developingeyes Entrepreneur of the week: Shawn Gupta and Reman Child

This week’s entrepreneur of the week is actually a team of two. Shawn Gupta and Reman Child are the co founders of Expensr. Expensr is a free online personal finance manager. It is explained in very basic terms so that anyone can use it.

In addition to that these guys have put a social networking component to their web application in true web 2.0 fashion. The idea behind the social networking aspect is depending on your tags and categories you can compare yourself against other persons similar to your financial situation and as a result determine whether your spending practices are good or bad. They have even developed a nice lite version of expensr for facebook, called iSpend so that you can have a similar experience while using your facebook account.

From what I’ve observed from reading the information on the site, Expensr makes its money like many social networking sites, through targeted advertising fuelled by the information and traffic provided by its users.

I really think these guys have got something going here. The finance and debt industry is a milti billion dollar industry and I think they are handling the niche well. You can read more about Gupta and Child at the expensr blog or in the September 2007 issue of Business 2.0.

Hope you enjoyed the post. Thanks for reading

5 inspiring blog articles for Entrepreneurs

Today I’ve decided to share 5 articles that I have come across that have really been inspiring to me. Some of them are just stories on the success of another individual while others are tips and strategies. I assure you that each one contains some knowledge and can be greatly beneficial to the reader.

1. 10 k ppc experiment part 1 and 2 by shoemoney

The first article is by our blogging friend Shoemoney. Its really two very extensive articles describing in detail an experiment he performed in affiliate marketing. He set aside $10,000 for advertising and tested a number of advertising methods and marketplaces such as adbrite and adword to help bring in money to his chosen affiliate programs. It’s really an excellent post and if your not inspired in some form by it I don’t know what will.

2. Beginners guide to make money online by blogging experiment

Ok I know what you’re thinking, another ordinary make money online blog post. Well that’s not the case this time. This article is actually different to the others you may have come across already. What Ben from blogging experiment has chosen to do here is give a general theoretical back drop so that we can put all the other make money online articles into perspective. Pretty nice and straight forward lives up to its name as being for beginners.

3. Do You Want to Run Your Own Business? Read this First! by Entrepreneurs Journey

Entrepreneur’s Journey is a great blog for any budding entrepreneur. This article is just a slight reality check. After reading so many success stories I think its best to be aware of the hardships that must be endured and overcome before reaching that level of success. This article is a before you start here’s what u need to know kinds of article. Check it out.

4. How to use the web to build a powerful reputation in any industry by dosh dosh

This article applies to every type of entrepreneur, web or not. It shows how to take advantage of the internet to market yourself and build an excellent reputation. It is very extensive and very well put together. The guys and dosh dosh did very well on this post and I definitely recommend giving it a read

5. The call of the entrepreneur

Last is this very nice video, that is really, really inspiring. It shows a bunch of established entrepreneurs and describes their importance and effect on society. Best way to describe it is touching.

Well that’s it for today. These are my blog recommendations, hope you enjoyed the post and thanks for reading.

Quick Project Management tip: “respect the chain”

This weekend I worked on a national event where I was in charge of the playing of advertisements on the big replay screen (I used to work for an ad agency so I have a soft spot for ads).It was quite a stressful weekend but I did learn some things that I will now share with you. As an Entrepreneur projects are our lives, each business venture we take up can be considered a new project as well any services we choose to provide. Project management is extremely important. Last week I mentioned some of this in my effective administration post. I want to dig a little deeper now.There will come a time, primarily depending on the size of the project when you will be forced to work with others. Established businesses often ask of your ability to work well with others, are you a team player things of that nature and trust me they wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important. Why is it important? Well if you don’t work well with others in a team effort then there will be chaos and the project will be a failure!

But back to my point. Normally when working in a team the work is split up amongst the constituents of the group, each person being put in charge of a particular topic, aspect, department, you name it.

What is important to remember here is that you must not undermine the authority of each other. Never cross over into the territory of another group member and start giving orders to the persons he is in charge of. If you recognise something fundamentally wrong with the approach he is taking then address it to him directly. This is the best way to keep everything in order. Persons do not take well to their authority being undermined, and there may be good reason (more times than not) why he is doing it in that particular way.

This is really just a quick lesson in team work. Trust each other’s capabilities and respect each other’s work and authority over the people they are in charge of. When there are too many chief’s in one tribe there can only be chaos. A clearly defined chain of command should be established and adhered to.

Hope you found this somewhat informative. Thanks for reading

developingeyes’ Entrepreneur of the week: Benjamin Sann

It’s Monday again and time for developingeyes’ Entrepreneur of the week. Every Monday I post the story of a young entrepreneur as motivation and inspiration for myself and my readers. Last week the Entrepreneur of the week was Ashley Qualls of WhateverLife.com. This week’s Entrepreneur is Benjamin Sann of BestParking.com

Benjamin Sann is 19 years old and is already and entrepreneur with budding success. from his excellent domain name you could guess that he tries to offer the best parking for drivers. People who drive in big cities and commute know how hard it is to find good parking. Essentially BestParking.com allows drivers to find parking garages and lots, compare daily rates and also book the parking slots in advance. It currently covers four cities in the United States, namely Boston, Philadelphia, New York City and Washington DC.

Benjamin Sann has partnerships with the garages which allow him to offer the reservation services and rate guarantee services to the users of his web application which is how I think the business makes its money. If you think about it, it’s quite similar to affiliate marketing. He is providing a service which gives the parking companies more sales and for each sale he provides will make some sort of commission.

I think this is an excellent idea, especially with the wide use of google maps (which ofcourse is built into his web application) the site is definitely a useful tool. What do we learn from young Benjamin Sann? Consider something that you find somewhat irritating and wished there was a better way of doing it. If you can actually solve that problem to make it easier to accomplish then you have something to go on because there is no doubt that others want it be easier as well.

Well that’s it. Hope you enjoyed the post. Thanks for reading.

Traffic Increase Update

Well I wrote a post complaining about my lack of traffic to my sites. Since then I did a little traffic building campaign for this blog and for one of my other sites. Today I will share the results of that traffic building campaign and the techniques I used.

I wrote that post on the 12^th of March. Since then I

• Attempted to publish a post everyday starting from Monday 17^th to 21^st of March
• Stumbled each article after it has been published

In reality I succeeded in publishing a post four days out of the five. This one was actually supposed to be my fifth post to really sum everything up, so I guess in a sense I made it. The results are in and according to Google Analytics; I had 644 unique visitors from 12^th March to 21^st March (590 visitors coming from StumbleUpon). This is quite an improvement from the 32 unique visitors I had up to 11^th March (a 2012.5% increase to be exact). There is also increased activity in my rss feeds as well as comments to my posts.

So that’s all I did to increase traffic at this point. I will continue this practice as well as try other traffic building techniques and will continue to update you as I go along.

Hope you enjoyed the post. Thanks for reading.

Don’t reinvent the wheel, just add new tyres!

There is a model for the majority of internet businesses on stream, a model for businesses in general. Let’s face it, most of us are not geniuses, we’re not coming up with the next world changing, unbelievably great big thing. Most of us are just average folk with average ideas. I don’t see anything wrong with that but we still need to push ourselves a little beyond the average. Now I’m not saying we have to try and be geniuses but we do need something more.

When deciding on starting a business and choosing a particular niche, I think it is extremely important to look at businesses (successful or otherwise) that are currently operating in that particular niche and follow the model used but observe what can be done differently by you to improve it and provide a better service to your clients.

Digg.com

There really is nothing exceptional or outstandingly genius about the digg concept. Digg.com was initially a technology news website where the users submitted links to news stories. This already existed at Slashdot.com which was very successful at the time. What users of Slashdot.com were silently unhappy about was the fact that the site editors had the final say as to what would be shown on the website out of the submitted material of its users. So essentially what Kevin Rose did was give the social networking news site a twist by placing the power in the hands of its users.

Good ole Walmart

Everyone knows Walmart, the huge multinational chain of discount variety stores. The founder Sam Walton had worked in variety stores previously, like J.C. Penny prior to going into business for himself. How did Mr Walton add new tyres to the wheel? Well his concept was to mark up less than his competitors and take less profit per item but achieve higher sales per volume to make up the difference. I think it’s safe to say that these tyres are doing well on the original wheels of the old variety store.

Strangely enough while writing this post Yaro Starak from Entrepreneurs Journey wrote a post as well saying sometimes you have to re-invent the wheel. It’s an excellent article, very extensive and filled with advice. At the end of it all I think we’re saying the same thing where you have to do things differently to some degree. I call it new tyres, but he calls it reinvention.

Well that’s it; I hope you have enjoyed my post. Thanks for reading.

Improve Landing Page Performance With Page Relevancy

Last night I came across this article at ezinearticles.com by Matt Jackson or WebWiseWords. I decided to share the article with you. I think it has some nice advice about page relevancy and the importance of your landing page. Currently I am working on improving the landing page on one of my sites since I would like a better response from my visitors when they arrive there. I’m definitely going to take the advice given in the article and see how I can improve.

The article is below as an excerpt. Ezinearticles.com allow you to do that once you have the article source link at the end. I hope you enjoy the article and find it useful

Thanks for reading

Improve Landing Page Performance With Page Relevancy

The landing page is one of, if not the most important aspects of an advertising campaign but it is one that is often overlooked. Upon embarking on an SEO, PPC, or any other type of campaign it is easy to get caught up in bid prices, link building, and optimizing the ad itself. However, if the landing page doesn’t perform then all of that work is next to useless. A landing page must convert visitors into customers.

What Is Landing Page Relevancy?

While there are several factors in optimizing a landing page for performance, page relevancy is one of the more important. The landing page is the link between your ad and the purchase, click, or signup that you crave. It needs to effectively and naturally ensure that visitors progress from being interested to being completely sold and ready to take the next (usually final) step in the process.

Linking Your Ad To Your Action

Landing page relevancy, then, means that all of the content elements on your landing page need to be relevant to your website and your product or service. It also needs to prove relevant to the actual advertisement or other marketing technique that you employed. It needs to be carefully planned and written in such a way that your visitors will not only want to complete the desired action, but feel they need to.

Remember That Visitors Are Real People With Real Needs

Consider the way your visitors found your site - your actual advert. For SEO and PPC this means looking at the keywords that led visitors to your page. Think about the individual people that found your ad and what they were looking for when they conducted their search and clicked on your link. Are they looking for more information or are they looking to complete the purchase of your product straight away?

Keyword Prominence

Include the relevant keywords in a prominent position on your page. It helps to direct the mind of your visitors and ensures that they know they are in the right place. Structure your landing page so it contains a good number of the keywords that are most important to these visitors without being guilty of keyword cramming.

All Advertising Demands Landing Page Relevancy

Other methods of advertising, such as banner advertisements and article marketing, still allow a good degree of visitor analysis and page relevancy. Any form of advertising means that you know the content of your ad, or article. This allows you to inject relevancy into the resulting page and improve the performance of that page to give you better conversions, greater profits, and an improved advertising ROI.

As well as offering a full SEO copywriting service, WebWiseWords is also a provider of high quality web site content that converts and performs. See how the WebWiseWords service can help you today.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Matt_Jackson

Pointers for Effective Administration: Get back on track to the real work

For those of us who are starting any type of business, online or “offline” with limited resources we often find ourselves being Administrator, Secretary, IT guy and Executive all at the same time. The administration department keeps the business together by handling everyday issues which must be addressed by the business in order to remain functional (such as billing, security, human resources or just answering the phone) but at the same time angle far away from the actual services the business provides. The role of admin is therefore extremely important and cannot be discounted. It is also very time consuming, especially if you’re just starting out like I am and sort of playing it by ear and learning as you go. Unfortunately this reduces the amount of time you have to do things that are pertinent to the development of the product or service that you are providing and you find yourself at the end of the day wondering where the day went and feeling horribly unaccomplished.

So we’ve got to find a way to handle our administrative responsibilities as best we could and as timely as possible. If proper administrative techniques or procedures are put in place one can really reduce the amount of time spent on them and return to our primary products and services. Below I have highlighted three administrative areas I think can be drastically improved through the use of proper software (Open Source of course!).

Billing and Accounting

Some of us are lucky (or unlucky) enough to have reached a stage where we need to keep better accounts. No matter how small an income you may be generating a track record of your accounts is very important. Every business needs to know how much it is spending and how much it is earning, how much it owes and how much is owed to it. The big names in this industry are of course Quickbooks, Sage and Microsoft Money.

My Open Source recommendations are TurboCash and Compiere. Both are capable of doing everything the proprietary guys can do with the added bonus of them being FREE. Having a proper billing and accounting system set up will save a lot of time especially if you have different streams of revenue; everything should be consolidated and you can more easily track your progress as your business grows.

Scheduling

I’m a procrastinator. I live by it, it’s my addiction. I’m sure a number of you can relate to that, tomorrow always seems like a better time to do things. As I get deeper and deeper into my entrepreneurial ventures putting things off is very unhealthy. Fabian from Small Fish Big Money did an excellent post the other day on effective time management strategies. I suggest taking a look at it, It is well detailed and very helpful.

I have found myself some days spending quite a bit of time just figuring out what to do next. This method results in a lot of things slipping my mind and I have to put it off further and further each time. As much as us procrastinators may hate it, scheduling and time management are important and they work well, at least much better than our current system.

The type of time management and scheduling may vary according to the type of services you provide but the core of it is very much the same. I essentially try to set goals and time frames in order to achieve these goals by; which are a good initial steps but I still have to work on my day to day scheduling a little better. My Open Source recommendation is Open Workbench. This is essentially an alternative to Microsoft Project and it’s very good for long term projects you may have. I think this in conjunction with a similar day to day schedule that you will see if you check out Fabian’s post will help you find a good balance.

Correspondence

When I say correspondence I mean the communication that takes place between a business and its contacts. You have to listen to your customers, clients, readers colleagues, whichever fits best. But at the same time, correspondences can be quite time consuming and you might find yourself losing the day answering emails and returning phone calls. This ties in closely to scheduling. It is much easier with emails of course to simply check ones email at a specified time each day or each week and similarly schedule a time to respond to all.

This communication is very important as I’ve come to realise. The input from the outside is invaluable as we may not always see it from the same perspective as others.

Well that’s it; I hope you have enjoyed my post and found it useful somehow. Thanks for reading.

developingeyes’ Entrepreneur of the Week: Ashley Qualls

This weekend I thought about things that motivate me to continue my tries at financial independence. One of those things is reading about persons who are doing it currently. I know very well I may never have that level of success but at the same time I find their stories very inspirational and motivational. As a result I decided to post about one every Monday as a nice start to the week. I will try and focus on the younger guys and also try to research those that are under the radar and not the traditional Mark Zuckerberg (facebook) and Kevin Rose (Digg) posts, I think most of us already know these guys’ stories. So here is my entrepreneur of the week. I chose this person because of their age (very young) and because I was not aware of them. So this week’s Entrepreneur of the week is…..Ashley Qualls of WhateverLife.com

I’m guessing quite a bit of you know her story already, I saw tonnes of articles online about her which kinda makes me wonder if I was the only person out of the loop. For those of you who don’t know who Ashley Qualls is allow me to make you familiar.

Ashley Qualls is 17 year old Web Entrepreneur who owns and runs the website whateverlife.com. She provides myspace layouts for teenage girls and her stats are averaged at 7 million visitors and 60 million page views a month according to an article at fastcompany.com Oh and did I mention she’s a MILLIONAIRE? Yes, she has done the norm: made more than a million dollars in revenue, dropped out of high school, bought a house and turned down buyout offers. I think this is an excellent story and I wish her continued success.

What does this show us? Well it holds true to the wonderful possibilities of the internet and the possibility of making money from social networking websites. From a broader point of view it speaks alot to niche marketing and focusing on things you yourself can relate to. Ashley is a teenage girl so she knows what teenage girls want and she chose that niche. If we could all be so lucky to find a familiar yet profitable niche. I hope you’ve found this somewhat motivating, you can read more on Ashley Qualls and a case study of her business model at doshdosh.com. It’s an excellent article.

Thanks for reading

Traffic goals: changing the light from red to green

I, like most green webmasters am addicted to viewing traffic stats. I find myself spending quite a bit of time checking stats on every service I have running, especially on google analytics. My traffic has completely died down, from my little StumbleUpon campaign for one of my sites, and for the period March 1st to 11th I have had 32 visits, 18 being unique visitors. Obviously something needs to be done here as I have gone from an average of 40 to 50 unique visitors a day to roughly 1.8. This blog is doing a little better actually. For the same period google analytics reports 47 visits, 32 being unique.

So lets make some improvements here; I will devote the rest of the month to doing intense traffic building techniques. I intend to write posts describing the different techniques I use and be able to show their effectiveness as results (if any) begin to show. As a starting point I will do some Search Engine Optimization, especially for this blog as well as some more social network marketing. Keep reading as I keep you updated as things progress

Thanks for reading and Thanks to all 47 visitors so far this month, I really appreciate it.