We heard some great advice while driving home one Sunday from a weekend road trip for anyone who wants to start a business. It’s easily adaptable to people who want to start an internet business so I thought it was worth sharing here. One of the guests on the eWomenNetwork weekly radio show built her business around teaching entrepreneurship. She encourages people to start a business part-time and said two interesting things.

Start By Thinking Small

The first thing she tells people is to start doing something to make $500 per month. Why should I worry about making $500 per month when I want $4000 per month? As she said, if you can’t make $500 then you can’t make $1000. If you can’t make $1000 then you can’t make $4000. Do something to make some money, leverage what you earn and what you learn, and use that to make even more money. Keep doing that and eventually you’ll reach your goals.

I see people forget this when they talk about a small internet business all of the time. It’s pretty common to see a member of a webmaster forum who joined six months ago talk about wanting to make a full-time income online and make 200+ posts, but not have a single website yet.

Forget about quitting your day job for a minute. Think of 10 ways you could make money with an internet business, take action on the best 2 or 3 of them, and start making a $1 per day. Just a measly $1. Once you do that you’ll see that it’s possible, learn more about how things work online, and have an income producing asset. Then you can make $2 per day and $10 per day and more. It’s overwhelming if you start with an unreasonable amount out of the gate.

Use Your Existing Skills

The second thing she said was don’t start by trying to learn an entirely new set of skills. If you’ve got a job then you’ve got some skills that people will pay money for now. Adapt those to making money from a business. When you do that you’ll need to learn additional business skills, like sales and marketing, but you won’t need to learn the whole kit and kaboodle. Even if you don’t like your job there are probably aspects of it or skills you’ve mastered that you enjoy somewhat. Otherwise you probably wouldn’t be doing that kind of work in the first place.

How often do new webmasters ask about finding the hottest niches? Anyone interested in an area (or paid to work in an area) understands it in ways the outsiders just don’t. You already know some of the problems people in certain industries face and their concerns. What you should figure out is where there’s already a market need in your circle of competence. How you can apply your current skill set and interests to making money online?

Mystery Guru

Unfortunately, the archive for that particular show isn’t available online. I don’t remember the guest’s name so I can’t give you her website either. I’ll edit this post if I find out the name of that mystery small business guru but hopefully you got the gist of it.

47
Loves listening to helpful podcasts and radio shows.

Related articles:

1. Starting The Right Small Internet Business For You – Part 2
2. Starting The Right Small Internet Business For You – Part 1

Google added a feature that I really, really wanted to their already awesome Google Docs office suite. I’d written about how we’ve used Google Docs to work together more efficiently. One of the features I loved was how, after installing the Google Gears extension, you could edit documents without having an internet connection. That’s great for people like us who travel a lot, but still want to get work done, and aren’t always online.

One of the things I hated was not having any control over which documents got synced to your laptop or USB drive to allow you to edit them offline. The application chose what to sync and what not to sync. There have been plenty of times when we didn’t have internet access while traveling, I’d find out something wasn’t downloaded, and I couldn’t work on an active project.

Well, they’ve fixed that little problem so I’m a happy dude. Now there’s a menu:

More options -> Sync now (for offline access)

which lets you sync up any document, spreadsheet, or presentation that you select. I could potentially sync every single document in my account while I was online. That isn’t likely something I’ll do. I might sync everything in a particular folder though. Either way, having the option is nice.

What features do you want to see Google add next?

47
Happy to see continuous improvement in Google Docs.

Related articles:

1. Using Google Docs And Google Gears To Improve Productivity
2. Using Google Keyword Tool Instead Of Wordtracker For Keyword Research

How many internet business owners out there buy products and services from freelancers? Almost all of us do at some point because there isn’t enough time in the day and it frees you up to focus on higher ROI activities. A lot of internet entrepreneurs that freelance forget about an eager group of customers sitting right in front of them though. So where is this pool of potential clients?

We’ve paid for article writing, directory submission, and a host of other things over the last couple of months. One and two person shops performed most of those services for us. Guess how many of them asked us for repeat business?

Nada. Zilch. Zero.

I started thinking about this a few days ago and, in the entire time we’ve been outsourcing, there hasn’t been a single service provider follow up with us at a later date to ask if we needed anything else. After smooth transactions with landing page designers, social bookmarkers, writers, directory submitters, and whoever else, you’d think someone would ask for more business. I actually prefer working with the same people again and, while we’ve done other projects with some of those people, I’ve always initiated the contact.

I feel like captain obvious saying this but it boggles my mind. I always need something done. I don’t want people spamming me but, seriously, if I liked your work the first time then I’ll likely hire you again. Maybe ask people if they’d like to opt-in to your newsletter. Then you can highlight a new skill you’ve picked up, let people know if you’ve got some downtime and could turn around a project quickly, and drop your old clients a line when you’re discounting your rates. Your customer list is an asset. Use it.

What’s in it for you?

1. You don’t need to advertise.
2. You don’t need to tout your superiority over your competitors.
3. You don’t need to build up the relationship to close the sale.
4. You don’t need to worry about getting stiffed.

What’s in it for me?

1. I don’t need to go looking for a good freelancer in a sea of mediocre ones.
2. I don’t need to worry about the quality and timeliness of your work.
3. I don’t need to wonder if I can trust you.

Why is it that people, especially freelancers, forget about getting repeat customers?

47
Thinks existing customers need love too.

I have a bunch of domains registered with GoDaddy and always use coupon codes to save money on registrations and renewals. A long time ago I figured out a simple way to save a little more.

There are several types of GoDaddy promo codes. Some give discounts on a certain type of domain (like this one for $3.20 off .coms), some give discounts on orders over a certain amount, and some give a small percentage discount on orders. You only get to use one coupon code per order though. So what I do is split up the order when necessary and apply whatever promo saves me the most money on those individual orders.

What usually happens is something like this. I’ll have 4 .coms to renew and 2 .nets to renew. Including private registration, which you don’t get a discount on, that would come to $117.24. Instead, I’ll make the .coms one order and use the code to get them for $7.49 each. Then I’ll make a second order for everything else and use a 10% off code. I spend $102.46 and save $14.78. The most I’d save when placing a single order is $12.80. It doesn’t seem like much but 50, 100, 500 domains later it starts adding up. It only takes another minute to place multiple (generally two) orders to save some cash.

I needed to renew a couple of domains that expired this month. I added all of them to the shopping cart, put in the coupon to save $3.20 per .com, verified the coupon got applied, and completely forgot about saving money on the .net. It would have only saved me another $1 but that’s my $1 dang it!

47
Sitting here with buyers remorse over $1.

Related articles:

1. Product Feeds Save Your Precious Time

We create and share articles using Google Docs a lot and it’s helping us work more efficiently. What usually happens is 47 writes an article, it’s junk, and he asks 46 to edit it. Or 47 buys an article from somewhere, it’s pretty good but needs a little work, and he asks 46 to edit it. We used to email drafts back and forth, would lose copies or work on the wrong versions, and it was a big mess. Now we share the same article using Google Docs and see updates as the other person makes changes. It’s really convenient and saves time.

Even if you’re working by yourself and won’t use the document sharing feature it’s still worth using. Sometimes just having online storage for your spreadsheets and articles is nice. Especially if you happen to lose your thumb drive. Google Docs also stores your revisions so accidentally deleting that final draft right before you need it isn’t a disaster anymore either.

Working Without Internet Access

Google Gears is another part of the equation that makes it even more worthwhile. Gears is an extension to your browser, at least Firefox and Safari, that lets you work with Google Docs documents without an internet connection. It lets you store those documents on your computer, edit them, and once you’re back online then everything syncs back up. This will become a lot more important as we start traveling more and don’t always have WiFi readily available.

Two Feature Requests

One issue we’ve run into is knowing when an article is done. There doesn’t seem to be a way to label a document. Being able to mark an article so both of us knew it was finished would help. That potential confusion did actually happened to us once. I thought an article was updated, put it on a website, but it wasn’t. I didn’t notice until later. There’s a way to put a star next to a document but, unfortunately, it only shows up for the person that added the star. Right now we’re just changing the titles and putting a note about status in the articles themselves.

I’d also like the ability to download all of my documents for offline use. What happens now is you have to open a document before it stores it on your computer when you’re running Gears. So sometimes I want to make changes to an article when I’m not online but can’t. An option for doing bulk downloads would be handy.

Liking Google Docs

We both like Google Docs and it’s made working together much easier. I actually use it for storing drafts and have hundreds and hundreds of documents. If you’re not already using it then give it a whirl.

Are any of you using Google Docs and Google Gears? What do you think about them? Do you know of anything better?

47
Addicted to Google Docs.

Related articles:

1. Revisiting Editing Documents Without Internet Access Using Google Docs
2. Using Google Keyword Tool Instead Of Wordtracker For Keyword Research