Starting a Business
Advice News: Epoch: the end of one era – the start of the next
This month marks a major shift in my business life: I’m changing from a solo consultant to joining the full-time workforce. Yes, I’ve been seduced by the Dark Side. They have cookies.
Rebusiness, Andrew Ballard, and this blog will still remain, however from here on in, I’ll be a little more selective in the clients and projects I take on out of ‘work’.
I thought that after 11 years of business in this mode, I’d go back through my archives and tease out some revealing insights from my records, to give you a brief glimpse into the life of a solo consultant.
So sit back, relax, and help me unravel some of the deepest and darkest secrets (??) of the solo entrepreneur. I’ll bring the cookies.
Advice: Content > SEO > SEM (Content is king)
A fairly striking contrast of events this week prompted this article – earlier this week, I attended the Search Marketing Expo in Melbourne, a two-day program covering all aspects of how to understand search engines (mostly Google!), and ultimately how to get your site to rank higher for your keywords. It’s a pseudo-science, in that the rules change every alternate month, but it is a noble goal – to make your site as ready as it can be to be found by your customers.
In stark contrast, a new client this week needed help with their web site – after paying for ads on some major search engines each month, they found that their visitors to their web site weren’t hanging around, and most certainly weren’t turning into customers.
The short version: the client had been paying for visitors, instead of earning them. Not the best.
Let’s take a look at how to make your web site work *for* you, organically, without throwing cash at the search engines.
Advice: Mind the gap
I’ve been out and about some local businesses in the past couple of weeks, gathering support for advertising for a cookbook fundraiser for my kids’ school.
Almost all businesses I’ve approached have expressed interest in the project – yet the thing I’ve been struck by is the yawning gulf between those businesses who could instantly identify that a) this was or wasn’t their target market, and b) that the price point was or wasn’t within their marketing budget.
The fact that the majority of businesses couldn’t identify two of their fundamental business metrics (target market/marketing budget) is more than a little scary.
With secure knowledge of these two fundamentals, you can quickly rule in or out the opportunity. In an effort to try to get to this easy-to-decide method of ruling opportunities in or out, let’s take a moment to explore market share, and see if we can close the knowledge gap just a little bit!
Advice: Good, fast, cheap: pick any two.
I’m sure it started as an MBA-level diagram at either Harvard or Yale, but I first saw it on a t-shirt of all things – a triangle with the words ‘Good’, ‘Fast’, ‘Cheap’ at the corners, and the phrase ‘Pick any 2′ underneath.
It’s an intriguing proposition that not only holds up pretty darn well under scrutiny, but also gives us in the world of business a chance to pause for a minute, and figure out where we are on the diagram – and where we’d like to be.
Thinking it through, there’s three obvious combinations, and a few other less obvious possibilities. Let me walk you through them, and try to find out where you sit…
Advice: What Happens When You Die?
Don’t panic – I’m not talking medical nor theological here – I’m talking purely about you and your business. If you were looking for the medical or theological aspects, try Wikipedia.org, Google, or even progressbaroflife.com.
The phrase ‘what happens if you die’ is one that I’ve heard a lot in my business. To date, I think every major client has asked me that question at some point in our partnerships. While it’s kinda nice that your clients are enquiring about your long-term health and your ability to cross the road without getting hit by a bus, they actually have a point – what would happen to their business if I dropped off the planet – and what would happen to *my* business, and my family, if I wasn’t around?
Lots of things to talk about, namely: chain of command; systems and processes; and the concepts of proprietary vs open source. Still here? Good. No-one’s getting any younger!
Advice: Domain Names 101
What is a domain name? At it’s most simplest, a domain name is a signpost, pointing the way to a location on the internet where web sites, email servers, or other internet services are located. It’s an address that’s human readable and hopefully memorable.
Advice: Bowing to a higher authority
I’d suggest that as an individual, we don’t need to be able to amass 100% of the skills we need all by ourselves – in fact, we simply can’t – and that apart from the odd moments of epiphany, we gain our skills and experience by absorbing information from other rich sources – our own stable of mentors. So – who are my own ‘rich sources’ of pure gold? Who are my mentors? Let me introduce you to a couple…
Advice: So, what do you do?
Just like the bad pick-up lines from days gone by (shudder), your opening line to a prospective customer can sometimes be a make-or-break thing: it’s the first opportunity you have to get across what you do with a bit of passion, and a bit of flair. This first contact is often called the ‘elevator pitch’ – if you only have 30 seconds to explain your business to someone you’ve never met, how would you do it? All it takes is a little navel-gazing, a little pre-planning, and some guinea-pigs to practice it on… Ready? Let’s take a quick look!
Advice: The ‘one percenters’ – a list of small things every business should/shouldn’t do
If the world of business was able to borrow just one phrase from the world of AFL Football, then I’d hope it was the concept of the ‘one percenters’ – the idea that it’s all the little tiny things that players do that win the game for their team. Get enough ‘one percenters’ going your [...]
Advice: Starting Something New – A ‘How To’ Guide
It all starts here: with the tiny seed of an idea. Perhaps it’s extending your current business into a market of a competitor; perhaps your ‘something new’ is to find a synergistic product or service that you can promote alongside your current range, but that cross-sell each other, and boost your total sales figures.