Are you thinking of starting your own business? Do you have a great product / service that you are thinking about bringing to the marketplace? If so, then you should follow the tips below for starting a business – these will establish some solid practises and give you ideas about how to drive your business forward:
- Work on Something you are Passionate About - work takes up a considerable portion of our time and so therefore has a considerable influence on our state of well-being and happiness. It is fair to say that if you are miserable in a job this will also adversely affect other areas of your life. Thankfully the opposite is true. If you are starting a business venture ensure to chose a subject you are genuinely passionate about. This will ensure your drive to succeed does not waiver over time and you will put 100% effort into your work. The odds on your business succeeding are ten fold when you work on something you are passionate about. Furthermore, this will have a positive influence on all other areas of your life.
- Know your Budget and Keep Spending Under Control - know precisely how much of a budget you are working with and also have a good knowledge of your likely costs. You should try to avoid all non-necessary spending until you have established an income. While you will encounter unavoidable spending, avoid frivolous spending completely. Not only will this greatly improve the chances of your business succeeding but will also lower the risks and consequences should your business fail, or take longer than expected to get established.
- Research your Market - there is absolutely no point in creating a product or service that there is no demand for. If you have a product or service in mind for your business complete thorough research of the intended market. Research the Internet, analyse competitors, get advice from experts in the field and leave no stone unturned in your research. If you decide that the demand for your product or service is poor then you have saved yourself a lot of time, money, effort and heartache further down the line. If you divide that the demand is good then you can proceed with your business plan with renewed vigour, happy in the knowledge that your business has a fighting chance.
- Do Not Overextend Yourself - the is a great old say that goes something like, “you can please some of the people some of the time, more of the people more of the time, but can never please all of the people all of the time”. No matter how great the level of expertise and effort you will not appeal to or please everyone. Focus your efforts on your target market and existing customers / subscribers etc. For example, if you are a computer technician with expertise in computer software – instead of attempting to cover all areas of computing, focus purely on the computer software niche and gain a solid reputation in this area.
- Learn from Mistakes – the man who never made a mistake never made anything. You are going to make mistakes – the success of your business will depend on how you react to these mistakes and the lessons you learn from them. At the end of each working week set aside some time to analyse what you have done well in the previous week, what has worked well, what has not worked well, what you could do differently, how you could improve etc. Try to foresee the challenges you will face in the coming week and identify how you intend to deal with them.
- Develop a Detailed Contingency Plan – all businesses go through rough periods and unavoidable expense can pop up at any time. Try to forecast potential risks to your business such as currency fluctuations, legislation changes etc. Develop a thorough and detailed contingency plan to lower the risks to your business and lower the impact of threats. Above all, always keep an eye open for signs of trouble and always react early to warning signs.
- Develop a Marketing Plan - a this point you now know your niche and target market. The next step is to develop a marketing plan that will convince existing customers to buy more from you and entice new customers to your business. An effective marketing plan will keep your business in the forefront of customers minds and keep them updated of your latest products / services, special offers, sales etc.
The decision to venture into a new business is one of the biggest decisions you will make in your life. By now you have already weighed up the risks and benefits and decided to venture forward. I hope by reading these handy tips some important areas and issues have been highlighted to you and you are now in a better place going forward.
Good luck! Let me know how you get on!
So by now we know the vital role link building plays in determining how high (or low) your website appears in search engine results pages. A popular link building method is to post comments on blogs that allow a link back to your website. However, not all links on blogs are worthwhile and can be split down into two categories:
The “nofollow” Attribute – when the nofollow value is added to the rel tag of a link it is advising search engines that the link has not been explicitly approved and therefore should not be followed. The HTML format of the link is as follows: <a href=”http://www.myadsenseguide.com” rel=”nofollow”>My AdSense Guide</a> – it is important you can recognise these links when you see them.
The “dofollow” Attribute – when the dofollow value is added to the rel tag of a link it is advising search engines that the link is trusted by your website. dofollow blog links help promote a website and help build the reputation of the website. The default rel value is dofollow so therefore if the tag is not specifically valued as nofollow it is considered dofollow by all search engines.
So now to the key piece of this article – how to find dofollow blogs and get vital links to your website. FireFox have a tidy plugin called “NoDofollow” and is available for free download @ NoDoFollow Plugin. This is a simple plugin that highlights links in a page that have been explicitly set to nofollow.
Once this plugin has been successfully installed we need to find specific blogs using Google that are in the same field of expertise as your website. To find such blogs type the following simple search into Google:
blog keyword (keyword is your field of expertise) notify me when new comments
So for example I am running a football blog I would execute the following search:
blog football notify me when new comments
This will return a complete list of football blogs that allow comments to be added. We are half way there, now we need to weed out the nofollow blogs. This is where the “NoDofollow” FireFox plugin comes into play. When you open each blog in the search engine results page the plugin will identify which blogs you should comment on and which you are wasting your time with. This is highlighted as follows:
Red Links – this is a nofollow blog. You are wasting your time adding a comment / link here. Move on.
Blue Links – dofollow link – ensure to post a comment here. Ensure the comment is worthwhile to ensure the webmaster will allow your comment to be published.
You should now have found a good list of dofollow blogs. The final check to ensure completeness is to ensure the blog is active i.e the article you are commenting on is no older than six months and has also been commented on recently.
You are now well on your way to building hundreds of worthwhile links and improving the competitiveness of your website. Good work!
Creating effective and exciting headlines is a sure way to attract visitors to your website or blog. Headlines that sell will interest readers and help differentiate your blog from the countless others online. Here are some great examples:
- Who Else Wants ?????????
- The Secret of ?????????
- Here is a Method That is Helping ????????? to ?????????
- Little Known Ways to ?????????
- Get Rid of ????????? Once and For All
Get the idea? Don’t you think these headlines will help your articles stick out above the competition? Why not try posting a new article with an exciting headline and see how it competes compared to some of your older articles. Let me know how you get on!
I posted about using Yahoo Answers for free niche content in a previous post but didn’t go into much detail.
As you’ll probably already know, Yahoo Answers is a community site where people ask and answer questions. The site itself is very popular, has a Google Page Rank of 7 and pages are featured in the yahoo search engine.
Although many people have found the quality of answers in Yahoo to be lower than other sites, I still use it for free content and traffic. Before I show you my method, here’s a comment from alexa reviews on Yahoo Answers that I found amusing:
“I’ve been to a lot of QA sites, and this one is by far the worst. It’s mostly comprised of teenagers engaging in popularity contests, and people that hate everything that moves besides themselves, harassing everyone they can. You will seldom find a serious question here, and you will even more seldom find a serious answer to a serious question. It seems most folks are there to make points, not answer questions. On the up side, the format is good, and the interface is easy to get a grasp on, but with all of that ease, there are no serious questions to be found.”
Despite the above comment, there ARE some good answers on the site (for example, Health related topics). Getting content from Yahoo Answers is easy. Just search for the niche you want info on then copy and paste the best answer to edit and place on your site. Simple.
You can also use your site to get targetted traffic from Yahoo Answers because getting your link on there is also pretty easy. There are two ways to do this, the first way is to search and answer questions by other people and the other is to make 2 accounts and ask and answer your own question.
If you are searching for other people’s questions, you’ll need to use the advanced search feature to search for open questions because you will not be able to post on resolved ones.
However, some naughty people open 2 accounts to answer their own questions. The reason for this is that when someone searches for your keyword on yahoo answers, your answer will be on the first page of results which means more traffic.
These people would:
- Make 2 accounts Yahoo Accounts
- Ask a question (and sure their keyword is in their title and body)
- Answer their own question with an in-depth and relevant answer
- Include their link as the source
- Wait 24hrs then choose their own answer as the best answer.
There’s actually a quick and easy way to get your new blog / websites indexed into search engines with high PR backlinks which will generate you an abundance of free web traffic.
I’m not talking about “social bookmarking” or “Tag and Ping” (although they are also effective). This method is simple and if you’re not already doing it, you should be.
Writing articles is a free method of generating hundreds of backlinks to your site which will get your new site indexed into all search engines super-fast. All you need to do is write a good quality article and then put a link to your site in the author’s resource box.
After you submit your articles to article directories, publishers will begin picking up your article and start publishing them on their site (with your link). Their visitors will see your link and go to your site. You’ll get a ton of free traffic and make some money in the process (adsense and affiliate products?).
I’ve been writing and submitting articles for new sites and the results have been great. My sites get indexed quickly and I get some good traffic which allows to dominate low competition niches 
Here are my tips for article writing:
- Write quality content related to your site
- Make sure your article has a good headline and include keyword in headline
- Include 2 links to your site in the author’s resource box
- The first link should be linked with anchor text that you are trying to rank for in search engines. For example, You have a flower arranging site, so you’re first anchor link text should be “flower arranging” because this is what people will type into search engines to find your site.
- Your second link should be your website address. The reason for this is because anchor text variation is good for SEO as it makes your links look more natural.
Your author’s resource box could look something like:
“To learn more about Flower Arranging (link this text), visit John Smiths site: http://www.FlowerArrangingTips.com “
The only disadvantage of submitting articles is that after you’ve written them, you have to go to article directories and submit them all individually. Some people would rather avoid this monotonous task (me too).
The way I submit articles is by using an article distribution service. Article Marketer is an article distribution service that will distribute your articles automatically to over 42,087 people in 528 article announcement directories and forums. All I do is write and submit my article once!
