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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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Blow Your Own Horn: Increase Your Visibility Using LinkedIn

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Even if you have demonstrable skills and great results, what good will it do you if too few people know what a valuable asset you are to any company or any client?  Zero, or close to it, is the correct answer.  Remember that question: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one’s there to hear it does it make a sound?” Answer: no, it makes sound waves; someone has to hear the sound waves for them to be perceived as sound.  And someone has to hear about your successes, achievements and accomplishments for you to  be perceived as effective and successful. There is real currency in perception. And it is up to you to shape those perceptions.

A membrane of drum makes vibration

I just Googled my name, Gretchen Glasscock and it returned 9,350 results.  It’s kind of scary, when you think about it, how much information is out there about you.  There’s a profile of me on Amazon.com from when I reviewed a book on the Net for them.  One of my Internet providers, of many moons ago, has a profile posted of me with nothing but my name.  Which makes it all the more important for you to write your own profile, which is accurate and which you have control over, so that is the first place potential clients and colleagues go when looking for information about you. ( Not the website with you wearing a party hat or your nieces and nephews climbing on your shoulder as your dog is kissing your ear and you are struggling for balance.)

First, let’s focus on Linked In

Guy Kawasaki, the popular VC and entrepreneur has provided us with Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn. I’m going to point out a couple of his tips, but I’d also like to say how much I’ve learned from Guy who is probably one of the most popular personalities on the Net.  It’s easy to see why, when you read his linked in profile.  He comes through as very engaging and personable. He says of his first degree from Stanford, before he went for his MBA:

“These were some of the happiest days of my life. I loved Stanford. Sometimes I wish I could go back to school there. By the way, I majored in Psychology because it was the easiest major I could find.

I think most of us have a tendency to make these facts too stiff and formal. I know I do.  And I’m going to go back and work on mine, to let my hair down a bit, and be more personal, like Guy is.  The end result is you, the reader, immediately think of Guy Kawasaki as approachable, someone who’d like to help you, which is, after all, what you want when your goal is for people to seek you out for your service or product,

Some of Guy Kawasaki‘s advice for your Linked In page”

  • Improve your connectability.

    • Most new users put only their current company in their profile. By doing so, they severely limit their ability to connect with people. You should fill out your profile like it’s an executive bio, so include past companies, education, affiliations, and activitiesYou can also include a link to your profile as part of an email signature. The added benefit is that the link enables people to see all your credentials, which would be awkward if not downright strange, as an attachment.

  • Improve your Google PageRank.LinkedIn allows you to make your profile information available for search engines to index. Since LinkedIn profiles receive a fairly high PageRank in Google, this is a good way to influence what people see when they search for you.To do this, create a public profile and select “Full View.” Also, instead of using the default URL, customize your public profile’s URL to be your actual name. To strengthen the visibility of this page in search engines, use this link in various places on the web> For example, when you comment in a blog, include a link to your profile in your signature.
  • Enhance your search engine results.In addition to your name, you can also promote your blog or website to search engines like Google and Yahoo! Your LinkedIn profile allows you to publicize websites. There are a few pre-selected categories like “My Website,” “My Company,” etc.If you select “Other” you can modify the name of the link. If you’re linking to your personal blog, include your name or descriptive terms in the link, and voila! instant search-engine optimization for your site. To make this work, be sure your public profile setting is set to “Full View.”

These small changes, which don’t take long to execute can make a huge difference how visible you are on the Net, and that is your first hurdle: Visibility.  We will work on the rest as we go along.

To read Guy Kawasaki’s  entire post go to Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn

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How Do I Do This Faster & Easier? Easy Blogging For Blog Newbies

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If you’re a “newbie” just wanting to “dip your toe” into the swirling waters of the blogosphere, presumably you’ve already read How do I Do This? Easy Blogging For Blog Newbies which attempts to set out the very basics of how to get started.  If you’ve gotten that far along and have a WordPress account and have your site installed and set up, I’m going to tell you an easy way to start writing your blog.

Writing your content on WordPress. Once you’ve gotten your feet wet and are comfortable with the program – perhaps a month of two from when you begin – you should probably try to put in greater originality and more of your own thoughts and stories.  But to begin, I would suggest the following 3 support steps for you:

  • Set Up A Reader to scour the Net for material that interests you and about which you have some comment, thought or opinion to make.

Blogging takes time.  And keeping up with news and other blogs so you have something to blog about takes time.  So it’s highly recommended you set up a Google reader, or any other kind of reader to bring blogs or your favorite kind of information and news to you, instead of you going out and searching the Net to track it down. (This will also allow you to get more familiar with the blogosphere: the most popular blogs and bloggers, the most popular topics, the different styles which bloggers use.)

Just go to Google and create an account, or log in if you already have one and get the free reader. Go to your favorite sites and look for an orange button indicating a feed. Then you put the RSS feeds of your favorite sites into the Google Reader.  Sometimes this process is automated so you will be asked how you want the feed delivered and in this instance you would select Google Reader.  This will save an enormous amount of time for you. And I’m told successful bloggers peruse a huge number of sites daily. ( I could give you some numbers but it can get kind of scary how much the top bloggers read and how hard they work.)

  • Shortcut – Press This!: Post from wherever you are on the web

A Press This bookmark you can add to your toolbar provides a fast and smart popup to do posts to your WordPress blog as you’re surfing the web:

The Press This bookmarklet is found at the right bottom of the Write Posts panel. Drag and drop it onto your Favorites, Bookmarks, or Links list or toolbar. To activate, simply click on the “Press It” bookmarklet link. A window will open with the URI of the current site displayed, and the site’s title as your post title. Here’s what it looks like:

Screenshot of Press This interface.

For example, if you click “Press This” from a Youtube page it’ll magically extract the video embed code, and if you do it from a Flickr page it’ll make it easy for you to put the image in your post. Not to mention using it with regular text posts where you just copy and paste the portions you want to comment on, write your own thoughts in and Voila!  You’re done.

Well, not exactly, if you really want to take your blog to another level, make it more useful and have it stand out, consider using the Zemanta plug in, which I believe is an almost brand new release:

  • Zemanta enables you to blog smarter with instant smart links, pictures, tags and more.  The ability to automatically add a relevant graphic to the top of your blog  adds interest for your users. Also, as Zementa puts it:

Save Time…with relevant content from all over the web delivered instantly as you blog.
Build Traffic…with immediate tagged links created between your posts and others sharing related conversations.

These features bring increased value to your blog. Plus using these fast and easy techniques will build up your confidence and get you moving in the right direction…..towards a higher level level of blogging

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How Do I Do This? Easy Blogging For Blog Newbies

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Ok.  We get it. After posting Shall We Talk? Easy Blogging For Blog Newbies, we learned a thing or two about your needs.  Although we know there are bloggers galore on every topic imaginable out there, there are also a number of you who are just stopped cold at the thought of starting a blog.  You might like to, but it seems too complex, too involved, too frustrating, too….whatever.

You’ve probably heard that saying: “To anyone whose only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” (Kind of like tunnel vision or having blinders on when it comes to others’ perspectives.)  To those of us who’ve already taken the high dive off the cliff and into the warm and welcoming waters of the blogosphere, the whole process seems rather user friendly and simple.  We perhaps forget where we started from.

I remember the first time I ever looked at a WordPress page, with no training and no preparation.  I thought “What on earth is this and how am I supposed to learn it”?  ( I think mild panic sets in at the first glance of the unknown, particularly when we know we’re supposed to do something with it…….like produce a published page, but how do your do that?)

I know Arthur, one of our blog readers, commented that he liked the post, Shall We Talk? Easy Blogging For Blog Newbies, and thought it was great to challenge women to make their own blog and create a community but regretted that the process was too complicated and long:

“I wonder if a step by step approach wouldn’t have been easier to follow…In a perfect world there will be some videos made from actions on both main platforms (Blogger and WordPress).”

Well, this post is an attempt to make the process easier for Arthur and all the hopeful bloggers, many of them women, for whom he speaks.  If any of you can add to this or enrich it with your own expertise or experience please do. For now, let’s see if we can break this down into bite size pieces:

1.  Free WP installation

There are sites out there which specialize in WordPress and will install and set up or transfer your WordPress site free.  One such site is SiteGround.com You have to get hosting with them at $5.95 a month. But you also get Free WordPress themes and WordPress tutorial. That sounds to me like a good way to get your feet wet.  They say they are the #1 WordPress Host, but there are probably others who offer the same services.

2. Gettting Started With WordPress tutorials

When you sit down, shake off that little twinge of “beginner’s anxiety”, and start to use it, WordPress has extremely intuitive administration: you will be able to compose a post and publish it on your website with just one click! The following are 2 different tutorials, both using screen shots, but the second is video, so also has a guide talking you through the process.

SiteGround.com offers an Easy Start tutorial with screen shots of every action telling you exactly where to go and what to click, step by step. It very clearly explains and shows a graphic of each of the following:

If you prefer to learn using video goto Ithemes.com Tutorials

NEW! WORDPRESS 2.6 BASICS

I was going to share with you how to start writing posts, the quickest and simplest way I know, again, just to get your feet wet.  But since I promised this would be in simple, bite size pieces, I’m going to save that for the next post : How Do I Do This Faster & Easier?  Easy Blogging For Blog Newbies

I hope this post has helped Arthur and all of you get started with your own blog.  Write and let me know how it’s going and what your experiences have been.  If there’s something specific you want to know, just tell me.  Our goal is to get you up on the Net, blogging your heart out, sharing all your stories with us.  Just remember: You make the path by walking on it.

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Shall We Talk? Easy Blogging For Blog Newbies

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Ok. This post is not for all you bloggers on the Jedi Warrior level. We know you know how to blog. This is for all those out there, and particularly women, who have a lot they want to say and just haven’t gotten the hang of blogging yet. ( We’re telling you this because, as you know by now, if you have been reading this blog, we are encouraging women to jump on to the Net and develop their own communities and blogs in support of other women.)

Maybe you haven’t started your own blog yet because you’re intimidated. Maybe you’re just discovering the blogosphere. Whatever the reason, we can almost guarantee there is such an ease and an immediacy and a sense of shared community with similarly minded bloggers, that once you start, you’ll be hooked, like the rest of us.

Whether you want to start a business or a women’s community or a news magazine, you can blog.

The start up is the hardest part – which is probably true of most things – and it is not so much hard as detailed.

If you want to spend a lot of time weighing your platform options and strategies, Choosing a Blog Platform at ProBlogger will walk you through all that. You may want a hosted blog at a company like Blogger or a stand alone platform powered by WordPress.org or MovableType or one of many others. You may want to build your own brand ( highly recommended) , and if you do, you will need a stand alone platform. Personally, I prefer WordPress.org. It is feature rich, continuously updated, with thousands of man hours in development time. It boasts communities of developers offering plug ins which automate hundreds of the most useful tasks imaginable, from SEO ( search engine optimization so your blog can be found) to spam catching to putting in Google Adsense or Yahoo ads on every post. New plug ins are offered almost daily and there is ample support for whatever your needs are. There are many ways to customize the plugins, widgets, and themes or change them with a single click. And did I mention, it’s free?

There are several ways to set up your WordPress.org blog.

WordPress.org offers its own Quick Start Guide, which, incidently points out the advantages of self hosting. It’s pretty straight forward and intuitive, with a well known “5 minute install”, but if you’re not comfortable with mildly techie tasks, such as using ftp, this is probably not for you.

Making A WordPress Blog adds screen shots to the process of walking you step by step through the set up of your blog, using a hosted platform at WordPress.com. Simpler, ( since there’s no ftp or techie tasks involved) but still, possibly not what you want if you are trying to build your own brand, which, one day, you hope to sell.

Paying a pro WordPress guru a couple of hundred bucks to install your blog is simple, stress free and a good investment. We Fix WP Blogs is one example of a provider who can perform this task for you, simply, seamlessly and relatively inexpensively. I just used We Fix WP Blogs for a pretty extensive installation of mine – 3 blogs – so I can personally recommend them. And the bonus is that you will have a WP guru already familiar with your blog, should you ever need help, an upgrade, to migrate servers or simply some quick advice on the fly. There are a number of WP gurus out there, some mentioned on the WP site and others you may have to Google to locate.

Once you’re at this point, you just have to be able to write in plain English ( or French or German or Spanish or whatever language you speak.) Although the program is really intuitive and very simple to learn you can return to Quick Start Guide or Making A WordPress Blog with screen shots, to walk you step by step through the process of writing your content, saving it, then publishing it to the Net.

Whatever moves you or stirs you, motivates or inspires you, we want to see it on the Net, in your blog. When you fulfill yourself, we are all one step closer to fulfilling ourselves and to creating real progress on the Net. So start your blog. And please do share your story and experience with us.

For more, see these:

Yes, Some Blogs Are *Very* Profitable – And Some Of Them Are Women’s Blogs

Community on the Net – The Platform To Network, The Power to Mentor

Women Power: From The Ballot Box To The Blogosphere

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Match Your Entrepreneur Story

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AdvancingWomen’com‘s Gretchen Glasscock

Share your story!  That’s how we learn from each other.  I’ll start.  As I was looking over these personal and pivotal entrepreneur tales from Startup Stories #1 from Scott Allen’s Entrepreneur Blog I had sudden flashes from my own entrepreneurial past and I suspect you will, too.

If you are a woman in business, take a look at ” Inside the Green Room - Internet marketer extraordinaire Donna Fox shares her experience as the only woman (not counting staff and spouses) at a conference of 100 top internet marketers.”

I can easily equal that.  In 1995, I was at an Internet conference in Tampa Florida, when the newly Netscape browser enabled Internet was in its infancy.  There were presentations on how to name your web page: beginning with a letter near the first of the alphabet was recommended so you’d come up first in lists of what was then pre-Google search.  There were dramatic videos featuring the metaphor du jour for the Internet, intergalactical spinning of planets, full throttle Star Wars type background music and strobe lights, indicating an out of this world, reaching for the stars future for all of us.

The conference, mostly patting the Internet’s creators on the back and imagining what the Net future might hold, boasted 5,000 attendees with a prospecting for gold mindset, about 5 of whom were women.  Tampa was sporting a brand new 600,000 square foot convention center, views of sparkling Tampa Bay, and huge, airy bath rooms of perhaps 50 stalls. For the very first time I could remember, you could enter the woman’s room and laugh in astonishment if you encountered another woman ( as the guys no doubt scrambled for space down the hall.)

And here were are today, with reports of women on the Net outnumbered 100 to 1.  Ladies, don’t wait to be invited to join the game.  Kick the doors in and come on in.  The Internet and particularly business on the Net is a very friendly place for women to be.  See:

Don’t Cry for Us, Silicon Valley
Yes, Some Blogs Are *Very* Profitable – And Some Of Them Are Women’s Blogs

The other story that struck me was Are We Products of Our Entrepreneurial Environments? – John Jantsch shares the story of his entrepreneurial upbringing.  This is really an excellent post and I highly recommend it. John notes:

“Many of the traits that make up the entrepreneur are ingrained as habits, I suspect, knowingly or unknowingly, by our well intentioned parents and caregivers.

Fear of failure is learned, fear of success is learned, fear over money and lack are learned, shame in tooting one’s own horn is taught, fear of being called different is acquired. Likewise, innovation can be an observed trait..”

My father, a fearless entrepreneur in a family of entrepreneurs taught us early on to take risks.  He taught us to play poker to learn the connection between the hand you held and the risk you were willing to take on it.  Since scientifically, if 1000 hands are dealt out to 4 people, they will all wind up with the same number of winning hands, the key was in the betting.  And knowing your competition.

If neither your father or your mother or any of your early mentors have been entrepreneurs, AdvancingWomen.com was created as a support system, an electronic mentor to help women succeed and prosper, to kick down those doors and put more cracks in that glass ceiling.

What have your experiences been as an entrepreneur?  Have you started a business?  Tell us about it.  Or tell us what you’d like to hear more about:  solopreneurs?  blogging?  You name it and we’ll discuss it or get one of you to come on as guest bloggers and tell us more.

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