Photography: MorBCN

There was a time when “self-publishing” was just another word for “loser.” It was what bad poets did when they ran out of magazines to reject them and what grandchildren did after they’d finished putting together their grandparents’ memoirs. But publishing is changing. Print-on-demand, “entrepreneurial publishing” and digital books have put the entire process from writing through publishing to distribution at the hands of anyone who wants to put their knowledge and their experience into a book form. And the results of creating your own book can be tremendous. It’s not just the money from sales — which actually might not be very much — but the ability to bill yourself as “the author of,” to show off your expertise and to pass on your knowledge to others who might find it useful. For many self-published authors, writing and then producing their own book isn’t just satisfying in itself but it’s the first step in preparing a massive boost to their careers.

Seth Godin, for example, recently announced that he will no longer be publishing books in a traditional manner. That might sound like a revolutionary move from someone who describes himself as a former “book packager,” has created 120 published books and written a dozen bestsellers himself. But it’s also a step back. After publishing Permission Marketing with Simon and Shuster in 1999, Godin released his next book Unleashing the Ideavirus as a free, self-published ebook. In effect,  he was putting the idea in the book to the test, releasing it into the wild to watch it spread and see how far it reached.

The Most Popular Ebook Ever Written

And it worked. Described as “the most popular ebook ever written,” Unleashing the Ideavirus is believed to  have picked up more than 200,000 direct downloads and a further 300,000 from other sites. It went on to win traditional publishing contracts in 41 countries and launch Godin’s professional speaking career. It might not be a strategy for everyone but if you’ve got the platform and the right content then giving away an ebook online, something for which you don’t need a publisher, can win you attention from publishers and build your platform.

Seth Godin’s book was in a traditional format but produced and distributed in an untraditional way. When Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson produced The One-Minute Manager, they wanted everything to be traditional, including the $15 price tag. The industry told them it wasn’t going to happen, that a book that short would need a cut price too. Rather than compromise the value of the information in their book they decided to go their own way.

At that point, their book should have gone the same way as most self-published business books: into large piles of boxes buried in the garage. Instead, within three months, the pair had sold more than 20,000 copies in San Diego alone. Shortly afterwards they were holding a contract from William Morrow — and in the 30 years since then, they’ve seen their $15 book sell more than 12 million copies in over 25 languages.

That’s unusual. It’s usually difficult to sell your own business books unless you have a platform as large as Seth Godin’s — or the determination to fill halls, speak to crowds and push your product yourself. But if you’ve done that, you’ll have the proof that doubtful publishers need to be willing to lend a hand.

Richard N. Bolles had much smaller ambitions for What Color Is Your Parachute. Originally intended as a job-seeking guide for Episcopal priests heading into the secular world, the book was initially self-published and passed around inside the Church. That was always going to limit the audience though, and the positive feedback the guide received suggested it could do much more good if more people could read it.

Ten Speed Press bought the rights, and the book went on to spend 288 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, returning to the bestseller lists with each annual update.

It’s possible that the success of What Color Is Your Parachute was a pleasant surprise but there’s a little more to it than that. Bolles wrote a book for a specific audience but which contained information that was also universal. When the feedback came in saying that the book could have had a more general audience,  he was quick to act on it and put the book in the hands of a publishing company with longer reach than his alone.

Know Your Market Better than Publishers

Writer E. Lynn Harris did something similar. He tried the traditional publishing route first for his novel Invisible Life but came up against the wall of rejection that meets most first-time novelists. So he turned to a market he knew. He printed the book himself and placed it in beauty salons and bookstores owned by African-Americans. It was a case of the author knowing more about a segment of the book-buying public than the publishing giants did. E. Lynn Harris sold 10,000 copies of the book before Doubleday/Anchor offered him a contract. His novels have since sold millions and repeatedly hit the New York Times bestseller list.

And if all of that isn’t inspiring enough there’s always Tim O’Reilly who began his career with a degree in Classics and as a self-publisher of books on Unix. O’Reilly & Associates is now one of the world’s largest computer book publishers as well as a conference organizer.

Of course, none of this means that if you lay out a pile of notes to a vanity publisher to print your book that you’re immediately going to hit the big time. Most self-published books don’t sell. But if you know your market, if you’re willing to do the marketing, and if the content within the book is valuable enough, then you too can build a platform, boost a brand, construct a company, and if you’re really lucky — and still want to — maybe even interest mainstream publishers too.

In a recent poll, tech blog Mashable’s readers voted overwhelmingly in favor of freemium products over ad-supported products. Of the 1,250 readers who voted, 461 chose freemium as their preferred way of enjoying goods without paying for them, while just 305 would want more features but also lots of ads. That looks like a big thumbs-up then for products that give the basics for nothing, charge for the extras but keep advertisers away. But look a little closer at the figures, and the picture starts to change. The second-most popular option after “freemium” wasn’t “ad-supported.” It was “tie: both work.” The difference between that shrug and freemium came down to less than 40 votes. And that was a poll of users, not producers. If even customers are confused about whether freemium or ads are best, what are creators supposed to do? Should they be giving away the store but packing it with ads? Or does it pay better to give a little and charge for the rest?

Part of the confusion lies in the complicated nature of freemium. Chris Anderson, author of Free, a comprehensive look at the free economy, has identified four different kinds of freemium models: time-limited products allow users to try for a set period, commonly thirty days, before forcing them to pay; feature-limited products give away the basics but charge for more advanced features; seat-limited products let a small number of people use the same license but charge for mass use; and customer-type products let certain kinds of customers, such as small businesses, use the product for free, but charges those who can more easily afford it.

Cannibalizing Your Customers

Each of those models has its strengths and weaknesses. Time-limited products give users little opportunity to get to know the product well enough to find it invaluable, says Anderson. Customer-type products require difficult enforcement. And other models risk cannibalizing the low-end of the market by giving away the store to people who might have been willing to pay for it. Choosing between those models then looks difficult, but in practice, the nature of the product will play a big part in determining the most appropriate model. Seat-limited and customer-type products are only useful for software that might be used by office-loads of people, such as Intuit’s QuickBooks and Microsoft’s Bizspark. A feature-limited model will be of little use to a very simple program, such as a YouTube downloader; and a time-limited model would be a poor choice for a program that might be used to solve a one-off problem. Most producers then are likely to find themselves wondering whether to limit the features or restrict the time.

That choice should come down to money. Michael Mullany, vice president of marketing at Engine Yard, a ruby-on-rails app company, has tried to produce a mathematical equation for freemium models which, according to CNet means that:

freemium will be a better choice when:

Conversion Rate % > (Cost to Serve a Free User + Cost to Acquire a Free User)/Cost to Acquire a Paid User

Conversion rates for freemium programs tend to be between 2 and 8 percent. (Despite claiming that TurboTax online has a 70 percent conversion rate, Chris Anderson reckons that companies should target around 5 percent.) So for free or freemium to pay, Mullany concludes, free users have to cost between one-twelfth and one-fiftieth of the cost of picking up a paying customer.

But that’s comparing free or freemium to paid models. What happens when you compare freemium to the revenues that might come in through advertising, one particular kind of free model?

Ad Revenues are Unpredictable

First, things start to get more complicated because the revenue streams are more complex. While a paid business model will have a fixed income for each license sold, ad revenues can be fluid and unpredictable. A gaming company, for example, might give away the first level of its game for nothing, and have a 5 percent conversion rate of free users to customers willing to pay $10 for the full version. As long as it costs less than half a dollar to acquire each of those free customers, then the company will be in profit. But if the company is planning to make money not by persuading one in twenty to pay but by charging advertisers on a cost-per-click or cost-per-mille basis — or both — then it’s dealing with revenue figures that are a lot less clear than a sales price. The value of a cost-per-click will vary depending on the conversion rate and the price the advertisers are willing to pay for a lead. Cost-per-mille prices, too, can depend on the subject of the content. And the platform matters as well. Greg Yardley of Pinch Media, a mobile analytics firm, famously crunched the numbers and concluded that advertising on iPhone apps just doesn’t pay; even charging 99 cents, he argued, makes better sense.

Those low CPMs were partly down to a quirk in the iPhone. The lack of multitasking meant that clicking an ad yanked the user out of the app, making banners less effective than they should have been. The launch of a multitasking function in OS4, coupled with iAds, Apple’s new advertising network, has changed that situation. Large advertisers are reporting that they’re pleased with the network’s performance. Apple has now picked up $60 million in advertising commitments to see out the year and publishers are already feeling the benefits. According to the LA Times technology blog, Dictionary.com has managed to raise the price of its ad space by 177 percent since its enabled iAds in its iPhone app.

For developers then, choosing between freemium and ads still isn’t easy. There’s no overall strategy that fits every kind of product but rather some difficult cost and conversion calculations to compare against clickthrough rates and expected CPMs. Picking up all of that data won’t be as easy as it sounds either. Ask yourself whether you should go for ads or freemium and the best answer is likely to be the same as that given by users: a shrug and an “it depends.”

It’s not easy to think about bizarre business success stories after Twitter. When a company built on the concept of public SMS messaging can pick up tens of millions of dollars in start-up funding and go on to become a phenomenon, anything is possible. But Jack Dorsey wasn’t the only one to come up with an odd idea that become a success (his new payment system looks a little more conventional.) There are plenty of other people who have thought of some weird concepts — and discovered that it’s just what the market needed.

A Novel About You

Part of the appeal of a good novel is the fantasy of being someone else. But when Katie Oliver was looking for a gift for her sister-in-law, a fan of romance novels, she stumbled on an idea for a very different kind of book gift. She set up UStarNovels.com, a business that puts the reader in the heart of the action. Buy one of the books available on the site and in addition to entering a dedication, you’ll be asked to substitute the name of the lead character with the name of the recipient — and to swap other characters for their friends and partner. The site offers a range of classic (for which read “out of copyright”) books but also a number of romance novels and, in response to demand, a range of erotic novels too. At about $40 a copy, they’re not cheap but they are selling. In one week alone, Katie Oliver told NPR that she’d processed more than 1,500 orders.

Forget e-books; maybe the real future of publishing is in designer books.

Personal Cakes

A good sign that a bizarre idea is a good ‘un is that the most common reaction to hearing it is: “Why did no one think of that before?” That has to be the most common reaction to the success of Crumbs Bakery, a chain that was launched in 2003 on the Upper West Side of Manhattan by Mia and Jason Bauer. The bakery sells the usual range of cakes and baked goodies but it’s really built its reputation on cupcakes — ornate, personal-sized cakes that are small enough to enjoy without having to feel you should be sharing them.

The product idea was smart enough but the concept came with an ambitious business plan too. That one bakery has now spread across America. It has branches in four states with more ready to open soon. Inc. Magazine has named Crumbs one of America’s fastest-growing companies, quoting its 273 percent revenue growth between start-up and 2008 when employees topped 200 and revenues reached $8 million.

That’s a lot of money from some very small cakes.

Money from Free Listings

The most bizarre aspect of Craiglist’s success is that it’s been successful at all. The list began way back in 1995 when Craig Newmark arrived in San Francisco and put together a listing of events that might interest other geeks. Initially, he distributed the list by email. It wasn’t intended to make money, and it wasn’t considered a business. But it became popular, grew, took on more cities, more countries, and more services. It also started to accept money: $25-$75 for job ads and $10 for some real estate listings.

The traffic the site has generated has turned those small payments into giant revenues. As a privately-owned business, Craigslist doesn’t report its earnings but estimates have put its annual revenues as high as $150 million.

And yet the site looks like it hasn’t changed since it moved from email to the Web. There are no graphics (the “Best of Craigslist” section is decorated with ASCII!). There are no social media widgets, no way to target listings except by category, no way to track results and no additional features at all. Most notably, there are no banner ads so no way to cash in on all of those users looking at the free listings.

It all comes down to the philosophy of Craig Newmark himself, who sees the site as primarily a service provider rather than a for-profit corporation. With an enormous readership and a price point that’s mostly zero, he’s created a very successful business though.

Selling Used Boxes

Marty Metro graduated cum laude from the University of Maryland. By the age of 23 he was completing his MBA, and before he had even graduated was recruited by Andersen Consulting (now Accenture), where he spent ten years as an enterprise technology consultant. In 2002, he turned his back on the giant tech companies that he’d been helping, and started selling cardboard boxes. Not just any cardboard boxes though: used cardboard boxes.

The idea was that people who had moved had boxes they wanted to get rid of, and people who were moving were willing to pay for those boxes. No less importantly, it was more environment-friendly to continue reusing the cardboard than to recycle it after one use.

Today, UsedCardboardBoxes.com buys stacks of boxes from large companies, paying more than they would receive from a recycler. It sorts them, pulps the ones it can’t use, refurbishes the ones it can and sells them on for less than the price of a retailer. It’s a system that’s simple, remunerative and planet-friendly enough to make the business a finalist for Green Business of the Year in 2009. Recyclers have long turned garbage into cash. But Marty Metro has managed to make cash by reusing garbage.

Bringing China to the World

If cupcakes and used boxes look so obvious that you would have thought that someone would have got there first, then at least when it comes to Alibaba.com, they did get there first. When Jack Ma, an English teacher from Hangzhou, created China Pages in 1995, it was the first Internet-based company in China. When he launched Alibaba.com in 1999 it went on to become one of the world’s biggest Internet companies.

The site acts as a giant wholesale market, offering products made in China to retailers around the world. Its Chinese site, www.1688.com (“yiliubaba” in Chinese), functions as a B2B site within China, and the company also has a Japanese version, and runs Aliexpress.com, a place for smaller retailers looking for fast shipments of smaller units. Together, those services are said to have over 50 million registered users. The company also owns China Yahoo!, AliPay, China’s most popular payment platform, and Taobao, an auction site that drove eBay out of the Chinese marketplace. When Alibaba had its IPO in Hong Kong in 1997, it raised $1.7 billion.

The ideas themselves weren’t odd, but doing it in China at that time was, and that first mover advantage turned the former teacher into a billionaire.

It’s the biggest sporting event in the world. Thirty-two countries, billions of dollars, a television audience that stretches from South Africa to North Korea, and 90 minutes of 22 men kicking a ball in a sport that Americans tend to dismiss as a girls’ game. The FIFA World Cup, an event that takes place once every four years and captures the imagination of (almost) the entire globe, is now under way in Africa for the first time. Like any event with an audience that runs into the hundreds of millions, it’s also a huge business. According to accountancy firm Grant Thorton, the games could add as much as 0.5 percent to host nation South Africa’s GDP this year, an injection of some $12.4 billion. Much of that will have come from the effects of tourism. About 373,000 foreigners are expected to visit the country during the month-long sporting jamboree, spending about $4,000 each. Most of the money though will have come from government coffers to pay for new stadiums, renovated roads and security. The biggest beneficiary is likely to be not the country, but FIFA itself. The organization’s profits from the last World Cup, held in Germany, were a cool $1.8 billion.

But the international sporting body isn’t the only one making money out of the World Cup. Sellers of vuvuzelas, the plastic trumpets that sound like angry bees and infuriate commentators, and which South Africans insist are traditional musical instruments, are clearly doing well. Earplugs that promise to block the sound are reported to be selling equally fast. Pubs and bars with big screens and expensive beer will do fine too, despite Fifa’s attempts to stop them. Makers of novelty items will struggle a little but websites that discuss the World Cup, optimize their AdSense units or offer decent affiliate products can expect to earn a little income too. Anyone can do that, although they’ll struggle to do well on search rankings when FIFA itself, big broadcasters and media giants are dominating the rankings.

The World Cup on Social Media

The best hope to make some money out of the World Cup then (other than scalping tickets) looks like social media. While Facebook and Twitter might not have done much to influence the UK election (depending on who you ask and how you measure the results), this World Cup does seem to have taken social media to its heart.

The biggest World Cup social media success has been Nike’s “Write The Future” ad. At three minutes, the full length version is too long to be played on television but on YouTube, it’s been viewed more than 15 million times. To reach that sort of audience during a television show would have involved a deep dip into the advertising budget, and even then the company would be lucky to get more than 30 seconds. Nike has managed to persuade an enormous audience to choose to watch an ad that’s three minutes long without having to spend a dime on placement.

It did however have to spend a lot of money on star sponsorships as well on the film itself, which is creative and as professionally-made as you might expect from a multinational footwear giant.

Outside the Xbox

YouTube isn’t the only social media tool that companies are using to spread their name during the World Cup though. Electronic Arts famously launched a soccer management game produced by Playfish, the social media game company it bought at the end of last year. The game, which can only be played across Facebook, may generate a small amount of cash but the real World Cup money for the video game company will come from its console games. 2010 FIFA World Cup sells for around $60 and moved more than 1.7 million copies in Europe in its first week alone, making it the most successful launch ever for a sports simulation.  If you’re really looking to make money out of the World Cup, the best approach it seems is to get yourself an official license.

But it can also pay to be think outside the Xbox. Korean company Hyundai has taken a broad approach to World Cup marketing. Describing its marketing activities during the event, the carmaker relegates television advertising almost to the bottom of the list. Perimeter boards are at the top, suggesting a high spend, but much of the focus is on the fans and on activities in which they have to play an active part. “Fan fests” consisting of screens and events around the world will put the brand in front of large audiences, a “fan of the match” will help to whip up enthusiasm, and an online program makes the interaction online too. The aim, the company says, is to “improve the quality of the interactive experience with the brand.”

The broad coverage is not without its risks however. After British broadcaster ITV cut away from England’s opening game in the fourth minute of the match to show a Hyundai ad, viewers were returned to the game to see captain Steven Gerrard celebrating the team’s only goal. ITV took the brunt of the blame for that faux pas but forcing fans to look at you instead of a goal is not going to lead your market to cheer your name.

So if earning from the World Cup has been dominated by companies with the biggest marketing budgets, is there anything left for small firms with deep enthusiasm but shallow pockets? Websites that already have plenty of traffic can certainly match their content to the event. Travel firm Bootsnall, for example, launched the WorldCupBlog, a site that’s managed to reach the first page of search results on Google for the keyword phrase “world cup” and is filled with affiliate ads, banners, and of course, ticket offers. Other sites will have to be a little more subtle with the odd promotion. Nor is it worth working investing too much in World Cup revenues. Unless you can repeat the formula for the Olympics in two years’ time, you’ll only have a month to cash in on your effort. If you’re Fifa, Hyundai, a pub with a big screen TV, or a stall-holder with a pile of plastic trumpets your best bet for making decent money from the World might well be Spain at 9/2.

Image: zengame

Being first to market always bring advantages You get to set the standard, establish your brand, create demand, and associate your product with the market. When there are no competitors, you’ll have 100 percent of the market share and the loyalty of satisfied customers. And when competitors do arrive, they’ll have to battle hard to push you off the top. But being second has its advantages too. You get to build on the mistakes made by the pioneer and enjoy a market that’s already been told the benefits of the product. With the right planning, the creators of a “me-too” product can quickly find themselves overtaking a tired front runner and moving from second — and even last — to first.

Stealing that position though will mean some smart preparations and creating a product that doesn’t just copy what’s already out there but which improves on it, exploiting the weaknesses of the current market standard and filling gaps so that your product can compete.

The best way to do that is to offer better quality. When industrial designer James Dyson created a new model of vacuum cleaner, he was entering a market dominated by large companies and in which “hoover” had become a byword for the act of sucking up household dust. By redesigning the product so that suction rates improved by 45 percent, Dyson was able to offer a vacuum cleaner that went on to become the market leader by value in the United States and the fastest-selling cleaner manufactured in the UK. And he was able to do it even though his me-too product is about eight times more expensive than that of his competitors.

When you compete on quality — and offer a significant improvement over competitors — it can be possible not just to steal market share but to change the pricing of the market too.

Be Nicer to Customers

Unlike manufacturers, retailers don’t have the option of offering higher quality products: the items on their shelves will be the same as the items on their competitors’ shelves. But they can beat the pioneers by looking for flaws in their customer service, and filling the gap.

That’s what Zappos did after founder Tony Hsieh had reviewed Amazon’s online bookstore and copied the model to sell shoes and clothing. After making almost no sales in 1999, the company was grossing over $1 billion ten years later. That growth came as a result of a focus on customer service that included return shipping assistance, a 365-day return policy and a call center that was always open and always helpful. So effective was the attempt to help customers that Amazon, which had enjoyed a five-year head start, bought the company last year for $1.2 billion.

Competing on customer service works best for me-too retailers because service is their main product. When customers can buy the same items in a range of different stores, both online and on the high street, the choice of seller will come down to convenience, trust and ease. When your me-too product is identical to something that already exists, then just offering to treat the customer better can be enough to pull ahead — at least until your bigger competitor pulls you in.

Apple is Always Second

Improved customer service usually concerns the relationship between the seller and the buyer. But when you can improve the relationship between the product and the buyer, then a me-too product can really steal the market.

Apple is the master of this technique. The company is never the first to bring a product idea to the market. It wasn’t the first to create an MP3 player, nor the first to use a touch screen nor even first company to offer a tablet computer, which have been around since the early 1980s. It did however improve the quality of products that already existed, but no less importantly, it made them easier to use.

iPods took off when music lovers realized they no longer had to click a button multiple times to find the songs they needed; the clickwheel meant that they could just roll their finger. And the sliding pages and large screen on the iPhone finally made changing functions and surfing the Web — something that other phones had been offering for years — convenient and easy. Although Apple had come in for criticism when it announced it was entering a crowded mobile phone market, its focus on ergonomics and user interaction meant that it was quickly able to dominate the field with a product whose core functions — communications, picture-taking, music playing and Web surfing — were the same as those of established competitors.

Of course, much of Apple’s success is also down to hype and marketing, but that’s another important way for a new product to beat a similar competitor with a first mover advantage. Users of Tivo, for example, may take the company’s dominance in its market for granted but the development stage was characterized by stiff competition from Mountain View pioneer ReplayTV. While Replay picked up the praise from critics and users at tech shows across the country, Tivo’s more business savvy executives were busy showing their player to broadcasting companies, making deals, and assuring them that their advertising revenue wouldn’t be affected. As Replay struggled to sell its player to customers, Tivo already had deals in place with retailers and broadcasters.

According to one survey, me-too products that differentiate themselves with unique customer benefits and superior value enjoy on average, five times the success rate, four times the market share and four times the profitability of the competitors that lack that key ingredient.

Whether you’re planning to mark yourself out with a better quality product, a superior customer service, revolutionary usability or some smart marketing, there’s no reason that being second to market means that you can’t conquer that market. Creating a successful business always means doing better than your competitors. That’s always easier to do when you know what your competitors have been doing — and what they’ve been doing wrong.

The biggest benefit of social media marketing isn’t instant sales, identifying your keenest buyers or even better customer service. You can pick up all of those on social media sites, but none of them is as powerful as the ability to build a close connection with your market. When you’re in touch with leads daily – through tweets or through Facebook discussions – your business will be on their mind when they’re ready to buy. But while social media can create relationships, those connections can be relatively loose. It doesn’t take much for someone to stop following a company’s tweets and once that’s happened, it doesn’t take long before that company is forgotten. It’s not just the number of connections that count in social media, it’s the depth of the engagement as well, and that’s something that even Twitter, with its brief posts, struggles to build. A number of leading social media types though have found a way of adding a uniquely deep level of engagement to their Twitter streams by teaming them with Ustream.

Formed in 2007, and now boasting 40 million monthly viewers, Ustream is a kind of live YouTube. Rather than recording videos then uploading them for others to view, users of Ustream can broadcast live, allowing anyone to watch them through the site. The videos are also recorded, making them available to be seen later by people who missed the original broadcast. It’s an approach that allows for spontaneity as well as all the excitement and unpredictability that’s a part of any live show. Groups as big as Black Eyed Peas and the Jonas Brothers are using Ustream to broadcast live to their fans while the American Music Awards used the service to beam stars live from the red carpet.

For businesses though, the real power of Ustream comes when live broadcasting is combined with two-way interaction. Earlier this month, for example, professional blogging expert Darren Rowse told his 90,000-plus Twitter followers that he would be on Ustream soon for “an impromptu Q&A session.” He tweeted the URL, and for 50 minutes answered questions delivered through Twitter while on air:

From Ustream to iTunes

Andy Brudtkuhl, “Chief Web Guru” at 48Web, a web strategy and internet marketing firm, takes this approach even further. Every Friday, he and his partner Doug Mitchell of createWOWmedia put on a live broadcast through Ustream, taking questions from viewers while they’re on air. But they also use that broadcast to push content in a number of different directions and drive their audience to take action. The audio track of the broadcast is recorded using GarageBand, turned into an MP3 and pushed to iTunes. The video of the broadcast is embedded into a blog post. A chat room allows viewers to interact with each other while they watch, as well as with the broadcasters. Using CamTwist, Andy can switch the feed to demonstrate an activity on his desktop, adding more variety to the on-screen presence than a pair of talking heads. And an opt-in form next to the video turns casual viewers into regular visitors.

“It’s also one more reason for people to come to our site,” Andy told new media marketing expert Jason Van Orden.

All of those extras certainly increase the power of the broadcast, making it available to more people, adding another level of interaction and engagement, and even providing a way to pick up some immediate benefits from viewers in the form of joining a mailing list. But it also requires a bigger investment of time and effort. Darren Rowse reported that while  his 50-minute live chat had been fun, it had also been exhausting — and that was just a simple chat.

More importantly, it was also spontaneous. That’s an important aspect of Ustreaming that can be missed by over-eager broadcasters. Put out programs on a regular basis and as the broadcasts become more common, they — and their content — become less valuable. It doesn’t matter if you miss a program or decide not to watch a recording if you know there will be another one along in a week’s time (and probably discussing similar content). One of the attractions of Darren Rowse’s live chat was that no one knew it was coming (even Darren) and no one knows when the next one will take place. It was a rare chance to ask a leading professional blogger about the best way to make money from a website.

Watch Me Drive to Work

That spontaneity means that there’s a value to broadcasting almost anything at any time. And the ability do it even from an iPhone makes it possible to broadcast almost anything at any time. Joel Comm, creator of iFart Mobile, has picked up viewers who watched him Ustream his drive to work and a trip to buy a new television for his office. If the kind of trivial details that make up much of the small talk on Twitter help to build relationships, then there’s a value too in inviting members of your market even deeper into your life.

Ustream then is flexible. It can be combined with Twitter, or even email, and used as a mass two-way communication tool, allowing an entrepreneur to address thousands of leads at a time. You can think of it then as a live online conference, complete with Q&A session. You can use it as a content creation device, a way of shooting an interactive video whose contents can later be pushed out in a range of different directions and through different channels. And you can use it too as a way of allowing your leads to see exactly who you are and how you lead your life. It might not leave much room for privacy but it might well lead to the kind of close and unforgettable relationship with a market that translates directly into sales.

Photography: franz88

He’s got the kind of career success the rest of us can only dream of. A record sixteen Grand Slam titles. Twenty-three consecutive Grand Slam semi-final appearances. A world ranking of 1. And generally acclaimed as the greatest tennis player who  ever picked up a racket, perhaps even the greatest sportsman ever. Roger Federer’s success is down to his ability to whack a ball across a court faster and more accurately than anyone has ever done before, but success at anything is never down to just the technical skills required for that particular field. Lots of competitors will have those abilities too. Being the best also means having the right mentality, the right preparation and the right attitude to make the most of the talents you were born with. So what can Roger Federer teach us about achieving perfection?

Recognize Your Potential for Perfection

The first lesson is to know what you’re good at.

That’s easier than it sounds and it’s something that even Federer struggled with, as well as the people around him. Asked after winning his latest title, the 2010 Australian Open, what the secret of his success was, Federer’s answer was very blunt:

“There’s no secret behind it,” he said. “I mean, [I’m] definitely a very talented player.”

That wasn’t particularly modest, or revealing, but he then went on to say:

“I always knew I had something special, but I didn’t know it was like, you know, that crazy.”

He wasn’t the only one not to spot immediately that his talent was that “crazy.” Adolf Kacovsky — a tennis coach at The Old Boys Tennis Club where Federer was the star pupil — would laugh when the 10-year-old would say that he would be the best in the world.

“I thought that he would perhaps become the best player in Switzerland or Europe but not the best in the world. He had it in his head and he worked at it,” he told Rene Stauffer, author of The Roger Federer Story: Quest for Perfection.

It’s easy to spot when you’re better than average at something. But it takes confidence to believe that you can be the best at it, and work hard enough to make full use of that talent in order to get there.

Patience Makes Perfect

It also takes time. When Federer enters a competition now, the expectation is that he’ll reach at least the semi-finals, even if he doesn’t win it completely. It wasn’t always that way. Federer played in seventeen Grand Slams before he won his first. He might not have looked back since, but his experience does show that there are no short cuts to perfection. Even the most talented performers still have to pay their dues, learn the business and build experience.

Federer’s playing history shows that perfection isn’t born, it’s made. That lesson of patience and practice is one that entrepreneurs need to learn too.

Know When to Be Perfect

Ask many people at the top of their profession about the secret to success and they’ll wheel out the cliché, “I work hard and play hard.” But lots of people put in long hours in the office and equally long hours in the night club with nothing to show for it but an average salary and a large hangover.

Today Federer trains as hard as he competes, and there’s no evidence that he’s a hellraiser in the evenings. Married with two small children, his home life doesn’t appear to have any of the tabloid excitement enjoyed by… say, Tiger Woods. But a telling story from his youth does give us one clue into the best way to use perfection. According to Marco Chiudinelli, a Swiss tennis player who played at the same club as Federer when they were children, the two would treat training fairly lightly. They’d goof around a lot and were frequently thrown off the court. Roger would lose to just about everyone. His attitude changed completely when it came time to compete however:

“When it came down to business, he could flip a switch and become a completely different person,” he said in Stauffer’s book. “I could give him a thrashing in training but when we played at a tournament together, he gave me a thrashing. Even back then he was a real competitor.”

Perfection takes focus, effort and energy. It’s not something that can be maintained constantly without the risk of exhaustion and burn-out. It’s notable that while Rafael Nadal has had knee problems and Andy Murray has taken time out after injuring his wrist, Federer has had relatively few injuries. His style of play allows him to achieve perfection at just the times he needs it most.

Achieve Perfection One Goal at a Time

With Pete Sampras’ Grand Slam record already broken, there’s little else for Federer to obviously aim at. Commentators though are busy discussing the possibility of Federer picking up a calendar Grand Slam, winning all of the four biggest tournaments in the same year.

Federer though is having none of it.

“I won’t just put the entire calendar just around trying to win the calendar Grand Slam,” he said recently. “It’s something if it happens, it does and it’s great, but it’s not something that’s like my number one goal, not at all. It’s the same as I haven’t put a number on how many Grand Slams I want to try to win. Whatever happens happens.”

For Federer perfection isn’t a goal. The goal is to win the next tournament, the next match, the next point. As all of those things happen, perfection is reached. Aim for perfection though, and you’re more likely to experience frustration and disappointment — exactly the kind of thing that’s likely to blow you off course long before you reach your ultimate goal.

Reaching perfection isn’t simple, and it’s not something that’s available to everyone. You can do all of things that that Roger Federer does and still come in at just “very good.” But you can also make a perfect effort, and that’s what Federer teaches us all to do. It comes by believing in your abilities (even when others don’t), having the patience to learn and practice, knowing when to put in your greatest focus, and looking to achieve success one step at a time.

Combine those lessons with talent and you can Grand Slam your market too.

Photography: Rich Anderson

There’s never a good time to start a new business. Whenever you decide to set up your company, seek funding, and launch your product, you’re going to be battling with competitors, struggling to bring in your first customers, and dealing with all of the setbacks and surprises that come with starting something new. Make the moves during a boom-time, and you’ll find that there are plenty of other firm flush with cash and racing to get their products out ahead of you. Do it when times are hard and you’ll struggle to persuade buyers and investors to put their hands in their pockets. But that’s not a reason not to do it. In fact, a shrinking economy can throw up all sorts of advantages for entrepreneurs looking to turn their business ideas into successful companies.

Perhaps the most important is motivation. Creating a start-up is hard work and initially at least, you’ll be doing most of that work yourself. There will be little, if any, income so you’ll probably have to squeeze the development, marketing and research around your day job. You’ll be putting in long hours, giving up your weekends and free time, and you’ll have no idea whether your plan really is going to play out or whether, like most new companies, it will crash, burn and become just another line on your resume.

When the effort is so real and the benefits so unclear, it’s easy to keep dreaming and stick with what you know does work: the day job that you might not find very satisfying but which you can count on to pay the bills.

The Recession Raises the Risk in Paid Work

During a downtime though, that day job doesn’t look quite so stable. While a start-up always carries risks, a recession brings those risks into salaried positions too, closing the gap between sticking to a job and starting a new business. Being able to control your own future can start to look a lot more attractive when the alternative is waiting for the boss to knock on the office door and call you in for that talk. At the very least, you want to have somewhere to land if the company does gives you the push.

And if you do find that you’re out, you’ll also discover that you have time. While job-searching is often described as a full-time job, in practice, it’s usually possible to send out resumes in the morning and have the afternoon free for building your own job. Even interviews won’t happen every day. Best of all, you won’t be the only one with hours to fill. A recession might mean a shortage of money but it also means that there’s no shortage of talent looking for ways to put their skills to use. When times are good, you’ll struggle to find a programmer, a designer or a copywriter willing to work for a song or a share of the profits. During the downturn, cafes and co-working spaces are filled with “consultants” and “contactors” hoping to stumble into a project that means they’ll be reading resumes instead of writing them. There’s no better time to build a team. Check out the people sitting next to you at Starbucks or work your social networks. At times like these everyone knows someone who’s either lost their job or could be about to. Even if they’re sitting pretty themselves, they’ll be happy to put out the word that there’s an opportunity available if it means they’re helping a friend.

A Downtime Means Being Cash-Poor but Time-Rich

There’s also no better time to find an office. As companies close, office space becomes available and rental prices fall. In 2008, even New York saw falls as high as 5.5 percent while the amount of sub-let space increased by 34 percent. Funding for a new business might be difficult to find in a recession but bargains are available everywhere. And that applies to other assets too. Businesses are much more open to negotiation when the alternative is an empty book. You might be able to push harder for better advertising rates on selected websites, or pick up deals on barely used office furniture and computer equipment.

Of course, that does still leave that problem of funding. But that’s going to be a problem in boom times too. A rising economy will deliver more money and a greater supply of angels and investors, but there are also more start-ups chasing that cash and booking appointments with those investors. The dot-com years, when it was possible to add “dotcom” to the end of a word and pick up a check for million bucks, are unlikely to return. But not all the money in the world has been wiped out and investors are still looking to put their funds behind a good idea. You might need a business plan that’s more persuasive and shows a faster road to profit than usual. And you might need names on the board that investors recognize — or which at least turn up well on Google. But if the idea is sound, and you push hard enough, you should still be able to find at least some of the funding you need.

Or best of all, the squeeze will make you discover that you didn’t actually need as much as you thought you did. Entrepreneur Rich Christiansen started CastleWave, an SEO firm, with a budget of just $5,000. It’s now worth over a million bucks. If he’d taken that to an investment firm, a large chunk of that value would have belonged to the investors.

Recessions are difficult for entrepreneurs because everyone is cash-poor. On the other hand, there are plenty of people who are also time-rich. Make the most of that time, invest it wisely, and you should find that when the economic tide rolls back in again, you’ve already built the kind of foundations that will keep your company afloat in good times and bad.

Image: sophistix

It’s the latest thing… apparently. Traditional tattoos are noughties, embroidered tattoos are nice. YouTube wedding dances are out, sword fight wedding dances are in. Imelda Marcos shoe closets are embarrassing, stiletto rolodexes are perfect for showing off. According to Trendhunter.com, a 30,000-strong community that tries to spot rising coolness before it cools off, those are just some of the trends that are currently on the way up. It’s the kind of information that’s supposed to be worth a fortune to companies keen to cash in on the next big thing. But can trendwatching really deliver returns for businesses?

Twitter certainly hopes so. The site includes a list of trending topics on its Web interface, letting users see the most popular discussion subjects at any time. Usually, those tend to be fairly banal. Standard subjects are often the music that people are listening to as they’re tweeting what they’re eating for lunch. Three words to say after sex frequently bubbles back into the list as do “omgfacts” and things that #WillGetYouSlapped. Where they come from, nobody knows but it’s hard to see how knowing that “”Queue” is the only word in the English language that is pronounced the same after removing the last 4 letters” is going to make someone some money.

And yet when Brizzly came out, a service that unites Twitter and Facebook into one social media platform and which also offers a short paragraph explaining what each trend is about, both Biz Stone and Evan Williams were quick to tweet about it and give it their thumbs up. The business option that Biz Stone has frequently hinted will soon be launched is said to include easy trend following among more obviously useful features that include multiple account users and mention alerts – information that can be accessed now through Trendistic. So far though, it seems that the only people who have managed to make money out of Twitter’s trends are the evil spammers who insert popular hashtags into their sales messages.

Trendwatching Unlocks Cool

But that doesn’t mean that trend following itself has  no value at all. Trendhunter.com defines trendwatching as “the science of identifying emerging shifts in our social behaviour and aspirations,” and claims that the information it gathers is used by industry professionals to develop products, generate ideas and keep marketing, media, design and strategic planners informed.

“Breakthrough ideas and strategic advantage hinge on the ability to anticipate trends and identify the next big thing,” the service claims. “By tracking the evolution of cool, Trend Hunters generate ideas, stimulate creativity, and ultimately unlock cool.”

Or to put it another way, its list of thousands of rising memes function as a kind of giant morgue file for creative types looking for inspiration. Art directors might not see it as a fleet of bandwagons ready for jumping on, so much as a place to copy and build on the smart ideas of others.

But trendwatching can do more than reveal original thoughts. It can also display which of those concepts is more likely to come out a winner. Helene Blowers, a self-confessed trend watcher who blogs about libraries and new technologies, has been tracking the rise of digital readers to discover whether the Kindle, the Nook, Sony’s Reader or the much-awaited Apple Tablet will be the format of choice for the future of e-books, and presumably replacing her bookshelves. The jury still seems to be out on which device will take the prize but it is clear that tracking the discussions might just reveal which of the platforms is currently the most popular. Compare the terms “Kindle,” “Nook” and “Sony Reader” on Trendistic, for example, and it becomes clear that Amazon’s device has consistently been a bigger talking point than its rivals:

Search for the tweets themselves that mention those terms and a publisher wondering which format to publish a book on first will be able to see whether Kindle is more discussed because it’s better or because Amazon has just removed a bunch of purchases from its customers’ devices again. Of course, the sales figures of each of those devices might be just as revealing, but they’re only available if the manufacturer agrees to reveal them. Discussion numbers are available to anyone.

There’s Money in Trends

Where trendwatching can be most valuable though is in finance. Ron Insana, author of Trendwatching: Don’t be Fooled by the Next Investment Fad, Mania or Bubble argues that when it comes to investment, those who have paid attention to the patterns of previous trends are able to spot bubbles as they rise, placing their money in when the bubble begins to grow, taking it out before it pops – and cleaning up after the pieces have finished flying around. The best investment professionals, he writes, are able to recognize the patterns in rising trends and spot the moment when behavior becomes irrational.

“At that point, these ‘trend watchers’ depart the scene, content to let others catch the last leg up.”

So trendwatching can function as a source of inspiration. It can reveal solid figures about the relative popularity of competing products and ideas. And it can even enable savvy professionals to spot investment opportunities, letting them place their money on rising assets — and remove them as the patterns in those trends start to change.

But the trends themselves are only the raw materials. While following them might make for some easy and interesting reading, Ron Insana notes as early as his introduction that understanding them and being able to act on them is a lot harder than just watching them. Inspiration is one thing but mimicry will only land a creative designer second place to the first and original. Seeing that one device is more discussed than another might be a measure of the effectiveness of current marketing rather than the long-term staying power of a new product. And lots of people saw that house prices were trending upwards in the last few years. Only a handful were smart enough to see that there was nothing behind those prices other than hot air and fat mortgages.

Trendwatching can make a business money then, but the data has to be matched with some smart thinking too.

The business world is supposed to be dog-eat-dog. It’s a zero-sum game in which any advance by a rival is a setback for you – and any achievement by your company is one in the eye for your competitors. Sometimes though it pays to put the hostility aside and look for areas where two (or more) competing companies can co-operate. While that might sound like a bad result for consumers (and an issue for an antitrust commission) the result can often be benefits all round.

Much though depends on the context and the motivation for the deal. When Google teamed up with Yahoo last year, providing the online directory with access to its search and advertising technology, the goal wasn’t to provide better services to consumers or even to ensure that both sides earned more money. It was to prevent Microsoft from getting a ready-made foothold in the search market by buying Yahoo. This was a case of two competitors coming together to defend against a common rival rather than create advantages that benefit themselves and the market as a whole. It’s rare though for an industry to be dominated by three firms in this way and the deal itself was temporary and one-sided. Google was the senior partner and by accepting its rival’s technology Yahoo effectively waved a white flag above its own position in the search market.

More common are partnerships in which rivals come together to set an industry standard, and this is something that seems to be happening fairly frequently now as technology advances faster than business models can keep up. Infineon Technologies, for example, recently announced a partnership with rivals Micron Technology to create CellularRAM memory, a kind of chip suitable for 2.5G and higher mobile devices. The two companies will agree on the specifications for products that will use the chips but compete on the products themselves. It’s almost as though the movie industry had decided whether Blu-Ray or HD-DVD would be the standard, created the video systems that would play them then focused on making the films. It’s a much more attractive option for companies than investing millions in a winner-takes-all race.

Publishing Rivals Team Up to Create New Magazine Formats

That kind of mutual platform-building is also now happening in print media. John Squires, an executive vice president at Time Inc., is planning to create a new company that will bring together his old firm, Condé Nast and Hearst. Together, the publishing rivals offer more than 50 of the best-selling magazines, including Vanity Fair, Vogue and Sports Illustrated. The aim of the new company will be to build a platform that will allow them to sell their magazines across different digital devices from the iPhone to the Blackberry. Reports describe the planned product as being something like iTunes for magazines but with a choice of formats.

The incentive for a move like this is clear. The publishing industry is struggling to roll back its decision to offer content for free online even as consumers become more used to reading on digital screens. No firm wants to be the first to put up a paywall for fear that it will send its readers to rivals. In order for everyone to benefit, everyone has to move together. Jointly creating a place for everyone to move to is a canny first step.

On the one hand, this model of co-operation appears very similar to that being followed by Infineon and Micron Technologies. The rival companies will create a common platform and offer their own products on top of it. But it’s not just the technology that the publishing companies are building – the various formats of their magazines that will work on different operating systems running on mobile devices; they’re also putting together a store from which readers can buy their products. They’re creating a marketplace too.

Co-operation Is Rare and Not Always Helpful

So what can small businesses learn from these models, and what can they do to enjoy similar benefits?

The most obvious point to notice is that this kind of co-operation is relatively rare. Major rivals teaming up to solve a mutual problem is unusual enough to generate headlines when it happens. It’s also clear that collaboration works best when everyone faces a common problem, usually one caused by a fundamental change in everyone’s business model. When magazines were sold mostly in stores and read on the buses or in the front of the fireplace, every publisher could have their own printing press and their own distribution system. When technology has changed the business model so drastically that profitability is threatened, it makes sense for everyone affected to come together to find a way to save the industry. Those kinds of revolutionary moments though don’t come along very often, and when they do the industry usually finds the co-operation a struggle. It often takes an outsider – even the force causing the disruption in the first place – to provide a solution. Apple’s iPods, for example, created an even greater demand for music in digital formats  but its iTunes store also provided a way for companies to deliver that music and get paid for it.

But perhaps the best model for co-operation between competitors isn’t the temporary truces sealed by rivals while they rebuild the battlefield. It’s the genuine respect and sharing found between online publishers giving away their content for free. Websites depend on links from other sites to build up their Google love, and references to publications offering similar content don’t detract from the site’s value but rather enhance it. Readers see the referring site as both a source of new information and a place that can send them off to learn even more about a similar topic. Even Internet marketers promote each other’s goods in affiliate relationships and swap testimonials to help each other sell – even if they don’t do it for those offering items that are exactly the same as their own.

For the most part, companies operating in a similar field  should be seen as competitors. It’s the kind of thing that keeps firms on their toes and ensures better and cheaper products. But co-operation can help to solve a temporary crisis – or bring more traffic to your website.

Photography: Lee Bennett

Tech types have been predicting the rise of the paperless office for  years. When you can pack more information into the average laptop’s hard drive than you can squeeze into a room full of filing cabinets and when you can send documents backwards and forwards without ever licking an envelope, who needs to chop down trees and staple pages? Computer power will soon mark the end of ink and pulp, we’ve been promised… again and again. But could we see the end of the computer first? Just as the ability to squeeze increasing flexibility into laptops and now netbooks has reduced demand for desktops, could the growth of mobile phone technology mean the rise of the computerless company too?

Judging by sheer computing power alone, desktops should be safe. A typical Dell Inspiron desktop comes with a range of processors from Intel Celerons to Core 2 Quads, 8GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage space, which certainly sounds impressive enough.

The iPhone is a Weakling

In comparison, even the latest iPhone 3GS looks like a seven-stone weakling. But for most users, even Dell’s most basic model is probably overkill. If all you’re planning to do is create spreadsheets, write emails and prepare documents, the lowest-end processor would be more than sufficient. And you’re only going to fill a terabyte of storage if you’re busy skipping round the corporate firewall to build your movie collection. Of course, you still have to pay for all of that extra power whether you use it or not.

That might explain why buyers are migrating to smaller, cheaper machines that pack a weaker punch but are still strong enough to do the job. According to iSuppli, a technology firm, sales of desktop PCs fell 18 percent in 2008. Sales of notebooks rose 12 percent in the same period.

But while even the smartest of smart phones might have relatively small brains, the iPhone didn’t revolutionize the mobile market with its muscle power. It was its interface that changed the way we compute. By making surfing the Web comfortable and easy, the iPhone’s true power doesn’t lie under its touchscreen but in the cloud. Who cares how much storage space you have when everything you need is available from one of the many online storage centers available – or even Google’s rumored GDrive? Does it matter if your iPhone only displays the last 50 messages when you can still log into Gmail and read everything you’ve received and sent over the last three years? And do you really need a program folder stuffed with bloatware when you can buy almost all of the programs? you need for just a handful of bucks – or even access the same functionalities free online

That became easier recently with the release for the iPhone first of QuickOffice and then of DataViz’s DocumentsToGo. Both were previously available for the Blackberry, Android and Palm but the iPhone’s bigger screen means that creating documents and spreadsheets is now more comfortable than ever. Although neither program offers the complete range of editing options available in Microsoft’s full-size Office suites – you can’t add comments, for example, or images to Word-type files — they both provide the most popular features used by most office workers. The completed documents can either be synced directly to a computer or – for non-computer types — emailed to a partner or client.

Can You Work without a Keyboard?

Best of all, the devices themselves fit in your pocket, weigh next to nothing and can be used and taken anywhere. You can now do your work while lying on the sofa or even squashed into economy class… with a food tray on your folding table. And it’s always with you. When was the last time you left home without your mobile?

Combine those basic office programs packed into a handheld device with Internet accessibility, email and the giant range of note-taking, organization and even entertainment apps, and it quickly becomes clear that there’s little a smartphone can’t do that your laptop can, except give you shoulder-ache.

But clearly, there are limitations. The iPhone still has no external keyboard, which means lots of tricky thumb-typing, and even the real buttons on a Blackberry or Windows Mobile device can feel pretty fiddly when you’re preparing a long report. Creative types who work with graphics might also find working from a mobile a challenge too far. The Zeptopad app does allow vector drawing – and even P2P sharing – while Color Expert helps artists and graphic designers capture inspiring  colors as they see them. Neither though offers anything like the flexibility designers need in Photoshop let alone a convenient, roomy place to store large format images. Attempting to put Adobe’s chief graphic product on the iPhone gives you something like this:

So while the rise of the personal computer was supposed to have done away with paper, in practice, things didn’t quite work out that way. Bored cubicle-dwellers are still able to three-point paper balls down the corridor. The Amazon is still being cleared to fill filing cabinets. And while screens sit on every office desktop, they’re often surrounded by piles of letters, documents and paper reports. The same is likely to remain true for the prospects of a computerless company. Mobile devices might be growing increasingly smart and incredibly flexible. They might now be able to offer many of the same functions and at the same speed that you could have found on a full-size computer just a few years ago. And their access to the cloud means that that potential is now limitless. But you wouldn’t want to use them all the time.

While you could now do all of your (non-graphic) work without ever touching a real keyboard, in practice, you probably won’t want to. Your smartphone won’t replace the desktop but it will probably sit on the desk, next to the laptop… and on top of your printed report.

Every successful business requires two key elements: a good idea; and the good implementation of that idea. Of those two, the idea itself is the simplest. Inspiration tends to come all at once, without effort and often complete. You don’t need to do any more than slap your forehead and ask yourself why you didn’t think of it before. It’s when you come to put your plan into action that the difficulties begin. The challenges are often unexpected, the costs higher than you planned and your forecasts more optimistic than you might have hoped. And that’s true for even the best prepared and the most experienced of entrepreneurs. While knowing what you want to do is important, having the flexibility to adjust is vital.

Carl Geitz decided to create his own Internet business after a successful career that included managing a product management team at Intuit, creators of QuickBooks and TurboTax. It’s the sort of responsible position that looks good  on business plans and which he might have expected to have prepared him fully for creating a small online sales company.

Managers at big companies though get to delegate the day-to-day work. They formulate strategy and make sure that the team is on the right track, while the actual labor is handed out to the designers, professional marketers and  coders under their control. They’re the people who know how to deal with the technical problems as they crop up and deliver the results without providing detailed reports on how they achieved them.

Entrepreneurs Are on Their Own

When you’re operating your own business though – and when your only resources are you, your computer and your checkbook – the difficulties can be much harder to handle.

“By the nature of my job at Intuit, I understood what went into developing a website or other technology,” Carl told us. “I was exposed to various aspects of Internet marketing, but never had to deal with the nitty gritty.”

The result was a learning experience that offers lessons in business-building not just for Carl but for anyone who wants build even the smallest of Internet companies.

The inspiration for Carl’s business was a cross-country move. Originally from New England, Carl and his family relocated to Nevada and wanted a way to stay in touch with their East Coast roots. As they were unpacking, they came across an heirloom, a detailed family tree created by an aunt of Carl’s wife Nancy, which traced the family’s lineage all the way back to the Revolutionary War.  It was a valuable asset and one they wanted to display. Nowhere though were they able to find a design that was attractive, matched the style of their home and which would allow them to show off their family history.

When the time came to move back east, Carl decided to set up his own business, one that would meet the demand for beautifully designed family tree templates that could be ordered online. Today, ArborArts is Carl’s full-time job – and it’s continued to throw up challenges and surprises.

Perhaps the most important challenge was the expense. ArborArts is completely bootstrapped. The funds come from Carl’s stock options and the appreciation of his home in the years before the decline in real estate prices. So far, Carl has spent over $100,000 on a range of vendors, including artists, Web developers and printers. And then, of course, there’s the lost income that Carl would have earned if he hadn’t been developing ArborArts.

“The biggest expense is really having me spend my time on all the various aspects of pulling the business together instead of drawing a salary,” Carl says.

That means operating with a close eye on the budget, especially in the early days before sales start to come in. Employing in-house staff has to wait until the business is established which demands a reliance on freelancers and outside suppliers. And while that sounds like an ideal solution — a way for a small company to receive expert services without paying a full-time salary – it does affect flexibility.

Freelancers Move Slowly

As awareness of the site grew, Carl would receive feedback from customers and clients but because he had to order the changes from a hired help, he couldn’t make the changes immediately. That slow responsiveness became a major source of  frustration.

“The biggest challenge has probably been moving fast enough to respond to learnings along the way, given limited resources,” explains Carl. “When we want to change the website, or develop a new design with an artist, we are by definition working with an outside supplier who doesn’t have the same turn-around responsiveness of someone working down the hall.”

It’s a difficulty that might be familiar to anyone who’s used to working from home or building on a very tight budget but it’s easy to see why it might be surprising — and irritating — to a former manager used to having an experienced team right on hand.

It’s also avoidable. When Carl built ArborArts, he thought the system through and tried to automate as many of the processes as possible. That’s a reasonable thing to do when you’re expecting a constant stream of sales and don’t want to be packing pictures and sealing boxes yourself. But when the sales are only occasional and you’re still learning about what makes the market tick and how you can best supply it, the result is a system that’s much harder to adjust than one created on an ad-hoc basis.

“If I had it to do over again,” concedes Carl, “I’d use more jerry-rigged operations until we proved out various ideas because of the time and flexibility that approach provides.”

That might be surprising but it is sensible advice. An idea might seem good and even complete when it first bursts into your head,  but the true test comes when you start to put it into practice. In those early days, you do nee d the flexibility to be able to make adjustments and adapt to what you learn about your niche.

Carl’s original plan had ArborArts generating $1 million in revenue in 2010. Today, he says, the company is “well south of that rate.” But he has learned some valuable lessons, and with those early growing pains behind him and the roots laid, he should be able to look forward to some solid growth in the future.

Photography: Esteban

The Internet is big. Really, really big. And really, really valuable too. Google has indexed over 40 billion pages and counted more than 1 trillion unique URLs. Estimates of regular users have ranged from 500 million to a billion (although no one really knows how to produce accurate user figures)… and retail sales have been estimated at as much as $178 billion in 2008 alone.

Those are huge figures. The revenues are the kind of money that could make a noticeable hole in the national debt, keep a small bank afloat or even repay Bernie Madoff’s victims several times over. It’s no wonder then that so many businesses have built an online presence, hoping to pick up a slice of those online billions – and make sure that their competitors don’t take a chunk of their offline market share too.

Growth figures certainly appear to make that a sensible decision. The top 500 online retailers enjoyed increased sales of almost 12 percent in 2008. Total US retail sales might have grown by as little as 1.4 percent in the same period. Amazon alone reported an increase in revenues of 18 percent in the first quarter of this year despite the downturn, taking gross income to $4.89 billion and net revenues to $177 million. That’s not bad for a retailer without a single High Street store.

Almost Half of Online Purchases Are Abandoned

But looking at the size of online sales alone misses the bigger picture. While Internet retailing might be weathering the recession better than bricks and mortar stores, it still only makes up around 6.5 percent of total sales. To put it another way, Amazon, which now sells everything from groceries to televisions, isn’t just missing 93.5 of purchases. It doesn’t even have a way to compete for any of those deals directly.

Worse, while Amazon’s size means that it is able to tempt shoppers doing online comparison shopping, its additional logistics expenses can sometimes leave it — and other online retailers — uncompetitive. According to a recent Paypal survey, a full 45 percent of online shoppers abandon their shopping carts before completing their purchase. They walk away when they realize how much they have to add for postage and packing, a figure usually hidden until it’s time to enter their credit card details. If almost half of all shoppers abandoned their carts at the checkout line in bricks and mortar stores, the other half would never be able to reach the cashier.

The size of the opportunity available away from the computer has prompted some online businesses to look offline for growth. Threadless, a t-shirt company that invites designers to submit their designs, started online but opened its first store in Chicago in September 2007.

“Why a store?” the company asks on its site. “A zillion reasons. Most of them revolve around ideas we come up with for giving back to the Threadless community and not having the staff, resources, venue or time to make happen. Ideas like teaching design classes, hosting galleries with Threadless artist’s work, having real-world group critiques and other various events.”

That willingness to offer more than a product — including services that are difficult to deliver online — may be one reason Threadless is still around while other online retailers that expanded offline, such as gift sellers Satinbox, have failed.

Other businesses though are ignoring the Web almost entirely. While it’s difficult to find any business larger than a mom-and-pop hardware store that doesn’t at least have a website, 63 percent of hospitals are said to have “little or no online presence.” That might be sensible. The same survey found that 37 percent of hospitals have “prevalent negative reviews online” suggesting that a dynamic website acts as a magnet for public complaints when what patients really want to know is whether the institution accepts their insurance and how they can reach it.

Press the Flesh, Not Just the Keyboard

Perhaps most tellingly, despite the growth in online networking, despite Facebook’s ability to renew old friendships, LinkedIn’s skill at identifying business contacts, and Twitter’s popularity with middle-aged managers looking for connections, the most valuable networking still takes place at conferences and conventions. Hitting the keyboard might be easy — and useful too — but there’s still nothing that can come close to the value of pressing the flesh in person.

Of course, none of this means that online retailing is overrated. A fifth of whatever retail growth took place last year happened online and there’s every sign that online sales are going to continue to take a larger share of retailing as a whole.

But just as it’s hard to think of a business that can’t benefit from the most basic website, so it’s difficult too to imagine an online company that can’t earn more by looking beyond the Internet. Even sellers of digital products and publishers who earn from online ad revenues can pick up some extra cash, stronger partnerships and new ideas with offline networking. And if a program sells well when downloaded from a website, there’s no reason it won’t sell just as well when burnt onto a disk, packed into a large box and placed on a shelf in a major computer chain.

The challenge though will be getting around the risk and the additional expenses of setting up in the real world. It can cost nothing to launch a website, and a professional site can be created for just a few hundred bucks. Maintenance costs are negligible, marketing expenses are easy to measure and predict, and you don’t have to worry about location. Renting a store, on the other hand, will require months of searching, negotiation, inventory storage and ongoing costs that often bring a company down before it can generate a profit. Even convincing a retailer to hand over a little shelf space can take a great deal of persuasion — and a willingness to take a smaller share of the sales price. Dealing with affiliates is always easier.

But remembering that more than 93 percent of business is being conducted offline should be enough to incentive enough for any entrepreneur to look again at the offline world… and step away from their computer.

Photography: michaelsharon

Whenever the going gets tough, tough companies don’t react by getting going. They tell their employees to get going instead. The US economy is said to have already lost some 6 million jobs since the recession began in December 2007, the largest number of layoffs in a downturn since World War II. Some of those fired workers are finding other jobs, perhaps with less pay and sometimes as a stopgap until something better comes along. Others are taking the opportunity to set up their own businesses or, if the last recession is anything to go by, rebranding themselves as “consultants” – the geek version of what actors call “resting.”

Lots of former workers though are neither collecting unemployment benefits nor looking for new niches in the marketplace. Instead, they’re going back to school. Even as endowments are falling and fees are rising, colleges are reporting an increase in applications, including from people hoping to graduate with new skills just as the economy gets going again.

But while education is always a good thing – and learning beats spending your time in front of daytime TV — going back to school isn’t always a simple option, especially when you’re too settled to uproot easily and you need a flexible schedule to suit family life. According to the Distance Education and Training Council (DETC), some four million students have solved that problem by using distance learning, including online courses.

While many of those courses are simply home-based versions of the sorts of classes you can find at any bricks-and-mortar college, others are a bit unusual. Here are some of the strange, valuable and useful classes that you can take from home and without ever seeing the inside of a lecture hall:

Video Game Making

A number of online colleges offer courses in game design but the Game Institute was created specifically to teach wannabe developers how to create games, while allowing students to learn from their own  homes. Classes include foundation studies in programming, modules in C++ for game development, game mathematics and even console engineering – for which you’ll have to bring your own soldering iron and motherboard.

While many online courses suffer from either a lack of accreditation or the kind of low prestige that makes them look less than glowing on a resume, the Game Institute’s knowledge is practical and useful for entrepreneurs. With a foundation package starting at $399, it could also prove to be a bargain when your game hits the top of the iPhone app charts.

Animation

The Game Institute will give developers the technical skills necessary to create games but not everyone has a head for figures. If a return to high school math isn’t your thing — and the modules include refresher courses on the kind of number-crunching you probably wish you’d seen the back of — maybe you can learn something a little more creative. Kaplan University’s online classes include a B.S. in Information Technology/Multimedia & Animation which explains how to blend interactive media with commercial content, as well as teaching game animation and virtual tours. It might not land you a job at Pixar, but it could give you the knowledge to create your own animation studio.

Helping Humanitarian Workers

These aren’t courses for the average redundant developer but they are interesting. The Headington Institute’s online modules are aimed at psychologists who want to help humanitarian workers returning from difficult environments. Classes include “Understanding and coping with traumatic stress”, “On the road again: Coping with travel and re-entry stress”, and “Understanding and Addressing Vicarious Trauma”. Presumably being able to study these fun topics while sitting in your pajamas in your living room is an important part of beating the stress.

And if you were thinking of riding out the recession with a little overseas voluntary work, then a quick look at the content of these courses should do a good job of keeping you at home.

Herbalist

You’ll need to be a psychologist to make use of an education from the Headington’s Institute to heal the world’s helpers. Anyone though can be a herbalist. The Clayton College of Natural Health is accredited by the American Association of Drugless Practitioners and the American Naturopathic Medical Accreditation Board, whoever they are. While that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to finally make your mother proud, call yourself a doctor and start looking for volunteers to practice your neurosurgery techniques, it does mean that the college’s degree-level classes in Holistic Nutrition, Traditional Naturopathy, Herbal Studies and Companion Animals Studies will let you start administering to the sick and trendy. More importantly, you’ll be able to start charging.

Food Studies

Of course, to cure your patients you’ll have to persuade them to drink your herbal mixes. That might be a little easier if you know how to make them look appetizing and taste nice too. The New England Culinary Institute is just one college offering food-related courses. At the moment, you can take an online bachelor’s degree in Hospitality and Restaurant Management but the institute is getting ready to start offering Internet-based classes in Cooking Theory and Food Science and History, Flavor and Culture among others. When they bring their wine-tasting class online, you’ll be able to sit in front of the computer with a bottle of booze and tell people you’re staying in to study.

Public Relations, Law and Business Studies

And if you really want to do something useful, London University is offering an online course in Management with Law, the Robert Kennedy College at the University of Wales provides an online MBA and the University of Phoenix is one site of many that allows online students to take degrees in Public Relations.

But all of those courses are practical and useful, and what’s the point of taking a class like that during a recession?

iPhone apps have become every frustrated geek’s dream path to riches. While computer games now demand the budgets of Hollywood movies and productivity programs mean eventually going head-to-head with either Microsoft or Adobe, iPhone apps can still be created in the way that software should be made: by lone developers spending their weekends in their bedrooms with a keyboard, a Mac and a manual for Ruby-on-Rails.

And it can work. While many apps have been developed by companies rather than individual programmers, there’s no shortage of stories about programmers who have struck it rich enough to give up the day job and dedicate themselves to a life of one-man mobile game-making.

So what are the key ingredients of an app that goes all the way? What sort of decisions does a developer have to make in order to increase the chances of success? And what can programmers learn from the experiences of others?

The Price is Right

Perhaps the biggest decision a programmer will need to make is whether to charge for the app or give it away for free. And if you are going to charge for it, what’s the right price: 99 cents or $899.99?

Surprisingly perhaps, it may well be possible to make money from the advertising on free apps — but only if the app is very successful. According to AdWhirl, a mobile ad network, because each use of an app generates several ad impressions, free applications that make the App Store’s top 100 can generate from $400 to as much as $5000 a day in CPM revenues.

Clearly though, only a small fraction of free apps will make it into the top 100, leaving the rest to pick up cents from each download, instead of the 99 cents (minus Apple’s 30 percent cut) that many paid apps earn.

One solution then is to use the free app not as a way to bring in ad revenues but as a tool to advertise the paid version. Perhaps the most famous success story that used this method is iShoot Lite, an artillery shooting game developed by Sun programmer Ethan Nicholas. After the full version of the game sold only a few downloads, Ethan released a free lite version that offered a limited selection of weapons. Within ten days iShoot Lite was the most popular free app in the App Store. At the same time, boosted by the 13 percent of free users who decided to upgrade, the $2.99 version topped the paid charts, generating almost 17,000 downloads a day. Within a month, Nicholas had netted over $600,000 and was no longer working for Sun. It’s no surprise then that the free app listings are now filled with lite versions of paid games.

Buy While Stocks Last!

Ethan Nicholas didn’t spend a dime on marketing. Once his app was in the charts, its high visibility was enough to keep it there. That’s not always the case though and many developers recommend marketing — even paid advertising — as the most effective way to push a new app. Brook Lennox, for example, has talked about using the iPhone ad networks as a way of promoting his company’s Textfree app. (The lite version of Textfree even integrates ads as a way of both promoting the paid version and recouping some extra revenue).

“Spend $200-$500 and see where it gets you,” he says on his blog. “You can target by country, device, and test several ads at once. Make sure you can track your new users and ranking hourly.”

For those with low budgets — or no budgets at all — reviews can also be helpful. A positive report from a review site like AppCraver or AppStorm can generate some free traffic. Feedback from users though is even more valuable. Buyers do pay attention to the number of stars an app receives in the same way that eBay customers look at buyer reviews.

That opens a couple of opportunities. Although app prices tend to be fairly low, those priced above 99 cents have the freedom to be cut for a limited time, creating a sense of urgency, and — no less importantly — increasing the chances that some of those initial buyers will offer enough reviews to keep the momentum going when the price rises again. Dmitriy Glebenok’s PandoraBox was created specifically to make the most of this opportunity, allowing downloaders to see which apps have recently been reduced in price so that they can snap up a bargain.

The second opportunity is to do a little black hat marketing. Infomedia, creator of perhaps the App Store’s most famous app, iFart Mobile, was accused by makers of rival app Pull My Finger, of placing negative reviews in the App Store. The discord between the competitors eventually led Pull My Finger to sue Infomedia for copyright infringement in its marketing material. Infomedia has counter-sued.

A better option then, is to add viral marketing to static reviews. DataViz, makers of mobile productivity suites, has been using Twitter to keep followers up to date with progress of its iPhone release, and has created a Facebook fan page to respond to customers’ comments. It’s even used giveaways on Twitter to bring new customers in and spread the word about the approaching release.

So pricing is an important part of a successful iPhone app, and it is possible for a free app to generate income, both alone and as a way to promote the full version of an application. Paid advertising on networks like Quattro and Millennial Media can bring rewards, while viral marketing and good reviews are free. Success too brings more success, and nothing generates sales faster than hitting the top of the App Store’s charts.

Perhaps the most important ingredient for an application’s success though is the same as that for any endeavor: you have to like what you’re doing. Ethan Nicholas didn’t set out to create an app that would allow him to say goodbye to Sun. He wanted to create a game that he would enjoy playing. Whether you’re creating something as trivial as The Moron Test or as serious as IRA Pro, create an app that you want to use and you should have the first and most important element for success.

Photography: J.N. Stuart

When Al Gore gets to wave an Oscar for a film about drowning polar bears, and Richard Branson announces that he’s committing all of the proceeds from Virgin Atlantic to the search for alternative fuels (a commitment said to be worth around $3 billion over ten years), you know going green is a serious business. And as it turns out, it’s good for business too. Although some of the steps that an entrepreneur can make to green their company costs money, most save cash.

What would once have looked like parsimonious penny-pinching now makes a company look with-it and generous to the planet. Here are 38 ways to give your business a touch of green.

1.    Skip the Business Travel
When the leaders of America’s motor industry flew in their private jets to Washington to beg for a handout, the waste and luxury didn’t do their claims of penury much good. Perhaps if they had bought HP’s Halo video-conferencing system, they might have had a better press. But they wouldn’t have needed to splash out even that far.  ACT Conferencing enables green, virtual, long-distance meetings (you can even calculate the amount of carbon dioxide you’ll be saving) and Webex lets former business travelers pack an entire conference into their mobile phones. So much for air miles.

2.    Commute with Muscle Power
You might be able to skip the trip to Shanghai with a virtual conference but you still have to get to the office in the morning. Instead of sitting in traffic though, give your legs a workout. Buy a bike and take the trails or plug in your iPod and walk. It might take you a little longer but it will be better for your health – and the planet’s.

3.    Take Public Transport
Unless, of course, by the time you get there it will be time to come home. If walking or cycling are out of the question then take another look at public transport. Compared to private vehicles, public transport is said to produce 95 percent less carbon monoxide and almost 50 percent less carbon dioxide for every passenger mile traveled. And if the weirdo sits next to you, you can just change seats.

4.    Make the Company Fleet Hybrid
Despite the benefits of cycling, walking and bussing though, people still tend to prefer traveling in their own cars. Better still, they prefer traveling in their company cars. If you get to make the purchasing decisions about the corporate fleet then at least go for hybrid. Your employees will still get to drive around but the fuel costs will be far lower, and when the car carries your logo, everyone will know you care.

5.    Work from Home
In fact, the only thing better than driving a company hybrid car to work is not going to work at all. Work from home – or allow your employees to do so – and you’ll win all round. Your employees will love the fact that they don’t have to commute, you’ll get to win better loyalty with improved conditions and you’ll still be saving the planet. If you worry it might not work for your business, try it once a week and check the difference in productivity. Even just one day a week will cut the car pollutants by 20 percent and make your workers feel they have a longer weekend.

6.    Use Recycled Paper
The easiest step to greening your office is to make sure that the paper you use is recycled. That’s simple enough when you’re only talking about printer paper but most offices – even home offices – use paper in all sorts of different ways. Business cards can be made of recycled materials, as can disposable towels, toilet paper and canteen napkins.

7.    Recycle
There’s a good chance you’re doing this anyway, especially if local laws require you to do so. But make it easy for any employees to recycle -and for you not to cheat – by placing different bins in the office. And include one for batteries too. Because they’re only thrown out occasionally, they often get forgotten. When you’ve got lots of people working in one space though, you might find the bin fills up very quickly, preventing the odd AA from slipping into the garbage.

8.    Raise the A/C
Every degree that you raise your air conditioning level leads to savings of between 3-5 percent in energy costs. You’ll barely notice a couple of degrees more but saving 10 percent of your air conditioning bill will make a difference to your business’s expenditures, and the planet too.

9.    Cut the Packaging
Pick up an individually-wrapped apple in a grocery store and there’s little you can do but gnash your teeth in rage. Unless you create products too. In that case, keep the packaging to the minimum needed to attract eyes, and give the wrapper a second use. The box for this bird table, for example, doubles as a cardboard mobile.

10.    Check the Home Office Insulation
Garages are made for parking cars not for use as offices – and unlike home office workers, cars don’t needed to be kept warm with heaters in the winter. That means they’re not always properly insulated and sealed. The amount you’ll save by insulating properly will depend on the size of the space and how you do it. Here’s one equation that might help you to figure it out.

11.    Get an Energy Audit
An energy auditor will review your home or office, looking for leaks and spotting opportunities for greater efficiency. You can bring in a pro or you can even do it yourself. The government will help.

12.    Know your Carbon Footprint
An energy audit will show you how you can improve. Calculating your carbon footprint though will tell you why you should improve. You’ll have to do a bit of number-crunching but there are plenty of calculators available to help you. Just try not to be too shocked at the result.

13.    Go Solar
One of the best ways to save energy is to use the free, renewable kind. While plenty of homes in sunny places now use solar panels to heat the water, it’s also possible to charge your mobile device just by opening up the solar sheets. Unless you do a lot of phone-talking, you won’t save a huge amount but every little counts.

14.    Grab Some Wind Power
Your neighbors might not like it, but who’s asking them? Putting a windmill on your property could reduce your energy bills by as much as 80 percent. Unfortunately, this isn’t a matter of adding a little plastic fan to your garden. Working windmills are big. But if your business is out in the wilds and you have the space, you might almost be able to get off the grid.

15.    Stock a Green Canteen
The fridges in workplace canteens often contain something green but usually it’s just the mayonnaise left by the long-gone graphic designer. The food you supply your staff though can be good for your workers and good for the environment too. Next time you fill up the cookie jar or buy a bag of coffee save the world  by heading for the organic nibbles and the sustainable beans.

16.    Create an Office Garden
And what could make for a greener kitchen than tea leaves picked straight from the office garden or tomatoes plucked from shrubbery. Forget about planting a ficus or watering the spider plant. Load up on plants you can eat. You can’t more local or organic than the products of your windowbox.

17.    Wait for the Dishwasher to Fill
Buying a better grade of snack will cost you money – although your workers will thank you for it – but improving your efficiency will save you money. Whether you have a dishwasher in the office kitchen or use the one sitting in the home office, don’t run it half-empty. Waiting until you’ve got enough dirty plates to fill it completely will save you water and electricity.

18.    Boil only the Water you Need
And that’s true too of your kettle. You might need steady injections of caffeine to stop you falling asleep at the keyboard but if you boil enough water for four cups every time you need one then halving the amount will give you – and your energy costs – an important discount. You also won’t have to wait as long for your beverage.

19.    Replace your Boiler
Boilers are said to account for about 60 percent of domestic CO2 carbon emissions. While replacing your old boiler will cost you some up-front cash, you should be able to recoup the money within three to five years. With the right heating controls, you could cut your energy bills by as much as 40 percent – and you still won’t have to wash in cold water.

20.    Check the Energy Star Ratings
If you’re considering buying a new fridge (or any other appliance) either for your office or your home, you might be thinking about size, reliability and appearance. But look too at its energy star ratings. They’ll tell you how much energy the item sucks in – and how much you can save by buying an uglier – but more efficient – model.

21.    Green your Cleaning
Cleaning fluids combine all sorts of dangerous chemicals which are hazardous to the environment – especially water systems – and sometimes to the people using them. There are planet-friendly cleaning fluids available and owners of home offices can even   make their own (vinegar seems to make most things shine.) For large offices though, the government has kindly provided a Green Cleaning Pollution Prevention Calculator that should make your janitor happy.

22.    Use Biodegradable Garbage Bags
And if you’re going to be tossing out the old cleaning materials then make sure you use a biodegradable garbage bag. These break down in a matter of months (so don’t leave them in the bin too long), freeing up space in the landfill and preventing the planet becoming clogged with long sheets of black plastic.

23.    Sponsor a Non-Profit
Most of the ways to green your business involve changing a few habits or swapping some appliances for more efficient versions. But sponsoring the activities of an environmental group allows you to help preserve the ecosystem and win some valuable publicity too.

24.    Make Coupon Deals with Vegetarian Restaurants
Many businesses choose to make life a little more comfortable for their employees by negotiating discount rates from local restaurants. But animal farming, with its use of feedlots and chemicals, and its production of boatloads of manure and cow flatulence, is more damaging to the climate than the entire transport industry combined. Going veggie will improve your health, reduce animal suffering and it will be good for the planet too. And making coupon deals with local vegetarian restaurants will give your workers a reason to cut the meat consumption as well.

25.    Make your Gifts Organic
Giving gifts to clients, suppliers, employees and even outsourced staff is a good way to cement loyalty and give your business a firmer base. Presents show that you care and that you appreciate the recipient. A gift of something green and organic, such as a fruit basket will make your holiday list doubly generous.

26.    Collect Rainwater
You might not want to drink it – although depending on the materials used to capture it, you could – but collecting rainwater isn’t as hard as it sounds. It would certainly help lower your utility bills and in areas like California with serious water problems, home and office water capture could go a long way to solving the problem. And if you’re like Tank Town, a manufacturer of rainwater collection equipment, you could even improve on Pepsi and Coca Cola, and sell it pure.

27.    Drink Tap Water
But don’t sell it, because whether you choose to drink the stuff that falls out of the sky or not, it is worth ditching the bottled water. The liquid that comes out of the tap is usually perfectly drinkable, even if it’s often tastier with a filter. Dropping the bottle will save on plastics and transportation.

28.    Ditch the Halogens
Halogen lamps might be low-voltage and easy to control with dimmer switches, but they’re not very efficient, producing more heat than traditional incandescents.  Measured in lumens, a measurement of light produced per watt, halogens only produce 15 lumens per watt, just five more than incandescent bulbs. Compact fluorescent bulbs create 50 to 60 lumens, and fluorescent tubes 100 lumens.

29.    Power Down
According to one estimate, the typical American home contains around 20 electrical ‘vampires’ – appliances that remain on standby even when they’ve been turned off. Those appliances, including computers and television screens, together cost the household around $200 a year. You might not want to unplug your fridge every night but you can ditch the screensaver and save power by powering down completely at the end of the day.

30.    Refurbish Rather than Renew
Recycling your garbage might be an old and easy standard, but how about your office furniture? Or someone else’s? Just because a desk chair has lost a wheel or torn the upholstery doesn’t mean it can’t be fixed. Either take it to be repaired or save some cash – and some resources – by buying used.

31.    Buy Quality
If you are going to buy new though, buy the best you can afford. That’s always sound economic advice anyway but it’s also good ecological advice. The better the item, the longer it’s likely to last and the less often you’ll have to throw things away.

32.    Buy Local
Ideally, the best computer or office desk will be made at a workshop within walking distance of your office and be entirely constructed of recycled parts. In practice, that’s not going to be too likely, leaving you to weigh up the benefits of paying for long-lasting quality against the advantages of lower transportation costs. Buy a good computer monitor, but shop for the canteen veggies in the farmer’s market.

33.    Quiz your Suppliers
When it comes to greening your own business, you get to make all the decisions. But what about your suppliers? As a customer, you have some influence over their actions too. Ask about their energy efficiency and in particular about the greenness of the products you buy from them. Use your authority to help them create a green business too.

34.    Go Digital
The paperless office was first mentioned in a BusinessWeek article back in 1975. We’re still not there. Companies still insist on sending and receiving faxes, printing contracts and producing paper goods, even though much of it is unnecessary. Faxes today can be both sent and received online, signatures added electronically, and much of the documents passed around today could easily by distributed by PDF and read on screens and mobile devices. Print your receipts but the look to keep everything else digital.

35.    Ditch the Junk Mail
And that includes your direct mail leaflets too. They might bring in a lead for every couple of hundred pieces delivered but there are so much easier ways of finding new clients than stuffing everyone’s mailbox. And no, that doesn’t mean spam. Even AdWords is more cost-effective than direct mail – and it doesn’t cost trees.

36.    Print on Both Sides
If you are going to print though, then at least do it smart. Use both sides of the paper. Most decent printers these days allow for double-sided printing, and the savings – fifty percent of your paper bill – make the search for the next page worthwhile. Just be sure to include page numbers to make the paging easy to follow.

37.    Block the Toilet
Not completely, of course, but just a little. Dropping a plastic container filled with stones into the toilet reservoir can reduce the amount of water used with each flush by as much as four liters. That’s a huge saving, especially in an office filled with regular coffee drinkers.

38.    Buy Carbon Offsets
There are some things you’ve just got to do though. Even with a windmill, solar panels, digital products and a half-blocked toilet, you’re still going to be producing waste, burning fuel and degrading the planet a little. But you can make up for it by buying offsets to your carbon footprint. The Carbon Fund has programs for individuals and businesses.

Photography: Scott Beale/Laughing Squid

It might not have struck you yet, but you can feel it getting closer. It’s one thing to hear about the credit crunch on the news and see the stock footage of Detroit’s production lines, now running on government loans and a promise to build cars that run on recycled sunflowers. It’s quite another when a friend at Sun tells you he just got his P45 or an old classmate asks if there are any jobs going at your place.

If you still haven’t had one of those conversations, expect one soon. According to one outplacement service, the tech sector lost just under 187,000 jobs over the last year, three quarters of them vanishing in the second half of 2008 alone. Sun has already sent home 6,000 of its workers, Microsoft has slashed 5,000 (hopefully, most of them from the team that created Vista) and even Google is said to have discovered that the Googleplex has an exit as well as an entrance, even if it is focusing on support staff – at least for now.

So what do you do when a friend tells you that they have free time and an updated resume?

You can sympathize, of course, and you can make an extra effort to meet when they invite you to join them for a cheap lunch. Saying that you’d love to but you’re super-busy at work is only going to make them feel worse. But there are practical steps you can take to help too.

Make Introductions, not Recommendations

It’s times like these that those social networking sites start to show their value. For years, we’ve been told about how LinkedIn is going to revolutionize job-seeking and how Facebook will make maintaining contacts more powerful than a giant pile of business cards. The ability to see just who knows whom — and how many steps you have to take to reach the employer with the vacancy – should mean that everyone is now at the center of a hub of opportunities.

But delivering those opportunities is not going to be too easy. You may have one friend who is a talented and recently-laid off developer, and another who has a small software firm but there’s no reason to believe that the entrepreneur is hiring or that your best friend is the best candidate for any job that’s available.

The temptation when you’re caught in the middle is to start dishing out recommendations. They’re likely to be most effective at landing your friend a job and they don’t appear to cost anything.

But they do cost something. When you do more than bring two people together – when you actively try to push them together – you place your credibility on the line and you put your relationship with both parties at risk. If your friend with the job decides to go with someone else, you’ve helped one friend deliver an additional punch to the already bruised ego of another friend. Neither is going to thank you for that.

Worse, if the recommendation does result in an offer and the job doesn’t work out, both sides are going to blame you. Instead of making two friends’ lives better, chalking up two favors to be repaid in the future, and deepening your relationship with both of them, you’ve harmed two people, cut two connections and indicated that you’re more enthusiastic than reliable.

A better option is to make the introduction as cursory and as non-committal as possible. When a former colleague hints that he’d love to work at Oracle and he knows that you have a social media connection to someone at the company, don’t say you’ll do what you can. Just ask your friend at Oracle if there’s anything going and suggest that he adds your other friend to his own network. Indicate that he’s someone worth knowing when something does turn up and both sides will feel that they’re getting something out of the introduction. But it will be up to them to turn that introduction into an opportunity.

Re-Tweeting Job Opportunities

It’s not just social media’s connections that are become particularly valuable today though. The information that runs along those connections can be worth a salary too. Both Facebook, with its status updates, and Twitter with its microblogs, provide a way for information about vacancies to bubble to the surface. That might be as obvious as @problogger’s frequent postings of freelance writing jobs but it could also be something as subtle as someone tweeting that they’re mad-busy and can’t cope. Re-tweet even that kind of post to a unemployed pal – or better still, show them how to use Twitter’s search feature to find those kinds of tweets for themselves — and if they’re smart, they’ll get in touch with an offer of help, charged – initially, at least — by the hour.

And you can also apply your skills more directly to help a friend in need. Plenty of writers these days are finding themselves inundated with resumes to review and job applications to look over. This is the time to help not to cash in on friends in need, and that applies to non-writers too.

Website developers can knock up quick templates that their friends can use to post their resumes and portfolios, and write themselves a blog. Making sure that their name appears at the bottom of the pages will ensure that they get some free marketing out of it too. Creative types with ideas but no time to develop them can share their visions with pals with spare hours and few ideas of their own. They might just find that they get to build themselves a brand new business with the help of a currently unpaid partner.

Above all, remember that recessions and unemployment don’t last forever. Your non-busy friends will find new jobs and it’s likely that at least some of them will find them at companies you’d quite like to work for too. Be nice to your unemployed friends now and they’ll be nice to you when you want to move on up – or if the axe falls even closer.

It’s been said that if you don’t have a plan to grow your business within the next five years, you’re likely to hit stagnation at some point. Whether you’re a freelancer, contractor or consider yourself an entrepreneur, even if your financial goals are small, it’s worth setting them so that you have something concrete to work towards.

On the other hand, some people are afraid to set big goals either for fear of failure or because they don’t believe they’re capable of achieving them.

Consider for a moment that you want to earn $100K/ year, gross, working only 20 days/ month, for a maximum of 50 weeks/ year. If you’re only earning $40K/year from your business, it might be emotionally difficult to believe $100K is possible, let alone anything more. But if you break that down into a daily rate ($400), the number is not so intimidating.

Tips
Here are some tips for setting your business financial goals.

1. Have a concrete financial goal. For the sake of argument, say it’s to earn $240K/ year in revenue from all sources, active and passive. Can you do it? Absolutely. Will you do it? Maybe. Do you have an emotionally strong reason to reach this financial goal? Is it strong enough to carry you through tough times.

2. Make the goal easier. Break the goal down into stages. For example, $240K/year might be emotionally difficult to accept. Break it down to monthly ($20K), weekly (~$4.6K), or even daily (~$660) earnings.

3. Build multiple streams of income. An earnings rate of $660/day might seem intimidating, might be hard to accept emotionally. That’s because the tendency when you’re starting out is to think, “What job could I do that would earn me that much?” If you think that way, then you’re already defeated already.

If you’re building your own business, then you have to think like a business owner, even if you’re just freelancing or contracting. Successful businesses typically offer more than one product and/or service over time. In a similar vein, you can build your financial goals from multiple streams of income. You’re building your revenue in multiple ways, never reliant on just one.

Key to making multiple streams of income work for you is that you maximize the passive streams. There’s no point in trying earn extra income if you have to work day and night to do so. However, if you spend some extra time initially to build passive streams, they may pay off in the future. There are many online opportunities for building passive income.

Having multiple streams of income, especially passive, gives you several benefits. Firstly, because you’re not reliant on one stream, you’re less likely to be in a situation where you have to take a gig or contract that you don’t like. Secondly, because you lift the feeling of desperation, the positive state this creates carries over to your entire way of running your business, doing your work.

4. Know what you need to do. Understand what your financial goal means mechanically. That is, how many hours of work, how many projects at a certain rate, how many units of sales, etc. Determine this for all your streams based on historical information.

Obviously, some income streams will earn more than others, but it’s far easier to emotionally accept the possibility of achieving your goal of $20K/month if you have multiple sources.

5. Build your timeframe. Step backwards. Use reverse tunneling to move backwards through your goal, to break it into easier to achieve smaller goals. For example, if you want $200K/ month in Dec 2009, what do you need achieve (sales and actions) in Nov 2009? Now what about in Oct 2009? Step backwards in consistent increments (in this one month).

Example
If you’re only earning your income from one source, say freelance writing, then think about how much work you have to produce each and every day to earn $660. Unless you’re one of those fortunate (and skilled) few commanding high rates per project, then that’s an awful lot of planning, researching and writing. Instead, think in terms of a number of services (multiple streams of income) at different rates. Include as many passive income streams as possible.

Types and Sources of Income
Here are few types of income you should consider:

1. hourly rate
2. daily rate
3. project rates
4. monthly income
5. passive income – note that there’s no restriction in terms of earning period, but often passive income is paid out monthly if you’re working online.

Here are some possible income sources, generically speaking:

1. active
   1. salary
   2. freelance
   3. contract
   4. advances
   5. bonuses
2. passive/ semi-passive
   1. advertising revenue
   2. ebook sales
   3. web service subscriptions
   4. royalties
   5. interest
   6. dividends
3. windfalls
4. capital gains

Which combination of income strams you aim for is really up to you, and dependent on the kind of work you’re interested in. It depends on your current situation, your knowledge, available time, and career and financial goals.

It’s important to keep in mind that passive revenue streams do require some initial effort. If you don’t have large blocks of time to devote to building what will become passive streams of income, then you may have to take a piecemeal approach.

An example of passive income is royalties from a book. The advance you get for writing it is active income. If you get asked to write a second edition, the earnings from that are semi-passive.

Semi-passive income refers to streams that require some ongoing effort to maintain. Another example is a subscription-based website. Keeping the site active with either a moderated forum or with fresh new articles, or both, is what will keep people coming back. This will also draw new visitors who might become subscribers. These new people will either supplement your current subscriber base or replace those that leave.

Photography: Annie Mole.

Have you ever thought what the ultimate telecommute might mean to you? Not the kind of telecommute where you work at home, but rather the kind where you travel the world and work wherever you can.

You probably already know the story: working from home not only gives you freedom of work schedule but can save you money in the long-term, from savings on commuting costs. But what if you could go one step further and make the world your home – anywhere you wanted? How adventurous are you? Could you live a long-term work and travel lifestyle? There are people already doing this.

The Internet and other technologies have made web working possible, and now people are pushing the envelope to become Nomadic Webpreneurs – running an online-based business from wherever they can get an Internet connection. Freelance web working, in particular, gives you the freedom to work from anywhere.

[Note: "online-based" does not mean that there's no offline component. It merely means that part of your operations is online, to source out clients or receive payment or to promote yourself.]

Ideal Conditions for Being a Nomadic Entrepreneur

Nomadic professionals have always existed, but technology has made it even easier for many more people to enjoy a work and travel lifestyle. This lifestyle is no longer limited to the jetset, ambassadors and politicians, athletes, authors, various other celebrities, travel writers and the odd business person.

With Internet access becoming so readily available, pretty much anyone can not only become a nomadic web worker but even a nomadic entrepreneur – running a web business online. All you need to satisfy are a few simple conditions:

1. Choose work that you can delivered remotely. Online freelancers have an ideal opportunity, since all of their work tends to be delivered online.

2. Choose suitable countries. Obviously, you’re going to want to pick where you’ll be staying as part of your traveling. You might choose to stay a few months here, a few months there, or put down roots for longer periods. If you find some place that you really enjoy, you might even settle down and become an expat (ex-patriate) – in which case you’re back to just being a work-at-home freelancer. When picking out host countries for your travels, besides picking somewhere safe, consider the following suggestions:

1. Desire. Countries you’ve wanted to visit. Maybe you have relatives or friends somewhere, want to see the sights of a country, or have work opportunities. (If the latter, keep in mind that you might need to get a work VISA.)
2. No VISA requirement. Countries with long-term non-VISA visitation waivers. Many countries let you stay up to six months (180 days) without requiring a VISA (assuming you can convince customs officials you’re not going to be “a burden on the system.” If you’re working solely on your computer, there may not be an issues.If your work requires some stability of location, you could spend 3-6 months at a time per country. (Check your home country’s rules for taxes, health care, etc., as there might be minimum residency requirements to remain eligible for certain services or deductions.)
3. Favorable exchange rate. If you have savings in your home currency and the exchange rate of the country you’re heading for is favorable, then you can go a lot longer than usual with your funds. In other words, you might take some time out to actually sightsee instead of always working.
4. Affordable, accessible Internet. Since without an Internet connection, you can’t be a nomadic webpreneur, this is an important condition to satisfy.
5. Countries with access to PayPal. PayPal is not available everywhere, though there are other online payment processing services. Just make sure that your host country’s banking system gives you access to your money through instant teller machines. Alternatives:
   1. Countries that allow visitors to have a temporary bank account.
   2. A means of depositing client payments into your bank account while out of country. Maybe you can have a friend or relative back home transfer monies into your account (from PayPal, etc.) for you.

3. Have the right tools.
Aside from the prerequisite passport, ID, insurance and various official documents, nomadic web workers and webpreneurs (i.e., Digital Nomads) are enabled by a number of tools and services, most of which are web-based or are gadgets:

1. Gadgets: cell phones, laptops/ notebooks/ netbooks, universal chargers. If you’re adventuring in other countries (not just working), you might want to add a few more items to your gadget list: GPS device, still and/or video camera, media player. Something worth noting is that some hotels are RFiD-enabled. That is, if you have an NFS-enabled cell phone in certain European and Asian countries, the key for your hotel room actually becomes a numeric code that’s downloaded to your cell phone, once you pay for your room.
2. Wi-fi or some ready means of getting an Internet connection.
3. Web services. E.g., web-based applications and services such as payment processors (PayPal) and banking, invoicing, travel planners.
4. Membership in social networks. It does get lonely out there sometimes, especially if you’re traveling alone. Your social network “friends” can keep you up to date on goings on as well as be a sounding board.
5. Co-working offices. If you don’t/ cannot work from where you are living, consider a co-working office. If you can’t find one, then you might have to resort to cafes, libraries, universities/ colleges. Or rent.
6. Cloud services/ applications/ technology. “Cloud technology” refers collectively to applications and web services that allow web workers to run software in a web browser and to store documents “online”. An example is Flickr, which lets you post your images online. Another is Google Docs and Spreadsheets, which gives you desktop application functionality in a web browser. So even if you do not have your laptop with you, as long as you have an Internet connection, you can access your documents.

Profiles of Nomadic Entrepreneurs/ Digital Nomads

While you muse over this approach to work and life, keep in mind that as a digital nomad, you’re not bound to having to travel the world. Some nomads use the lifestyle to see the country they live in, while maintaining a career to pay the bills. However, should you want to start traveling, this lifestyle allows for the possibility for long periods away from home.

If you’re interested in how others are living the Digital Nomad lifestyle, a great motivator is the Nomad Stories category on the Digital Nomads website. Some of these posts have embedded videos where digital nomad personalities talk about how they’ve maintained their lifestyle, made a living, etc. Pay particular attention to the interviews with Treehugger’s founder, executive coach Marshall Goldsmith and New Media expert Julia Allison.

The Geekpreneur article Why Entrepreneurs Should Pay Attention to Crowdsourcing covered the general aspects and origins of the crowdsourcing phenomenon. This article discusses some ways that entrepreneurs can use crowdsourcing – in its loose definition – as part of their online operations, even if a business has an offline component.

To recap, crowdsourcing refers to a relatively new phenomenon online where large groups of people from a global pool provide feedback and resources for commercial and non-commercial causes. Their incentive for doing so varies from pure pleasure in doing a good deed to fees for their efforts.

7 Ways to Crowdsource Your Business or Organization

Here are just a few of the ways that you can crowdsource your business.

1. User-contributed resources.
Aka distributed computing. Often used for non-profit organizations or scientific research.

User incentive: Opportunity to contribute towards projects they feel are worthwhile or at least interesting.

Business gain: Reduced cost of technical resources and operations.

Example: SETI@home and numerous similar applications for environmental modeling, etc.

Example: Mass Animation Facebook Group. Users join the group for information and download the Autodesk Maya application and select “assignments” from the FB group for rendering animated frames. They get credits for each “assignment” rendered.

2. Beta testing.
Voluntary user testing, bug reports and features wishlist feedback for desktop or web-based software.

User incentive: Exclusivity of access to a new application.

Business gain: What better way to give your user base what they want from your product than for them to tell you?

Example: These days, new web applications first go through closed beta, then private beta, then public beta, then official release. The same cycle is sometimes applied to desktop software, and will likely be applied to apps on the mobile platform. (Though until cell phone data plans are more affordable in some countries, don’t expect a lot of buy-in globally.)

3. Affiliate programs.
Crowdsource your online marketing. Affiliates sign up, get a unique ID for tracking purposes, then display ad banners on their websites. Any customer leads from their sites to yours that result in a sale produces a commission for them.

User incentive: Affiliate programs them to earn a commission by generating sales leads.

Business gain: You get free advertising upfront, and your customer base helps evangelize and promote you with articles and reviews. (At least, that’s one effective way to do affiliate marketing.)

Example: Numerous businesses that sell products or services online employ affiliate programs. Of course, some are more successful than others. (Educate your affiliates.)

4. Idea sourcing.
Setup a system in which users generate ideas for you, then vote on them. This could be applied to a number of business niches.

User incentive: Participation, ego gratification, prizes, or more.

Business gain: Quality feedback from end users and/or colleagues.

Example 1: Cambrian House crowdsources ideas that might in turn be business concepts that use crowdsourcing. Techcrunch published an article about some of the difficulties Cambrian House has had in gain traction. Erick Schonfeld, the author, asks,

Or is crowdsourcing simply a bad idea that should be put to rest?

Despite what the article says, Cambrian House says they are not going out of business. They’ve just changed their strategy, which includes developing Chaordix(tm) – a “crowdsourcing in a box” platform for other organizations wanting to implement crowdsourcing.

Example 2: Another example includes a number of online t-shirt companies. A few of them, including Threadless, source either full designs from the crowd or just slogans.

5. User-generated content.
Offer a central marketplace for a certain type of content. The resulting synergy of the network effect ends up being beneficial to all participants. This is possibly the most prevalent monetized crowdsourcing model, though not all user-contributed content implementations monetize.

User incentive: Publication channels, personal brand-building, promotional incentives, revenue.

Business gain: Members are often end users, and they promote your site.

Example: Non-monetized examples include wikis such as Wikipedia and microblogs such as Twitter. Twitter content is now appearing on some news websites monetized with ads. (Don’t forget to check out Geekpreneur’s Twitter ebook for self-promotion strategies.) Monetized examples include sites that sell stock photography (.e.,g iStockPhoto and even flickr), audio and video snippets, screencast lessons, etc. Video sharing sites fall in between monetized and non-monetized. Even video commercials can be crowdsourced, as can custom annotated maps – though monetization does not appear to be part of the equation yet.

As Jeff Howe discusses in a video at the Crowdsourcing blog, a lot of this crowdsourced content is possible because of cheap technology – especially when it comes to photography and video. Crowdsourcing allows businesses to treat some customers as partners. Instead of harming business ideas, it allows for synergy to take place.

6. User-contributed services.
Lease your membership to your clients, using incentives for members (but not the general readership). With the economy in a downturn, crowdsourced personnel will be cheaper than employees or even freelancers and contractors, and companies have an entire online world of people to choose from.

User incentive: Revenue and personal brand-building.

Business gain: Released from the costs and management of having a large employee pool. Opportunity to monetize virtual employees.

Example: As discussed in our previous crowdsourcing article, uTest and TopCoder both use this model. Both offer a pool of software debuggers, and TopCoder also offers developers.

7. Funds sourcing. Crowdsourced funds can be accumulated for various entrepreneurial or charitable purposes. A number of platforms make it easy to set up the infrastructure online.

User incentive: Depending on the implementation, possible fame, ego gratification, investment opportunity.

Business gain: Operating capital upfront.

Example 1: Microloan sites such as Kiva and Prosper are popping at the same time some are either closing or being given the ultimatums by the U.S. SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) to be more transparent in their operations. Still, they’ve proven the potential of crowdsourced funding.

Example 2: Film funding. People contribute funds and get a credit in the film. Since the cost of entry is relatively low and the benefit emotionally high, this model has the potential to work – but probably up to a point. Could it work for every film? Probably not. Just a personal feeling, but it’s more likely to work for “underdog” projects (indie films, documentaries), not films by large studios. The Internet allows niche filmmakers to reach their niche audience. The same goes for TV series. Firefly was funded by fans who paid upfront for a DVD of an entire season.