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: Web Pro Business BlogGetting those first 10 Clients
In my first post, I asked for comments from readers about topics they would be keen to see me cover. A number of people responded with some fantastic questions, with a handful at least asking along the lines of marketing, and how I went from sitting at an empty desk, to getting the first few months work in the door.
Well, for starters, I cheated. I had worked in the web industry for a number of years, so I already had quite a few contacts, and one of the first things I did was get in touch with other freelancers, particularly developers (remember, I started as a designer) and offered to help them out with any overflow work they couldn’t handle.
I ended up with a handful of clients that way, and some immediate work, however what I found was also interesting. I expected to do the work behind the veil of their business names, however I actually found that these colleagues trusted me enough to deal directly with the clients, and just provide a small kickback to the freelancer. Sweet! Not only did they send me work, they trusted I would do a good job, and I therefore made sure I …
Do you have the right personality for running your own business?
I’m always meeting people who have jumped into freelance or small business life without really understanding their own skills matrix. As rewarding as it is starting your own business, there are some negatives as well. It’s great that you’re a PHP expert, or can design like the best of them, but do you really want to run your own business?
Here’s some myths of running your own business, and the reality I have found from these;
I can spend all day doing what I want to do, and turning down the rest.
Sure - if your dream is wanting to spend copious amounts of hours wrestling with your accounting package, endless meetings with clients, planning your cash flow and dealing with debtors, then I guess that myth holds true. The rest of us though will find we get very little actual time to do what our hearts would prefer.
Running my own business means I can work how and when I want.
Within reason, this is true, however you’ll also find, especially in the early days, you’ll end up working when your clients want you to, and never actually getting that weekly game of Golf in. When you realise that billable hours equals income, you …
The Business of Building Web Sites
Hello everyone, my name is Miles Burke. Five years ago this month, I was crazy enough to start a web site design and development company by leaving my previous employer, with only two weeks pay, mortgage payments to make, a 23 month old child and pregnant wife.
As you can imagine the latter was not overly impressed by my act of bravery, however I managed to quickly turn this around, and employed my first staff member less than three months later. I’d freelanced a few years earlier, but this time I believe I learnt from my earlier mistakes.
We now have fifteen staff in the web team and are part of a larger company, which I am a shareholder and director of, with a total staff of just over forty. I recently was awarded ‘one of Western Australia’s most pre-eminent business leaders under the age of 40′, an award which I am proud to have received.
Over the coming months, I hope to discuss with you my thoughts and observations, the mistakes I made and the lessons that I have learnt on this journey of small business ownership and management. I say discuss, because I really hope I can count on …
sitepoint.com ranked 3rd most popular eBusiness site in the world!
sitepoint.com was today recognized as the 3rd most popular eBusiness web site in the world by ebizMBA.com, just behind news.com and ZD-Net.com.
The article used a number of metrics to list 25 must-have bookmarks for anyone serious about succeeding in online business. Web sites were ranked by a combination of inbound links, Google Page Rank, Alexa Rank, and U.S. traffic data from Compete and Quantcast.
Here are some reasons why I think we made the list:
- Our online marketplace continues to grow at warp speed. I’ve posted before on why I believe that if you haven’t taken the plunge to get involved, you should do so now.
- We produce some pretty awesome kits, books, articles, and newsletters sharing the secrets of doing business on the Web to entrepreneurs all around the world.
- To top it off, we’ve got a massive online community of entrepreneurs sharing their online success stories every day in the SitePoint Forums.
So if you’re looking to make money from the Web, be sure to put sitepoint.com on the top of your shopping cart.
FirefoxPortable - Your Mobile Office Without a Laptop
SitePoint plays host to a growing number of people who operate small internet-based businesses, often single-person operations. Sole-proprietors have always found it tricky to find time for vacations given the constant demands of business.
The always-on nature of internet business only exacerbates this - your users operate on numerous different timezones, and customer support expectations are high when competition is fierce.
Luckily, the flip-side is that your internet business can, by and large, be operated from anywhere. This gives you freedom to travel when and where you please - so long as you can take care of day-to-day operational issues in a timely fashion.
At first thought, this would imply taking the laptop with you. I gave this careful consideration prior to making the trip to Thailand, from where I’m writing this post. But the idea of lugging a laptop + accessories to a hot, humid location where it’s liable to get damaged / sandy / lost really didn’t appeal.
As this is a short trip, I examined what the necessities were in terms of things I might need to do while away. I certainly planned not to undertake any development work, instead taking care of customer …
The Value of Email Marketing
On average, email marketing generates an average return of $51.45 for every dollar spent in 2006, according to the Direct Marketing Association.
If that statistic alone doesn’t convince you of the value that email marketing can add to your business, nothing will! Of course, there are heaps of reasons why email marketing is so popular — it’s extremely cost-effective and timely, it helps build lasting relationships with specific segments, sub-segments, and even individuals within your audience, it integrates well with other marketing tactics, including viral marketing, and so on — but that statistic really should make anyone who operates online sit up and take notice.
Are you making that kind of money from your email marketing efforts?
This was the first question that came into my head when I read that DMA statistic in the opening chapters of the recently released Email Marketing Kit. I mean, we’ve been conducting email campaigns for more than six years now — longer if you take into account our electronic newsletters — and I think we’ve got it down to something of a fine art. This is not to say that we know everything and can write top-notch email first time, every time, but we do …
The Worlds Longest Month – How much does your business really need you?
I’m happy to be home, and I don’t mean that in the ordinary ‘happy to be home’ way. You see, our annual trip to Asia went well this year, but just as we were getting on a plane from Tokyo back to the US I suffered a medical emergency and wound up in the hospital. Everything turned out fine - I’m home again and steadily recovering from what turned out to be a nasty but routine illness. But I’m happy to be home, in a big way.
So, back to business: why am I writing about this?
First, I wanted to explain my long absence, and thank everyone at SitePoint (members included) for their patience and kind words. Second, being away from my business and my clients was a big eye-opener so it seems an idea blog post.
Most of you understand the value of documenting and codifying all of the procedures that make your business run. A business that is overly dependent upon one person has little value to anyone but that one person, whereas a well documented business allows new employees to quickly step up into various roles if need be. This message was popularized in Michael Gerber’s ‘E-Myth’ …
It’s That Time Again
When I first launched Outlook this morning I was greeted with a reminder that I’d just as soon forget - tax time is coming.
Because I deal with so many new/growing web development groups in my consulting practice, I spend lots of time talking about taxes, tax reduction, corporate entities, and bookkeeping. I’ve come to enjoy this because so many of our clients can get major tax advantages simply by employing some basic bookkeeping and tax reduction techniques. We also make an effort to improve our own tax situation each year, which helps us to manage growth and preserve our profits as the business grows.
This year is no exception. While we expect to pay more taxes than ever in actual dollars, I am hoping to reduce the percent of net profits that we pay in taxes if at all possible. Around this time last year we added three new ingredients to the tax-reduction mix:
1) Health Savings Accounts
2) Individual 401k’s for principals
3) Conversion to American Express for all expenses
The Health Savings Account (HSA) is a relatively new form of health care plan in the US, and is not to be confused with the older …
2007: Beginning with the End in Mind
With just one week of vacation remaining, I’m beginning to consider both my personal and business objectives for 2007. The beginning of a new year is, of course, a great time to look at last year’s progress and make a short list of objectives for the coming year. It’s important that such a list be short, achievable, and for (small business owners) geared towards our personal satisfaction rather than simply an increase in revenue or profits. Two or three main objectives is more than enough, and any more than that will most likely result in the list being forgotten early in the year!
Looking back on 2006, the primary business objective was to improve our marketing strategy. It was quite a lot of work, but this objective appears to have been fulfilled. We’ve sharpened our marketing message, adjusted our pricing, renewed our website content, and established a new mailing list system.
My primary personal goal was to ‘disconnect’ a bit, and better separate business time from personal time by eliminating points of contact between myself and the Internet during non-work hours. This has also been successful – I’ve cancelled my mobile phone’s connection to the internet, stopped …
Unexpectedly Handy
Over the last few months I’ve received a surprising number of requests that involve integrations with Paypal, especially integrations between Joomla/Virtuemart and Paypal.
For the most part, Paypal integrations tend to be fairly easy to configure. The fraud department at Paypal, however, recently made our lives more difficult by tightening up the fraud prevention rules so that a single login from a ‘prohibited’ country causes the entire account to immediately go into a restricted mode. Once the account is restricted, transactions are limited and the account owner has to go through a painful series of validations which sometimes include waiting for a PIN to be delivered via postal mail.
Fortunately, we stumbled into this problem while working on our company website rather than a client site. Our team that handles Joomla/Paypal work is based in Romania - a restricted country according to Paypal. Although we’ve never had a problem in the past, a single login from Romania caused our entire Paypal integration to become crippled. To make matters worse, we have a 6-week backlog of Paypal related work that needs to get into production immediately, and we couldn’t risk causing a client’s account to be spontaneously restricted.
How could our Romania-based team …
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