Category Archives: business

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?

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.

business, Consultancy, service

Is Your Blog/Business Getting Noticed – Your Internet Plan

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This being my three hundreth blog post I am going to publish an Internet Marketing Plan in several parts. With so many sites competing for traffic you have to stand out. What I hope to do with this series is to give my readers a clear strategy to building/marketing an e-commerce website and getting traffic to those carefully crafted blog posts. I will be publishing a step for step on how to best do that .

Goals

One needs to start somewhere and I am sure that if you are reading this you already have an idea of what you want to create. Goals are intimately related to every aspect of your business plan. You’ll want to massage your goals again and again as you research various aspects of your marketing plan. Goals ought to be both financial and non-financial and be related to the length of your marketing plan’s timeline. Below are some examples:

Non-financial goals:

To grow steadily in market share each year from the current ? to 32% over five years.

To grow the percentage of sales from our store’s website from 5% to 45% over five years.

Move from hobby site to a profit centre within two years.

Year one: add e-commerce capability.

Year two: develop an advertising revenue from both website and Rss/e-mail newsletter.

Increase the number of visitors and page views per a month, respectively over a period of six months using a combination of traffic-producing strategies.

Redesign the site using Web 2.0, E-commerce technology. Make the site visually attractive, interactive, and easy to maintain, over the next 9 months.

How to do it – Months 1-3

Links

  • Inbound links not only bring appropriate traffic to one’s site but also improve rankings in certain search engines, such as Google.
  • Find informational sites on writing, on small business and on marketing and submit pages from your site as suggested links.
  • Discussion groups; Join and participate in about six discussion lists/forums (topical discussions carried on among subscribers by e-mail). Serve as a moderator of one of these. Of course, there are lots more where I can have an influence and attract subscribers, visitors and clients.
  • Post something related to this month’s new product in each of my regular discussion haunts.

Web site and infrastructure

A web site is an ever-evolving entity. It is constantly changing, and needs adding to and improving.

  • Make sure every article and feature at my site contains appropriate keyword metatags, which help for some search engines’ rankings.
  • Revise or remove outdated information.
  • Create and install “e-mail a friend about this page” utility.
  • Install bookmarking tools
  • Ponder changes I could make to convert more visitors to buyers.

Starting a Member Web Site?

Setting up a member website where distributors and sale agents can meet on line and gain product knowledge, and discuss products in a closed website that is only accessible to selected members. Websites like this can give a big input into you business. Such websites like this can be set up using technology from http://www.ning.com/ or www.drupal.com

Search engines

  • Continue to monitor the amount of daily traffic which search engines are sending to you- where your visitors are coming from and which keyword phrases are bringing people to your site.
  • Search engines can provide a wealth of information , in particular when used in relation to competitors website.

Publicity

  • Decide on 6-12 industries to target for the rest of this year and compile PR contact lists for each niche.
  • Distribute at least one press release this month designed to produce more Web site traffic and more RSS/Newsletter subscribers.

Direct mail

  • Send Webcards of your business to executive directors of professional organizations for selected niche markets.

Product development

  • Convert existing special reports into downloadable products and use them for selling material for users/distributors. Find third party outlets on the internet to sell your products.
  • Persuade appropriate site owners to sell course/product knowledge from their site in exchange for a commission.
  • Convert special information into audiotapes and make them downloadable

Posting content

  • Write, Post and Convert press releases into an articles
  • Post Press releases & Internet Marketing articles (previously written) at free content sites.

Is there anything you would add?

Check back soon for part 2

business, Consultancy, E-Commerce, money, Relationship

Value of Social Networking in Dollars

Just recently somebody tried to sell there twitter profile on Ebay. Strange as it may seem and almost laughable. He did manage to get $1,125 plus for his profile

Is this real value of his network? It may not be so far wrong. Moving into the 21st century more and more people will be conducting there sales research, people research etc online. If you do not have profile you may well be drawing a blank. People will expect to be able to reference you or check you out online. In the pursuit of sales I imagine that all these companies are going to be using these tools.

 

Would I employ somebody who is well networked? Sure I would.

The real value in social networking may be only just be starting to be unraveled, while I am not suggesting that we all start selling our profiles. I do think that individuals with well managed net works will be setting themselves up for whole lot more business at sometime in the future. As posted here by Owen, we may be related to every one much closer than we think. By networks in this blog post I am referring to social media sites, whether that is Linkedin, Facebook, community sites or a blog. To name but a few.

 

What do you think?

Management, Relationship

Hopes and Dreams

1 Comment

It’s not rocket science but this being double o day with the Olympics on the eighth and all, something different.

The root of this blog post is about what Churchill describe in the second world war when he visited his old school. He stood up said. “Never never never give up”. and than sat back down. These few words have reappeared through out history. You see them more recently in self help books by Paul Mc Kenna, or how to get rich by Naploean or in great sport to name but a few. Incredible simple words. But it is what distinguishes success from failure.

In another life time I was a musician. Extraordinarily passionate about music. I had some success and some failures. When my Son was born I decided it was time to do something else. Ten years later I remember hearing very similar music to what I had been making back then. It was then that I realised if I had pursued what I had already been doing for many years I too could have cashed in on what become very popular at that time.

I firmly believe that you can do anything, not everything though. When committed to one true desire mountains can move. There are more than enough example of this from Ghandi through to the fantastic array of modern entrepreneurs that are responsible for so many of the innovative products we see today. It starts with an idea.