YoungEntrepreneur.com: It’s virtually impossible to own a business today and not have a website – but what makes a great website? For today’s Entrepreneur University we connected with Tim Knox. Tim is the founder and president of four successful technology companies and serves as an investor, mentor and advisor to many companies in his home town of Huntsville, Alabama. Here are Tim’s suggestions for how to build a great website:
Building an effective business website is a simple matter of definition.
Before the first graphic is drawn or the first line of code is written, you must define the website’s budget, purpose, target audience, design, navigation, and content. And when that’s all said and done you must define the marketing that will bring visitors to your site.
The 8 Things You Must Know To Build A Great Website [YoungEntrepreneur.com]
Month: October 2007
I advised preparing to be able to work from home. This is not because I think you are going to be thrown out of a job immediately. But one day you may be. Or you may decide that your future will be better secured and more under your control if you take the plunge and go solo. If your home routine has already been modified to allow you to have time and space to work, that will be one shock less for the family to have to cope with. It will also have given you some experience of doing so and of what the problems are.
But there’s another reason why being prepared to undertake work at home is valuable. Full-time regular jobs will continue, of course, but there will be many more ‘portfolio’ workers, people who have several jobs at the same time. Every consultant has been doing it for years. Many more of us are ‘consultants’ now; even more will be in the future.
A portfolio of jobs may seem strange to those used to working for a large company that demands more than full-time attention. In fact, until the arrival of the MNC and the big international conglomerate, it was quite common. In parts of the world over 90% of the workforce have portfolios of jobs even if they don’t always describe them that way.
Will portfolios consist of a number of identical jobs? Probably not. There will be common characteristics, of course, especially the required qualifications and training, but too much similarity can lead to a conflict of interests. So there will be experts who span several aspects of the subject on which they advise. For example, builders will do more of their own design and, for simpler and smaller jobs, rely less on architects. Financial Advisers will become more ‘hands on’ managers of their clients’ portfolios. General Practitioners are already conducting minor operations in their clinics. Chemists will, in addition to having a Pharmacist on duty, employ a part-time GP for ‘instant’ consultations. Trainers will be prepared to train in a number of areas, not just the one for which they are well known.
The portfolio life will consist of much more project work – you will take on the job of getting something up and running, after which you will go on to another project. Many will combine academic work with actual operations, achieving a better balance between the theoretical and the practical.
To get a flavour of how dramatic the changes may be, think of the old grocery shop fifty years ago; only a limited range of products, counter service, delivery, specialist butchers, greengrocers, fishmongers. That today is the supermarket, selling everything from carrots to cars.
It is very important that you prepare yourself to take on portfolio work. To do so you should undertake a thorough personal SWOT analysis. I prefer the PASDAQ analysis*. It seeks to establish your interests as well as your abilities and when planning a career change or job move is much more successful at getting the right fit.
Equipped with a clear idea of not only what you can do but what you want to do – and what you need to do financially – you are already half way to a happier, more varied and more financially rewarding life.
John Bittleston blogs at TerrificMentors.com, a site that provides mentoring for those who wish a change in career or job, wanting to start a business or looking to improve their handling of people (including themselves).
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Main Customer Focus
Entrepreneur: It’s both a problem and a blessing: You have one or two very large accounts that make up the bulk of your business. According to what you may have been told, such a concentration is very risky; you should never put all your eggs in one basket.
Or should you?
Most experts would advise you to get more accounts, reducing your concentration of business. But your major accounts will likely grow at a faster pace than your new ones. The concentration will remain–and thus you will remain vulnerable.
There’s nothing wrong with trying to grow other business. But I’d like to suggest a different approach. Instead of reducing your business concentration, consider providing services outside your core business or activity. In doing so, you’ll add value to your account.
With that in mind, ask yourself: Do I know all the key players involved in my main account? If not, get to know all the departments and personnel involved in the account.
Why Your Customer Count May Not Matter [Entrepreneur]
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Selling an Unknown
Business Advice Pro: Entrepreneurs spend days, weeks, months in order to come up with new products which, very often, might not even sell. But what if you could see its selling power before you create the product?
This would mean you don’t spend the time nor money to create products or services that won’t sell. In a very broad view, it might look like I’m suggesting you to become a scam artist, but just think about it. You are not selling air. You are actually selling a product which you don’t have yet. But if you see the product would actually sell, you make it happen, you create the product.
When selling something that does not exist, you test the waters. You see if people have any interest towards it. If you get a lot of people to sign up for free, you already have a knowledge that this product actually has the power to sell. And if that’s so, you will start working on it, if needed 24/7 for two weeks in a row. You now know it is going to sell like crazy (if you won’t make any fatal mistakes during the actual selling process that is). You already have a certain number of people who are interested in buying your product. You know it because they have subscribed via your free subscription form. Just to be notified when the product gets ready.
Selling something that doesn’t exist (yet) [Business Advice Pro]
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HitTail
Small Business Trends: The HitTail widget shows the keywords that searchers are using to arrive at this site, updated in real time. It demonstrates part of what the HitTail service does.
Using the HitTail service, you can (1) track the keywords that people are using to come to your site or blog, (2) extract the keywords that matter most into a handy list, and (3) use those keywords in future articles or blog posts that you write.
The idea behind HitTail is to increase the organic (non-paid) search traffic to your site, by revealing the keywords that visitors are using to find your site so that you can build on those to attract even more traffic.
HitTail Helps You Build Web Traffic Without Advertising [Small Business Trends]