Archive for September, 2009
Blog Post – Automating your money for small businesses and Entrepreneurs
Posted by Admin in Advice for Small Businesses on September 29, 2009
This blog post is taken from Ramit Sethi of “IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com”
http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/automating-money-for-small-business/
In this blog post, Ramit gives a straightforward and simple way to deal with the issue of irregular payments you might receive as the owner of a small business or as a freelancer.
When you have a “regular” job, then you are likely to get paid on a regular basis, and it is a much simpler issue to sort out your finances for regular bill payments etc.
However, when you are a freelancer, or you run a small business, then your payments received might not be so regular. Instead, you may receive varying payments at irregular intervals.
Ramit’s solution is very straightforward.
Simply pay all your payments into one account as and when they occur, then withdraw some money into another account on a regular basis. This mimics the process of receiving a monthly salary. This way, from the second account, you can make sure all your bills are being met and you are contributing to your savings accounts etc.
This helps to balance out the big financial irregularities that can occur with the self-employed or freelance life, and helps you to live a financially stable life anyway.
So what do you think about this? Perhaps you have already been doing this. Perhaps you learned this lesson the hard way, as I did. Please share your stories or ideas below to help out our other readers!
Blog Post Analysis – The myth of the Great Idea
Posted by Admin in Advice for Small Businesses on September 29, 2009
Analysing Blog Post: http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/the-myth-of-the-great-idea/
This is a blog post written by Ramit Sethi, of IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com
This post is very helpful reading for anyone who does not already have a business, but is thinking of setting up a business, and is possibly thinking of different ideas.
The basic idea is that for success, you do not necessarily need “A Great Idea”. What you need is a simple idea, executed well.
Ramit makes the point that many would-be business people spend lots of time thinking of a perfect business idea. He encourages his readers to take action on the few ideas that they can think of. And then, he gives a few tips to hone these ideas by listing what, you might like to do or what you would definitely not like to do within a specific business industry. From that, you can keep narrowing down your options until you have a few ideas that you could try out.
In all, I think this advice is very powerful. So if you’ve been saying that you want to run a business, now is the time to go for it – but please remember that “the doing” is more important than endless thinking!
So please let us know what you think about this. Have you been searching long and hard for an elusive “Great Idea”? Or do you instead have a history of getting going, and trying out ideas? How have you found that excellent ideas have come to you just because you decided to give something a go? Please let us know!
New Newsletter!
Posted by Admin in Great Sites on September 28, 2009
At Great Sites, we are very happy to have installed a new free newsletter. This will enable you to keep up with our latest blog posts, the latest businesses that we have reviewed, and new exciting Joomla extensions that we have reviewed.
There is a question that we would like you our readers to answer though – how often should we send out this newsletter?
I had thought that around once a week would be fine. However, I then myself signed up with another newsletter and they seem to send out emails at least daily, if not more often. So please let me know what you think. Would you like to receive newsletters more often? How often would be enough? This way the emails could be more targetted as they would not need to cover so much information. This would also mean that you are more likely to be able to benefit from the special offers that we are planning to run, which would be first come first served.
Or – would you prefer the once weekly model – please let us know, so that this could shape our service to you – please leave your comments below.
If it does happen that you feel you are receiving too many emails from us, then why not consider setting up a special “Great Sites” filter in your email inbox? This way, you can scan over the received emails whenever you wish, without them filling up your inbox… 
Why all our business advice is coming from blogs about being bloggers
Posted by Admin in Advice for Small Businesses on September 26, 2009
Now, our blog is quite new, however you may have noticed a trend already – which is that our “Small Business Advice” blog posts that we analyse have come from blogs about being successful bloggers. Now this is a trend that I can only imagine will continue. There are very simple and powerful reasons for this:
Writing blogs is a big business
Writing blogs online is a big and fast-growing business. The ease of attracting lots of potential customers from all over the world and communicating with them all quickly and inexpensively through email combined with the increasing technological advances in web development make this an attractive way of “being your own boss”, usually from the comfort of your own home. Even when combined with a traditional offline business, it has been shown that a regular and well maintained blog greatly contributes to the success of your company
Showing people how to blog is a big business
Because of this, there is also a growing industry in showing people just how to more efficiently market their blog, or how to make more money from their blog.
We deal with fulltime blogging professionals
So these people whose blogs we link to are full time professionals, doing this, this is their job to think of excellent ideas and communicate them to others about business success – it is how they make their living. All these things make their posts accessible to us when we are trying to share business advice with you.
Golden blog posts
This is different from when someone occasionally posts an idea that they have about a business idea, or when a blog on another field covers this topic as a once-off. Because these “pro-bloggers” depend wholly on this, then their content has to be excellent and has to remain excellent, otherwise they will lose their customer base to better “pro-bloggers”. Pro-bloggers spend a lot of time researching and analysing excellent business advice, and considering how to apply it easily, for the sake of their eagerly waiting audience. This is why I can be confident that a top pro-blogger will produce golden and easily useable advice, and this is why I highly recommend it to you to check out their offerings for yourselves, to find the gold in their posts for yourselves. Very often the principles can successfully be applied to offline businesses as well as online ones.
Our little secret!
So our secret is out! What do you think of this? Are there any other online sources that you have found to be consistently good sources of information for small businesses? Please let us know, so that we can share them with our own readers! If there is any specific blog post that you have found useful, please post the details in a comment below. Please also leave a comment to let us know what you think of this blog post.
Blog Post Analysis – How to not suck at business blogging (Or how to ethically and successfully sell your services for any business)
Posted by Admin in Advice for Small Businesses on September 26, 2009
Blog Post Analysis – How to not suck at Business Blogging by Christian Russell at Next Level Blogger – http://www.nextlevelblogger.com
This post is actually written by the same individual who wrote the article “10 smartest things to do to promote your new blog” (it was written as a guest post for DavidRisley.com) which we have previously reviewed in this blog. I highly recommend having a click around his posts – there are lots of strong and valid points listed there.
A fantastic post!
Now this post is fantastic. Once again, it refers to blogging, as Christian is a blogger. However, in my opinion, the correct title of this post should be “How to not suck at being a salesperson” (sorry Christian, if you’re reading this!)
We are all salespeople – whether we like it or not!
Basically, the summary of his post is that we are ALL salespeople, and the way we make sales is by genuinely filling a need. If this is true of everyone, then this is going to be even more true of those of us who run businesses. Now for those of you who don’t run businesses, you are still a salesperson in the sense of getting people to “buy” your services off you – in terms of looking for a job, asking for a raise at work, even selling yourself as an excellent relationship prospect…we all have skills etc that we need to convince other people to invest in.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I hate the thought of being a salesperson. It makes me shiver to have to think of forcibly converting leads into actual sales, or having to force customers to do what they don’t want to do. Now the way Christian addresses this is very straightforward.
Offer a genuinely good deal
To summarise, make sure that what you are offering customers is genuinely a good deal, and what they need; make yourself available to help the customers and show excellent customer service, and let the customers decide what is best for them. At no point do you need to force a customer into a sale – simply show them simply and honestly how your service fulfills their needs, and then let them choose whether to go ahead or not. And if your service that you are offering is an excellent service at a reasonable price that fulfills a true need, then it will sell. The better you are at showing how it will fulfill a need, the better it will sell, and the happier your customers will be with you.
Everyone has legitimate needs – be the one to fill them!
The point Christian makes is that everyone has legitimate needs that they are looking to fulfill. Demonstrate to your customer how you can fulfill that need, then let them make the choice. Obviously, trying to force them into a decision is more likely to make them run away. Something else that strikes me as I write this is that I always thought that you could be one of 2 extremes – either insistent, as in the typical stereotype of “Sales”, or totally shy, and refuse to even discuss what your business offers. Now I see that there is a 3rd alternative, where everyone benefits, where you tailor your business to genuinely fill people’s legitimate needs, and you communicate this in a way that encourages the customer to trust in you and your business.
How we at Great Sites are going to use this:
I am happy to say that at Great Sites this thinking is already built into our company structure. We build our company around offering a service to our customers that we believe you greatly value – finding and analysing excellent blog posts online, as well as giving you the chance to promote your businesses on here, and giving advice about your websites etc.
Is there anything that we are missing?
Is there anything we are missing? If there is any part of our offering as a company that is unclear to you, or where we are failing to excel at giving a fantastic service, then please know that we rely on you to tell us. We want to be the best that we can be for you.
So what do you think of this article? How has it challenged your views about selling? How are you going to change your attitude to your business, if at all? Please give your comments below