Category Archives: bootstrap

Twitter Tools

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Currently we are in the process of learning how to use Twitter so we can make new friends, broaden out sphere of influence and blow our own horn, in order to be more successful.

Since I am no authority on Twitter, I’m going to turn to stand in tech evangelist, entrepreneur and Twitter guru Guy Kawasakit to tell you which tools to use and how to use them.

In Looking for Mr. Goodtweet: How to Pick Up Followers on Twitter, Kawasaki provides……

“Tip 8: Use the right tools. At the end of the day, you either have many followers or you don’t. A good effort doesn’t count, so you might as well use the right tools to make picking up followers as easy as possible. Here’s what I use:Here’s what I use:

  1. SocialToo. SocialToo provides a service that automatically follows everyone that you do. It also enables you to send them a nice welcome message. If you heed my advice to follow everyone who follows you, it’s indispensable. It can also inform you when someone has stopped following you too.
  2. Twitthat. This is a Firefox button that you install by dragging onto your toolbar. You click on the button, and it grabs the link of the page you’re reading and creates a tweet with from the link. By default, it quotes the existing headline, but you already know you should blow that out.You can also create custom “actions”—meaning a snippet of text to precede your tweets. I made my custom action the simplest possible: “-”. I wish that a custom action wasn’t required, that the editing area was larger, and that Twitthat displayed a character count, but how can I complain about something that’s free and indispensable?
    Update: check out a product called Adjix. It works like Twitthat plus it doesn’t require a custom action, the editing area is large, and it displays the character count. It also shows how many people clicked on each link.

  3. TweetDeck. TweetDeck is an Adobe Air application that front ends Twitter. You can open multiple panes on it with specialized purposes like displaying your direct messages and custom searches. These custom searches enable you to create a “dashboard” to Twitter.
    Picture 5.jpg

    TweetDeck is what I use for custom searches. I have a pane with this custom search (brackets not included): [Guykawasaki OR Alltop OR “Guy Kawasaki” -Alltop.com]. This finds all instances where people mention “Guykawasaki” as well as my own tweets because they are from “@guykawasaki” and “Alltop” plus it removes all tweets with “Alltop.com” (Notice that there’s a minus sign before “Alltop.com” and you must capitalize the “OR”.). I remove tweets containing “Alltop.com” because hundreds of people evangelize Alltop news posts by using this Twitterfeed (see below).

    You can also do custom searches like this at the Twitter site by clicking here, but the TweetDeck interface is much prettier.

  4. Twellow. Twellow is a site that categorizes people according to their interests by monitoring their public messages. Its categories include accounting, advertising, marketing, real estate, and science. You can use it to find people who are interested in the same topics you are. Here is an example of the people in the beer category (Courtesy of @ducttape).
  5. Twittelator Pro. This can provide the same custom search results as TweetDeck, so I use it whenever I’m not on my MacBook.
    6. photo.jpg
  6. Posterous. Don’t click on the link. Instead, send an email to post@posterous.com with a photo, video, or audio clip attached. Posterous will create a blog for you and post the photo, video, or audio. You can even include the HTML embed snippet from video sites like YouTube, and Posterous will embed the player. Your subject line becomes the headline of the posting, and the body of the email becomes the posting itself. Then set your Posterous blog to automatically post to your Twitter account, and voila!, you have pictures, video, and audio in your tweets. This is how I tweeted the showerhead picture from the Singapore Airlines lounge. The Posterous FAQ explains it all. An alternative for posting pictures is TwitPic. It is also quite easy to use to tweet pictures, and it is integrated with TweetDeck.
  7. Twitterfeed. This website enables you to automatically post RSS feeds as tweets. I use it, for example, to automatically post all Truemors posts as if they were tweets from me. When you really trust a site’s feeds, I recommend that you incorporate Twitterfeed to reduce the burden of manually finding good content.”
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Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of Bootstrapping

Guy Kawasaki, American venture capitalist and ...

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The Art of Bootstrapping

There is probably no one smarter, more capable and creative on the Net….. and friendly, approachable and outgoing, in addition…. than Guy Kawasaki He has a string of successes as long as your arm.  And, from that, he has really honed his knowledge of entrepreneuring or, as most without really deep pockets wind up doing, bootstrapping.

You should read his entire post, The Art of Bootstrapping and, if you like that, you might consider buying Kawasaki’s latest book, Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition.

I’m going to point you in the right direction with five of Kawasaki’s guideposts, but if you’re planning to bootstrap, you should definitely read the rest of them at The Art of Bootstrapping.  If I had read his guidepost on How to Forecast From The Bottom Up, I could have saved myself a lot of heartache when I used a “top down” forecast, because I didn’t know any better.  The best advice any entrepreneur can give you is to learn from their hard earned experience and their mistakes so you don’t have to make them yourself. Here’s how to start:

  1. Focus on cash flow, not profitability. The theory is that profits are the key to survival. If you could pay the bills with theories, this would be fine. The reality is that you pay bills with cash, so focus on cash flow. If you know you are going to bootstrap, you should start a business with a small upfront capital requirement, short sales cycles, short receivables terms, long payables terms, and recurring revenue. It means passing up the big sale that takes twelve months to close, deliver, and collect. Cash is not only king, it’s queen and prince too for a bootstrapper.
  2. Ship, then test. Perfect is the enemy of good enough. When your product or service is good enough, get it out, because cash flows when you start shipping. Besides, unwanted features, not perfection, come with more time. By shipping, youll also learn what your customers truly want you to fix. It’s definitely a trade-off your reputation versus cash flow so you can’t ship pure crap. But you can’t wait for perfection either. (Nota bene: life-science companies should ignore this recommendation.)
  3. Start as a service business. Let’s say that you ultimately want to be a software company: People download your software or you send them CDs, and they pay you. That’s a nice, clean business with a proven business model. However, until you finish the software, you could provide consulting and services based on your work-in-progress software. This has two advantages: immediate revenue and true customer testing of your software. Once the software is field tested and battle hardened, flip the switch and become a product company.
  4. Pick a few battles. Bootstrappers pick their battles. They don’t fight on all fronts because they cannot aff ord to. If you are starting a new church, do you really need a $100,000 multimedia audiovisual system? Or just a great message from the pulpit? If youre creating a content Web site based on the advertising model, do you have to write your own customer ad-serving software? I don’t think so.
  5. Go direct. The optimal number of mouths (or hands) between a bootstrapper and her customer is zero. Sure, stores provide great customer reach, and wholesalers provide distribution. But God invented e-commerce so that you could sell direct and reap greater margins. And God was doubly smart because She knew that by going direct, you’d also learn more about your customer’s needs. Stores and wholesalers fill demand, they don’t create it. If you create enough demand, you can always get other organizations to fill it later. If you don’t create demand, all the distribution in the world will get you nothing.

(Kawasaki says) As my friend Craig Johnson, the great Silicon Valley corporate finance lawyer, likes to say, “The leading cause of failure of startups is death, and death happens when you run out of money. As long as you have money, you’re still in the game, and outlasting the competition is one of the hallmarks of bootstrapping.”

Amen!  The Art of Bootstrapping might well be called The Art of Belt-Tightening, Ingenuity and Persistence.

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Rorschach Test For Entrepreneurs : If You See Opportunity, Start A Company

I have built start-ups throughout my life and also have been fortunate enough to be surrounded by successful entrepreneurs throughout my life. And I can tell you one thing:  They may be fazed and affected, like everyone else, but they are unstoppable and undaunted by droughts, depressions, recessions, and natural or man-made disasters. Entrepreneurs and steely businessmen or women don’t stop, don’t look back, don’t complain, they just keep on powering through, whatever the tough times are. The key is these people know they are in it for life, good times or bad, and they may have to adjust their strategy but the game remains the same and they’re in it to win it. They just keep on going, like the famed energizer bunny.

I got onto the Net, riding the wave of the Netscape browser, surfing on the crest of an Internet boom, then weathered the dot com bust, really not so much the worse for wear, just with a little belt tightening, as I have learned to be a lean, mean operator, which I recommend to you as well, at least when you’re starting out.  See Start Your Own Small Business Using More Ingenuity, Less Cash.

In  10 Reasons This is the Best Time to Build a Startup, NewsCred Blog gives it’s reasons why it’s a great time to start:

“I’m not a blind optimist, but I think the best suggestion in this situation is simple: forget the depressing “reality” painted by the so-called pundits, and just get on with it. Why? Because I really believe the naysayers are full of it, and it really is a great time to be building a startup. Here’s why:

10) You can’t dwell on what you cannot control and change, so this is the perfect opportunity to concentrate on the present and focus on delighting your customers TODAY. I don’t practice Buddhism, but I think Buddha got it spot on: “Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future – concentrate your mind on the present moment.”

9) Capital efficiency is your friend (thanks Fred). You always wanted to do it, but now you have no excuse. Optimize spending, optimize investing, optimize hiring, optimize everything. This one is Buddha version 2.0: “Yesterday is a canceled check. Tomorrow is a promissory note. What we have today is ready cash – so spend it wisely.”

8) All your competitors with million dollar burn-rates are in trouble.

7) The current crop of startup winners were all created right after the Dot-Com bubble burst. Naysayers were out in droves in 2001 as well. Look at what happened to some of the entrepreneurs who chose to ignore the doom and gloom and just got on with it. $$$.

6) There are fewer distractions. All the hype surrounding web startups and the Web 2.0 bubble will disappear. Rather than worry about flipping your company or XYZ buying ABC for $100 million dollars, you can focus on your product.

5) Yes, product. In times like these, let your product speak louder than anything else. If you build something people want and need, all you need to do is make sure you can continue providing it. If you stop today, it’s going to be pretty hard for people to get to your product. Don’t disappoint them.

4) Build a great team, and don’t worry about paying them boatloads of money. You don’t have money, they don’t expect money, so its a pretty decent ZOPA (zone of probable agreement). There’ll be plenty of talent available. If said talent comes with high salary requirements, slap them across the face. Then tell them “thanks, but no thanks.”

3) Necessity is a big … mother (of invention). You’re brain synapses should be firing on all cylinders and creative juices flowing non-stop. A little creativity will go a long way, and no one will dismiss your crazy ideas if it can a) save money or b) extend your runway or c) get you sales. Also guerrilla marketing is fun.

2) Remember that business model you’ve been putting away for a while? Well, dust it off and starting focusing on it now. During the good times, things like business models often seem like perks or bonuses. Bad times are a blessing in disguise – you can bring back the biz model and put it front and center. God help you if you don’t have one.

1) You’re an entrepreneur. Your whole purpose of being is so that you can take scarce resources, optimize like hell and get maximum output from the least input. This is your time to shine.

The most important thing to remember is if you quit, there’s a 0% chance of success. Life’s too short to worry, so just go out there and have fun. Build a kick-a.. product that’ll delight your customers.

And don’t worry about the world coming to an end today. It’s already tomorrow in Australia.”

Now, I happen to wholeheartedly agree.  And I can say, looking back, even in the middle of the dot com bust, I said: “Are they kidding?  Not even 10% of the world is on the Net yet. The Net is only beginning.  This is a blip on the map.”   And this is only a blip on the map as well.  Work now and you’ll be better positioned for when the economy roars back as it inevitably will

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BootStrapMe: Tips for the serious bootstrapper

A pair of boots with one bootstrap visible.

BootStrapMe: Tips for the serious bootstrapper.

Just in case you’re not familiar with the term, Wikipedia to the rescue: bootstrapping or booting which began as a leather strap evolved into a group of metaphors that share a common meaning, to better oneself by one’s own unaided efforts, or a series of self-sustaining processes that proceed without external help.

Sound familiar?  If it sounds very familiar, you may be a bootstrapper.  I have bootstrapped a number of businesses so it’s a very familiar term to me.

Shawn Hessinger, who is a bootstrapper himself, is also a blogger and journalist who spent years covering business issues. Then he decided to dive off the deep end, become an entrepreneur and blog about his adventures. He shares some hard won knowledge, which might be helpful to you, if you are considering bootstrapping or are already in the thick of it.

“Once the wave of exuberance over starting a new bootstrap business passes giving way to a lot of hard work accompanied by occasional disappointment, it’s time to take some serious stock…

• Take criticism seriously. Though it’s the part that NOBODY wants to deal with, the fact is criticism can be your best friend, if you learn to read it correctly. Learn to draw inspiration from your customers’ complaints to build a better product by knowing the difference between things you can change, things you can’t and what requests are just unreasonable.

• Treat your startup like a job. You would think this would be obvious to anyone. But, if the reason you became an entrepreneur is so you wouldn’t have to do it, it’s time for some unpleasant facts. Behind all the supposed glamour that comes with owning your own business, there’s just a lot of plain old fashioned effort. Think of it this way. The only difference between work you do for your startup and what you do for an employer is the person who owns what is built by that labor in the end.

• Reinvent yourself daily. There will be things that don’t work and paths that lead to no where. The benefit of bootstrapping is that while you have no money, you also have no constraints. With no one looking over your shoulder to tell you, ‘That’s not how you do it,’ finding the right equation may be easier.

• Focus on problem solving. Most business goals can be better seen as a series of challenges to overcome or problems to be solved than as the pursuit of a single and constant goal. Break your startup into challenges and set priorities for what must be done. With each problem you solve you will find others arising. Keep the process going and you will slowly inch toward your goal…often almost without realizing.

• Never give up. Never surrender. … There are days you will feel like throwing in the towel. Remember, very few things are an immediate success. Persistence is key in the end.”

To read this entire post or more of Shawn’s blogging, go to BootStrapMe: Tips for the serious bootstrapper.

You may also want to consider these suggestions by

Esther Dyson,  who gave some advice to Bambi Francisco CEO, co-founder , Vator TV, Inc. (Owner) in Esther Dyson: Feign smarts by listening more

Dyson is “widely regarded as an Internet/high-tech luminary, thought leader, and respectable investor, having put money in some of the hottest startups, such as Flickr and del.icio.us (both part of Yahoo), and more recently 23andMe, which is backed by Google.

In this “Lessons learned” segment, Esther offers her advice to entrepreneurs and lessons learned to investors.

Her first is to listen. “Whatever the context, people will think you’re smarter,” she said.

The second is to be focused and not be distracted. “More companies die of indigestion,” she said. “Pick one opportunity and do it well, rather than do five or six things badly… opportunities will always be there.”

The third one is “always make new mistakes.”

Hopefully, we can all focus in, listen to Dyson, and try to only make new mistakes

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Finding A Product To Sell Online – Don’t Marry It, Test It

The :en:headquarters of :en:eBay in :en:San Jo...

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Just because a product sells like gangbusters on someone else’s site, don’t assume it will sell on yours.  Your product has to fit in with your overall expertise and what your site is about in order for people to go there and look for it, much less buy it.

Even if a product fits your site and its personality like a hand in a glove, don’t assume it will sell.  The pricing may not be right, the market may be saturated, the stars may not line up right.  Who knows why some things sell on any particular site and others don’t?  You can’t be clairvoyant: you’re not a mind reader, you’re a web marketer.  Everyone has 20/20 hind sight.  That’s why the best plan is to just put up a product and test it out.  It either sells or it doesn’t.  Sometimes you can tweak it…tweak the price, tweak the offer.  But often people just aren’t interested in buying that product from your site and that’s all you really need to know.  And there’s a very simple way to figure this out.
Whether you wish to sell ads related to your content, or join an affiliate marketing program or sell your own products on your site or on Amazon or eBay, there are a lot of moving parts to get right on a website and you will need to make a lot of right choices along the way.  The way to do this is by testing: testing ad placement and color, testing content, testing product categories, testing various suppliers and vendors, testing affiliate marketing programs to see which ones work for you.

Those who take the time to test everything they are doing are the ones who eventually become successful in whichever field they choose.

I can’t begin to tell you how many things I’ve tested.  I’ve tested travel, which I thought might be convenient for business customers: zero.  I’ve tested business ebooks: nothing.  I’ve tested many, many products, all of which came to nada, nothing. Even in  the two core revenue producers on the AdvancingWomen.com site, advertising and employment recruiting, I’ve been through a dozen morphing and transfiguration experiments, starting with Doubleclick Ads, from the day they were born, to some new European ad company which sweet talked me into believing they were going to take the Net by storm, but all they did was truly anemic revenues and give me one more learning experience.  All this was before I morphed my way into a successful combination of Google ads, text ads sold from my site, and some proprietary ad networks. It just took time and testing.

Same with a Job Board or employment recruiting facet of our site at Careers.AdvancingWomen.com.  I was a part of every one of what seemed like a half dozen permutations of what eventually became CareerBuilder.com. That was ok for pocket change. What I began to realize was that big job boards who wanted you as an affiliate wanted the demograhic you had captured but in no way wanted to promote your site, and why should they, as they would be creating their own competition?  Basically they were getting the benefit of your traffic and assuring that you didn’t compete with them or join another competing job board like Monster.com. It worked pretty well  for them, but not necessarily so well for you. Ultimately, I was able to start Careers.AdvancingWomen.com , our own job board which guaranteed a.) I would be building my own brand and therefore an asset I could invest in and  b.) I would not be giving up 50% of the revenue up front.  It just took a lot of testing to arrive at a successsful combination of revenue streams to support the business.

There are many product testing examples as well. Mom-and-pop team Cheryl and Gary Casper started small, like many do on eBay, first looting their own garage, even snatching up VHS copies of their daughter’s Cinderella and Sleeping beauty then moving on to sell their neighbor’s cast offs.

As they learned about online auctions and particularly the eBay environment, the Caspers moved on up the selling food chain.    They now sell $15,000 to $20,000 a month in goods on eBay.

How did they do it?  Trial and error.

After their home started overflowing with neighbor’s cast off products, the Caspers turned to drop-shippers–companies that charge others to sell their products then ship directly to buyers. Although this looked good at first – removing the risk of buying the merchandise, the inconvenience of storing it and the hassle of shipping it—there were definite drawbacks. The Caspers were selling about 40 TVs a week but about half of those arrived damaged at the customer’s home.  The Caspers needed more control over the quality of the product which was shipped to the customer.  They also set out to identify a product category which was less crowded and more profitable than electronics on eBay.

The couple used eBay itself as a research tool, and began going to Chamber of Commerce meetings to find people or companies with products to sell.  They discarded many possible products including Star Wars light sabers and gumball machines.

Ultimately the Caspers decided on auto floor mats, an item with as much as 75 percent profit margins, even after paying the dealer.  The Caspers put as many as 50 mats up on eBay, at $16 to $125 each. Once or twice a week, They buy the mats they’ve sold from a Houston-based auto surplus company.

“If I only wanted to make a few hundred dollars a day, I’d be done by noon,” says Cheryl.

So, the  best advice is probably to use  your common sense to figure out what would be a good product or service for your site to offer.  Don’t spend an excessive amount of time trying to ponder all the variables.  Just put it up.  If it makes money, keep it, if it doesn’t drop it.  That’s the benefit of testing.  Oh, and if it makes money, expand it. That’s the road to success.

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Art Of The Incremental: Start With Your Core Competency

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I’m all about the art of the incremental. For one thing, that’s what bootstrapping is and I am inveterate bootstrapper.  I recommend it to you as well.

Entrepreneurs have been doing this for centuries: starting from where they are with what they’ve got and seeing what works.  This is a time- tested process: if you want to start a business you do two things:

1. Analyze the true nature of your unique assets and core competencies to figure out how they can become a basis for a business.

2. Try small, low stakes testing in the actual marketplace to determine what actually works.  Do more of what works and cut the losers. Keep doing low stakes testing and raise the ante on the winners. ( Didn’t I tell you my very successful father insisted I learn to play poker because it was like the game of business?  It’s not about the cards you are dealt but how you place your bets.  You fold on bad cards and quietly build the pot on the sure winning hands.)

As you practice the art of the incremental , you will be learning your business from the ground up and you will soon learn when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em.  But, my advice, is to start small and build gradually

Author Diane Helbig has some helpful thoughts on this as well in Keep Your Message Simple | Small Business Trends. She says:

“No doubt you’ve heard the term ‘core competency.’ It refers to that which a company or person does best.

The best way to build a business is to start out offering only what you do best.

Why? For a couple of reasons:

  1. It gives you one thing to focus on; to build a marketing message around.
  2. It helps you define your target market – those people who need that thing.
  3. It helps others land on who you are and what you offer.

In short, it provides clarity. It keeps you and your prospects from getting confused.

Too often small business owners try to offer everything under the sun. They think there’s value in being a one-stop shop and they’re afraid that if they don’t offer more things they’ll miss out on business.

Set yourself up for success by starting out simply. Focus on the thing you do best and market that product or service to that target market. Build your business from the foundation of your core competency.

Once you’ve established your company as a solid entity, you can add products or services and develop a menu of offerings. Be sure to add things that make sense – things that go along with your core product or service.”

How will you know what products or services to offer? Unless your customers have been asking for a particular product or service from you, you probably won’t know.  You will have to rely on small scale testing.  As someone once put it, “Starve the problems; feed the opportunities.”  Or, take a close look, then, as my father would say, “Know when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em.”

Let us hear from you.  Tell us your start up experiences.  Have you learned “the art of the incremental”?  How did you do it?”

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How to Start an Online Business for $100 – Ramp Up As Needed Or Just For Surges

PC World – Business Center: How to Start an Online Business for $100.

These challenging economic times may be pushing you ever closer to the idea of launching your own business.  Whatever your reasons……whether it’s a life long dream, or a type of insurance against massive slow down in your day job, or you’ve been pink slipped out of the 9 to 5 work force and have no choice…. starting your own business has never been easier or less expensive.

How to Start an Online Business for $100, lays out a plan, with specifics, step by step, just how to do  this, covering just about every aspect that you need to consider.  Having “been there, done that”, many, many times, as a serial entrepreneur, I think they make very good points.  In the few instances I have a different take, I will point them out to you:

“Starting your own business doesn’t have to mean spending thousands of dollars on setup costs before you ever open your doors. Don’t get suckered into spending loads of money on services that you don’t need or that have far cheaper alternatives. Seriously: With $100, you can obtain everything you require to start just about any business online, with only minimal need to get up from your desk. Here’s how to do it.

Find an Affordable Web Host

The Web site for your new business has to reside somewhere. How do you pick a Web host that won’t leave you high and dry?

Most hosting plans for small companies offer similar features: basically unlimited storage space, support for common databases and publishing systems, and anywhere from a few gigabytes to 2 terabytes of data transfer per month. Expect to pay between $5 and $15 a month for the service, with a one- or two-year up-front contract.

Get Logos and Design Work

Numerous Web sites, such as Logo Ease and LogoMaker, will design a free logo for you based on options you set via a Web interface. The quality varies, but generally you can get the logo for free for online use. The services make money if you want to download the logo in EPS format, which is more suitable for printing on T-shirts and coffee mugs. A Web search for “free logo” will turn up dozens of additional alternatives.

Another, possibly better, approach is to seek out an independent designer to work on your logo. If you don’t need anything fancy, you can find someone to do the job for $50 or less through a simple Craigslist ad. The advantage is that you get to work with a live person (with genuine artistic skills) to create something unique for you rather than a cold, computer-generated logo. ( My advice: Later, when your business is roaring and cash is pouring in, you can splurge on a big time designer for your logo, which might cost a couple of thousand dollars. That’s what I did. I started out using a Matisse graphic of people holding hands around the globe since there were no online logo makers in 1995,1996. In 2001, I finally was able to go big time working alongside  Lara August, branding guru and Creative Director of Robot Creative, an award-winning creative marketing firm in San Antonio, Texas to create our present brand.)

Build an E-Commerce Site on the Cheap

If you’re planning to sell a lot of physical goods, you’ll need a service that can handle e-commerce transactions, process credit cards, and provide security for both. Setting all of this up on your own server is an expensive, time-consuming task laden with security risks. ( Forget about it!) It’s best to outsource the functions to a hosted service targeted at merchants. Such services can be surprisingly affordable. Yahoo’s popular Merchant Solutions start at $40 a month. E-commerce sites at Netfirms start at a mere $15 a month. You can customize both extensively to match your desired look and feel.

Find a Big Sales Partner

Thousands of merchants use Amazon to promote their goods, giving Amazon a cut when items sell. The big advantage: You don’t need a Web site at all to sell there. You can sell just about anything that Amazon stocks by registering as a merchant, finding the product page for the item you’re selling, and clicking Sell yours here. Merchants must pay $40 a month, plus a sliding scale of closing fees (6 to 20 percent). Individual sellers can sign up to sell with no monthly fees but must pay an extra 99 cent closing fee.

You’ll find similar services (though less of a selection) at Half.com (part of eBay), and of course you can always try your hand at dealing on eBay itself, which is still a popular venue for selling new and used merchandise, though one drowning in noise.

Think SEO, All the Time

Don’t underestimate the value of optimizing your Web site for Google. But you don’t need to pay an expert thousands of dollars to optimize your site for you: Check out the expert advice from SEOmoz and other search engine optimization writers to learn the basics of SEO, and instill your site with good SEO habits from day one. It takes time for the engines to get to know your site, so be patient. (Just make sure you’ve submitted your URL to all of them!) ( My advice: If you use WordPress as a content management system you can get a free SEO plug in with the click of a mouse which will automate the entire process for you, so you won’t have to learn all the tech stuff, which is not so much hard as detailed and complicated. Keep it simple.)

Get Bonus Income With Google AdSense

Unless you’re selling physical merchandise, try adding Google AdSense ads to your site. You might pull in only a few dollars a month while your site is small, but that’s more than nothing–plus, it opens the door for bigger ad opportunities down the road. (Me:  Besides, it gets you on Google’s radar.)

Constantly Promote Your Business

How do one-person businesses get big? They’re always promoting themselves–always. Add your URL to your e-mail signature. Create a Facebook group for your business. Write a  about your product or industry.

Managing Your Growth, Scaling Up

Set Up a Switchboard

If you’re expecting a lot of incoming phone calls, an answering service might be worth the investment: You’ll seem more professional to customers, and you won’t be roused from bed at the crack of dawn by callers who don’t understand what time zones are.

You can have a live answering service (similar to the one your doctor uses) for $20 a month–or less, if you have minimal incoming calls. Another option is to do it virtually: For about $10 a month, you can get an 800-number-based system such as RingCentral that answers calls with an automated greeting, routing calls to you (or other employees or contractors) or to voice mail depending on button presses.

For a Little More: Get a Virtual Office

The world doesn’t need to know you’re working in your basement, so many business owners turn to a P.O. box for the official address of their company. A bare P.O. box, however, doesn’t seem all that professional, and you can’t receive UPS or FedEx shipments there.

Another option is a virtual mailbox service, such as that of Regus. With a virtual mailbox, you get a physical mailing address and someone who will sign for packages from other carriers. The catch is that people sending you mail still have to put a PMB code on the envelope, though it’s less conspicuous than with a regular post office box. You pick up the mail once a week, or the service forwards it to you at cost. The plans cost $100 to $150 per month.

You can step up from there to a more serious arrangement: A virtual office setup gets you not just mail service but a live receptionist who answers the phone however you like, plus access to a physical space with offices, conference rooms, and even videoconferencing facilities. Fees can range from $250 to $325 a month.

These costs are admittedly beyond our $100 budget, so consider whether you really need them before signing a contract. With so much business conducted online and via phone, you may never deal with visitors at all. ( My advice:  Skip it.  Should you ever need a conference room, you can rent one from an office company like Regus, or borrow one from a fellow entrepreneur in off hours.  Most likely, in an online business you would be doing teleconferences or conferences online anyway, from your own computer.)

For a Little More: Offload Fulfillment and Shipping

Selling physical goods online often means long hours spent in your garage packing up orders to ship to buyers, and then standing in long lines at the post office to mail it all off. Another option exists, thanks to the wonders of e-fulfillment: You pay someone else to do all the inventory handling and order shipping for you. Fees can be pricey unless you have the volume to mandate it: Efulfillment Service costs $70 a month flat, along with $1.85 per order processed and $0.25 per cubic foot per month for inventory stored, plus actual shipping fees.

Alternatively, you could hire a student or other temporary help to do the work for you a few days a week, but you’ll still have to find somewhere else to park your car.

Behind The Scenes Technicalities

I think it’s important to know how complete this piece is, in case you want to go back to it for things you’re not contemplating now and  use it for a reference.  It also goes into some nuts and bolts things you may want to consider such as filing for an assumed name ( Jane Smith doing business as, dba, “Fashion Forward”), additional licenses you may need, depending on what business you’re in, what kind of bank account to use, and whether to incorporate — the author recommends keeping it simple, opening as a sole propriertor ship, then incorporating later, if you want. ( My advice: Just don’t forget to do it as you get successful so you will not be personally liable for issues relating to your business).

What was left out here, was where to find outsourced help, which you can find in the link below.

Now, that is really a very thorough road map of getting started for $100.  If you have the burning interest, the drive and ambition that fuel an entrepreneurs rise, you will make it.  We wish you the best.  Write and tell us about your experiences so we can add them into our common well of shared knowledge.

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Crunch Time – Prepare For the Personal Credit Tsunami

Suze Orman addressing a Senate Committee.
Image via Wikipedia

If ever there were a time to batten down our financial hatches, don our life vests and check the life boat for leaks, this is it; I can almost hear the gale force winds howling when I listen to Maria Bartiromo giving us the horror tale of the stock market in the evening. This is only made more scary by Suze Orman advising us how to deal with our incredibly shrinking assets in the morning.

But we all know what the best first step should be.

Michael Sitarzewski in How we got out of debt: from $50k to $0 in less than a year talks about his own moment of illumination when he realized he was looking at “a $23k personal loan, $24k in two cars, and a few thousand on credit cards ($50k for for the math deficient). He had heard Dave Ramsey on the radio, was impressed, so he and his wife turned to Dave’s book The Total Money Makeover for help.

“The plan? Live on less than you make (a lot less if you can), and use the rest to pay off debt.

So we formulated a plan based on Dave Ramsey’s “Baby Steps.”

1. The $1,000 Emergency Fund - we put ours in a savings account that was tied to the checking account as overdraft protection. That helped us get over using the credit cards as a buffer. We found that we never had an expense so large that we needed more than $1,000.

2. Pay off all debt using the Debt Snowball – pay off the debts, smallest to largest, using the payment from the last one on the next. Eventually, everything is paid off and the fun starts. Interest isn’t relevant in the conversation because the excitement and the feeling of progress by paying off debts is extremely valuable. Don’t get out the calculator, it doesn’t matter. Pay them off, smallest to largest, and you’ll see how fun getting out of debt can be.

We started with the smallest card, then the other. Closing credit cards is fun. In the meantime I made the incredibly difficult decision to rid myself of my car and the $800/mo it was costing us. Man I loved that car, but $580 for the payment, another $100 for insurance, and $120 or so in gas per month? Didn’t love that. My car took two months to sell, but once it did we were able to apply that money to the other car (it was next in line).

With the second car paid off ($300/mo), my car sold ($800/mo), and the credit cards gone ($180/mo), the personal loan was up next. The friend that loaned us the money was getting a little impatient with us given how much debt we were paying off, but he was pretty excited to see the progress come so quickly when it was his turn. We were paying that debt off quickly. Very quickly.

It is said that once you start doing smart things with money, money finds you. Whether or not I believe that in a metaphysical sense is a matter of debate, we did see a nice tax return (the largest in years) and had an investment pay decently that spring. We didn’t get raises during that period, and still haven’t, but the investment keeps making returns and by getting out of debt, we’ve found a lot more money in our salaries.

We wrote the last check on September 18, 2007 – we were debt free in less than a year.

3. 3 to 6 months of expenses in savings - we chose a high interest savings account… and decided on 3 months of expenses because two of us were working. By extension, that means 6 months as long as we don’t both lose our jobs. We’ve completed this step. Reaching this goal while debt free was relatively painless – we were already trained by the budget.

4. Invest 15% of household income into Roth IRAs and pre-tax retirement. In 2007 – for the first time ever – we fully funded our IRAs. We snuck it in just under the wire, but we did it.

For the long run, look at  5 through 7: College funding; Pay off your house early – Build wealth and GIVE! “

This advice is good for normal times but in today’s hazardous financial climate, with worse times looming, it will pay extra dividends to start the belt tightening and budget crunching, injecting more discipline in our spending and, generally, getting our financial house in order. When the good times return, this should accelerate our savings and one day we could be receiving interest instead of paying it out monthly.

Video: Suze Orman’s Guide To Tough Financial Times

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Tough Times? Craft Your Competitive Advantage By Thinking Me, Inc.

This picture of my Palm TX was taken by me, Br...
Image via Wikipedia

Career Success: Get Ahead of the Crowd – Careers-Employment-AdvancingWomen.com

Regardless of where you open your briefcase or palm pilot each day – at a large corporation, a small business or the end of your dining room table – the key to staying employable the rest of your life is your own creative action. The person who is going to be successful is not going to succeed just because of good work. That is a given. It is expected. Crafting your competitive advantage is what is going to get you ahead in these crazy, changing times. Pay attention to and practice the following three tactics to not only stay in the game but to get ahead of the crowd.

Think Of Your Career As A Business.
The business of career management is that—an independent business that you manage—even if you work for someone else. In this world of downsizing, restructuring, and mergers, you, not the company, must be in the driver’s seat of your career. Always think of yourself as self-employed.

Ask yourself these tough but important questions: What business am I really in? What is my product line? What is the target market for my products? For example, if I am an accountant then, what is it that I really do that people will pay for? Can I list three features and three benefits of my talents? Do I know my current worth in the marketplace? It doesn’t matter what your title is. What matters is, if what you do has value and is needed by someone or some company.

You must start looking at your workplace with new eyes—as a marketplace of buyers and sellers—and start thinking of your career as a business. Launch your business called “Me, Inc.” by defining your a product line, targeting your customers, and having a well thought-out career strategy. Therefore, YOU, not the unpredictable winds of change, become the driving force for your career. Exit job security. Enter career security.

Have Skills, Will Travel.
What’s your competitive advantage? What do you bring to the employment table? You carry with you, wherever you go, a large suitcase or portfolio that holds all of your skills, experiences, and accomplishments. What’s in your portfolio? Is it heavy with many skills or light with only a few? Do you know if it would be valued in lots of different places or just a limited number?

To be competitive, you must periodically audit your portfolio and benchmark your skills. How do you compare with your peers in terms of education, experience, training, career progression? Are you new and improved? Or, are you just the same person you were three, five, ten years ago? Do you have the right mix of skills, knowledge and experiences to position yourself for the future? Or, do you need to repackage yourself in some way? Getting ahead tomorrow means getting better today and throughout your work life. Avoid becoming a professional dinosaur.

The key question is not where you stand on the corporate ladder. It is: “What do you know how to do; and where else can you do it.” A well honed and portable portfolio will provide you with the greatest security in today’s changing and competitive business environment.

Become Street Smart.
What will keep you in the race as the rules of the workplace road continue to change constantly? Initiative, visibility, and flexibility are the three cornerstones of success in the new career game.

Exercise leadership. You can’t afford to crouch behind your desk, buried in your everyday work, and hope for the best. Go beyond your job description and direct your energy to the top priorities of your boss, your department, your team. Make yourself indispensable.

Stand up and be seen. Promote yourself, not be your title, but by the outcomes or results of what you’re doing. Your reputation can either pave your way or get in the way of your success. You can start making a name for yourself by being involved in successful assignments that allow you to be visible to a wide range of people who could have an impact on your career. These assignments could include for example: Building a new team from scratch; or overseeing the introduction of new technology; or taking on projects that require liaison or communications between departments, functional areas and vendors?

Marcia Zidle, career coach, http://leadershiphooks.com/

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Website Or Blog Building Blocks: The Only Constant Is Change

It’s easier now than it ever has been to get on the web and start a website or blog and make a profit at it. This didn’t happen overnight, however.

I started the process of getting on the Net in 1995 and finally launched AdvancingWomen in March of 1996.  Much has changed since then. Core concepts have not, but they’ve evolved.  I think my journey through the Net and now the blogosphere can offer useful lessons to those about to embark on this journey.

Someone once said ““Change is inevitable. Change is constant.” Since that is particularly true of the Net, you’d better get used it and prepare for it. Learn to be proactive when you see change coming, and failing that, be able to react in a lightening strike split second before change overwhelms you.

Here are a couple of changes I’ve seen over time:

Webhosts

When I first launched in 1995, web hosts were relatively expensive, about $200 a month

When AdvancingWomen.com finally launched, we got about a million and a half page views in a month, melting down our webhost’s server 3 times. This resulted in our web host calling me and giving me 24 hours to bring him $4,000 or have my website shut down. This was the wild and wooly frontier at the time without all the rules in place.  However,  I still considered this blackmail, which apparently it was, since I managed to switch the site to one in Colorado for about the same $200 price. (As for the sudden surge of traffic, remember, back then, the Net was relatively small with little competition.  There were no large corporations.  No Hearst, no IVillage, although I later worked with both of them.)

Web hosting prices went down to about $20.

Next, many good web hosts could be had for as little as $5 to $10. And still can be.

But that depends on the size of your website and your individual needs. Ultimately, I had a horrible experience with a web host who happened to be listed on Nasdaq.  There were sudden and frequent outages, sometimes lasting for days.  You could go for a week without getting service.  Only one person, a system administrator, seemed to know anything about what he was doing. The rest of the time their phone was answered by one of a gaggle of call center people in Manilla who barely spoke English and definitely couldn’t take a technical message.  Apparently, although the client list was long, the webhost staff was skeletal.

So the time had come for me to step up. And that’s what happens with growth.  As you grow your needs become greater and you can’t afford mistakes or downtime with other businesses and workers depending on you. It’s the wild west no longer. Now, “under the hood”, the tech underpinning of our site is maintained with 24/7 service by a dedicated team of high level techs. Our server is in Dallas; our tech admins are in Austin; our techs are in Austin, and London, to cover the evening and night time hours. Our  programming team is located in the San Antonio-Austin high tech corridor. And our job board is maintained by partner/developers in New London, Connecticut.

But you can start with a $5 to $10 a month host.  Why not?  Eventually you’ll probably outgrow your “cheap host”, but hey, you will have been pocketing some savings in the meantime.

Software

Some things have gotten simpler.  In the beginning, in order to produce web pages there was only html coding. The problem with html was that it didn’t do what you wanted it to do, it did what you told it to do and I sometimes didn’t know how to tell it to do the right thing.  Much of it was trial and error. Then Adobe, I believe, came out with the first “What you see is what you get” software to produce webpages.  It was clunky.  Then many other programming languages arrived. For me, Dreamweaver, by Macromedia, was a lifesaver, in no small part, at least in the beginning,  because I could get good techs helping me remotely from Silicon Valley.

Today there are hundreds of content management systems… here’s a list.…both free, opensource and proprietary that enable you to create just about anything you want on the web with relative ease.  I use WordPress, but occasionally go for another system if a particular task is required by an organization or association I’m working with. But you should start with a simple system. Think Joomla or WordPress as a content management system.

Techs

Suffice to say, when I started most of the techs I knew about worked for the government or huge corporations and weren’t available to help small, start up websites.  I was blessed when a Web Girl from Silicon Valley came on my site to help me with some gigantic tech problem for me…. ‘Oh, it’s nothing at all” issue for her.  She continued helping me for a long time and got other Silicon Valley tech women to help me as well.  That’s what networking was all about.

Now the software has advanced to a point that most don’t need any help with a small website or blog.  For larger sites or more expansive requirements, just Google.  There are experts for hire for any time of web work.  Or go to eLance.com and search the globe for someone who meets your requirements and fits your price range.

Revenues

Like much on the Net, revenues have been a roller coaster.  When I launched, commerce had yet to arrive to the Net.  Nor was there a way to exchange small sums on the Net.  Then the arrival of Paypal changed all that.

Ad Revenue

The first website revenue I remember came from Doubleclick, targeted ad system founded in 1996 and formerly listed as DCLK on the NASDAQ.  I was selected for the women’s demographic and went to their opening launch party in New York. It was a heady time. I learned a lot about targeting my demographics and managing my website from Doubleclick, until we went our separate ways. For one thing, I never really made  much revenue from Doubleclick so I struck out on my own. (Unlike many other dot-com companies, Doubleclick survived the bursting of the dot-com bubble. In March 2008, Google formally acquired Doubleclick.)

In the beginning, without large competitive corporate websites, I would typically make $5,000 from each large corporation which wanted to advertise site wide with AdvancingWomen.com.  That came crashing down in the dot com bust, as did the money I was making from syndicating our content when the syndication company went under.

The next big uptick came from the advent of Google Adsense.  And that was always a wild ride.  It would include what’s known as “The Google Dance”, where they change their algorithm and your revenues, which could spike to the stratosphere for a time, would plummet to earth overnight, leaving you wondering what happened to your revenue model. My advice:  Never depend on a single revenue model, particularly one which has its own best interests at  heart and they might not necessarily align perfectly with yours.

There are a lot of ad networks out there.  Try a broad range of them and see how they work for you. Keep Google in the mix as well.  If you can develop your own ad client base, so much the better. The extra 50% or more you get to keep is gravy.  Plus you can sell text links off a popular page for more than Google is likely to make for you off of dozens of pages.

Job Board Revenue ( which for your demographic might be something very different and specific to your demographic.)

In the meantime, I had always made a moderate income from a job board, and been a part of every morphing of CareerBuilder.com which changed hands or management many times.  I finally decided the real goal of job boards seeking to align themselves with your site was to keep you hidden and small so you wouldn’t grow up to compete with them.  I could be wrong about this, but I noticed when I started my own job board, our revenues increased 5 fold.  So it’s something to think about.  Whatever field you’re in, if you can avoid barnacle-ing on to the big boys forever , figure out a smaller, tighter niche and start your own, whatever it is; you’ll have more control, probably make more money and feel more fulfilled at the same time.

Products

There are many products to choose from out there, particularly  almost every product imaginable which you can sell through Amazon.com. You can also open your own storefront on Amazon.com.

I have read about a couple who made a killing selling auto rugs through eBay.  After trying to sell electronics and various products they discovered a warehouse full of auto rugs and evidently, using only a few unchanging photos and the occasional trip to the warehouse, they are able to make a killing.  But it is not something I would want to do.  But you might, and that’s ok too.

Find something you love that has synergy with your niche and sell it. If it doesn’t work….if, as they say in advertising, the dogs won’t eat the dog food, look for somthing else until you find the right thing that goes flying off the shelf with your demographic.

There’s never been a better time to start than now and it will never be sooner than today.  Good luck!

Let us hear from you what your experiences have been… what works and what doesn’t.

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