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 online 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.

StumbleUpon Traffic Trips

My initial attempt to build traffic for my website involved the use of StumbleUpon for almost a year and I love the concept. I figured it would be a good way to get persons aware of my website easily. There are a number of posts and articles I’ve read which suggest the same and give you tips on the best way to get good traffic from StumbleUpon and some that suggest that StumbleUpon traffic isn’t worth getting. My experience has me between both points of view. I have yet to understand the secret of StumbleUpon traffic. I have used StumbleUpon a total of five times on two websites, one being this blog. I can say for certain that almost all StumbleUpon visitors do not go any further than the landing page. I myself am guilty of that when I am stumbling; I simply review the site and click stumble again, if the website interests me intensely I will bookmark it in hopes of coming back to at some time in the very far future.

Here is a table showing the visitor responses I got for my website and for my blog when i stumbled a few pages. The visitors are those that I got within the first 24 hours of submission.

As you can see there is a fluctuation in the traffic when a new page of my site is newly stumbled. I have yet to figure out what exactly makes a new stumble more popular than another, but I’m guess it has something to do with the tags used in describing the particular page. Another strange thing is there was a time I was averaging about 40 - 50 new visitors a day from stumble upon, a steady flow of traffic without me creating any new stumbles from pages on my site, and then it just stopped suddenly one day.

Granted all of this I currently take the stance that StumbleUpon traffic is extremely unpredictable. I recommend it for ordinary websites but not so much for blogs. StumbleUpon users bookmark as they go along but bloggers are more interested in getting rss subscribers.

I will continue to experiment with StumbleUpon and give further observations when I have much more comprehensive and conclusive data.

Thanks for reading.

My First dot com: Idea to Implementation pt2

In my last post I went through my thought processes for my first online business venture. Now I’m going to speak about my implementation process. I wont bore you with any in depth programming and technical details, but rather give you information on the tools I used to implement my website. I will also give you information on viable alternatives to what I used so you can weigh your options and choose wisely.

Web Development

My first dot com has a social networking theme to it. After doing research on similar sites I noted the basic services I should provide along with the back end needed to support such services. Being a software developer myself and a web enthusiast it wasn’t too hard for me to identify what was needed. A basic point of view for a web application, involves a front end and a back end. The front end is what the user sees and interacts with. This is the nice layout and information on your website, well presented to the user. The back end usually involves a database filled with the information you are presenting. We use a programming language or scripting language to communicate between our front end and back end as described in this post.

Programming Language of choice:

My programming language of choice was ruby using the ruby on rails framework. For those of you who may have never heard of ruby before, just check out those two links in the previous sentence for a nice introduction. Although I recommend ruby and ruby on rails for anyone, the persons just starting out would have a nice time with it. It has a much more gradual learning curve for easy and quick development. Additionally ruby and ruby on rails are..FREEEEE. Yes folks, ruby and ruby on rails are open source languages and frameworks respectively. Of course one can argue any language is free and available for use, but not all the tools available to aid in the development are free in most cases. Full Story →

My First Dot Com: Idea to Implementation

My first entrepreneurial endeavour has been a website. It was fairly easy for me to come to this decision mainly because I’ve always loved web development and design, so I had a natural bias toward an online business venture.

Why do a website?

I based my decision on the criteria below:

• Something that I had a passionate interest in, so that as I worked on it I would be having fun.
• Needed a business that required very little start up capital. Being a new graduate, lots of money isn’t something I have at my disposal.
• Utilize my skills. I am fairly good at software and not too shabby in design as well

With all these in mind and the motivation I felt from the success of so many other online businesses to date I decided to try my luck at a website for my business venture, my first dot com.

Choosing a topic for the website

This is a very important step. I’ve read in many blogs about the importance of doing something that you are genuinely interested in. I have to agree with this belief. I wrote a list of things I like to do while I am online or on the computer along with the relevant websites associated with each item on the list. An example list is as follows:

1. news - digg.com, slashdot.com
2. blogs - shoemoney.com, smallfishbigmoney.com
3. misc - facebook.com
4. web and graphic design - tutorialized.com, braineak.com

A quick look at the online trends and a social networking site seemed like the way to go. In the end I chose a simple yet interesting topic and decided to take the social networking approach.

Check out the competition

Everyone says it and I will repeat it, don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Now that I had decided on a website and a concept behind it, I paid numerous visits to as many sites that were similar to the one I intended on developing. My belief is that if these sites are operational and successful then for mine to even stand a chance it must at least match the look and basic services of these sites. Turn your competition into your comrade, by looking for what is missing in their sites and making a list to incorporate it into yours. This will help to get users interested if you offer something that is lacking in the other options.

That’s it for the idea portion of my first dot com adventure. It all boiled down to three steps

1. choosing to do a website in the first place based on my current income and skills
2. choosing a topic that interests me and that I am passionate about
3. Learning from the big guys that have already established themselves

In my next post I will talk about my implementation experiences. Thanks for reading.

Developing Eyes

Hi and welcome to Developing Eyes. The concept of this blog is to show my journey into the world of entrepreneurship. I am interested in areas of software development and engineering, online marketing, affiliate marketing and many more.

I intend to share my experiences with you, the reader so they can hopefully answer any questions you may have about starting your own business, whether it be online or not. Hope you enjoy my posts and comment frequently and we can develop our eyes together.