A New Series on Business Startups — Part 7

As well as considering how to start a business in various parts of the world, we will also be inserting in this series ideas for unusual businesses that you may not have thought of. For example, what about a business that runs itself with little input from yourself? Impossible? No, not on the internet.

How to create that online money-spinner that works automatically, even when you sleep, is a question often asked. One solution — rather an oldish one — is affiliate marketing.

Essentially, this is signing up as an affiliate with websites selling products or services off the sites. When anyone clicks over from your site, a “cookie” (a little scrap of software identifying you) registers on their site and persists for a set number of days, often 30. Anytime they go back and buy something within that period, you will be entitled to a percentage of the price paid. This may vary from 4 percent on the Amazon Associates scheme, to a bumper 50pc for selling an eproduct, like an ebook or ecourse.

Quite often you’ll find an “Affiliates” link in the footer on retail and other websites. An alternative is to use a mass affiliation scheme like Commission Junction or Tradedoubler, where you can choose from a large range of schemes from crafts to credit cards.

So long as the product or service matches the subject of your site, you should be able to make a start.

Many of the early Internet marketers started out on affiliate schemes. Some became millionaires quite quickly, by first making a success of what they did, then selling their own ebooks on how they did it.

The secret is to presell the product on your site before the client clicks through to the seller’s site. That way they are much more inclined to buy.

From there, it’s a numbers game. The more traffic your site generates, the more likely you are to get sales. That early lesson made serious affiliate marketers become experts in SEO — search-engine optimization — whereby the site figures prominently in Google and other search results for certain keywords.

An understanding of the keywords searched for for each product is also necessary to do well from this process. There are keyword aids available free on the net.

Affiliate marketing can be tough if you go about it the wrong way. But with hard work and a shrewd eye for a chance, you could do very well at it.

SEO
People make whole careers out of advising on how to get websites to feature prominently on search engines such as Google. The process is called search engine optimization, but it doesn’t need to be complicated.

Duncan Jennings started his first website when he was 17. At 24, now owns www.econversions.com. He says :

“All websites want to appear at the top of the list when someone searches on Google. In response to a search, Google will take all the websites that are relevant and rank them according to the number and quality of other sites that have linked to them. If you can get links to your site on lots of others, you will be ranked higher and you will get more traffic. It builds from there.”

If you want a business that costs next to nothing and will run itself once you put it in place, affiliate marketing is a good one to consider.

You can also combine it with onsite advertising, like Google’s Adsense, to add value to your site’s content.

A New Series on Business Startups — Part 6

A new study shows that a great deal of time is wasted at meetings, mainly through faulty procedures, but also because many are not necessary in the first place. Add on travel time and overnight stays and it becomes essential to control the number and length of meetings you attend.

Entrepreneurs setting up a new business will find themselves attending more meetings and interviews than they deem necessary for their purpose. Similarly, small business owners are frequently asked to attend, or even chair, formal meetings. A brief summary of the rules governing business meetings will be useful here.

The chairman, or chair, is the ruling authority at any meeting. It falls to him/her to make the initial arrangements and to draw up an agenda. The main considerations will be:

* Is the meeting absolutely necessary?
* Who needs to come?
* Are they all available on the proposed date?
* What is the precise subject to be discussed?
* What will it achieve?
* At what times will it start and finish?
* Where will it be held?
* What information is required in advance?
* Are any other facilities needed, i.e. projectors, lunch etc.

The next step is to draw up an agenda. This will consider any topics that the attendees wish to raise. It will also contain:

* Place, time and date of meeting.
* Subject, or subjects, to be considered.
* Subject order for discussion.
* Other points of interest.

The agenda should be distributed in advance to all the proposed attendees at the appropriate time, i.e. neither too early, nor too late. The ideal time for distribution is not so far in advance of the gathering that the people may forget, and yet giving them sufficient time to assimilate any brief and do all the necessary homework. At the meeting the chairman will:

* Start on time unless there are pressing reasons against it.
* Introduce newcomers.
* State the purpose and aims of the meeting.
* Follow the agenda as written.
* Let the meeting flow if progress is being made.
* Sum up the arguments if they are being lost.
* Pass on to the next item if the meeting is getting bogged down.
* Not allow drama queens to dominate the discussion.
* Conclude the meeting on time if possible.

Meetings are useful in that they get people together face to face. Prevarications can be quickly worn down. Misconceptions, or areas not well defined, can be discussed, and conclusions agreed there and then. On the other hand, a badly handled or mistimed meeting may just be a waste of everyone’s time and effort.

Readers of Small Business Booster may be interested in a piece over on Syntagma taking up Timothy Ferriss’s idea of a “low information diet” to boost personal productivity and quality of output :

The problem is, information makes us feel important, connected, in league with “where it’s at”. If we don’t get any, we’re sure to look inadequate at the XYZ Conference. We never stop to think that the XYZ Conference is just another vehicle for more useless information, as is that so-vital podcast, video hookup or blog post (present post excepted because of its essential nature).

Ferriss’s chapter with the same title as this post is the best eight-page sequence in his book. Alone it will change your life. If you’re a Techmeme groupie or a news junkie — as I used to be — read it and learn about “selective ignorance” and the trial one-week media fast.

Read the whole article here.

More than half of small business owners think that their enterprises are harder to run than three years ago, according to a survey commisioned by T-Mobile.

A third believed customers, suppliers, and even co-workers now demand faster response times. This has increased the pressure on smaller businesses, which often have fewer resources than larger outfits.

Dead time, defined as time wasted by travel and meetings, cost small concerns around $120,000 (£60,000) a year.

Head of T-Mobile’s business marketing said, “The rise of the internet has given rise to a ‘want it now’ culture — customers expect an immediate response to every inquiry. This is forcing smaller firms to operate in a different way and use all the tools at their disposal to be more productive and efficient”.

Small Business Booster suggests a careful reading of : Take a Nap! Change Your Life by Dr Sara Mednick, previously reviewed.