will be a learning curve. Anything worth doing is worth doing right, so take your time and learn the ropes. There is no such thing as a get rich quick scheme or we would all be millionaires.

For more information about articles like this please visit: http://www.myddnetwork.com

fun, Marketing, sales

killer blog posts (How to)

Sit comfortably, take a deep breath and relax. What is a rather an ambiguous blog post title and is meant to be taken both ways. You can kill your blog by the posts you put on it or you can do the reverse. This blog post is about how to make your blog posts work for you in a given time allotment.        

A couple of days ago I thought seriously about making Whooah.biz a private blog. My blog is very much a sort of a development to try out new ideas that I will then use on www.WorkConneXions.com or for clients. Waking up on a Sunday morning I read some of the weeks past posts and noticed a few too many errors. There are number reasons for this. My brain works faster than my hands can type. I may suffer from a form of dyslexia. What every the reason the blog posts were not of a sufficient quality to be published. As I thought about this, and talked it over on twitter and with friends, I realised that I was not the only one and that you do not need a degree in journalism or English to make a contribution to blogsphere.

As Sherrilynne from www.Strivepr.com pointed out, nothing leaves the office without being proof read by someone else. My brother Sebastian who is starting work at local law firm www.dc.co.im said that he prints everything out as you just cannot see the mistakes on a computer screen. That is enough justification for all blog writers to contemplate how you are publishing something.  If it is for yourself then fine, but if you are going to share it with blogsphere, how are you going to know if you are achieving what you have set out to do?

Below is step plan that endeavours to insure success in this field:

1.      To write you need to concentrate. To concentrate you need to be relaxed. However you do that is up to you. Whether it is a breath of fresh air or taking a deep breath. Make sure you do it.

2.      There are lots of blog post out there that talk about the writing of a blog post, how you should repeat the theme in the last  paragraph etc. Fundamentally a blog post can be anything that you want as long as it achieves your goals. My approach is too give it a start, a middle and an end and to make sure that it has a meaning and relevance. There is no easy way to do this but the more you do it the easier and better it becomes like anything else. How will we insure that it achieves your goals? By reading below.

3.      Check your blog post, checking it may sound simple but if there is one thing in life that you can not do enough of it is checking. Here are some of my suggestions, you may want to apply one or two of these in any given situation.

A.     Save the blog post in different form than you have written it. So if you have written it in Word than save it as text file and proof read it.

B.     The great thing with computers is that you can increase the size of the text. Why make it hard to read, increase it.

C.     Studies have shown that MS Sans Serif in grey on a white background is the easiest font for the brain to read. Of course one shoe does not fit all so you may have to experiment a bit.

D.     Ask a colleague or a friend to proof read it. This often helps with total comprehension of the piece.

E.      Take a break and check it much later when the brain has forgotten what you have written and you can see it with fresh eye

F.      Print it out, there is nothing like sitting somewhere else and checking it on a different media form

G.     Employ the services of document proofing company. Like this one http://www.betteredit.com/

That’s about all that I can think of for now. With these controls in place either you will succeed or you will find out that you and your friends are not very good at english.

 

 

ideas, Marketing

Smart Marketing – Arigh Nam Beist

3 Comments

While leading a a truly balanced life now, I make sure that I have time for reading a broad selection of material. The IOD magazine has come up trumps again in the March issue of this year. Yes, I am aware that it is 5 months later, but like I say balance is the key word in life. That is what I try to do now, and probably should have done earlier.

There is an article about Scotland Glenmorangie distilleries that accidently mixed the wrong sort of whisky. Faced with a dilemma they come up with a clever campaign; they used a direct mail marketing  to ask for an official pardon and sold the whisky as a collectors item. The campaign generated a 23 percent response. 8 percent above what you would normally expect.

The best bit is still to come; their direct mail marketing grew. When they launched a special whisky called Arigh Nam Beist (shelter of the beast) for Halloween in 2007 their response rate was 69 percent. Virtually unheard of. A little clever marketing can go a long way. Do you know any such stories? I am sure that Richard Branson could tell a few, how about you?

ideas, Marketing, Relationship

Running For Gold on Style and Grace

With the Olympics almost over I was catching up on some of the events last night. The running events always amaze me. Some of these long distance runners, in fact all of them, run with such grace. They run long distance events the same time I could do 400 meters when I was at school and I was one of the best runners in the North West aged 13. These athletes run with such grace that it almost looks like no effort at all. There is a lesson for us all there. I am sure that America and many other countries have much better resources and trainers. But it is the Africans that dominate this sport. While I am sure they train very hard I think they have something more.

Do you run your business on Style and Grace? Would you like to?

business, Consultancy

Why One Should Love Business Plans

You have been out somewhere and had a great idea for generating some money or starting a business. We have all been there. What should you do next?

If your idea is to be anything more than just an idea you will have to test it. It is important to test each idea as potentially you can save yourself alot of time and money. A well tested idea is of a benefit to everybody involved. So how do you test your idea?

The first step is to write it down. Writing things down focuses the mind more clearly on what you are trying to achieve. Below is a step for step plan on how to test any new idea. If your idea can make it to the end of these questions then you may well be ready for stage two, a business.

1. Write the idea down in its pure simple form.

2. Go onto the internet and see if there are any related products or services that compete with your idea.

3. If the idea is serving a local area, check local newspapers and magazines to see if anyone is doing something similar.

4. Write your ideas down on paper so that you can present it in email or paper form to a small group of people related to the project.

5. Gather a small group of people who will benefit or help you and do a brain storming session. The objective of the brain storming session is to find faults in the plan and reasons not to do it. Not the other way around.

6. If your plan survives this far you are ready to build a prototype. A prototype can be a model of your idea or a process flow chart if it is a service. For example, if you are designing a new sort of gear system you are going to have build that either in model form of for real to see if it works and if there are any possible problems that may exist with it. If it is a service (a non physical object) than you will need to document the process flow including as much information as possible.

7. After you have done this, one will have established any potential problems and to see if the idea is still feasible. But you are not finished yet. A second round of group analyses is necessary to see if the idea still stacks up. If you succeed in this, you can pat your self on the back and start on your business plan.