Planning Your Business
Focus - Your Key To Online Business Success
Posted by Andy Williamson on June 11, 2007
Filed Under Your Online Business Entrepreneurship Planning Your Business
When I first decided that I’d had more than enough of my job and all that it entailed, I started to look at every possible option and opportunity available from a sandwich bar franchise to unworkable MLM schemes, eventually I decided that the only way to get what I really wanted i.e., a job where I could work from home and a life where I could live anywhere I wanted to, was by using the Internet - and that’s where the decision making process really went into extreme overdrive and the chances of me settling on any one single business idea seemed remote.
If you’re anything like I was when I first started out, in order to move to sustainable profit as quickly as possible you’ll need to be very careful about the incredible amount of noise on the Internet that sets out to capture your attention and consequently takes your focus away from your business. At best you’ll lose a few hours work, at worst the distraction will keep you in a state of perpetual indecisiveness unable to commit long enough to anything for it to work.
One thing that I never really appreciated when I first started working from home was just how much extra discipline it requires - or to put it another way, how much easier it is to allow yourself to be distracted. On top of this new found home based freedom to be distracted, you have the Internet with all its charm and temptation to just click around for a while. It’s so easy to just follow a couple of links on the web and hey, 2 hours have gone and no work has been done! Worse still, you’ve just read about another great way to make money on-line and you’re about to rewrite your business plan for the 4th time this week and it’s only Monday!
Basically you have to start to become immune to the incredible ‘listen to me’ type noise on the Internet - everyone will be telling you that they know the only real way to make money on the Internet - and when you’re starting out this can prove to be a real distraction.
Yet while all this is going on if there ever was a secret to making money on-line it’s this:-
“Don’t allow yourself to get distracted, keep yourself focused on producing one great website focused on a niche or topic that you love and enjoy”
With that single secret firmly in mind your site will start to climb above the others - forget the people who you read about trying to manage 100 sites, don’t feel threatened by them, relax because they can only give their sites 100th of the time that you can give your site.
Starting From Nothing
Posted by Andy Williamson on April 09, 2007
Filed Under Planning Your Business
For anyone about to enter into the World of on-line publishing assuming that they don’t have a huge budget and the ability to buy into an already well established publication there’s only one option - starting from nothing and that’s hard, but nonetheless it’s something that we all have to do.
Take us for example - we run three primary publications all established with loads of content and here we go starting all over again with So Called Gurus. Do we love starting new publications? Well yes and no: ‘Yes’ because we have a clear vision of where we’re going and when we plan to be there, and ‘no’ because we know just how much work is involved in getting there.
So how do you keep going when you start from nothing?
The first thing to do is to make your expectations reasonable, unless you strike a very sweet spot in on-line publishing you’ll probably get very little traffic to your site in your first year. There are many reasons for this, the major search engines and especially Google don’t always go a great deal on new sites, they prefer to monitor you for a while before gracing their listings with many of your articles and posts. Google have created a reputation and trust based algorithm and humans tend to employ a similar mechanism. If you’re telling the World that you’re the expert in your field but no one else is backing you up it’s hard work, yet with work and time when other sites and experts in your field start to discuss your contribution and link to your publication you will enjoy the huge double benefit of both search engine and human approval.
Actually this is why we would never recommend going to great lengths trying to get artificial favour from the search engines using imaginative SEO practices, while knowledge of practical SEO is valuable, tricking the engines will nearly always end in tears, it’s far better to take the long road to listing success on the major engines.
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