Archive for January, 2009
Over the month of December I have been writing down different names that I could use for this business and I have finally found one that fits my business and what it represents. It wasn’t easy to find because so many names that looked great were already taken.
What Domain Name To Choose – a dot com?
The first step I did when I was choosing a domain name was to ask myself, what does my business do? Since this is a website for people to learn about how to start, run and succeed in an Internet Business, I made sure the domain name had “InternetBusiness”. This it is a keyword that is commonly used for this particular topic and when other sites link to my site, I have a greater chance of ranking higher in the search engines. You can read more by clicking here: how keywords and SEO work.
The second factor to consider is the length of the domain name. This may not sound so important but when you are distributing print material such as, pamphlets, business cards, brochures or catalogues, you will want to consider making it easy to remember and short enough to make sense. Try to use no more than 5 words for a domain name and no hyphens(-) as it doesn’t come up in search engines that well.
The last factor, which I consider to be the most important is choosing the extension of a domain name. I highly recommend getting a domain name that ends with .com, regardless of which country you are in. The World Wide Web is now a global network of websites and most businesses are doing business all over the World. By limiting your business to your country, you may also be limiting the opportunities that are available. I do recommend considering registering a domain name for your country as well. For example if you are in Australia, you would register .com.au and have that redirected to your .com website as well. That way you will have presence globally and not just in your own country.
Who Do I Buy A Domain Name From?
There are lots of Domain Name Service providers that can help you register your new domain name. Personally I would choose the cheapest one available and consider the one that would offer 2-3 years of domain name registration so you won’t have to worry about this for sometime once it has been setup. Furthermore if you have not purchasing hosting for your site as yet, these companies usually give you a domain name for free when you sign up for the first time. A company that offers this is Hostmonster. You can also read a review about Hostmonster
If you already have a hosting company and you need to register a domain name, I would recommend GoDaddy.com, iPower.com and Crazy Domains. I have used these companies to register additional domain names and they are very easy to setup and good value.
Tyrone Shum
Domain Chaser
I always think it’s fun and exciting to start a new Internet business. I know for me that I would do something that I’m interested and passionate about. Otherwise the new venture doesn’t last for long. As it’s just as important to have passion, motivation and interest, there are a few areas that help me succeed in business.
Promoting Your Internet Business
I would call this the “show me the money” part of the business. Without money or income, there is no business. Therefore it’s important to promote your business and turn your promotional activities into sales. At every opportunity, try to promote your business through passive means: e.g. through your stationary, letterheads, emails, brochures and any other promotional material you may use. Even if it’s just an article you write for a directory, remember to put your website address at the bottom of it. In the past, I made stickers of my logo that I could easily stick on my products. Also I made sure that every email I sent out to a customer had a company logo in it. This all helps with creating the brand for the business.
It’s crucial to develop a marketing plan that will not only sell your products, but also your brand. Here are some other articles I recommend to read to help you promote your Internet business:
Operating Your Business
This is the “lifeblood” of the business and I’m amazed at the amount of businesses that still operate without having good systems in place. An electrician I use from time to time asked me how I maintain my book work and said he doesn’t know how to do it. I was shocked because I’d known him to be trading for over 2 years and he probably doesn’t know how much money is being made in his business or let alone lost. What I am saying is to not be like my Electrician friend and make sure you buy an accounting software to track all your accounts and paperwork. I would suggest hiring a book keeper because it will save you the hassle and time of doing it all yourself. Some good software packages out there that are under $500 like MYOB Accounting and QuickBooks will be more than sufficient when you start out.
Another area that most people forget or get caught out on are getting the appropriate insurances for your business. The most common are public liability insurance, fire, burglary, vehicle and workers compensation insurance. All these can be easily found via a quick search on Google. I would recommend ensuring both public liability and fire insurances are in place before even running your business.
Keeping Pace And Staying Up To Date
This may sound all too overwhelming when you have to promote, operate your business and keep up to date with your industry. Believe me it’s not as hard as it sounds. Take the first step and join a trade association or your local Chamber of Commerce. You will find it both informative and beneficial to your business. To know what is happening in your area and within your industry can help you make better decisions for promoting your product or service. Whether it may be time to change a product line or add more services to your business, you will be keeping up with the industry and making sure you are not missing out on opportunities. Also it’s a great way to network and promote within your trade associations and Chamber of Commerce. Simply write an article to contribute and it can be used as great public relations (P.R) for your business.
Also I emphasise to have a well prepared business plan created before starting your business, because this will be your starting point. A business plan is useful for so many areas for your business from sourcing finance to implementing a growth strategy for the next 5 years. Once it’s written down, it will become a living breathing document that you can update and review over time. I’ve just finished preparing my business plan for this business which took nearly 3 weeks to complete but I can tell you that it is well worth the time and effort to do. Learn how to put your own business plan together and I can guarantee you that you’ll get finance and negotiate business deals much easier.
The Future Of Your Internet Business
Starting your Internet Business is rewarding and if you look into those areas I have mentioned, then you will have a good foundation to running a successful Internet Business. Take action today and know that you deserve to live your dream.
Tyrone Shum
Internet Business Coach
If you’re looking to achieve greater results this year, then it’s a great time to look at the state of your business right now. Start reassessing your goals and look at how to improve your business practices. Make sure you read Plan Or Not To Plan? to understand the importance of planning for your Internet business. Here are 8 ways to increase the success of your business for 2009:
- Write (or revise) Your Business Plan
You may already have a business plan in place, but with the uncertain economy it’s a good idea to revisit your goals and objectives for the next six months, the next year, the next five years. Make your business plan a living document and update it at least quarterly, or even better, every month. It will help you stay on track and more easily adapt to changes in customer demand. Be sure to read Business Plans Are Good, Are They Really? on how I created and updated my business plan for 2009.
- Focus On A Niche
Many people feel that being more general about what they offer makes them more marketable. Often the opposite is true. Most people want to work with a specialist, and one of the best ways to stand out in a crowded market is to be very specific about what you do and who you do it for.
- Increase Your Marketing Relationships
At core marketing means building relationships, being able to speak clearly about the benefits of your offerings, and having conversations with people who might need your products or services. Search the Internet for tips, use Pinpoint to find expert help, and talk to other professionals about the marketing efforts that work best for them.
- Become An Expert In Your Industry
You know you are an expert, but if you write, speak, and network like one people will automatically associate you with your niche. You’ll make a much greater impression as the speaker at an event than simply shaking hands and handing out business cards. And you can further build expert status by writing articles for publication, having your own newsletter, or starting a blog.
- Establish and Follow Up With Business Contacts
You’ve likely collected numerous business cards, but what have you really done with them? Following up is critical to business success. A few tips to keep your company in the front of people’s minds:
- Send individual e-mails recalling specifics of your conversation with an invitation to visit your Web site.
- Invite contacts to periodic open houses to see what you do firsthand.
- Distribute a newsletter or blog that builds your reputation as an expert.
- Promote special offers to pique contact interest in what you offer.
- Stay Competitive And Offer Incentives To Your Customers
Everyone is looking for a deal these days. Whether it’s reducing your prices, offering something free as incentive on your Web site, or providing additional services to customers when they contact you, doing something above just selling your product or service can give you an edge on your competitors.
- Add Value By Providing Great Information
Build customer trust by providing clear, succinct information about your products and services, with emphasis on the benefits to customers and your expertise in meeting their needs. Providing helpful tips on your Web site where appropriate establishes your credibility and helps customers see how what you do can provide value to them.
- Sell Your Benefits And Results
Most people don’t care how you help them reach their goals, as long as you do it with integrity, efficiency, and within their budget. Instead of talking about how you work, be clear about your expertise and the changes people can expect from working with you. Get into the habit of asking clients for testimonials and referrals and consider writing (or hiring someone to write) case studies on successful engagements you’ve had. The most effective promotion comes from satisfied customers.
Tyrone Shum
Success Chaser
There are so many money making opportunities in the world today. By far, trading your time for money is probably the worst money making opportunity I see because if you don’t work, you don’t get paid! In fact, I have not held a job for more than a year and a half as I can’t see why I should earn dollars for the hour. Since quitting full time work, I’ve run numerous businesses and I believe that is how the rich get richer. Some comparisons to why minding your own business is better than working for money:
Reason #1: You get taxed the most as an employee
Once you start earning above a certain income bracket as an employee, the government starts to tax you around 48.5% of your income and I would start asking is this worth it? So if you like to trade the average 50 hours a week to earn $100,000 a year from your job and have a nice chunk paid to the government, then I would say keep your job. But if you are smart and start your own business, doing the same hours and earning the same income in your company, then you will be able to keep more of your money. Even if you earned $100,000 through your company, you are only taxed at a flat rate of 30% after expenses are paid.
Reason #2: Security versus Stability
In my opinion a job nowadays doesn’t necessarily have security, because your employer can make you redundant anytime the business goes through hardship. An example in more recent times can be seen when Australia’s ANZ Bank cut almost 3,000 jobs or nearly 10% of it’s work force. Unfortunately once you are made redundant, your job security is lost and the weekly income is gone, a tough call for stability? In comparison if you had a business that you setup and structured well, you could be living off a stable source of passive income just like many successful Internet Marketers who are earning in excess of $200,000 a year from their businesses.
Reason #3: Fewer Tax Benefits
As an employee not only do you get taxed the most, but you also get fewer tax benefits. As a company you can write off almost everything that you do for the business and claim it with pre-taxed dollars. On the flip side, as an employee you have to pay for your lunches, conferences, buy clothes, buy fuel for your car with after-tax dollars and only do you get to claim these deductions back at the end of the financial year. Doesn’t that seem unfair?
Use Your Time Wisely
Everyday you are limited to 24 hours just like everyone else and no matter how much you earn as an employee your income is caped. Once you stop trading your time for money, your income stops immediately. Even if you are a high paid IT consultant that bills out $1000 an hour you still have a cap, and you are still trading hours for dollars.
There will come a time when you can no longer work either because you become sick, have an accident or are forced to retire. What happens then depends on the decisions you made earlier in life. If you planned well, you’ll have enough to live on without trading hours for dollars. However, statistics shows that the majority doesn’t plan well and will be force to take some kind of social handout – either by the government or family.
If you are currently working for money and not minding your own business, I urge you to take a serious look at your situation. You will see that governments tax more on employees than on companies and it can mean that my company only pays a flat rate of 30% tax on it’s profits and an employee has to pay almost 50% on their wages upfront. There are substantial benefits in minding your own business and I urge you to explore how it can help you become wealthly and have more freedom for yourself.
Tyrone Shum
Business Owner
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Yaro and Gideon has been in the blogging game for a while now, so they know what they’re talking about. For example, Yaro, makes as much as $70,000 per month from his blogging ventures. So, I’m sure you can learn a few things from him.
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I just couldn’t sleep last night having so many ideas running through my head so I decided to stay up writing down my thoughts. I formulated a 2 month plan of how to implement these ideas and I am very proud of what I have laid down as a foundation. So you must be wondering what I wrote down? I can’t quite tell you in detail of what the grand plan is but I will give you details on the strategy I used and how it can be applied to any business.
Brainstorming Your Thoughts On Paper
The first thing I always do when I get ideas is to write them down. I would grab a large sheet of paper, something like the butcher’s paper or A2 size. Then in the middle of the page I would write down the name of my business and then start jotting down my ideas around them. It doesn’t have to be in any sequential order as long as you can get your ideas down on paper and I wouldn’t worry about how neat it is.
Once I have written down all my ideas, I will start to circle the ones that I think would be profitable for the business and then choose and prioritise 5 of the ideas. Why only 5, when I may have like 20+ ideas written down? Most of the time by having too many ideas can be overwhelming so I choose 5 to start researching and doing due diligence on. By taking baby steps it helps me to focus on the tasks leading to the big picture. I will come back to the other ideas once these ideas have been implemented.
Connecting The Ideas To Formulate A Plan
The fun part is now connecting the dots just like the ones you see in a puzzle book. Let me show you how I do it. Once you have the 5 ideas prioritised from 1 to 5 then you are able to use this to start doing your research and gathering the information required to turn your idea into reality. Start with the first one and in my case my first idea was to gather subscribers to the blog and ask them to sign up for my weekly Hot Business tips. Most readers on the Internet don’t just subscribe unless there is an appealing Free gift. Therefore coming up with this eBook that you can get here and giving it away for Free is one of the ways of asking a reader to subscribe. I have spent hours creating this eBook to provide value to my audience and hopefully they will come back to this website because they see the information I offer useful and practical. In turn I can build an audience of subscribers who will be able to take the information I provide for FREE and apply it to their business.
So you ask, where do I get the information to write this eBook and what information to include that will provide value to your audience? The first thing is to know what target market you are speaking to. Then research what they want and write about it with your opinions and your story. Most people don’t want to read about facts but want to relate to your story and how you did it.
Therefore take your first idea and begin researching what you need to turn it into reality and remember to take baby steps to achieve your goal. Once you’ve implemented your first idea then move onto the next one and so forth.
Planning to Win
At the end of the day when you have written down your ideas, prioritised, researched and taken action to turn this idea into reality, we want to see results. In this case we are talking about the bottom line, which is MONEY. So when you do your research you need to definite a clear dollar value of how much the idea will result in. That way you have a set goal allowing you to lay a path of “how to” achieve this result. As in my example of gathering subscribers, I have a goal to introduce 10,000 subscribers by December 2009. Through a group of selected subscribers I will offer an opportunity to be part of my coaching program and this program will generate $100,000. As you can see I have a defined goal from the idea I prioritised and this is how we plan to win!
Tyrone Shum
Strategising To Win
Since your new website is your marketing tool for your business it’s going to be crucial to be listed on search engines. In the past when I have setup new websites I have used 8 methods to get them listed on search engines fast and as high as possible. Though, we first need to understand how Search Engines work and how we can maximise our efforts to rank up high.
How Do Search Engines Work?
Search Engines have two elements that make them work.
1. The Index
Simply, the index of a search engine is a giant catalogue containing a copy of every web page and file that the spider finds. If a web page changes, this catalogue is updated with the new information. To give you an idea of the size of these indexes, Google has over 8 billion pages.
It sometimes takes a while for new pages or changes that the spider finds to be added to its index. Thus, a web page may have been “spidered” but not yet “indexed.” Until a page is indexed – added to the index – spidered pages will not be available to those searching with the search engine.
2. The Search Engine Spider
This is also called a web crawler or robot. A search engine spider is an automated program that reads web pages and follows any links to other pages within the site. This is often referred to as a site being “spidered” or “crawled”. There are three very active spiders on the Net. Their names are Googlebot (Google), Slurp (Yahoo!) and MSNBot (MSN Search).
Spiders start their journeys with a list of page URLs that have previously been added to their index (database). As it visits these pages, crawling the code and copy, it adds new pages (links) that it finds on the page to its index.
The spider returns to the sites in its index on a regular basis, scanning for any changes. How often the spider returns is up to the search engines to decide. Webmasters do have some control in how often a spider visits their site by making use of a robot.txt file. Search engines first look for this file before crawling a page further.
The Search Engine
Most people have heard of Google, Yahoo and MSN. As these are the dominate search engine providers on the Internet today most websites look at being listed on their indexes. Therefore it is crucial for a new website to let “The search engine spiders” know they exist. Here are the 8 ways to get your new website listed:
1. Search Engine Optimization
I highly recommend setting this as your first priority to do. The reason is, once you get listed onto a search engine – particularly Google, you will find increasing amounts of traffic to your new website.
Since search engine optimization is a very large area for discussion I have created another post about search engine optimization.
2. Google Sitemaps
Simply by creating a sitemap that tells Google to crawl your website will enhance the chances of listing higher in Google searches. Google has written a very comprehensive manual to show savvy webmasters how to communicate with Google through their Webmaster sitemap submission system
Something interesting I discovered with my own website: if you know how to create Cron Jobs and have it automatically run it on a daily basis to tell a search engine to crawl your site, you will have a greater chance at getting to the top of a search.
3. Manual Submission
Once you have optimized your site using keywords related to your website, the next stage is to submit your site to the various search engines. I don’t believe it’s necessary to submit your website to all the search engines on the Internet, but I do recommend submitting to the top three: Google Add URL, Yahoo and Bing. Each of these search engines provide a submission page to let you submit their websites.
One last tip about manual submission, I wouldn’t recommend anyone pay a company to submit your website. Personally I think they are a waste of money because there are no proven results that they work and get your website ranked higher.
4. Submit Your Site To Directories
Another good place to start is with web directories. The two biggest by far are Yahoo Directory and the Open Directory.
There are plenty of other directories you should consider as well. To find them run a search for ‘web directory’ on your favourite search engine. The directories that come up highest in the search rankings will probably generate the most traffic. You can also check these directories of directories:
5. Comment In Blogs, Forums, Bulletin Boards And Newsgroups
A great way to get your website listed on the search engine is to provide comments on other sites with your website at the end of your comment. NOTE: The idea is to provide something of value to another site, not just putting your website there as that is considered SPAM.
6. Linking To Other Sites And Ask For A Link In Return.
There are three ways you can find websites that might want to link to you.
- Go to your favourite search engine and type in some words related to what your website is about.
- Sift through the websites in directories such as Yahoo Directory or the Open Directory
- Find out who’s currently linking to both you and your competitors, check who’s linking to them, and who’s linking to them, and so on (To see a list of the inbound links to a website go to Google and type in link:http://www.URL.com) – replace URL with your own website name.
Now that you’ve found these websites, ask them to link to you. A quick phone call or e-mail will help. And remember, always mention that linking to your website will benefit their site users and therefore their website. You could also offer a link exchange, where by you both link to each other. If you’re going to do this, it’s wise to link to their website first, before getting in contact.
7. Press Release Distribution
This is one of the most cost effective way to distribute your website in the marketplace. PRWeb.com is a great place to promote your website.
Tyrone Shum
SEO Tipster
Most people start a brand new year with a resolution to what they want to accomplish for that year. For me it’s a new year, with a new lifestyle and a new business venture. Over the last 12 months I’ve been consolidating all the different ventures I have dabbled in and streamlined the systems so that I could take myself away from running businesses and spend more time working on them instead.
For 2009, my goals are:
- To teach others how I have successfully run Internet Businesses.
- To work only 4 days a week and take one day off to purse my hobbies.
- To monetise InternetBusinessPath.com so it will generate $200,000 per year from multiple revenues.
- To offer valuable content about Internet Business, Entrepreneurship and Making Money Online to my customers and readers.
- Increase the readership of this website to 10,000 subscribers by the end of 2009.
In 2009, I will look forward to working with like-minded people who want to also succeed at creating a profitable Internet Businesses.
My name is Tyrone Shum and I'm on a journey to outsource and automate my business to allow me to work only 12 hours a week. On this website I share with you my outsourcing strategies to achieve this goal and I have a passion to teach others about what I do. Read more 