Finding Ones That Consistently Work

In the past, I’ve had hit-and-miss luck with coupon codes. Sometimes, they’d already expired, and sometimes, they just didn’t work for no apparent reason. In the last few months, however, I’ve noticed some coupon codes that Andy of Comluv has been sharing from his friend Brian, and they always seem to work great. So when I noticed that his friend is a sponsor of the Famous Bloggers Comluv contest, I decided it was time to share this little money-saving gem with everyone.

Good for Renewals Too!

The really cool thing about these Godaddy coupon codes is that they work for both new domain registrations AND renewals. That’s hard to find, and it’s great to be able to get discounts on my domains when they come up for renewal. You can also get coupon codes for other Godaddy services there too, although I generally don’t recommend Godaddy for hosting. Besides the fact that their hosting isn’t the best, it’s really not a good idea to be completely dependent upon one company for both your domain name and your website. If that one company goes bellyup, or just decides they don’t like your site anymore, you’ve lost everything. If you get your domain name from Godaddy, and your hosting from someone else (I recommend Hostgator), then you’re unlikely to lose both the name and the site all at once.

Bookmark While You’re There

So, bookmark the Godaddy coupon codes page now while it’s on your mind. You don’t want to wonder where those coupon codes are the next time you have a “brilliant” idea for a new site!

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Post tags: Coupon, domain name, FBCLcontest, Go Daddy
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Globalization may be yesterday’s news, but it never ceased to be an important concept when looking for tools for enhancing your web development. Outsourcing your web development projects to international expertise enables you to utilize creative talent on accelerated timetables at potentially lower costs than you can find locally. If you need good code on the cheap, here are some tips for outsourcing your projects.

1. Know what you want

You will save yourself hours of strife by making sure you can cleanly and unambiguously state your request. Have a short list of important points, and clearly identify areas where you expect the developers to take creative license. Make sure that you spell out what you want, when you want it, and what kind of additional support you want along with it.

2. Find the best candidates with small projects

Your options are enormous, so don’t be afraid to send small jobs to a few different agents to test your options. See who produces the best product, who has the best turnaround times, who offers the best rates, who offers the best client communication, and so on. The more contacts you make, the better your range of options will be.

3. Seek partners, not disposable contractors

Following the last tip, remember that each of the developers you contact is a prospective long-term partner. Your first job with them may be the last, or it may be a gateway to a highly productive partnership. Evaluate each group for their best strengths to determine who should be used for which projects. Ask for portfolio samples to see what other work each developer has done, and seriously compare the end results of each developer against what terms they offer.

4. Price is what you pay, value is what you get

This bit of Warren Buffet’s wisdom applies just as much to choosing developers as it does to investing. You won’t get “the same results” from every quote you’re offered. If your demands are very simple or low priority, then the budget option is perfectly acceptable. Otherwise, remember that you are entrusting these developers with your public-facing content, and that any lazy or sloppy component of the final product reflects poorly on you, not them. Don’t be afraid to pay more for good work.

5. Tie objectives to payments

Since you already know what you want and when you want it, you can set clear objectives for your web developers. Establish pricing at the beginning, and identify when you will provide payment per component of what you want. This establishes your ability to pay, and their ability to deliver on time. This helps you get what you need in a regular, timely fashion, and creates a model for working with your developer.

6. Establish ownership, and back it up with paperwork

You pay, and they code. Who owns the end result? That’s up for negotiation. Bring this up at the beginning of your contract so that you don’t run into legal complications farther up the road. You might be able to get a discount if you permit them to reuse their work, and you may have no special reason to claim ownership of the resultant code. Whatever you decide is best for your project, be sure that you include it in your written contract.

7. Document everything

All arrangements listed above should be in writing. Spending the money to have a properly drafted contract, preferably a reusable one, will save you endless headaches.

All of these guidelines apply to almost any business situation, but are just as keenly important to building your relationship with web developers. Just remember that they are people, and build your relationship with that in mind. Speak clearly, hide nothing, and be a good partner, and you’ll get just what you need every time.

During his time as a staff writer at an online ink cartridges store, James has covered everything from the release of the HP 901XL to the latest developments in design.

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Post tags: outsource
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I discovered one today, in fact. Rankraiser has a free website tools section. Some of the interesting tools I found from there included a form style generator, a site usability checker, a background design tool, a broken link checker from W3C (I never realized they had one), and free icon sets. Speaking of free icon sets, I also recently discovered another source for that over at Icons, etc..

If someone will remind me once in a while, I’ll share more of the free and cheap resources I use all the time.

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Post tags: free tools
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When I first reached the point where I needed to move from shared hosting to something bigger and better, I kept seeing VPS being bandied about as the right solution, but it was hard to find out what VPS really *was*. I already knew that I couldn’t afforded a dedicated server, so I was fairly certain that the mid-range VPS solution (Virtual Private Server) was what I wanted, but I felt like I was stepping into that decision with blinders on. (In fact, I was, but it didn’t take long after making the decision to figure out what it all meant).

So, I think it’s a good idea to give a brief description of the differences between shared hosting, vps hosting, and dedicated hosting. Then, if you need to make the move to something bigger/better than your current shared hosting, you’ll at least have enough information to start research on what you need.

Shared Hosting – The Low End

Benefits:

• Cheap. You aren’t risking much money on a site that may never make you a dime.
• Fully managed by host. You don’t have to worry about keeping the hardware or software upgraded, or manage the server in any way. The host takes care of it all.

Drawbacks:

• Shared Disk Space, Ram and CPU Resources. Your site is sharing those resources with many other sites (usually a few hundred, sometimes many more than that). If there are enough resources left for whatever your site needs to display, it gets it. If those resources have been used up by someone else’s site, tough luck, kiddo. This is usually the reason your site ends up outgrowing shared hosting. Once it becomes popular and is getting bucketloads of traffic, there will never be enough resources on a shared server to allow your site to work properly.
• Restrictions, restrictions, restrictions. Shared servers, for security purposes mostly, must restrict your access to certain features that would normally be available to you on other types of hosting. These restrictions may vary depending upon the host, but things at the server level such as SSH access and the ability to add custom server configurations are often restricted from shared hosting. These restrictions usually don’t affect most sites, but if your site needs it, and your shared hosting restricts it, that’s an ugly problem to have.

Dedicated Hosting – The High End

Benefits:

• No Shared Resources. All of the server’s resources are yours and yours alone. Only your site(s) live on this server, so no resources are being taken away from you to give to others.
• Completely Configurable To Your Specific Needs. The dedicated server is yours to mold however you wish. Need some new web gizmo running on your server? No problem. Just install it and use it. You can think of this server as being just like the computer you have at your desk. It’s yours. Do what you want with it.

Drawbacks:

• Expensive! Your site needs to be bringing in enough income to justify the high price of going with a dedicated server.
• Requires technical skills to manage. You’d better have a good working knowledge of running a web server, because you’ll be responsible (in most cases) for running this one. If you’ve never done it before, you’re in for a shock. It’s a steep learning curve for the newbie. Some dedicated plans come fully managed by the host, but you can be sure your expensive plan just got a lot more expensive if you add fully managed service to the plan.

VPS Hosting – The Middle Ground

Benefits:

• Dedicated RAM & Disk Space, Shared CPU. While a VPS server will still share the CPU resources amongst your site and the other sites on the server, your site will get its own dedicated RAM and disk space. This is a big improvement over shared hosting.
• Server-Level Configuration. Just like a dedicated machine, you can configure the server however you wish.
• Burstable Memory. On at least some VPS plans, you get burstable memory which allows your site to be able to handle sudden traffic spikes (such as the Digg effect). The most painful thing to watch is a site that hits the front page of Digg but shuts down because it can’t handle the load. Burstable memory is designed to help alleviate that problem.
• Scalability. Like a dedicated machine, a VPS gives you room to grow. As your needs change, you can add more databases, expand to ecommerce, or add new sites. The VPS will handle most sites’ needs until they become powerhouses.

Drawbacks:

• Usually requires more management on your part. Although you won’t need the level of skills that you’d need for a dedicated plan, you’ll probably find that you’ll need to learn a few more things than you ever thought you’d know about running a web server. Many VPS plans come with semi-managed service, which means that some of the management is done by the host; leaving some of the management left to you. In general, the host will usually handle all the hardware and server software management, and you’ll need to handle any custom software issues. This threw me for a loop the first time I moved to a VPS plan. I recommend getting as much information as possible from the host as to what you’ll *really* be doing behind the scenes. You need to know if you can really handle the management tasks or not. This is not something your grandma can generally handle, so keep that in mind.
• Not Cheap. Ok, but that’s really only a slight drawback, as it really isn’t all that expensive either. More than likely, if your site is to the point where it needs to upgrade from shared hosting, it’s probably bringing in enough income to handle the added hosting fees. So in my mind, this is a non-issue.

Armed With Basic Knowledge

Now that you have a general idea of what a VPS is all about, you can start to research properly. Don’t upgrade with blinders on like I did. Have an understanding of what the move from shared hosting to a VPS plan will mean, and your experience of the upgrade will be better.

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Post tags: dedicated server, Shared web hosting service, Virtual private server, web hosting
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Today’s workforce is becoming more and more distributed. In the current economic climate, making do with less is a constant requirement. In addition, many teams are put together as ad hoc virtual teams, with members who are often on different continents and never meet face to face. Fortunately, there are many other companies that face this challenge- enough that a viable market in online tools has grown. Here are five great online sites that can help you build and manage your team.

Recruiting

Your first order of business will be to track down your team members and get them on board. Craigslist is the best known tool for this, but their geographic focus means that you need to place a lot of ads and search many different posts to find the team you need. Instead of the advertising approach, it’s best to use social networking and track down great team members through your network of business contacts. LinkedIn has the edge over Facebook for most business-oriented relationships, as people are much more willing to forward business requests to contacts on LinkedIn than on Facebook. Elance can help you find a hired gun for a particular task, but the site will want to control the relationship and the billing rates, so it isn’t recommended for full-fledged team members, only contract help.

Project Management

Once you have the team, you need to keep everyone on task and on time. Basecamp has become the de facto choice for many organizations. It provides shared collaboration spaces, file sharing, milestones / calendars, shared todo lists, and shared document areas. Basecamp also provides some time tracking; however, it is limited. A dedicated time-tracking tool will often do a better job.

Time Tracking

Virtual teams face a special problem with time tracking: Since not everyone is in the same physical location, it is mandatory to keep an eye on how much time is being spent on each task. Harvest is a great tool for time tracking, reporting, and invoicing. It works via a website (you can connect with it over twitter, and an iphone app makes mobile time tracking simple). It will also handle your billings, and will export timesheets directly to quickbooks.

Communications

Keeping everyone on the same page is always a challenge. You’ll need to figure out how to keep everyone in touch, without breaking the bank. Skype is the obvious choice for voice and conference calls. It also supports direct file exchanges and runs on all major platforms. Many teams find that instant messenger is an important part of how they communicate; however, not everyone is on the same messaging service. Meebo is an online service that allows you to connect to all the major instant messenger networks.

Customer Care

Customer service – handling complaints, questions, and suggestions – is particularly hard with a virtual team spanning many timezones and with fewer full-time employees. Get Satisfaction allows you to set up a public area where customers can raise issues, and can actually help each other resolve problems. This provides you with a 24×7 customer service presence, at dramatically reduced rates. UserVoice provides a similar service.

Top Picks

• Recruiting: LinkedIn
• Project Management: Basecamp
• Time Tracking: Harvest
• Communications: Skype
• Customer Care: Get Satisfaction

Louise Baker is a freelance writer who has worked on more then a few virtual teams. She currently writes about online degrees at Zen College Life.

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Post tags: Basecamp, LinkedIn Ltd, Louise Baker
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Are you using Google Analytics to monitor your website performance? It’s a goldmine of free market research data, but most businesses fall into one of two categories:

• They mistakenly decided they didn’t need analytics. How can you improve your website if you aren’t measuring it?
• They installed analytics and then never used it.

If you rely on your website for any part of your sales or business lifestyle, then please let this be a call to action: start using analytics to measure your online performance. What can Google Analytics (or any other analytics package, for that matter) tell you?

Pencil by The Shane H

Where are your customers coming from?

In an analytics package, you can learn where your customers are coming from. There’s no comment box or clerk having to ask everyone where they heard about you – the tool does it without them even knowing. Wouldn’t it be nice to know:

• Which one of your advertisements and banner ads were working well? Which ones send people but those people don’t stick around?
• Did that blog feature actually send any web traffic?
• Does that paid directory listing not actually send you any web traffic?

This isn’t just data: this is market research information you can use to measure and evaluate your online performance. And it’s free!

What parts of your website are popular? Which parts stink?

Unfortunately, many businesses put a website up quickly and without much thought. They wouldn’t do the same for a real world storefront or send out a salesperson without a clear message and call to action.

Analytics can help you understand how popular and effective the pages are in your site, such as:

• How many customers arrive and leave immediately?
• Where do customers linger? Is there a particular popular section?
• Do you have a page nobody reads? Is that because it’s not important or because nobody can find it?

It’s easy to over-analyze this stuff here, but it’s important to do some digging and see what’s happening behind closed doors – what exactly are people doing on your website?

How’s your search engine optimization?

Last but not least: SEO. Regardless if you are a newbie to this area or your website is a well-oiled machine, analytics can teach you a few things, such as what are people actually typing in the search engines to find you. It’s not what’s here that will surprise you (often weird phrases will show up), but moreso the stuff that isn’t here. It goes back to what I said earlier: you can’t improve performance if you aren’t measuring it.

Andy Hayes is the managing director for Travel Online Partners, a travel online marketing firm.  Don’t miss their popular Google analytics ebook to make this most of this free market research!

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Post tags: Andy Hayes, Google Analytics, Travel Online Partners, Web analytics
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Oh, the temptation to wax sarcastic is upon me! Since becoming a successful homepreneur I no longer get to enjoy the scenery of my former 45 minute commute to the office, a stop and go affair that kept my attention riveted to the bumper of the car in front of me or to the signs telling me how long the construction zone would be. And yes, I miss that special moment of being reunited with my child after a long day apart, when picking him up from daycare or the babysitter! Of course, now each day is filled with multiple lovely moments. I could go on for an hour!

Instead, I’ll try to be helpful by pointing out 7 real-life disadvantages of working from home, so you will know all sides of what you are getting into when you make the move to homepreneurship.

1. Home life is full of distractions

Those who find it hardest to make the transition to working at home often talk about the interruptions, the intrusions, and the temptations to turn on the tube instead of getting to work. The keys to overcoming the distraction bug are personal discipline and dedicated scheduling.

• Tune out the home phone.
• Ignore the postman’s knock, unless you are waiting for something important.
• Reject the remote control.
• A sick partner or child should never be a considered a distraction, so when those issues arise, be thankful you can be there to nurse them back to health.
• Schedule a lunch break with children or an afternoon snack. Help them learn to use their time well, too, without being overly dependent on you. If infants and small toddlers are at home, again, be thankful you can be there for them, and learn to schedule work time around their nap/sleep schedule or when your partner is there to take over the parenting tasks.

2. You don’t get paid for sitting around doing nothing

Salaried or hourly in your former position, the pay kept coming whether you were busy, productive, essential to the company’s success, or not. At home, you now get paid only for your productivity. The upside? You experience the deep satisfaction of knowing you truly earned every dime you make. This feeling will become one of the chief highlights of working for yourself.

3. There are no paid days off

Holidays, vacations, or an afternoon playing hooky at the park are all on your dime. Let this reality inspire you to maximize your productivity so that you can create a fund to “pay yourself” for the time off you take. Adopt the following principle, which most in the traditional work force know nothing about: Work extremely hard in order to earn a break – and then enjoy that break to the hilt. If you are a workaholic by nature like I am, this will be a special challenge. But now that I really feel like I’ve earned some time off through sustained, focused work of the highest quality, the feeling of deserving a day at the beach or a week in the mountains is intoxicating. I have never enjoyed my breaks more.

4. Low starting pay

It takes most homepreneurs 3-12 months to reach the level of pay they were receiving, and to move beyond it. And that’s for those who succeed. The rationale is to enjoy the advantages of being at home and weigh the financial offset of spending far less on wardrobe, fuel, parking and car maintenance, daycare, fast food, and in some cases, city or county taxes. Plus, you’ll get a tax deduction for maintaining a home office.

5. Added responsibility

If you don’t want to take personal responsibility for your success, then homepreneurship is probably not for you. But if you want to prove your worth and maximize your potential, there is no better way than to start your own business. Embrace the challenge!

6. Additional expenses

At home there will be no company supplied laptop, or even so much as a free pen. You’ll foot the bill for all you need. Look on the bright side, however. First, much of it can be deducted on taxes, and secondly, you’ll learn to budget to the bone, making the most of what you have which will maximize profitability.

7. Lack of motivation

While many homepreneurs express this problem, I confess I don’t get it, being pretty self-motivated. If you are used to competing with colleagues in the race to exceed sales goals, as a means of motivating your best efforts, learn to compete instead with yourself. Determine to surpass last month’s totals. Aggressively pursue new customers and clients, knowing that even though you can’t see them, there are many others out there competing for that business. Every time you land a contract or even make a small sale, know that you won that battle. Take a moment to celebrate it, and then dive back into the fray, fighting for the next success.

Homepreneurship is not for everyone. But don’t give up on the dream until you have given it your absolute best effort. Be dogged, disciplined, enthusiastic, and smart. The same qualities that allowed you to win while working for someone else will translate into carving a winning business working for yourself … and your family, your future, your dreams!

James Adams is a blogger who works for an online company specialising in ink cartridges. Check out their design blog for more of his writing.

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Post tags: homepreneur, James Adams
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Stories Connect On An Emotional Level

Storytelling For Sustainability

Stories bring an emotional context to the unfamiliar, enabling us to not only process information, but determine if that information should sway us. Truth is, you can’t win anyone over with a superior argument. You need to connect with them on an emotional level.

>> Follow Marc Stoiber

Customer Stories

Online Storytelling Marketing: The New (Old) Way of Delivering Your Brand Message

Every company has a story to tell, they just have to find it. And the best way to find it is to start talking to your customers at a very personal level. Don’t just ask them what they think about your products. Talk to them about themselves and their experiences. Once you get into their psychology, you start getting qualitative information. If you’re a creative person, you’ll come out with a story.

>> Follow Dana Todd

If you would persuade, you must appeal to interest rather than intellect.

- Benjamin Franklin

When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.

- Dale Carnegie

If you are hoping to increase conversions, or you are simply interested in the art of persuasion, consider mastering the art of storytelling.

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Post tags: Benjamin Franklin, Dale Carnegie, Dana Todd, emotional marketing, Marc Stoiber, persuasion, storytelling
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Imagine opening up a store in a mall somewhere, and just when the profits start rolling in, the mall decides to close down forever, but they don’t tell you. In fact, they not only fail to inform you, but they place tons of dynamite around the mall, and completely blow it to smithereens. Your store is gone in a flash, and no matter what you do, you cannot get your store and its inventory back, nor can you get compensated for the loss of any of it.

Does that scenario sound ridiculous? Of course it does. But that’s exactly the risk people take every time they create a new site/blog on a free hosting platform like Blogger or WordPress.com. At any moment, those platforms could decide, on a whim, and for any reason, to delete your site forever. Period. End of story. Buh-bye.

Let’s take a look at a recent example, shall we? Look at Ning’s latest decision to go strictly paid. Everyone who built a community on Ning has two choices now: upgrade to a paid version or lose the community. (See Ning’s Bubble Bursts: No More Free Networks, Cuts 40% Of Staff). Luckily, Ning gave a warning, so at least they didn’t just nuke communities without telling the “owners”, but it’s still a huge blow. Notice how I put “owners” in quotes? That’s because Ning is the owner, not the people who created and grew the communities. That’s the whole point I’m trying to make.

Be The Owner. Be In Control.

If you only want to blog about your cat and your lunch, and you never ever want to turn it into anything more serious or professional, then by all means, take whatever risks you want. But if you intend to build a site or blog that has a chance of earning you income, or that may become popular enough to sell someday, then I urge you to own and host your own site on your own domain. Here are the pros and cons of choosing to self-host a WordPress blog on your own domain, for example, rather than choosing the free option of wordpress.com.

Pros of self-hosting WordPress blogs:

• Credibility: A self-hosted blog on yoursite.com immediately lends more credibility and professionalism to the site than one hosted at yoursite.wordpress.com.
• Affiliate Approval: If you plan to monetize your blog with affiliate ads, you’ll only be approved by some affiliate networks if your site is on its own domain.
• Place Ads: Want to place ads of any sort on your blog? You can do that with your own self-hosted WordPress installation, but not with wordpress.com.
• Don’t Display Ads For Someone Else: You aren’t forced to display ads that makes someone else money (like wordpress.com).
• Unlimited Plugins: Choose from the vast abundance of scripts, widgets, code, and plugins that are available world-wide to enhance your blog, rather than just the few pre-approved ones that wordpress.com allows. Or make your own!
• Unlimited Themes: Choose from the vast abundance of themes that are available world-wide to beautify your blog, rather than just the few pre-approved ones that wordpress.com allows. With a self-hosted blog, you can also get a custom theme created just for you!
• Sell It: When you own your own domain and site, you can sell it any time you want. Imagine building the site into a powerhouse that gets tons of traffic and then selling it for big money. Think you can sell a popular blog hosted on wordpress.com for lots of money? Forget about it. You can’t sell yourblog.wordpress.com for even a penny.
• Move It: When you own your own domain and site, you can easily move it to another host any time you want. (WordPress.com does have an export feature, but the process isn’t as easy, because you’ll need to deal with a new domain name, losing search engine rankings for the old URLs, and redirecting old URLs to new ones to get those rankings back before the next century begins).
• No Dynamite: No worries about a free host suddenly deciding on a whim to delete your site and account. Although all hosts have terms of service rules that you have to comply with, and technically, your site and account can be deleted from your host if you break those rules, you haven’t lost the domain. You can just set up yoursite.com on another host. You can’t do that with yoursite.wordpress.com.

Cons of self-hosting WordPress blogs:

• Maintenance Is On You: You have to maintain it, upgrade it, and deal with anything you might break. This can be scary, I understand that, but it shouldn’t override all the pros listed above.
• Price: It’s not free. But it’s not expensive either.

Don’t Hand Over Control Before You Start

It’s your site. One day, it might even be your livelihood. Don’t give up the control that will make that feasible before you ever even begin. Just don’t do it.

Don’t hate me for repeating myself. Don’t give up control before you ever even begin. Just don’t do it.

Other Useful, Semi-Related Tips For Maintaining Control Over Your Site or Blog

• Don’t ever host your self-hosted blog or site at the same place where you purchased your domain. If you buy your domain from godaddy.com for instance, don’t sign up for one of their hosting plans. Why? Because then you’ll put the control of BOTH your domain name and your site’s content in one company’s hands. Some of the same problems I’ve already discussed would also apply in this situation. Use one company for your domain registrar and a different one for your hosting company to avoid having any one company be able to delete or destroy or steal your entire site (domain name and contents). I recommend Godaddy for domains and Hostgator for hosting because they meet all my needs and satisfy all the recommendations I list below, but feel free to choose whoever you want. Just don’t put all your site eggs in one company’s basket.
• I recommend choosing a host that uses Cpanel. Cpanel is a standard web host administration application and that means there’s plenty of help if you need it. It also means that you can be fairly confident that you’ll be able to access and control pretty much everything necessary in almost any situation imaginable.
• I recommend choosing a host that lets you have SSH access, for both secure access to your files and ease of moving a large site if you ever need to. (Even if you don’t know what SSH is, and never think you’ll use it, it’s good to have the option down the road).
• If you already own a site (like yoursite.com), and want to add a blog to it, install WordPress in a folder of that same domain, such as yoursite.com/blog/. Dont host your blog on a different domain from your site’s current domain. Blogs are great for generating interest and acquiring links, and ideally, you want all that interest and link-love to accumulate at yoursite.com. Although there can be some cases where placing a blog on its own domain might be useful, if you are just starting out and don’t know what those cases might be, then it’s probably not the right thing for you to do. (Remember: this tip only applies to people wanting to add a blog to an already-existing site. If you don’t already own a site, and are starting a new blog, and only a blog, then ignore this tip completely).

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Post tags: Blogger, self-hosted, WordPress, WordPress.com
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I gave some quick tips recently on making a living online, which included: Make a plan, but don’t plan too long. At some point, you just have to jump in and get started. The sooner that is, the better. After you check out the rest of the tips there, it’s useful to see what other experienced folks from ’round the web have to say about getting started. Here are a few:

Ruud Questions: Steve Rubel

Figure out what you want to be known for and how it differs from everyone else out there. Then use online tools to be that man or woman – and don’t veer from your individual strengths and talent. Fuse this into the services you provide and the way you engage online to build your business. There’s no room for generalists anymore. We all need to specialize.

>> Follow Steve Rubel

Gathering Grist For Your Mill

Doing the necessary homework before you start out gives you focus, direction and confidence. Yet many people have no notion about how to begin gathering information. At the beginning stage of the process, you aren’t making permanent decisions, you’re just collecting all the information you can to help you make an informed decision later on.

>> Follow Barbara Winter

How to Start Each Day Motivated

Here’s an unusual piece of business advice: Set yourself on fire every day. The life of an entrepreneur is full of ups and downs. One day things are exciting; the next we have to face a new hassle. On a movie set, the actors would say “It let the air out of our day.” In other words, the fire is out and the passion is gone. But as entrepreneurs, our passion is our responsibility.

>> Follow Sid Kemp

Takeaways: Plan, but not too long; Research; Be passionate.

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Post tags: Barbara Winter, entrepreneur, Sid Kemp, Steve Rubel
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