Online Literacy - A 'Must Have' Skill for Starting Your Small Online Business
Everyone used to be educated in the 3Rs. Reading, wRiting and 'Rithmetic once upon a time was enough to get you a job for life.
But there is no such thing as a job for life today. So what can you do to prepare yourself for our dramatically changed conditions?
Today a 4th skill is required if you want to be sure of maintaining your financial independence. Today's 'must have' skill is Online Literacy.
Showing posts with label start business. Show all posts
Showing posts with label start business. Show all posts
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Friday, 25 September 2009
Internet Business Set-Up - Progress is Haphazard
Internet Business Set up Can be Haphazard
Follow progress on my internet business which teaches others how to start their small business online.
For those of you who have not visited us before, I am putting together an online business. The business will teach others to do th sane using ebooks, online courses, video, audio and offline seminars. Our goals is to help get 1,000 small business up and running in the next five years.
Oh, and to:
It is just that there are so many things you have to do when you set up a new online business. They all seem to need to be done at the same time, and as you do one thing, you are reminded that you should be doing something else. Also, so much of what you do is related and you need to make the links as you go, or you are likely to forget them.
The good thing about that is much of what you do or write can be used more than once. A web page can be re-written and circulated as an online or offline article, a blog can become part of your sales materials, a sales page can be updated to be a new web-page.
So far I have got a very clear idea of what market I want to be in. This market is made up of people who want to learn to make money online.
Know What Your Niche Is
I also know exactly what my niche is and I have set up all my goals with this in mind. My niche is made up of people who have possibly not thought of starting this kind of business before.
These people may not be natural e-ntrepreneurs perhaps, but they have been pushed into starting an online business by current financial circumstances.
Know What Your Business Model Is
The four models we describe are:
Start Communicating
It can take a long time to get noticed on the web, so the sooner you start the better. I have got my web-site up and running and written 12 pages of content. However, it is best ot wait until you have 30 pages or more before submitting the site to the search engines, so there is a while to go yet.
It is also good to get as many incoming links as possible before submitting to the search engines for the first time. To try and achieve this, one of the things I am doing is creating useful links from this blog to various pages on my web site.
I Can See Clearly Now
OK, well that has clarified that what I need to do this week is frantically write pages for our website and compliment them with articles and blog entires that are linked to the website.
If anyone out there has got a good suggestion as to where else I should try and get links from, let me know - I will be very grateful.
Follow progress on my internet business which teaches others how to start their small business online.
For those of you who have not visited us before, I am putting together an online business. The business will teach others to do th sane using ebooks, online courses, video, audio and offline seminars. Our goals is to help get 1,000 small business up and running in the next five years.
Oh, and to:
- boost my potential pension using e commerce and
- describe my progress and help me get things in order in my own mind.
It is just that there are so many things you have to do when you set up a new online business. They all seem to need to be done at the same time, and as you do one thing, you are reminded that you should be doing something else. Also, so much of what you do is related and you need to make the links as you go, or you are likely to forget them.
The good thing about that is much of what you do or write can be used more than once. A web page can be re-written and circulated as an online or offline article, a blog can become part of your sales materials, a sales page can be updated to be a new web-page.
I though I would run through what I should have done by now, what I have done and work out what needs to be done this week
Know What Your Market Is
So far I have got a very clear idea of what market I want to be in. This market is made up of people who want to learn to make money online.
Know What Your Niche Is
I also know exactly what my niche is and I have set up all my goals with this in mind. My niche is made up of people who have possibly not thought of starting this kind of business before.
These people may not be natural e-ntrepreneurs perhaps, but they have been pushed into starting an online business by current financial circumstances.
Know What Your Business Model Is
There are as many ways of running a business online as there are offline. In my free course course I will be describing four business 'models' (apologies for the jargon), and I will be combining three of them in my own new business. The four models and I will be combining them in my own new business.
The four models we describe are:
Start Communicating
It can take a long time to get noticed on the web, so the sooner you start the better. I have got my web-site up and running and written 12 pages of content. However, it is best ot wait until you have 30 pages or more before submitting the site to the search engines, so there is a while to go yet.
It is also good to get as many incoming links as possible before submitting to the search engines for the first time. To try and achieve this, one of the things I am doing is creating useful links from this blog to various pages on my web site.
I Can See Clearly Now
OK, well that has clarified that what I need to do this week is frantically write pages for our website and compliment them with articles and blog entires that are linked to the website.
If anyone out there has got a good suggestion as to where else I should try and get links from, let me know - I will be very grateful.
Monday, 7 September 2009
Online Businesses can be profitable - in the right niche
Find the Right Niche to Make Money Online
Anyone can make any amount of money they chose online, as long as they chose the right niche.
What is a Niche?
A niche is a tiny, usually specialised corner of a market. For example, there is a market for Jewellery. Within that there are markets for precious jewellery and costume jewellery. There are markets for Celtic, Indian and Chinese jewellery to name a tiny few.
Let's go with Celtic jewellery. You could say the market was split into types of trinket (necklaces, bracelets etc). You could break the market up by what the jewellery was made of (gold, silver, semi-precious metals, plastic etc). You could break the market up by colour – blue, gold, red etc. There are as many ways to break markets up as there are features to the jewellery.
You might find that there are enough people interested in blue, plastic Celtic jewellery. If this just happens to be your passion, and there are not too many competitors – you have found the perfect niche, and have taken a great step along the path of making money online.
Find out what markets are considered to be hot then send for our step by step how to choose the perfect niche for you by sending for our free introductory course on Affiliate Marketing.
Why Should I Go for a Small Niche?
The great thing about the internet is that you can reach a huge market. The worst thing about the internet is the huge range of competitors you are exposed to.
Focusing on a small niche minimizes the competition (if you chose the niche well) and actually makes it easier to reach out to your potential customers.
How Does A Small Niche Make Reaching Customers Easier?
People searching on the web have a good idea what they want and they use words to find it. “Green cow” might be their Google entry; “vacation in Ethiopia” might echo round Yahoo’s database.
It is this use of words that will help us find the perfect niche.
Slicing up the pie
Anyone can make any amount of money they chose online, as long as they chose the right niche.
What is a Niche?
A niche is a tiny, usually specialised corner of a market. For example, there is a market for Jewellery. Within that there are markets for precious jewellery and costume jewellery. There are markets for Celtic, Indian and Chinese jewellery to name a tiny few.
Let's go with Celtic jewellery. You could say the market was split into types of trinket (necklaces, bracelets etc). You could break the market up by what the jewellery was made of (gold, silver, semi-precious metals, plastic etc). You could break the market up by colour – blue, gold, red etc. There are as many ways to break markets up as there are features to the jewellery.
You might find that there are enough people interested in blue, plastic Celtic jewellery. If this just happens to be your passion, and there are not too many competitors – you have found the perfect niche, and have taken a great step along the path of making money online.
Find out what markets are considered to be hot then send for our step by step how to choose the perfect niche for you by sending for our free introductory course on Affiliate Marketing.
Why Should I Go for a Small Niche?
The great thing about the internet is that you can reach a huge market. The worst thing about the internet is the huge range of competitors you are exposed to.
Focusing on a small niche minimizes the competition (if you chose the niche well) and actually makes it easier to reach out to your potential customers.
How Does A Small Niche Make Reaching Customers Easier?
People searching on the web have a good idea what they want and they use words to find it. “Green cow” might be their Google entry; “vacation in Ethiopia” might echo round Yahoo’s database.
It is this use of words that will help us find the perfect niche.
Slicing up the pieTake the examples above. You might have decided that you want to sell cows or vacations. But if you just head for those markets, you will find it is very crowded. (20,000,000 results for cows and 56,000000 for vacation on Google at the last search).
But if you used Google Adwords tools or Wordtracker, you would discover that people are quite specific in what they search for.
You might find for example, that there are 200 searches a day for ‘green cows’ and 500 for ‘vacation in Ethiopia’. Now we are beginning to slice that pie up into manageable slices. And now you are beginning to see the outlines of a niche, a place you can make ‘all your own’ with a very definite group of potential customers and little competiton.
Finding your niche, understanding the people in it and giving them exactly what they want is one of the key secrets to making a success of starting a small business online.
Step by Step by Step
Again, if you want step by step instruction as to how to find your niche send for our introductory course in Affiliate Marketing.
Sunday, 6 September 2009
Outline Plan to Start a Small Business Online
Job Squaring Gets the Small Busines Online
In my first blog I talked about the huge number of tasks there are when you are starting a new online business. It is harder for the new E-ntrepreneur to keep up with her/himself than to marshal bees in a flower-field. It is therefore vital to be organised, systematic and methodical.
You can’t rely on multi-tasking even if you are a mother. As a person who has studied personal efficiency in detail, and taught it to hundreds of people, I know that using multi-tasking is unfortunately utterly ineffective.
Then I had a brilliant ‘a-ha’ moment. You can’t multi-task (there have been scientific studies by experts proving this), but you can job-square. That is, instead of trying to do multiple jobs at once, do one job but make it have multiple outcomes.
In my first blog I talked about the huge number of tasks there are when you are starting a new online business. It is harder for the new E-ntrepreneur to keep up with her/himself than to marshal bees in a flower-field. It is therefore vital to be organised, systematic and methodical.
You can’t rely on multi-tasking even if you are a mother. As a person who has studied personal efficiency in detail, and taught it to hundreds of people, I know that using multi-tasking is unfortunately utterly ineffective.
Saturday, 5 September 2009
Get Your Home Business Online With Great Organisation
Yahoo….It worked. In previous blogs I talked about the new E-ntrepreneur marshalling bees. ‘It is therefore’, I stated somewhat pompously, ‘vital, when managing a business start up, to be organised, systematic and methodical’.
My trouble is, like a lot of you, I’m not. Organised, systematic and methodical I mean. Not by nature anyway. So I have to be careful to make a habit of the things I think are useful when it comes to the planning to set up my internet business. But seriously, I think I have come up with a useful tip in terms of job squaring.
Thursday, 3 September 2009
WOULD YOU RATHER START YOUR OWN ONLINE BUSINESS OR RIP YOUR FINGERNAILS OFF?
STARTING YOUR OWN SMALL BUSINESS IS HARD
“Start online business; rip my own fingernails off”
Do you remember that great advert where a little girl is asked by her sister “which do you prefer? Chips or Daddy”. This as a plate of luscious French fries is placed in front of her by her mother. Staring dreamily at the plate she intones “Chips, Daddy... chips, Daddy” as she tries to make this impossible choice.
This advert was funny and touching because it seemed like such a silly choice. Clearly she was a small, hungry girl who felt that she had to make the choice based on her feelings at that moment in time rather than on the long-term factors.
But perhaps the advert held a hidden truth. Perhaps the advert illustrated a truth about us that makes us all uncomfortable. Perhaps the vast majority of us would prefer to do anything rather than start our own business. (And by the way, I did mean your artificial nails.... natch!)
“Start online business; rip my own fingernails off”
Do you remember that great advert where a little girl is asked by her sister “which do you prefer? Chips or Daddy”. This as a plate of luscious French fries is placed in front of her by her mother. Staring dreamily at the plate she intones “Chips, Daddy... chips, Daddy” as she tries to make this impossible choice.
This advert was funny and touching because it seemed like such a silly choice. Clearly she was a small, hungry girl who felt that she had to make the choice based on her feelings at that moment in time rather than on the long-term factors.
But perhaps the advert held a hidden truth. Perhaps the advert illustrated a truth about us that makes us all uncomfortable. Perhaps the vast majority of us would prefer to do anything rather than start our own business. (And by the way, I did mean your artificial nails.... natch!)
Tuesday, 1 September 2009
Starting a New Online Business
If it is true that you can't teach an old dog new tricks I am in trouble. Arthritic, smelly, fur falling out all over the place and four-legged I might not be, but transister radios were cool when I was a teenager. Yup, I am that old - I can even vaguely remember the Beatles the first time round!
I am comfortable with the world wide web, I know how to use most of the programmes on my computer; I even know how to use all the apps on my mobile phone. So I feel fairly comfortable with new technology. But not with nechworking (a little word I came up with to describe the technology of online networking).
Why am I bothering you might ask yourself. I am bothering because I intend to plunge into the icy internet pool and start a business online.
I am comfortable with the world wide web, I know how to use most of the programmes on my computer; I even know how to use all the apps on my mobile phone. So I feel fairly comfortable with new technology. But not with nechworking (a little word I came up with to describe the technology of online networking).
Why am I bothering you might ask yourself. I am bothering because I intend to plunge into the icy internet pool and start a business online.
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