From Employee to Entrepreneur - Finding your Business Mindset
Monday, November 17, 2008 at 09:34PM 
When you work for another person or company, you often don’t think about things like sales, success, goals, or even your own frame of mind. In most cases, even if you like your job and are proud of what you do, you simply go through the motions, doing what is required by your boss, clocking in and out each day with no change in your schedule. Being an employee is much different than becoming an entrepreneur, and being overzealous is one of the main downfalls of new business owners and those trying to start a business.
They want so much, and they try so hard, but there is such a thing as "too much".
In order to approach entrepreneurship with the right business mindset and not sell yourself short before you even get started, you need to calm down and focus your energy on what is most important to you. When you were an employee, you had no real responsibilities or accountability beyond showing up every day and completing your daily tasks. The growth and success of the company was up to the corporate bigwigs and the marketing team. You simply did your job, collected your pay, and went home. Now you are in charge of everything. And often, when you first start a business, you might be working for no pay for a while.
Business owners need to be more committed and driven than traditional employees are; you need to be:
- innovative
- creative
- willing to learn and change with the changing business world.
These will be key principles to include in your business mindset. You will need to take the time to re-train your brain to think like a business person instead of an employee. Most importantly, you’ll need to realize just what business ownership takes and be willing to give it everything you’ve got and accept nothing less than success.
Making the transition from employee to entrepreneur can be complicated if you’re not prepared, but you need to know that your first step will be in developing and adopting a business mindset that works for your specific business needs. This will include learning about various types of important components and principles of a good business mindset, as well as being prepared to re-focus the way that your brain thinks so that you can make the most of your business ownership.
No longer are you the worker bee and you shouldn’t act like one anymore. You are the king or queen of your own hive and it’s up to you to keep your business going and growing.
Web Design Business
Saturday, November 15, 2008 at 02:06AM 
Okay, this is not new. But Web Design Business is still in demand as more and more people realize the importance of Internet exposure for a business.
The Business Idea
Design websites for business(s) and charge either by project or by hour.
Benefits and the Market
A good thing about this business is, you can start this business with a computer at home. Start-up cost can be very low and the market is very large. More and more business(s) are going to need websites in order to survive in the future. Therefore, the demand is still increasing.
Another good thing about Web Design Business is your clients will help you a lot with the word-of-mouth marketing. As other people ask your clients about who did their websites, they will advertise for you.
What you need
You need a computer and a website with some portfolios. You cannot start a web design business if you don't have a website yourself. If you know a bit about web design you should have an idea of the kind of computer you need.
Ideas to get Started
- Register a domain.
- Build an attractive website. Show off your web designing skills.
- Have screenshots of your previous work. If you don't have any experience, create some sample websites and take screenshots of them. Post them on the website as your portfolio.
- Develop Web design packages. i.e. domain and web hosting registration (I recommend not to provide web hosting service, but recommend them to use existing web hosting service providers such as GoDaddy), sample static website design, dynamic website design (blogs, forums, CMS, Joomla, Portal, e-commerce). It's a good idea to have demo sites for each of the categories.
- Once when you have your website all set, have your business cards ready.
- Go out around your town and start looking for business(s) that don't already have a website. Explain to them the importance of web exposure for their business.
Conclusion
Web Design Business is not hard to run, but the quality of your service is very important as word-of-mouth marketing is a free bonus to this type of business - good quality of service will expand your business exponentially, and vice versa.
Try to start small. Focus locally first. When your income increases, then you can consider advertise on the Internet and expand your business.
Think hard about Why Should People Choose You Not Other Web Design Companies? Explain to your prospects about the advantages of your service such as (for example) that your websites come search engine optimized...etc.
Think hard, work hard, and expect success.
P.S. It is a very good idea to have a backlink (something like "designed by your company") on every project that you do. This will build up the backlinks to your business website, increasing page rank in the long run.
P.P.S. If you have a blog on your business website, with all the backlinks that you get (mentioned above), organic traffic to your website will build up over time exponentially. Monetizing your blog will be an easy task with traffic.
10 Tips to Increase Blog Traffic
Thursday, November 13, 2008 at 03:07AM 
Traffic is the soul to any online business, including the recent trend, the blogs. If you imagine it this way:
You have a business in a mall. Customers find information about your business through coupons. Customers come to the mall and go into your business. They look around and decide if they should purchase or not.
The concept is the same with any online business.
You have a website. Visitors (traffic) find information about your website through advertisements. Visitors search on search engines, find your website and click to your website. They look around and decide if they should purchase or not.
If you compare two together:
Online Business vs. Offline Business
Traffic = Customers
Online Ads = Coupons
Search Engines = Mall
Website = Storefront
No traffic to a website is the same as no customers coming into the mall.
No traffic / No Customers = No Sales in both cases.
Blog-driven websites are becoming more and more popular. If you have a blog, pay attention to the tips below: (not in particular order)
1. Choosing the right platform, domain, and internal tagging (categories)
CMS (short for Content Management System) is a computer application used to create, edit, manage, and publish content in a consistently organized fasion. A Blog is a CMS application. The right blog software can make a huge difference. If you use blogger or wordpress templates, make sure they are designed with search engine optimized in mind.
Domain should be carefully thought through before going for it. A domain is not just an URL. A domain represents your brand! It should be unique and easy for people to mention to each other. Don't make it too hard to pronounce. Ideally a domain should have the most important keyword about your business in it, and it should be no longer than 20 characters. You should also always aim for dotcom domains first, simply because "dotcom" is more well known compared to dotnet, dotorg...etc.
Proper internal tagging is very important for both search engines and users. Internal tagging enables search engines to better crawl the various content within your website. Internal tagging also allows users to navigate your website a lot easier, as they can just choose and display certain categories of their interest.
2. Write Title Tags and Content with both Search Engine and Visitors in mind
Search Engine is all about relevancy. The more targeted keywords you have in your content the higher you will rank in search engine results for these targeted keywords. Title tags and content should have your targeted keywords in them. The more the better, but avoid spamming. This is why you should also write with visitors in mind. If you mention too much of the same words, it's actually quite annoying. Write with honesty and provide quality content to the best of your ability.
3. Proper bolding and underlying
Your writing has to please your readers. Don't make your font too small to read. Use proper bolding and underlying to help readers read more efficiently.
4. Use more than just Text
This is self-explanatory. You will see popular blogs or websites make good use of graphics, audios, and videos, just to remove the boredom of plain text.
5. Pay attention to your site stats and focus on topics that's popular and needs attention
If you pay attention to the traffic logs of your site, you will be able to tell which posts and topics that your audience like the best. If you find posts and topics that draw the most traffic, they are probably what people are looking for. If you focus on these topics you will be fulfilling people's needs, thus, increasing your readership and building your authority in these topics. Of course if would be even better if these topics lie around your targeted keywords.
6. Invite Guest Bloggers / Posts
It's a good practice to invite guest bloggers to post on your blogs. This will improve the variety of the content on your site. Of course, these guest posts should be relevant to your site.
7. Implement Search Feature
I can't tell you how important the search box feature is to a website, especially for blogs with hundreds of archived posts. These archived posts may still be valuable to your visitors. By implementing a search feature on your website you are connecting related content with respect to your visitors' demands / needs.
8. Praticipate in Social Media, Forums, Blogs and Article Directories
Most social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, can allow you to automatically update content to your profile with your blog's RSS / Atom feeds. These Social Media, if used properly, can bring you tremendous amount of traffic.
Participating in forums and blogs related to your niche will help building up your authority and your voice in your niche. Not only that, you will also get backlinks to your website if you have your website URL in your signature. Also, a lot of people on these forums and blogs will click on your signature URL out of curiosity. Same effects can be achieved with submitting articles to article directories.
9. Include Keywords in your Links
A lot of people only include their direct website URLs in their links.
Example: <a href="http://websiteURL.com">http://websiteURL.com</a>
This is a simple mistake that most people make which dramatically reduces the quality of their backlinks. As previously mentioned, search engines are all about relevancy. The quality of a backlink depends on the relevancy between the linking text of the backlink, the title and the content of the website. If your website is about travel (targeted keyword), make sure the keyword "travel" is mentioned in the linking text.
Example: <a href="http://websiteURL.com">Travel Opportunities</a>
10. Building your Brand
Your brand is like the purpose of your blog. Your readers share the same purpose as you and their loyalty are built based on their level of comfort with your brand. Sticking to your brand is very important as you will be consistently building up your authority and voice within your brand, your community. Your readers follow your brand, and you want loyal, quality, and focused readers.
You can, of course, diversify your website but it takes a lot more work and dedication to build up authority in multiple areas. It also takes a lot of work from the search engine optimization point of view since the relevancy of all the content on your website dramatically changes.
If you already have a solid readers to your existing brand, introducing a completely new subject can be offputting for them.
Reducing Employee Turnover Rate
Wednesday, November 12, 2008 at 02:48AM 
Many companies are finding it increasingly difficult to retain employees. Turnover has becoming a serious problem in today's corporate environment. The employment culture is changing as more employees are demanding more and more balance between work and personal/family life; it is not uncommon to see people changing jobs every few years.
Turnover costs for many businesses are very high, resulting in a huge impact in the financial aspect of an organization.
Turnover costs include:
- Recruitment costs - Job position advertising
- Training costs
- Increase in workloads and overtime expenses before the replacement is ready to take on the responsibility of the job position
Now because the company is short on staff, productivity is reduced resulting in an overall reduction in profits and growth.
Now I hope you get a clear idea of how serious this can be!
This is why hiring the right people initially is extremely important! It is best of the candidate shares the same vision as the company and proposes a will to follow and grow with the company.
Another way to reduce employee turnover is to make the company employee-oriented, focusing on interactions between all levels in the organization - from workers, to supervisors, managers, and directors. If one can feel part of the company as a whole, trust and loyalty can be built up between employees. Does your company's environment openly encourages communications and feedbacks from employees?
Attractive compensation packages also help to retain the employees. The top companes that have low employee turnover have attractive compensation packages such as health and dental benefits, RRSP packages and healthy work environment. Many companies offer vacations packages, and other freebies such as free lunch, yoga courses...etc. to their employees. All these are worth considering to reduce the impack on employee turnover.
Here's a video on how to reduce employee turnover by hiring the right employee initially. If the video does not play for you, try this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En0vOTS5WlQ
White Space is Available for BroadBand
Sunday, November 9, 2008 at 10:53PM 
Federal Communications Commission has approved, through voting, to allow broadband signals to be broadcasted within the White Space spectrum.
"It will be like the Wi-Fi you get at Starbucks, only a lot better," says FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, who first proposed the idea four years ago.
The major benefit about signals in White Space is they are able to penetrate walls, making it ideal for Wi-Fi use.
The approval of this shows a trend of the increasing in the broadband needs of U.S. consumers.
"We are trying to make sure we're using this spectrum in the most efficient way possible," Martin says.
This is a good news, especially for us Internet Entrepreneurs. Being able to work on the road will be easier with better Wi-Fi service.
Broadcasters, however, are strongly opposing this. Why? Because they are saying Wi-Fi signals in the White Space spectrum, might interfere with TV signals and wireless devices (microphones) used by theater owners such as Broadway.
Bruce Mehlman, executive director of the Technology CEO Council, representing tech giants such as IBM and Intel says "(broadcasters) were mentally reserving the right to use the spectrum for their own profit."
To guard against interference, the FCC offered a number of safeguards such as, for example, in major markets, you can't use white-spece devices near TV broadcast stations.
The world is changing fast to a digital, wireless world. As more and more consumers go digital, i.e. more use of computers and Internet, bringing your business online (if you haven't) is going to be a change that future business(s) will have to adapt to.
