Watch live video from FearLess Q+A on Justin.tv
FearLess Q+A with CP&B's Alex Bogusky and guests. It's always worth watching. Laid-back, entertaining and insightful conversations about life, the universe and advertising.
The episode above features the guys behind shockinbarack. But be sure to check out the others, too!
There are lot's of sites (paid and free) that try to answer our questions in many domains. HowTo and DIY and stuff...
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After the confirmed success stackoverflow that answers programmers questions, the real news is that there is a link at the bottom... to another site that I hope gets filled with good answers and it's a twin site called doctype and is aimed at... as they put it: |
Doctype is a free question and answer site for web designers. You can ask questions about CSS, HTML, web design and email design.
Check the whole family
There are times when the internet's vast expanses of information fail us. You know the routine: a question comes up (or a debate starts), nobody has the answer on hand -- what to do? Ask the Googles, of course. Stuff that's super specific or that requires expert opinion, however, can be tough to nail down via search. Happily, you have alternate resources at your fingertips. While Hunch and AskMeFi are both incredibly useful in their own ways, Aardvark 's social Q & A network has been my go-to for quick answers to almost any question since its launch late last year. Two big factors here: ease of use and real answers from actual people.
Aardvark gives you four ways to submit a question: on their website , through the new iPhone app, or via email or IM (Google Talk, Windows Live Messenger or AOL Instant Messenger). The IM integration is one of Aarvark's genius features, because you're likely to have it open anyhow. Type out your question, give it a subject tag, and Aarvark's question triage system goes to work for you in the background, asking people on your behalf based on the subjects they've indicated in their profile. Any response is immediately sent back to you through Aardvark, with additional opportunities for follow-up questions if needed.
I could go on about the quality and simplicity of the user experience, the high level of engagement within the Aardvark community, or the quality of the iPhone app -- but these are some things I urge you to discover on your own. Check out Aarvark and experience a much more human, immediate side of the internet.
Question #1
Question: How do I promote my business when I have limited amount of money ?
What ways have you advertised/promoted your business with minimal money. So far I have done the following :-
- Google Ads
- Face Book Ads
- Linked In Groups
- Face Book Groups
- Email Collegues/Friends
I am probably impatient as want people to know about my business now. Also I feel a bit embarassed about sending info on groups about my business.
Answer:
This is one of my favorite new business questions to answer and am planning on doing a full series of blog posts on building a brand and community. And obviously, I have a bit of work to do myself for this Q&A site, but wanted to make sure all the kinks are worked out before I go commando and push this whenbusiness.com to the bones.
Start thinking about your brand in a niche saturation context and what value your content/conversation can bring to the niche.
Obviously you've already started attacking some of the larger social networks, which is a great first step, but now you need to take a step back and do a little market research finding who maintains the heartbeat of the conversation and influence in your niche.
- Find the top 25-50 bloggers in the niche and engage in meaningful (important!) conversation. Have something intelligent to say in replying to their blog posts. Your intelligence is your key to driving traffic back to your site. Have you ever read an intelligent reply in a blog post and followed their name back to their website? This is exactly the type of behavior you're wanting to encourage. You may not get google juice from backlinks to your site because of "nofollow" attributes on most blogs, but you'll get something more important, a visitor. Being one of the first to respond to large blogs, like techcrunch.com for example is a meaningful thing, and free to do. Technorati.com actually just re-launched and has a top 100 blogs, and which you can use to find those blogs that belong to your niche.
- Aside from the mega social networks, there are literally hundreds of other social networks and message boards that you can newbies like you can leverage and is easier to have a voice because there is much less noise. Sites like Ning.com, have hundreds of networks for every niche imaginable. This is a perfect place to join and again engaging in conversation, and make a little noise at first, and more noise later as you gain a noticeable persona on the network. These social networks and forums, are really the key in establishing your brand.
- Creating a blog and/or podcast, gives you the opportunity to continue engaging your audience with what you've learned about the current social conversation in your niche. This also gives you a direct voice in casting your opinion for your audience and then becoming an influencing presence within the niche yourself. When doing a blog, you can reply to another blog's post and leverage automatic pingbacks or trackbacks on meaningful topics. This is also an important way to establish relationships because these authority bloggers will now know who you are. They will see what you've written about their blog post. And you'll be listed on their authority blog site, waiting for their readers to find your title of the blog post interesting. If doing a podcast, ensure to do or use a transcription service. This is an extremely important way of getting a lot of free content written and works tremendously well with search engines (SEO). Don't worry too much about that audience at first, doing a podcast is difficult, for me anyway. Getting the equipment and production level right, is a difficult process. Just start out small, and if you need guidance on podcasting, i have a ton of resources. Have unique and meaningful titles, have a look at CopyBlogger.com for a series of tips, tricks and trends on what is working for blog copy.
- Now that you have blogging and/or a podcast, make sure that you try to use aggregation services for your best material, digg.com, alltop.com, reddit.com, 9rules.com, etc.
- Find available directories to put your business online. Places like technorati.com allow you post content yourself back to your site. Techcrunch.com has Crunchbase.com which is a directory of startup businesses. Then do all of the typical other directory sites, DMOZ.org, etc.
- USE Posterous.com, and Tumblr.com even if your blog is on another platform, posterous allows you to quickly and easily create a synergistic brand concept, where now you're influencing the conversation on a whole bunch of platforms. Just by emailing a Posterous account they support many other social tools and networks, Twitter.com, Youtube.com, Facebook.com, Vimeo.com, Flickr.com, WordPress.com and Blogger.com blogs and more. You post once, and you post everywhere, social saturation, social saturation, social saturation.
This last one is my personal favorite, help people and the favor will be returned tenfold. Create tutorials or how-to's on your niche's subject matter helping people out, and they'll realize that you are a valuable resource to them. Then google tutorial aggregation sites for your niche. There are like 30 prominent players..
Gonna say it again, Social Media Market Saturation!!! Hrmm, wonder if i can coin that term. Get out there, it's all FREE and yours for the taking. Say that out loud! It's FREE marketing, and you'll be smarter at the end of it all to boot!
Question #2
Question: Business Books for Beginners
I want to know some books on business for beginners?
Answer:
These are my favorite business books, and really have formed many of my viewpoints on business, marketing, and entrepreneurship.
The Art Of War, by Sun Tzu Know your enemy(competition), be as close to their heartbeat as possible. This is technically not a business book, but if you ever want to succeed in any competition, be it life, war, or in business, this is the book to turn to.
Crush It, How to cash in on your Passion, by Gary Veynurchuck I know it just came out, but it's a great book, and definitely worth it's weight in gold. Gary Vey*ner*chuck, of winelibrarytv.com fame, likens this new period of internet as the Printing Press incarnate, and that it will have a huge shift on global business that we are barely beginning to see come to fruition. He argues that anyone can use their passion monetize it in today's internet with a limited budget. The book has many new social methods in building a personal brand.
Purple Cow, Tranform your Business by being Remarkable by Seth Godin Seth is awesome, and his blog and books are a must read. Realize that your only as good as your product/service, and if it's not remarkable, then you will not succeed. You can find some of his talks online as well, his TED talk was great, and so was the one at Google.
Predictably Irrational, By Dan Ariely A must read for anyone selling a product/service and needing to figure out price points. When it comes to decision making, in general, people are easily manipulated, while the people maintain that they are always making the wiser decisions.
How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie An oldie, but a goodie. You'll be amazed at how easy it is to have people/clients on your side by just listening, genuinely caring, and being human.
Built to Last, by Jim Collins Business visionary Jim Collins has really passionate ideas about leadership in the enterprise.
The Entrepreneur's Guide to Business Law Just because I haven't finished this book doesn't mean it's not valuable. It serves as a fantastic laymen legal resource I pickup constantly.
Bootstraping your Business, Start and Grow a Successful Company with Almost No Money If you've followed my posts, I'm a fan of shoestring budgets, and this is huge reason why. Founder of RightNow, an entrepreneur built a world class business from Montana with virtually no money.
There, that should keep you busy! Good luck.
Question #3
Question: Should we keep support functions in-house or outsource them?
My family has run a business for four generations. Revenues are extremely reliable, and there is no competition in our operational area. We are, however, geographically constrained and internal growth is minimal. Support costs (billing, collecting, accounting) are substantial. Historically, we've done this in-house, which has kept two or three people employed (out of 10). Our systems are now outdated, requiring a substantial IT investment (>$30K in hardware and software). Outsourcing has been suggested as an alternative. How, exactly, should we evaluate these two options?
Answer:My personal preference would be to keep it in house for the following reason: control. When you outsource these types of operations you lose direct control over what is happening with them and if your outsourcing partner does not do a good job you could be in serious trouble. The 2/3 people working for you there have already established themselves and you trust them to take care of your business. Besides, if you have any trouble with them it's much easier to find replacement help than it is to try find a different outsourcing partner or bring it all back in house. Not only that, but after you outsource you lose control of the cost structure as well. Your outsourcing partner may start you on a 1-2 year contract at a reasonable rate, but continually up it on you in subsequent years to the point that you may be forced to bring it back in house anyway.
Additionally, your expenditure can be capitalized over a period of time allowing you to offset the costs of the new equipment against your taxes, which should ease the burden some. Another thing an improved accounting package may do for you is allow you to reduce your Days Outstanding for Accounts Receivable and improve your payment speed on Accounts Payable to hit some of those NET10 or NET30 invoices (if you have any). At some point this investment will break even for you, so even though you have a large initial outlay it's not like you're losing the money.
Question #4
Question:
Where should a small business advertise?
I own a home-cleaning business and would like to know the best places to advertise. I have tried the local paper's classifieds ads with no response. I don't have a large advertising budget but I am willing to pay for advertising that will help me grow my business.Answer:
Hi Jenni,
Depending on your budget, and assuming you're like me, where shoestring budgets are the norm, there are several places where you can advertise and get leads for your home cleaning business. Here are a few suggestions to get you going, but whenbusiness.com is going to be doing a full series of posts on Advertising and Marketing for small businesses such as yours.
Some of the more simple items to do are not traditional advertising related, but just work.
If you're not already leveraging some of the online tools available to you, let's start there.
1) Add your business to Google Local http://www.google.com/local/add/businessCenter?gl=us&hl=en-US When people search for "Cleaning Service, 75123" or "Maid Service 75213", then you will automatically show up in a map along with your phone number. This is crucial for people who are more willing to give immediate local business their jobs because people are known to help out their immediate community. The same goes for the other top 3 search engines: a) Bing https://ssl.bing.com/listings/ListingCenter.aspx b) Yahoo http://listings.local.yahoo.com/csubmit/index.php
2) One of the first places I'd recommend using some advertising dollars is via Google Adwords.
This service allows you to specify a budget of the amount that you are willing to use for advertising. You can specify a series of keywords that you want to use when advertise, and after running typical search terms via a tool I have, we have found that most people search for the following terms when looking for house cleaning. And you can then use these keyword terms when setting up ads in google. These words look funny together, but will give you The best part is that you can specify that you only want your ads to show up within your city, since you're likely not going to travel to do cleaning. This keeps your overall costs down.
- average house cleaning costs
- average house cleaning prices
- best house cleaning
- bonded house cleaning
- bonded house cleaning services
- clean house
- cleaning your house
- commercial house cleaning
- complete house cleaning
- cost of house cleaning
- detailed house cleaning
- elite house cleaning
- exceptional house cleaning
- general house cleaning
- good house cleaning
- house cleaning
- house cleaning lady
- house cleaning maid service
- house cleaning price
- house cleaning prices
- house cleaning pricing
- house cleaning rate
- house cleaning rate per hour
- house cleaning rates
- house cleaning review
- house cleaning service
- house cleaning services
- housekeeper cleaning
- light house cleaning
- maid house cleaning
- need house cleaning
- total house cleaning
3) If you're a bonded maid service, I would also suggest adding listings to craigslist.com under their service providers for your city or area, and ensuring when creating the listing to put on there that you are bonded. It makes a big difference knowing that we as people can call on you knowing that our stuff is protected against any major damage that might happen.
It really is a lot easier than you think, but you have any difficulty, we're here for you. Again, we'll be doing detailed walkthrough and how-to's on these subjects so please come back for those.
Good luck to you.
Question #5
Question:
Where do I find a good graphic designer?
I am starting a new company and I need a corporate identity. I would also like to get a template for my web pages. How can I find a good free lance designer that will not break my bank account?Answer:
Check out http://99designs.com. A site for posting your design brief from which multiple designers submit numerous designs for you to choose from. Very powerful and very cost effective.
I'm wandering in the mountains above Altadena with Mr. Lewis. No better context for his thoughts.
If there is no God, then all creatures have adapted to where they are today as a result of their environment, their potential enemies and their desires. For instance, a lion fish which has pointy fin tips laced with poison may have just been a fish long ago who got tired of being eaten. Or, a chameleon was a reptile who gained the ability to change color based on its surroundings for the same reason.So, if this is all true, can I potentially work/think hard enough and grow myself a third arm?
