Four easy steps to apply in potential Small Business

Work.com brings a “Guide to start a Gardening Business”, to help you get started in turning your hobby into a successful gardening business, but we can apply in almost every new project.

 In their own words: “By learning about the many local, regional and national resources available , you can increase both knowledge and profit, and build a strong client base in your local community.”

They give four outstanding action steps that I summarize bellow:

Continue reading

Improving our thinking process

Pat Croce, make us remember that in this new world full of competition, our best weapons are fresh ideas that can distinguish our products or services.

But yes, some times we can face a mental blank at our drawing board and then take us to the right moment to explore new ways to come up with creative thoughts.

Because thought its true, by learning their brainstorming patterns, we can demystify our creative thought processes and generate better ideas with more regularity; it’s also true that activities as daydream considered by many as a waste of time are actually invaluable pieces of the creativity machine.

Continue reading

How to introduce 2.0 tools in your company

Are you thinking in introducing a 2.0 service in your company? Blogs, wikis, social nets … Is undoubtedly a complicated world in which some advices will not come badly. In that way, Dion Hinchcliffe offers nine ideas for those chiefs who consider putting their company in the Web 2.0 world.

The most important thing, affirms Hinchcliffe, is to assure the facility of use. That anyone is capable of using the new tool without a workshop. Without forgetting that we must explain the users why it has introduced and how it is going to do easiest their life.

As for the application control, we must support ourselves in a balance: Not to make it empty and clean, hoping the workers to contribute the whole content, or to exaggerate the fear of losing control on what the users do with our tool. Instead of censuring, intervene only if it is indispensable.

We neither must forget to include in our wiki or our social net an effective search service. This way, when we upload the company contents that the workers should know, they will be able to find them without problems.

But not everything is going to be a technique in this adventure: To have attorneys who really are interested in the project (even if they are external and not habitual ones of the company) and to insure that the tool solves users needs, will be also two essential points.

Source: ZDNet

Ten Entrepreneurial Mistakes

Paul Lemberg, bring us the “Ten Entrepreneurial mistakes”, we can usually find in our business path. He makes us remember that when we are novel is hard to avoid certain mistakes, but in his own words: “Many of the following mistakes are hard to avoid even if we are an old hand.”

1. Big Customer Syndrome. Following the new idea of diversifying our customer market, Lember affirms that: If more than 50 percent of your revenues come from any one customer you may be headed for a meltdown.

2. Creating products in a vacuum. After you or your team have a brilliant idea, don’t spend many time implementing it. And if you don’t get a good response, go on to the next idea.

3. Equal partnerships. Can seem fine and fair at a first glance, but as your personal and professional interests diverge, it is a sure recipe for disaster.

Continue reading

How to make money with free services

A business model that VC* adores. Business 2.0 has published a series of advices to make money offering free services. Which is the strategy? The “Freemiums”services. That is to say, services 100 % free that attract users to a basic product, to offer then a special product, with a respective payment.

Examples of this strategy success are many, the Magazine mentions, between others, two examples: Adobe, which started by giving their PDF reader in 1995; and MySQL, the second company in open-source database software, that also offers it for free.

These are nine advices to begin your “Freemium” business:

Continue reading

Firefox Tip: Log simultaneously in two Gmail accounts

If you have multiple Gmail accounts and use Firefox, you don’t have to be opening and closing the accounts to see your mails, for it you can install the extension IE Tab, then open a tab with FF and log there; and then do the same thing, but with IE’s tab. You can see the result in this image.

Even when the trick does not turn out to be so convincing, it’s effective and the tip not only serves for Gmail, but in general for any web service. Once again, Firefox does easier to surf in the Internet.

Continue reading

So you want to start an online business?

Follow these five golden rules, says Michael Parsons, and nothing can possibly go wrong

At this point even the most cynical will probably concede that this internet thing is going to be around for a while. For good or ill, the audience is moving online, which means the people who serve the audience have to move with them, whether they’re selling TV, baked beans, or words. This means a lot of change: The Daily Telegraph is even going to a specially designed, brand new round office in Victoria as part of its belated conversion to the importance of new media. I’m sure they will be absolutely fine, as long as they study my five basic principles for understanding online publishing.

Continue reading

Seth Godin: Major mistakes entrepreneurs make

In workhappy, as part of the promotion of his new book “Small is the New Big“, Seth Godin shares 5 good advices for entrepreneurs. Of them, which I believe stands out is the fifth one.

5. Failure to measure

All the previous advices (to strain very much, to make efficient expenses, to understand what is and does your company, and to listen to other people) would not have any value if you don’t test and measure insistently your mistakes.

Continue reading

11 ways of optimizing an URL

11 ways of optimizing an URL it is an article published in seomoz that seems to be very interesting, it shows really valuable information. The especially part that called my attention was point 6, since the web make fashionable spam seekers with subdomains. Here I left you part of the article.

11 advices to achieve successful URLs

1. Describe your content

An URL who says everything is a magnificent URL. If a user can read the URL and understand exactly the content of the page before at least seeing it, you will have done your work. Remember, these URLs are copied, shared, sent for email, annotated and even approved by the search engines.

2. Keep it short

Briefness is a virtue, remember it always. If you make a shorter URL, it will be easier to copy and paste, to read rapidly, to write it in a presentation card or to use it in hundreds of other slightly common ways, everything which gives it major utility.

Continue reading

Free Online Marketing Strategy

With the free marketing tools that we are going to list and explain here, you can create a whole online marketing strategy that will generate the amount of traffic needed for your website to start generating sales.

This means that you will never have to choose any tactic that requires continuous advertising investments. This does not mean in any way that there isn’t any money to be spent.

The tools that we are going to explain can be implemented either in automatic mode or manual mode. The manual mode proved to be a very time consuming effort that is considered not only inefficient but can also be ineffective sometimes.
Continue reading