Wislounge

Thoughts and opinions on web development

Handling an Entrepreneur Blog

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The blog of a business site is often referred to as an entrepreneur blog.  Handling an entrepreneur blog is not the same as handling a personal blog.  The emphasis of an entrepreneur blog is to support the main business site through active engagement of customers, whether existing or potential.

It is in the best interest of businesses who have online presence to maintain an entrepreneur blog.  The main goal is to present the business in the best light by providing relevant and current information directly related to the product or service being offered.  Customers always appreciate additional information especially if it is being volunteered by a company which they intend to transact with.  Every offered product or service tends to be enhanced when they are fully explained to the public especially in relation to surrounding issues of use.

Handling an entrepreneur blog requires the handler to be updated in current and factual information.  Providing the right information establishes a site that provides it as an  authority in the subject.  A company that explains a product or service in an easy and understandable manner will gain more customers.  It shows genuine concern for the welfare of the  buying public, lending an image of reliability and credibility.

There are many blogs that purposely cater to the interests of business bloggers.  They are able to provide important information, positive encouragements, and timely guidelines that are critical for the development of an effective entrepreneur or business blog.  It is a wise move to look into the good practices of business blogs which enjoy considerable following.

An entrepreneur blog has to developed in line with how the main business is being developed.  As it is primarily aimed at providing support, it should never run counter to the business being promoted online.  When handling an entrepreneur blog is done correctly, businesses will reap its benefits in no time.

Is it Okay to Start a Business During Recession

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It’s the big “R” word. Since the prime mortgage bubble (among other bubbles) burst middle of last year, a lot of businesses have been feeling the crunch. It’s not only small businesses and entrepreneurs who have been on the losing end. Even large corporations have been filing for bankruptcy. Big industries, like the American auto industry, had to be helped with massive bailout schemes.

Is it then a good time to start a business during recession?

The answer is a definite maybe. This is not necessarily the best time to be taking risky investments. However, if you plan your business just right, then you might be in for a successful venture. Here’s why.

It’s a buyer’s market. These days, the market is favoring buyers, and not sellers. In my experience trying to sell homes for a few friends, we’ve always had to contend with buyers’ offers. Because everyone else is selling cheaply these days (with the financial crunch), competition is tough.

Therefore, if you’re planning to start a business, you can expect good deals on assets, equipment and other things that a business may need (be it hardware or software). People are letting go of properties easy, and these are ripe for the picking.

Everything is cheaper. Related to the first point, many thing are cheaper in times of recession. Not only are buildings, assets and other products cheaper, even services are cheaper. Because a lot of people are being given the pink slip at work, many will be starting to freelance. Some would also agree to take jobs at lower rates than their previous ones.

If you’re planning to start a business, it might make sense to start now, while labor is cheap.

It’s the same with investing with stocks. Common sense might tell you not to buy shares of stock while prices are dropping. But long-term investors actually prefer to buy stocks while prices fall, because they consider the long-run average cost to be more important than the short-run returns. A lower long-run average cost, compared to a higher return (say, when you sell shares once the prices are back up) will give you some yield.

There’s no way than up. It’s a matter of perspective. When things are looking down, you should expect them to improve one time or another. If you start a business with a booming market, you might be facing tough competition from other people who have the same idea. But if you’re starting a business during a recession, then everyone else is thinking of survival or even subsistence–therefore, no one is really too keen on spending money to start up a a business and compete with you.

This is a maybe rather than a definite yes because this business strategy is not always applicable in all industries and instances. If you have extra money to burn, then by all means go for it. But if you expect banks to lend you money, then watch out for tough times–credit is expensive these days. But if you have a business plan that won’t involve much external investment, and if you can bootstrap your way into profitability, then starting a new business can be a worthwhile activity even with a recession.

The Case Against Monetization

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Empty billboardYou’ve probably heard it one time or another. Monetize this … Monetize that … Monetize everything. In this cutthroat world of Internet businesses, web applications, new media networks and the like, everyone wants a cut of the pie–whether it’s in the form of advertising, subscriptions, commissions, or even sponsorships.

About four or five years back, I realized that the Internet was big business. And so I dropped everything I had going on: launched several blogs, joined ad networks, and looked for sponsors. After some time, I quit my day job and focused solely on making income from online sources.

But it’s not as simple as that. Most people would think that running a money-making website is easy as pie. Well, in some cases it probably is. If you have a great domain, steady traffic, and good products to sell, you can perhaps make it big on affiliate commissions. However, this might not always be sustainable.

For the rest of us, though, successfully monetizing a site requires time, focus, effort, and a lot of marketing. You would often see your revenues trickle in a few dollars (or cents!) at a time, until you reach that tipping point when your cashflow would be enough for the site to support itself.

And so here comes the case for or against monetization. Most experienced online entrepreneurs would advise people to focus on several things long before we think about monetizing our sites. Some popular words of wisdom I’ve come across include the following:

  • Brian Clark of Copyblogger would often advise online publishers to focus on writing good headlines. These are the first things that people see when looking at your content, and headlines could be a deciding factor on whether they will read on or not.
  • Chris Garrett, who used to edit Performancing advises to start slow, but steady. True, while Performancing essentially launched with a bang itself, its editors were mostly considered celebrities already. For the rest of us who are lesser known, then growing one’s site steadily would proably be better.
  • Problogger Darren Rowse advises to focus on a niche, rather than to spread yourself too thinly. A lot of blog networks have fallen into the trap of launching and running too many blogs about too many topics. Yes, it’s doable, but not always easy, and not always sustainable.

There are a handful of great advice out there, and these range from the very new to the very old. If you notice, my links span one, two or three years back. That’s because online entrepreneurship goes through the same cycles, and the same experiences year in and year out. Now the piece of advice that I would add is this: you shouldn’t be in a hurry to earn.

The best earning blogs, websites and web apps out there probably started out as hobbies, academic research, or something that was intended to scratch an itch, so to speak. Consider Google. Consider YouTube. I know I have a handful of personal blogs that I’ve either sold off or successfully monetized through advertisements. But I try to start clean–without sponsorships, without ads.

I think the best reason for not jumping into the monetization bandwagon too early is the matter of trust and public perception. Think of it this way: when you read a blog that has a clean, fast interface, don’t you prefer it to a blog that’s full of ads popping about here and there? Even if some advertisements are discreet, it still says something about a blog if it were ad and clutter-free. And to me, at least, it’s most especially a turn-off to see a poorly-written and poorly-maintained site that looks too commercial.

This doesn’t mean you should not plan ahead, though. Further down the road, when you’ve achieved your intended readership, traffic level, and authority, you can then start monetizing your site. It could be sponsorships, links, AdSense, or any other means. The important thing is to focus on quality, because that increases the earning potential of your site.

Image credit: flickr/westm

Small Businesses Should Make Better Use of Social Media

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Social Way A recent report by Reuters cites a study conducted for Citibank Small Business that found out majority of small businesses do not use social media for business purposes. According to the survey, 75% of the respondents don’t find social networks and mediums like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn as useful in expanding their business networks or generating leads. 86% has responded that they don’t even use information from social mediums as a source for business advice.

I say small businesses stand to gain much from using social media in their day to day operations.

Granted, most small businesses out there are probably brick-and-mortar operations, which have a small sales, manufacturing, service or other activities as its main source of income. Some of these may be home-based or freelance/professional basis. Indeed, many small businesses go on by without the need to engage social mediums on a day to day basis.

But social media can definitely help small businesses expand their network, and do marketing at lightning speeds at dirt cheap costs. Offhand, here are a few benefits of social media that I think small businesses should consider.

Viral marketing

For any business, there’s nothing like a viral marketing campaign done right. Word of mouth, after all, is a very effective tool in the dissemination of information, especially if it’s done among people who are considered to be connectors. The real measure of how effective a small business can do viral marketing is not by the number of people whom you can share information with. Rather, success can be determined by the importance and influence of the people you share this information with. Social media users who are influential and trusted are better at word of mouth marketing, especially if they are within fields of interest relevant to your product or service.

Market research

Not all businesses can afford to hire marketing consultancy firms to determine market trends and do research. The Internet is rich with this information, to some extent. For instance, you can use Google Trends to spot trends in user interest for certain keywords and phrases. You can look for product reviews to find what customers are looking for. You can even search for mentions on Twitter and on blog review sites to find what people are saying about your industry or product.

Custmer relations

In the eyes of a consumer, the best companies are those that are transparent with their dealings with the public. It’s best for any business to build up trust with the consumer base. One of the ways you can do this is by being accessible from all possible channels. Most businesses already have a website. But having a contact form that lets you receive emails might not be enough. If you bring your conversations online–like through a blog, forum or Twitter, then you have a better chance at resolving possible problems even before they happen. If you’re lucky, passionate users might even build interest groups themselves, and it will be the community that does the support for your clients.

Any small business stands to gain a lot with social media. Even if the benefits may not be direct, it’s a matter of extending goodwill and enhancing your presence in an ever growing community of connected individuals. Being active on Facebook, Twitter, in blogging and forums may not necessarily be able to directly result in added sales, revenues and expanded business. But by being connected, you can start building up a network and you can gain the trust of your audience.

image credit: flickr/caseywest

Are You Assuming Too Much?

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Magic 8 ball I love Gmail. I use it everyday. It’s the first thing I open whenever I launch my browser. I actually have several Gmail inboxes open at any single time–this includes my main “gmail.com” email and another Gmail for domains account. I also use the mobile Gmail application on my Nokia Series-60 phone. What I like is its seamless integration with Gmail features, like labels, seach functionality and address book. And since it’s a native Symbian application (and not Java), it’s fast.

But there’s one thing I don’t like about Gmail for mobile. Once you’re connected, it seems to assume you have a constant connection to the Internet. And therefore, in the even that I walk out of a WiFi hotspot’s range, my mobile phone incessantly asks me for a connection until either (1) I select a valid connection, (2) activate a new connection, or (3) turn off Gmail.

In case #1, I should be in an active WiFi hotspot, in the absence of which I have to resort to #2, which means I have to pay connection charges (minimal, but annoying if it accumulates unnecessarily). Since I don’t want to spend extra money on unnecessary connectivity, I often select option #3. However, since the software incessantly asks me for a connection, this usually involves some keypad calisthenics, which requires me to bring up the task manager, hit the “kill” button (the erase button on the S60) and hit the confirmation button. All this while shooing away the connection window every nanosecond or so.

What’s my point in all this? I think it’s all about a usability issue. These days, you would rarely see a piece of software that doesn’t bother you for an Internet connection to update something. In fact, most would rather just go ahead and initiate a connection without your knowledge. My issue here is about the software doing something on its own, and it’s something I would rather have it not do. Software these days are too smart that it makes you feel stupid. Sometimes you have to fight with it in order to maintain some semblance of control.

It makes me feel as if developers (and businesspeople who own the services) are assuming too much. Suddenly, everyone is assuming that we all have a running Internet connection wherever we go, whatever time it is, and that we don’t care how much we spend. Well, some of us want to keep our privacy, thank you. We want to be able to control when we get online, how we get online, and how much we spend getting online.

This would be a good question to ask yourself when you’re in the process of developing an application, or just about any business (online or offline). Do you assume too much? Do you do too much of the thinking for your clients or intended userbase? Is everything becoming too automated that manual intervention would suddenly become tedious and cumbersome?

Don’t take anything for granted. Just because you’re overflowing with bandwidth doesn’t mean everyone else is enjoying the same connectivity. Just because you have massive processing power doesn’t mean everyone else’s computer is fast.

This is the core of most usability tests–try to drop all assumptions and take take things afresh. Try to put yourself in the shoes of your intended client. Try to see things from the perspective of someone who knows nothing . Try to put yourself in his situation. Will your application or service still be as cool, interesting and usable as it is from your own point of view?

Oftentimes, it’s looking from outside that we can see as objectively as possible. When you assume too much, you tend to narrow your field of vision too much, and you could lose sight of the more important things.

Image credit: flickr/banlon1964