Category Archives: Consultancy

Questions about Social and Business Media

I asked these questions a couple of months ago, and today I posted the last answer. Enjoy.

How effective is social media?

Answer here:http://tinyurl.com/5cdt2y

How long is it going to be around?

Answer here: http://tinyurl.com/3o989x

How much does it cost in relation to other media forms?

Answer here: http://tinyurl.com/5znakl

What is the biggest growing age group?

Answer here:http://tinyurl.com/4lmpk5

What can it do for my company?

Answer here: http://tinyurl.com/4d3veg

What can it do for me as a director? Can I do it my self?

Answer here: http://tinyurl.com/3kk325

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?

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

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.

Is Your Blog/Business Getting Noticed – Your Internet Plan

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