So you think you have come up with a winning business idea. Do you find yourself telling anyone who will listen about the merits of your product? I’m sure you are already dreaming about that big day when you can quit your day job. But are you ready to go it alone?
Coming up with new business ideas is easy. But the hard work that follows can stop budding entrepreneurs in their tracks. You actually have to start taking action and get the ball rolling with your business idea – dreaming about it doesn’t count! So it’s time to conduct a little market research for your online business. Read More
When it comes to owning a successful small business, one of the hardest things proprietors face is dealing with all work that comes with wearing all the hats. As a sole proprietor or even in a partnership, it can be very difficult for business owners to relinquish any control, especially to someone they have never met.
Since they have been doing all of the work successfully for a period of time, there doesn’t seem to be much logic in changing things if they are working. As the old adage says, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But as a smart business person, knowing when and what to outsource is the key to handling it all. If you have never considered outsourcing work to anyone before, you might want to keep your entrepreneurial mind open to the possibilities. Read More
As entrepreneurs, we come across a lot of folks who poke holes in our ideas. We hear a lot of “No – this won’t work.”
So when should we go full steam ahead with our idea even after hearing all the negativity—and when should we pause and evaluate the idea? The answer depends on who the naysayers are.
Read More
The idea of ‘filler’ content is nothing new in publishing. Magazines, newspapers, even TV has filler, it’s the stuff that bulks up and fills out your editorial calendar. But online, filler content has the potential for a whole lot more than just plugging gaps, and it all rests on search traffic.
For most online publishers, search traffic makes up a reasonably large bread and butter base of visitors. On our Envato blogs, for example, search traffic generally makes up about 20-30% of visits. That’s a pretty substantial amount of traffic for us, but for some publishing sites those are some really low numbers.
You see there is a way to grow search traffic that has nothing to do with tinkering with the keywords on your articles, or even building link-backs. Instead it’s about publishing masses and masses of content, and that’s where filler content is taken to a whole new level.
Read More
A useful classification of online startups is to put them in two groups: Scale-First and Monetize-First. The first type is all about getting as big as possible, as fast as possible and then figuring out how to make money from the market. This Scale-First approach requires an often significant amount of capital to fund until either monetization or acquisition occurs. The other is about producing income as fast as possible and then using that cash flow to grow larger. This Monetize-First approach tends to be slower but comes with far less risk.
In his post Are you a Seesmic or Balsamiq Entrepreneur, blogger Jeremy Chone gives a good roundup of the pros and cons of both these approaches, using two well known startups as examples of each. Of course a brilliant example of the Scale-First approach is Google, who for a long time had a big question mark hanging over them regarding their business model. If you flip back to December 2000, you’ll find BusinessWeek published an article that literally had the words “But how will Google ever make money?”
Personally I fall most definitely in the Monetize-First camp. I like a business to be self-sustaining as soon as possible, and that means you need to have a clear plan from the out-set about how to actually make money. In startup literature this is called a business model and this post is all about finding one! Read More
