Image: Shoeboxed

Start freelancing and not everything in life gets better. We do get to work from home and set our own schedules. We’re around when the kids finish school and we’re free to hunt down the jobs we want to do. All of those things are a big improvement over the 9-to-5. But some things get considerably worse. The income is unstable. We have to find our own work. And there are taxes.

Of course, there are always taxes, but when your income changes from month to month and when every receipt has to be kept and filed in case it’s deductible and an auditor wants to see it, the paperwork involved in freelancing can be horrendous. The bookkeeping takes organization and it takes time. It’s not only dull, tedious and a long way from fun, it takes valuable hours away from the work we’re actually being paid to do. Do your booking badly and it will cost you money; do it properly and it will still cost you money. It was to give freelancers and entrepreneurs those billable hours back that when Taylor Mingos graduated from Duke University in 2007, he launched Shoeboxed.

“Shoeboxed set out to be (and has become) the bridge between the pile of physical receipts on your desk and an organized and online IRS-accepted archive of your financial information that is accessible at your fingertips anytime, anywhere,” explains Jake Brereton, Shoeboxed’s Marketing Manager. “At the end of the day we strive to take the work out of paperwork so that our customers have more time to spend doing what they love to do.”

The service works a little like a taxman’s Netflix. Shoeboxed sends members prepaid envelopes into which they can place their receipts. The envelopes are then mailed back to the company which scans the invoices and extracts the information they contain into the member’s account. Although OCR technology is used to ensure accuracy, each receipt is also hand-checked to make sure that users aren’t accidentally claiming more than they should or leaving money behind. Users can then view the data online, edit and annotate it and incorporate the tables into most tax preparation software, including QuickBooks, Quicken and Outright.

The envelopes are the most popular way that users get their physical receipts off their desks and into their desktops but Shoeboxed makes a point of accepting just about any method that works. Free uploaders both online and on the computer make it possible to scan receipts and drop them into the account; electronic receipts can be forwarded to a personal Shoeboxed email address; and it’s even possible to snap a picture of an invoice with a smartphone and move the data immediately into your records. Users can choose whether they want to receive the invoices back (for storage in a real shoebox) or let Shoeboxed shred and recycle them.

The system has proved remarkably popular. The company serves over 100,000 customers in more than 100 countries. Although it can’t say how many invoices that represents, the number of small pieces of paper that have been scanned, checked and added to databases reaches “well in the millions.”

Most of the company’s customers are owners of small businesses, professionals and, in particular, freelancers whose businesses are too small to hire bookkeepers or assistants but would like to outsource the paperwork to someone else.

The benefits can certainly be impressive. In a video testimonial, videographer Chad Owen paints a familiar picture of chaotic receipt keeping, lost bits of paper and deductions that could have been made but which were left behind the desk or at the bottom of the drawer. Jake Brereton recalls a conversation with a freelance client who said that using Shoeboxed put as much as two entire workdays back into the month.

“I spoke to someone last week who said that he thought our service was literally saving him three to five hours a week,” he says. “I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who doesn’t want to put three to five hours back in their week, especially if they’re a freelancer and these three to five hours could be billable hours of quality work time.”

Services like these aren’t entirely original. Bookkeepers have long existed to offload the pain of keeping an orderly desk on which receipts are filed and easily retrieved instead of chucked and lost. But few bookkeepers are willing to work for $29.95 a month and when they do work, only they — and not their clients  — have access to their files.

That does sound like Shoeboxed is bad news for at least one kind of freelancer: those who keep the books for other freelancers. In fact though, according to Jake Brereton, the service is popular with bookkeepers too, saving them the hassle of data entry while letting them keep an eye on their clients year round and making sure that everything is ready at tax time.

There’s no question then that services like Shoeboxed’s have value. In allowing freelancers and other professionals to outsource one aspect of their work to an automated service, they’re able to remove a giant headache from their business and free up more time to spend on the tasks that really do bring in money. The question that freelancers should be asking though is what else could they be outsourcing?

It’s a question that Shoeboxed has been asking too. The company is expanding from invoices to business cards, bills and just about any other document that users want to send it. But freelancers should be looking at their own activities and counting up the hours not spent producing billable work.

Outsourcing client acquisition might be difficult. Pitches should really be tailored and hand-made rather than cut and pasted into every advert. But newsletters could be replaced by an autoresponder or written by a copywriter instead of crafted yourself at the end of every month. Blog posts can be bought in and online advertising could be managed by an assistant instead of tracked every morning when you could be making headway on a new project.

Starting with a service like Shoeboxed might be valuable. But the biggest benefit might come when you keep going.

Photography: Fevi Yu

There was a time when a good golf game was a necessity for any budding business executive. A salesman who couldn’t close a deal after spending half a day in an electric buggy with a prospect was barely worth his salt. And the introductions those golf games generated couldn’t have been picked up any other way. These days, basic networking can be done online from the comfort of an office chair, and the endless rounds of conferences can go a long way towards making up for eighteen rounds with a small ball. But even if golf isn’t always the game of choice for today’s younger and geekier set, who are more likely to be playing Angry Birds or forming a guild in an MMORPG, it should be. There are good reasons that executives like golf and the sport can still teach rising entrepreneurs, even technical types, a thing or two about business success.

Technology Changes Everything

The basics of golf have remained the same. Players still whack a ball with a stick until it lands in a hole. But technology has now changed the way the game works. The dimpled ball has been around since the nineteenth century but a number of professional players, including Sergio Garcia, Darren Clarke and Sean O’Hair, are now using Low Drag Performance (LDP) balls. The technology was introduced three years ago by TaylorMade and is intended to keep the ball in the air longer by maintaining lift and reducing drag. On iron and woods, LDP is said to increase the sweet spots, while the multilayering in modern balls delivers different reactions depending on the speed with which the ball is struck.

And that’s just the ball. Changes in driver design have produced some strange-looking objects while professionals are now able to call up a host of stats for each hole they play. The result is that people who might have struggled to get halfway up the fairway can now smack the ball further and more accurately than ever before — and companies that might have been content to stick a few dents in a ball need to rely on detailed research if they’re to keep their place in the market.

For smaller businesses, the lessons from both sides should be clear: when small advances in technology can produce significant improvements in efficiency, they need to be familiar with the newest tools (even if they decide they don’t need them) — and even businesses in fields as leisured as golf still need to employ engineers and look for ways to add improvement.

Failure Brings Success

In Mentored by the King: Arnold Palmer’s Success Lessons for Business, Golf and Life, Brad Brewer, co-founder with Palmer of the Arnold Palmer Golf Academies, extracted 35 life lessons from the time he spent with the first golfer to earn a million dollars on the PGA tour. Some of those lessons are fairly bland. “Remember your Roots” we’re told in the first lesson. “Always Play for the Love of the Game,” we’re reminded in lesson eight. But perhaps the most surprising lesson to learn from one of the most successful players to swing a stick at a ball is the value of failure.

 “A lot of people think that the tournaments I lost as a result of aggressive play were a real downer for me. They weren’t. The experience was all just a continuation of the things I felt I had to do personally,” Palmer is quoted as saying in the book. “I think I was learning by what I was doing, turning a negative into a positive. And in doing so, it often inspired me to work harder so that the next time, I was confident and ready to go for it and win.”

It’s an approach that goes without saying in golf. No one expects to win every game or shoot a perfect hole every time. They start each match knowing that not only is there a good chance that they’ll fail — and ready to accept that failure — but understanding that even if they do fail, they’ll be back to try again. They’ll also expect that when they do come back, they’ll be a little  better than they were the last time they played.

That’s easier to do on the golf course, where the price of failure is low (at least for amateurs), than in the business world where failure isn’t shaken off with a handshake but takes with it years of work and giant investment sums. But for young entrepreneurs, the type most likely to expect that their start-up will be bringing them fame and fortune within a couple of years, it’s worth remembering that even the best fail sometimes — and that failure can deliver the kinds of lessons that lead to the next success.

Practice… All the Time

But that’s only going to work if you take the time to learn and absorb those lessons. It might seem strange that someone who plays golf for a living would need a coach or have much of a reason to practice beyond keeping their swinging muscles loose. But in a telling 2009 interview with PGATour.com, Tiger Woods, explained how his leg injury had affected his practice routine.

“We usually practice after the round, warm up, play, then practice,” he said. “And I haven’t been able to do that. One, my leg wasn’t very good for a long period of time. And then when I was coming back this year I didn’t do it just because you just want to get off of it, ice it, elevate it, make sure everything is okay for the next day.”

At the end of each round then, when most golfers would be expected to head for the bar and talk about the one they missed, Tiger Woods would head back out and shoot some more, correcting the mistakes he’d made that day.

In business terms, that’s the equivalent of ending a day of important business meetings with a role-playing workshop instead of a long drink. Few entrepreneurs are willing to go that far but the ones looking for success do tend to see the end of the workday as the moment they start preparing for the next day.

Golf then might be about hitting a small ball into a small hole, but executives like it for more than the occasional feeling of success or the chance to meet new partners. The sport delivers valuable lessons about life and business — and those lessons are valuable for today’s entrepreneurs too.

Start your own small business, especially online, and you’ll quickly need to develop a range of brand new skills: a little bit of HTML; a touch of Web design; some knowledge of usability; a grounding in marketing channels. But the skill you’re likely to be drawing on most is a version of a technique you’ve known since you were a child: the ability to write. Whether you’re creating sales copy, writing a blog or even just sending an email, you’ll need to do more than just put one letter after another. You’ll need to craft copy that persuades.

That’s a very different kind of writing skill and it’s one that depends entirely on context. Writing headlines is different from writing email subject lines and crafting a newsletter demands a different approach from that used when keeping a blog up to date. Even if you’re planning to outsource the writing to a professional at some point, you should still have enough basic knowledge to know what to ask for and to judge the work you’re buying.

Headline Writing

Copywriting experts will tell you that the headline is the most important aspect of any piece of marketing copy. They’re not wrong. The headline is always the first thing that the reader sees and it determines whether he reads on or looks away. But the role of headlines has changed. Sales letters, ruined by hard-pushing, online, long-form versions are giving way to softer versions, free even of sub-headings, such as those promoted by Darren Rowse’s Third Tribe Marketing, and to video marketing. The most important use of an online headline is fading away while its traditional use, in billboards and ads, isn’t relevant on the Web.

Where headlines do remain important though is on Web copy. Even here though, the semi-pro business owner has one advantage over a professional copywriter: non-professional writers just want to get to the point; professional copywriters can be tempted to want to show how clever they can be, as though they’re writing as much for their portfolio as for their client’s bottom line. When Robert Bly reminds readers in The Copywriter’s Handbook that “The goal of advertising is not to be liked, to entertain, or to win advertising awards; it is to sell products,” he’s telling copywriters something that clients already need know.

That simple approach is always the best, especially on current website designs which use a large headline and an equally bold button to bring readers in.

Best approach: Don’t use Web copy headlines to persuade; use them to inform.

Email Subject lines

You can think of email subject lines as a kind of subset of headlines. They serve the same purpose, turning readers into curious leads. But unlike headlines, email subject lines reach readers unsolicited — they come to the user — so they have to work harder. And they do that by being simple, friendly and often non-salesy. According to email marketing expert Stephanie Miller, the best subject lines are deceptively simple. Like a good headline, they tell readers what to expect inside the message. That usually means keeping the text short but relevant, and avoiding spam words such as “free” and “buy now” while still keeping the value of the content clear. Numbers, like list posts, have been shown to improve read rates, she argues together with co-authors Matt Blumberg and Tami Forman in Sign Me Up!: A Marketer’s Guide to Email Newsletters that Build Relationships and Boost Sales.

One important difference between subject lines and headlines though is that email marketers can draw on knowledge of the subscriber gained at sign-up to send targeted messages to different readers. By segmenting lists, a business can send one subject line to a subscriber who provided an email address in return for a booklet of dessert recipes, for example, and another to someone who downloaded soup recipes.

Best approach: Send different subject lines to different subscribers. Keep the writing simple and personal, and avoid messages with subject lines that contain offer words such as “free” and “download now.”

Blog Content

Where your writing skills are going to be most in demand is in keeping your business blog up to date. That’s more crucial than it sounds. Google weighs dynamic sites, those with frequently refreshed content, more heavily than sites with static content, forcing serious business owners to keep adding new pages if they want to stay visible in search results.

According to Matt Cutts though, Google’s SEO expert best known for enforcing Webmaster guidelines, frequency of posts is less important than quality of posts. Frequent posting might bring in traffic by giving readers a reason to return each day but it’s the discussions and back links generated on high quality posts that attract the search engine’s interest. Cutts cites Mike Masnick of Techdirt, a technology blog, as an example of a blogger who maintains a high search engine ranking despite infrequent posting because his posts generate discussion, comments and links.

In terms of style and the content itself, blogs are flexible enough to provide room for a variety of different approaches, and the type of content they contain will depend on the kind of business they’re trying to promote. Photographers’ blogs can load up on images with just enough text to keep the search engines happy; blogs written to support software firms aimed at developers might contain plenty of jargon to keep its readership happy.

The length of posts can vary too. A quick update can be as short as a couple of hundred words.  A long exploratory post can run into a few thousand. Which of those you use depends as much on your relationship with your audience, as your own writing preferences. The more valuable and usable your content, the more likely readers are to continue investing their time in reading it.

Best approach: Think before you write and blog when you have something valuable to say. Short posts might keep regular readers checking in but long posts that promote discussions will attract the search engines. Write naturally and clearly, but drop unnecessary colloquial interjections such as “okay” and sentences that start with “Well…” The key is to write as though you’re writing to a friend but not as though you’re talking to one.

Large businesses have to tackle some potentially serious conflicts of interest. Insurance firms maintain strict divisions between the claims and underwriting departments. Newspapers distinguish between the editorial and advertising sections. Law firms in jurisdictions that allow the same company to serve both sides of a law suit make sure that the different teams aren’t sharing confidential information. Even when a firm takes on a case against a former client, the “Chinese Wall” —  the information barriers set up inside the company — prevents lawyers from accessing facts the firm might have gathered on the previous case. It’s not just an ethical requirement. It can also be a legal demand. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act strengthened the Chinese Walls in financial firms to make sure that the firm’s brokers don’t affect the recommendations supplied by its corporate advisory divisions — and prevent employees from trading on inside information.  But these are big companies serving lots of different clients in areas with clear ethical issues. What about small companies and freelance workers? When do they have to worry about building Chinese Walls?

One dramatic example turned up recently in entertainment. Towards the end of Mad Men’s fourth season, advertising company Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce was in trouble. Its biggest client was about to leave and, wondering whether the firm will still be around in a few months, small accounts were heading for the door too. Creative Director, Don Draper, the egotistical focus of the show, made a move that was high in opportunism and low in ethics. He asked his girlfriend, a freelance consultant, whether any brands served by her other clients were looking for a new agency. It was a request that breached the Chinese Wall the consultant had mentioned in an earlier episode: the boundary that she had set up to prevent sensitive information picked up on the job from being shared between the people who hired her.

A Barrier is Good for Business

That Chinese Wall wasn’t a legal requirement, but it was good business sense. Talking to her advertising agency clients about the feelings of their clients would have made the freelancer harder to hire. An agency that felt that she was talking to others about their business wouldn’t have been quick to bring her back.

It’s not too difficult to see how other freelancers can find themselves in similar positions. As Web designers put together sites, they come to learn about the processes, pricing strategies and clients of the companies they’re working for. As they look for more work, the nature of the jobs that gather in their portfolios make it more likely that they’ll be working for their previous client’s competitors. While sharing knowledge of their time with their old client may help to deepen a new relationship, it won’t do much for the degree of trust that new client puts in them.

Other small businesses can face similar temptations. Photographers who take executive portraits can pick up all sorts of small talk during the shoot. Even freelance QA experts and copywriters can be privy to the kind of inside information that other clients would find very valuable.

Clients, of course, are aware of the risk and effectively bring their own Chinese Walls to a freelance relationship in the form of an non-disclosure agreement. But not all clients bother, either because they don’t place a high enough value on the sort of information they’ll be sharing or because they trust to the freelancer’s discretion. So what can a freelancer do to ensure that they don’t give in to the temptation to release information previous clients might not want to set free?

For a one-person company, it’s not easy. The Close Asset Group, a financial services company, explains how a Chinese Wall

“may involve a range of practices including the segregation of data and computer systems, as well as physical separation of certain businesses so they are unable to access the same part of the office. The use of a Chinese Wall will be established and enforced by the Compliance Department.”

The company maintains a Chinese Wall between the Asset Management Division and other divisions of the Group, and only uses the services of other companies within the group when commissions and other charges are “generally comparable” with competitors.

Freelancers though tend not to have different businesses to physically separate or hire, and there’s little point in segregating data and computer systems if the same person has access to all areas.

A Wall Between Work and Home

It may be something to consider for the future though. A freelance business that grows quickly enough to add assistants might want to consider restricting client files to reduce the risk of leaks. Freelancers that outsource parts of their work should be implementing a type of Chinese Wall by only providing information necessary to complete the job. That might not prevent a conflict of interest but it could stop the hired help from cutting out the middle man and heading straight for the client. For the most part, freelancers are going to be relying on discretion, common sense and a well-bitten tongue in place of solid barriers.

There are a couple of other kinds of Chinese Walls that freelancers might want to consider though. In 1999 Sony lost a lawsuit against Connectix, a software developer that had reverse-engineered its game system to produce a Virtual Game Station emulator. Connectix had tried to construct a Chinese Wall between one team that had analyzed and created documentation for Sony’s product and a second team that used that documentation to re-create the system. Sony eventually bought and killed the Virtual Game State but the ruling laid down a legal precedent regarding reverse engineering. Small companies and freelancers looking to copy the work of larger firms will need two teams and a clear division between the two.

But perhaps the most important Chinese Wall that a freelancer or small business owner needs to construct is also the hardest to maintain — and one most frequently breached in episodes of Mad Men: the barrier between work and home. But how dramatic would life be if that wall was in place?

Photography: nightthree

“Follow your passion,” business-builders are told. “Do what you love and you’ll always be successful.” Nik Bonaddio is doing exactly that – and so far at least, his twin passions for sports and numbers are letting him come out a winner.

An honors graduate of Carnegie Mellon University with a Masters Degree in Information Systems Management, Bonaddio was a college athlete. He won several AIGA Student honors, was a two-time All-American athlete and a fourteen-time All-Conference athlete. He describes himself as “very athletics-oriented… despite also being a total nerd.”

Since graduation, he’s been part of a serious fantasy football league, and as you might expect of a former college competitor, he’s determined to beat his rivals. Tracking the stats needed to produce good predictions though turned out to be harder than he thought. The information supplied by ESPN and other sources was very weak, he explained. While the sports channels were quick to hand out advice, there was rarely any supporting information behind their recommendations.

“[It was] almost as if they were just rolling a dice or throwing a dart at a dartboard,” he told us.

With so much information about players and games available though, Bonaddio assumed that there had to be a better way to collect data, analyze it and produce predictions of player performance based on hard numbers. In September 2010, he combined his knowledge of information management with his love of sports to launch Numberfire, an analysis engine that uses a series of mathematical models to crunch player data. Each model compares current  situations with those that have happened in the past to predict the chances of a player’s success in the future.

From Concept to Launch in Three Months

The site took just two months to build, much of which was spent collecting and organizing the data, then another month to refine the models. All of this was done while Bonaddio held a full-time job. (He’s been the creative director for a number of companies and used to be the lead designer for Yahoo’s OpenID/oAuth implementation.) While his company was very supportive of his side-project, much of the work on Numberfire was completed in his spare time.

According to Bonaddio, the result is a system that has proved more accurate than the typical fan (or ESPN) because it combines a fan’s understanding of the sport with a computer’s objectivity.

“We understand that certain statistics are more important than others,” he says, “and… we eliminate human bias/limitations of human analysis.”

The results speak for themselves. By the time the season ended, Numberfire had outpredicted ESPN and Yahoo! almost seven times out of ten. It had also picked up about 7,500 registered users and 40,000 unique visitors. In November, Sports Illustrated began taking bi-weekly content from Numberfire, generating a big boost to the site’s own numbers.

Perhaps most importantly, Numberfire also received “a ton” of emails from people saying that the site had helped them to win their leagues.

Where Numberfire didn’t come out on top though is in revenues. Registration during the season was free and none of those fantasy football players who beat their friends paid for the recommendations they were receiving.

A Model for Start-up Success

That’s likely to continue, even as Numberfire expands into other sports — a growth plan that will take more time and more developers, says Bonaddio. But while the basic projections will remain free, Bonaddio does have plans for monetization. The kind of data analysis used in Numberfire can also be used for trade and roster analysis, he points out. And a planned handicapping tool will help sports gamblers to place smart bets. When Bonaddio trialed the tool during the playoffs, Numberfire came up 9-2 against the spread. In the future, these additional tools will all be available on a premium subscription basis.

It all sounds like a good foundation for success and a model not just for predicting the win rates of football players but for fulfilling the ambitions of anyone with a business idea of their own:

• The product was built in a relatively short space of time while still holding a full-time job.

That’s not always going to be possible but being able to feel the success after just three months of effort must have been highly encouraging. Setting bite-sized milestones instead of depending on a long-term goal isn’t a bad approach for an entrepreneur with a good idea and little time to develop it.

• One completely free season allowed time for testing and branding.

While its first free season didn’t raise revenue, Numberfire has been able to use the time to test its data models and build a name for itself. The site got lucky with its association with Sports Illustrated but that luck wouldn’t have happened if the player predictions weren’t accurate.

• Know how you’re going to make money.

With the basic platform tested and working, and with 7,500 registered users, Numberfire is in a great position for the start of the new season. Most importantly, Bonaddio knows how he’s going to generate revenue from at least some of those users. If only a fraction are in the habit of placing bets, for example, then the value of the increased chances of winning their bets should outweigh the cost of a subscription — allowing Bonaddio to hire those extra developers he needs to expand into other sports.

The biggest lesson to take away from the rise of Numberfire though isn’t its short timetable from concept to launch. Nor is it the site’s free beta phase. The ready monetization plan is certainly important but most important of all is the fact that Numberfire has fallen exactly into the nexus between two of Bonaddio’s passions: information and athletics.

Bonaddio had been thinking about the idea for Numberfire for some time, telling himself that he would do it one day but always coming up with excuses for not doing it today. His advice for other would-be entrepreneurs thinking of following their own passions comes straight from another winning sports company: “just do it.”

Clients might  mean work and revenues but they also bring a range of problems, from non-payment to unreasonable demands. Here are six of the biggest problems that clients cause freelancers, and what you can do to squish those problems flat.

Cash Crises

The biggest problem a client can cause is when they don’t pay the bill — or they don’t pay the bill on time. That usually happens for one of two reasons: the client might not be happy with the work; or the client might not be happy about paying money.

You’ll have invested time, effort and skill into producing something valuable. You’ll have taken a bet that that period will give you the money you need to pay the bills, and it looks like you’re about to lose that bet. That’s a problem.

The first of  those situations is easier to solve. When there’s a conflict about whether the project has met the client’s requirements, the solution is a negotiation about how much more work needs to be done and how much extra it’s going to cost. It’s not likely to be comfortable and it’s not likely to be very remunerative.

And you’re not likely to keep the client — or want to.

But investing a little more time in the project is usually enough to get the funds, even if they come in at a lower overall hourly rate. Most clients are willing to pay for the work they’ve received eventually.

Sometimes though they aren’t willing to pay — ever — and then your squishing tools are more limited. Milestones for delivery and payment can reduce your losses, small claims courts can work if both clients and contractor are in the same judicial zone and  you have enough patience, determination and sheer outrage to see it through. Otherwise, when you control the client’s Web server, there are always more forceful methods.

Mission Creep

A client who doesn’t pay is stealing your work. A client who keeps asking for more work once the project has been completed is trying to steal your time. Instead of selling those hours to a new client or investing them in a new project, you’re forced to keep adding them to the old project, reducing the amount you’re going to earn in that month’s work hours. Once again, the client is causing a real cash flow problem.

The best way to squish this problem is to head it off with a clear proposal so that both sides know exactly what the final delivery will look like. In practice though, that’s not always enough. It can happen that a client will only think of a new feature once he sees the complete project. If the addition is minor enough to make up only a small percentage of the overall bill then you might want to swallow it in the interest of keeping the client and winning future jobs — think of it as an investment in marketing. If the additions are major though then the only solution is to present a new quote. That’s often enough to help the client realize that those additions aren’t that necessary after all.

Work-Life Balance

Clients can ask for more from a project; they can also ask that it be completed in less time. For a freelancer, it’s difficult to refuse. Completing the work faster by pushing themselves harder means that they’re earning a higher hourly rate. Adding more hours to the day or the week means that they’re making more in the month, increasing their overall revenues. More money for more time looks like a solution, not a problem.

The bill though is paid by the freelancer’s family which gets to see less of a contractor chained to the desk at the weekend or stuck in the study in the evenings.

Partners (although perhaps not children) tend to be understanding of occasional work sprints that require extra hours but long hours become a problem when they turn into a new permanent work schedule. At that point, the only solution is to adjust your proposals to take into account a realistic assessment of the amount of time you need to complete the work. If the timetable doesn’t fit, suggest ways to reduce the complexity of the project. Burnout is usually a freelancer’s last problem.

Friction with Other Clients

For clients, freelancers are an easy way to get work done. They don’t need to pay benefits, they don’t need to supply office space or equipment. They don’t even need to see their contractor. They only have to describe the project and pay the bill. The price they have to pay though is that they’re not the contractor’s only client. It’s a price that many tend to forget.

They make demands on a freelancer’s time that the freelancer can’t meet and they’re surprised when the contractor is reluctant to take on a project at the time they need. Worse, freelancers can find themselves agreeing to a new project and then having to explain to another client why their work is late.

Honesty is the best solution to this problem. Although some clients like to treat freelancers as employees, knowing that the contractor they’ve chosen is in demand is reassuring. It shows that they’ve made a decision with which other businesses agree. It’s usually enough then to point out that you’re not available for a set period and to explain when you can have the work ready. When the alternative is to hire an employee, the client tends to be understanding.

Work You Can’t Supply

There are some things you know you can do because you’ve done them a million times before. And there are some things that you don’t know whether you can do because you’ve never done them before. Clients have a habit of pushing freelancers out of their comfort zones, asking writers of sales letters to create video sales letters, for example, or demanding Flash scripts from HTML website designers. Unwilling to refuse, the freelancer is left committed to a job outside his or her skill set.

In fact, this is a solution, not a problem. Freelancers are always faced with the challenge of keeping their skills up to date without wasting the time they need to put them to use. Accepting a job from a client that goes beyond their experience is a way of gaining those new skills. Make it clear that this is the first time you’re doing it, be prepared to make lots of changes until you get it right, and understand that the first one or two jobs is likely to cost you time, and you should find that clients are willing to bear with you while you advance your skills.

Leaving You in the Lurch

One advantage of working with freelancers is that clients don’t have to pay severance pay. They can end the relationship at any time, cutting off one revenue source for the freelancer. Sudden and unexpected income loss is a real problem for any freelancer.

And the only solution is to be ready for it. Avoid being dependent on one large client, know where to go to find more work, and have a marketing plan ready to roll out as clients fall away.

Most clients are willing to pay, pleasant to work with and understanding of your pressures. But their interests will come first. Keeping an eye out for the most common problems they cause and knowing how to beat them should help to keep your freelance business healthy.

There was a time when careers advisors would warn jobseekers against printing their resumes on pink paper, using strange fonts or including pictures to make their names stand out in the pile. It was enough to have good skills, solid results and a persuasive cover letter to grab attention, they would say. The rest was up to the interview. Not any more. In an age of almost 10 percent unemployment, LinkedIn profiles, job sites and social media, tech-savvy jobseekers are using all their skills to grab attention and win an interview.

YouTube is for Lolcats and Video Resumes

It worked for Justin Bieber, and for countless other amateur music stars who shot footage of themselves singing into the vacuum cleaner, uploaded it to the Web’s biggest video site and found a record contract and a new career waiting in their comments. Almost. But these things are rare. The more usual route, even for bands, is to build an audience on the pub or student circuit then watch bootlegged versions of their gigs appear on the site once they’ve made it. For people looking for jobs whose descriptions don’t include bad haircuts or television-tossing though, video resumes are becoming an increasingly popular alternative to Word docs and PDFs. Search on the site for “video resumes” and you’ll be offered a list of more than 235,000 results, including both resumes themselves and guides from “experts” explaining what to include and how to make a good impression.

And for some people, it seems to work. When Graeme Anthony began searching for a job with a PR company in England he uploaded a video that showed himself sitting at a table with a guitar in the background. Having introduced himself, he then invited viewers to click through to other parts of his resume, with the clicks leading to new, more detailed clips. It was all well done, very professional and won him a job with a PR company.

But not all video resumes are that well done. Too many look dull and lifeless, with little to offer the viewer but an audio speech. While written resumes needed very little writing skills, the best video resumes need some pretty keen awareness of video editing — and of copyright too.

If the technical challenge of creating a video resume isn’t a big enough hurdle, there are also a couple more.  The resume has to be seen, first of all. Serious jobseekers can’t expect to upload the story of their life and wait for the offers to pour in. Employers, like everyone else on the site, are looking for lolcats not potential employees. Even Graeme Anthony’s video was unlisted and viewable only by those who had the link. The video might be the resume but you’ll still need a cover letter to persuade people to look at it.

And there’s also the matter of being taken seriously. Some of those 235,000 results for video resumes include some pretty toe-curling spoofs.  You don’t want to look anything like Dave.

Get a Job with a Google Custom Resume

If being found on YouTube is difficult, just think how hard it would be to turn up in Google’s search results. Winning links to an online resume, getting the keywording right and pushing it up the rankings is going to be anything but easy, and a waste of time for anyone who isn’t looking for a job with an SEO firm. Internet marketer Valentin Vivier though, gave it a try… although he did skip the whole search engine thing.

Instead of relying on Google to push him through the pages, he created a page that looked like Google’s search results, but with each link leading to a section of his portfolio. It took him about three days to put together, building the site from the ground up in Dreamweaver, and raiding Google’s code to get the images and colors right.

The page went up in September 2010. The buzz surrounding the resume tripled his traffic, and most importantly, by the end of October, Vivier had a job.

Advertise with AdWords

Valentin Vivier though was doing things the hard way. One of the more creative uses of Google for a job search came, appropriately enough, from someone looking for a job in a creative department at an advertising firm. Alec Brownstein created AdWords ads targeting the names (and vanities) of some of New York’s top creative directors. When they searched the Web for their own names, the first result they saw was an ad from Brownstein asking for a job.

The results were pretty impressive. Brownstein targeted five creative directors, won interviews from four and received job offers from two.

It’s an approach that’s going to be difficult to copy though. Part of its appeal was its originality, a particularly important asset for an advertising copywriter. And few industries contain such big egos as advertising. Target the name of a chief accountant in a financial firm, for example, and you might be waiting a long time to win an impression.

When it became possible to email a resume to an employer and upload a version to a jobs site, jobseeking changed forever. Those changes haven’t stopped. LinkedIn is used primarily by people looking to maintain connections with people who might one day give them a job while Twitter lets them create those connections in the first place. From video clips to Google campaigns, the competition to grab the attention of employers has only grown hotter. But there’s a downside to all of this technical innovation too. In a poll last year, 45 percent of jobseekers said that they look at the social networking pages of job candidates. The Web can’t just  land you a look from a dream employer; it can just as easily keep those employers looking.

Within fourteen hours of posting his project on Kickstarter, a site that uses crowsdsourcing to fund creative projects, Andrew Plotkin had raised the $8,000 he needed for his idea. By the time credit cards had been charged and the money delivered a month later, those funds had risen past $30,000. Considering that his idea was give up his day job and dedicate his life to writing interactive fiction — the kind of text adventures that used to be played on mainframes — Plotkin’s achievement was all the more remarkable. So what does his success tell us about ideas that win funding on Kickstarter and delight investors in general?

Writing on CNNMoney.com, Plotkin himself puts his persuasive powers down to a number of factors. A great video, he says, is essential, but there are certainly better videos available for viewing on Kickstarter, and his own clip — mostly a talking head — lacked the smooth professionalism of his own products.

Describing what the money will be used for, delivering an experience, not a list of features, should encourage the money to roll in too, Plotkin argues. But both his video and his pitch bullet-point all sorts of benefits, including adding Javascript and CSS to an open-source interactive fiction game engine, that look a lot like features created with cash.

Creating a demo is also essential for game funding, he recommends, something he only realized at the last minute despite the use of demos in the game industry for years. And while other successful Kickstarter pitches show the products they want to create in their videos, few allow potential donors to play with them first.

I’ve Created Stuff Before…

While all of those factors might have contributed to the success of Plotkin’s use of Kickstarter then, what really made a difference appears to be a combination of two elements that turn up again and again on successful Kickstarter ventures.

The first is background. Answering the question “How did I do it, really?” Plotkin writes:

“First, spend 15 years working hard on projects with no reward but community goodwill.”

Fifteen years might represent a lot of spadework to pick up $30,000 but the background is important as a promise of the quality of future products. Schuyler Towne, who aimed for $6,000 of pledges and picked up a remarkable $87,407 to create a set of lock picks, describes himself as “a competitive lockpicker” who has been featured on All Things Considered, in the Boston Globe and on the History Channel. His video repeatedly showed him opening a padlock even as he continued talking to the camera, proving that he had the skills and the tools that he could deliver to backers.

Kickstarter then isn’t actually giving a kick start to people who haven’t done anything. It’s delivering an extra push to people who already have a list of achievements to their name and who need a little help to move ahead.

In the world of publishing, another area in which Kickstarter operates, this is platform. Just as the publishing industry is more likely to support an author who brings an audience created through years of professional speaking, so Kickstarter works best when the project owner is already known in their field. Andrew Plotkin’s promise to put more work into his open-source game engine was a pitch aimed directly at people in his niche, not potential customers who thought the idea sounded interesting. And as he put his pitch together, Plotkin also worked his contacts, ensuring that backers were ready with their wallets open as soon as he launched.

The rewards are vital too. Kickstarter is not a crowdsourced investment scheme so much as a sandbox in which creatives can test their concepts in a real marketplace before investing their own money. Backers don’t receive a share of the income, have no say in the production of the product and no claims on the product when it’s done. Instead, they get to choose a “reward” that corresponds to the level of their donation. For Andrew Plotkin’s project a $3 pledge landed a copy of Hadean Lands¸ the game he plans to create, for iPhone — a reward worth $5. Ten dollars added a collectable postcard with a quick reference on the back. Twenty-five dollars delivered an exclusive CD version of the game (inscribed with runes), while additional amounts added other goodies up to what Plotkin called “the traditional Kickstarter ‘I’ll fly out to visit your and bake you cookies!’ offer” for pledges of $1,000 or more. He sold both of those offers available.

Kickstarter as Pre-Order Store

Of the ten different rewards available, it was the $25 rune-inscribed CD that won the most buyers, with 358 backers contributing the cash compared to 119 people who were prepared to pre-order the iPhone game at a discount.

Perhaps the best example of the way in which products alone (combined with a good idea) can power a Kickstarter pitch though is Scott Wilson’s attempt to raise $15,000 to enable his design studio to create watch straps for the iPod Nano. With nine days still to go, he had already raised an incredible $630,789. Most backers were effectively pre-ordering the LunaTik conversion kit for $50, winning themselves a $20 discount. Unlike other sellers, Wilson wasn’t offering to fly out and bake cookies.

That emphasis on rewards makes Kickstarter very different from traditional fundraising. Unlike investment plans the risks are minimal. As long as the creative gets the money, the backer should get the reward he or she has bought. While there’s always the chance that the creative will take the cash and head for Cancun (or just fail in the production process), their background and enthusiasm help to give backers an idea of the risk involved. Try to hit up a venture capitalist or an angel, and you’ll need to do more than promise to create one copy of the product for everyone watching the presentation.

But the principles are the same. You still need to show that you can create what you promise to build. You still need to have a market ready to buy and contacts who can help to deliver the cash. And you still need to have a good idea. Venture capitalists will assess whether that idea is good enough; Kickstarter backers will tell you whether customers are actually willing to buy it. For both approaches, it’s a tougher test than trying to leave a locked room at the start of a text adventure.



Photography: bindermichi

When it comes to turning the best green intentions into large piles of greenbacks, few entrepreneurs can hold a candle to Shai Agassi. A former software entrepreneur, Agassi founded TopTier Software in 1992, selling it to SAP less than ten years later. By 2007, Agassi was in line to become CEO of SAP but when the then-CEO’s contract was extended, Agassi resigned and started an entirely new firm — and an entirely green one.

A Better Place, Agassi has said, was inspired by a question posed by economist Klaus Schwab at the 2005 World Economic Forum at Davos: “How do you make the world a better place by 2020?” To Agassi, the answer lay in removing the fuel tanks from cars and replacing them with batteries.

Armed with an initial investment of $200 million, Agassi began developing not a new kind of electric car but the infrastructure to refuel the electric cars that others would create. While car makers focused on redesigning the vehicles, his firm would concentrate on redesigning the refueling process. Gas stations would run battery exchanges which could swap a battery in as little as two minutes — less time than it takes to fill a fuel tank — and drivers would also be able to plug their cars into special recharging stations set up by the road.

Entrepreneurial Drive Meets the Electric Car

It all sounds like a green dream but combined with Agassi’s entrepreneurial drive — and further investments that took the company’s capital to around $500 million — that vision has already started to become true. Refilling stations have gone up in Agassi’s native Israel, and no less importantly, A Better Place has brokered deals with Renault and Nissan to produce suitable cars,  and with the governments of Israel and Denmark to set up the stations under a tax-friendly regime that will make the cars competitive. The Renault Fluence Z.E., compatible with A Better Place’s refueling stations, is scheduled to go on sale in 2011. Deutsche Bank has predicted that A Better Place will cause “massive disruption” to the auto industry. It’s the kind of disruption that could turn that $500 million investment in a green company into a multi-billion dollar multinational.

Few ecopreneurs have such high ambitions. Most in fact, might be thinking globally but they’re definitely acting locally. Waste Neutral, for example, was founded in 2008 by Keith Lasoya. An organic waste hauling firm, the company collects food scraps from restaurants, schools and office buildings in the Baltimore, MD metro earlier and turns them into compost. It’s a small firm consisting of just half a dozen staff, many employed on a freelance basis to sort the garbage. But it operates six trucks, sometimes powered by biodiesel, which hauls 50 tons of garbage every week.

The economics appear to make sense. Because Waste Neutral’s tipping fees are between $10-$20 cheaper than traditional landfill or incineration services, clients find that their costs are either neutral or a saving within three to six months. But for Waste Neutral, it’s vital to choose clients carefully. As Julie E. Gabrelli, a green business advisor, put it in an article about the company on Ecopreneurist.com, figuring out routes that are profitable is Waste Neutral’s biggest and most important challenge.

As Lasoya has learned, in the hauling world, the path to profit is through density of the route. The more stops along one route, the better. It’s simply not profitable to be too strung out, which means they can’t say yes to everyone.

That’s the sort of collision with the real world that didn’t seem to bother Shai Agassi.

What to Do with Green Money

Another collision with the real world that often bothers ecopreneurs is what to do with the money their green businesses have earned. Place it in the bank and the bank may lend it to the sorts of dirty, polluting companies the ecopreneur hopes their firm will replace. Buy bonds, and the ecopreneur is left to trawl through annual reports to count the number of trees the firms cut down and trace exactly where their money is going. It’s no surprise then that a number of ethical investment firms have sprung up to fill that gap. They choose investment vehicles for clients based not just on the funds’ financial performance but on their environmental value too — and try to measure that value.

Natural Investments, for example, was set up by the authors of the 1992 book Investing From the Heart and the 2000 book Investing with your Values. For fifteen years, the company has been using its own rating system to assess the ethical standards of the funds it offers. The slightly cheesy Heart Rating measures a fund’s avoidance filters — the degree to which they filter out firms involved in dodgy practices such as arms-making and tobacco sales — but gives greater weight to affirmative screening, funds that “seek and support alternative energy or invest in companies that have progressive employment policies.” The investment company then tosses in shareholder activism and “community investing” to produce a heart scale of 1-5 that indicates the fund’s degree of right-on behavior. Putting your money where your mouth is when you’re an ecopreneur isn’t easy; but Natural Investments makes it a little easier to put it where your heart is.

For many ecopreneurs though, choosing where they’re going to invest their hard-earned returns is a worry that they’d be happy to tackle one day. Green businesses might be growing in popularity but they’re still relatively new. Most firms, like Waste Neutral, are relatively small and operating in small areas. But even for those firms development can still be a danger: it’s not always easy to stay green as you grow. Anita Roddick’s The Body Shop, a chain of fair-traded, natural cosmetic stores, was one of the first to make use of ethical consumerism but came under fierce criticism in 1994 by a journalist who claimed that the store used synthetic products, donated less to charity than other businesses, and was generally about as right-on as the average burger bar.

If you are going to continue turning a green business idea into greenbacks, you’re going to have to keep it green.

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.

Photography: dhaneshr.

Imagine this: you’re standing “here” with “nothing”. You’re looking “there,” visualizing a time when you’ll have entrepreneurial success and with it the wealth and prosperity you want. It’s so vivid that you can almost feel it. That’s a very good start. But the question that pops into your mind is, “How can I possibly get there?” And that one question sets off a panic, or the feeling that you’ll never make it, that it’s way too hard. How do you deal with this fear?

First, ask yourself… if you don’t try, will that bring you any closer to that destination you dreamed of? Maybe you’ll find inner reserves of bravery, stamina and self-reliance and commit yourself to your career and business goals. But wait, there’s a simple yet powerful approach to solving problems for business or otherwise. It’s so simple that it’s a wonder more people do not consciously use it. What if you took little steps towards that dream, while carrying on with whatever else you’re already doing?

Mapping Your Entrepreneurial Success
People have started from nearly nothing and gone on to great success simply by having a goal, breaking it down, and moving forwards.

1. Have a concrete goal. Also, have a personally powerful reason for your goal.
2. Start somewhere. If you ask, “How can I possibly go from the nothing of Now to the goal I have Then,” then you’re already defeated because you’re telling yourself that you doubt any possibility. Instead, ask yourself, “How will I go from Now to Then?” Now you have a chance of accomplishing your goal because you’re receptive to the possibility of completing it. Start from where you are, and go step by step.
3. Break it down. Start by breaking your goal down into a sequence of smaller goals. Some goals will be far more important than others, simply because they are a “bottleneck” task. That is, if they’re incomplete, they’ll hold up other tasks. You need to identify these bottlenecks as soon as possible. They might be emotional rather than logical or procedural bottlenecks.
4. Be project-minded. Manage your overall goal as a long-term project filled with smaller, related goals or tasks. Find the critical path through the sequence of efforts you need to perform. The bottlenecks will affect your entire project. Solve each problem in whatever way is most suitable. If you don’t know what that is, then explore some problem solving techniques.
5. Always see the big picture. Don’t think about a task in isolation, but as a building block to greater success. So no matter what it is, even if it’s not a bottleneck, each task is important and needs to be completed. The sooner it’s done, the sooner you progress towards your overall goal.
6. Do visualization exercises. It’s easier to keep the “big picture” in mind when you remind yourself regularly what your goals are. Daily visualization sessions are recommended, but even weekly sessions help you maintain your enthusiasm. It all depends on how disciplined you are, and whether you can sustain this activity if you only do it once a week. Most people cannot, at least not at first. So nightly visualizations before retiring for bed are ideal, even if they only last 5-10 minutes.
7. Revisit your goals weekly. In addition to your goal visualization exercises, spend time once a week to review what smaller goals were achieved and how your “project” is affected (positively? negatively?) as a result. It’s not necessary to do this daily. In fact, that’s probably a bad idea.
8. Gauge your weekly achievements against your larger goals. Are you progressing? Did you meet your self-imposed deadlines, or were they unrealistic?
9. Reassess your goal monthly. The smaller goals of your “project plan” may no longer apply. Maybe they’re outdated, or you’ve achieved them already. Or maybe you have an alternate way of achieving them. Also look at your large end goal. Does it mean the same to you as when you started? Has your end goal changed? How are your smaller goals affected as a result.
10. Keep going. Whether your goal has changed or not, if you still have a goal and a suitable project plan for achieving it, then persistence is key. On the other hand, if you keep changing your plan because you’re afraid of reaching the end, then you’re not going to find any satisfaction any time soon. You’ll have to ask yourself why you’re afraid of reaching your goal. Do that for yourself: make a list of what negatives there are if you do succeed, then deal with each item step by step. This is part of what persistence really is all about.

When you do achieve your goal, share your success. Then start work on another goal.

Photography: ChrisL AK

If you’re in career planning mode right now, you’re not alone. Even entrepreneurs occasionally need to find opportunities. The economy has people scrambling to find new jobs, new careers.

Approaches

Career planning does not have to be a daunting task. Here are some suggestions and preparations to consider.

1. Have a plan. Execute your plan one step at a time, and don’t get discouraged. Part of your plan should include updating your resume, writing a strong cover letter to sell your skills, and creating a schedule for job hunting and sending out applications. This is common advice but bears repeating: treat your job search as a job in itself.

2. Take job retraining.
Retraining does not have to cost a lot of money.  Your options include government-funded retraining (based on various eligibility requirements), interning, or any number of open courses online that are offered by numerous top colleges and universities. Some of these courses might be relevant to your desired job retraining.

If you’re currently working for a company, check to see if your employer has a retraining program. Ask your boss or colleagues. If you’re asking your boss, make it clear that while you’re enjoying what you are doing, that you would like more of a challenge. Start there, gain their confidence that you are not going to quit, then ask for their suggestions. Carry on from there.

3. Use the right tools.

Get tapped into social media. Use social media. LinkedIn, Twitter, Plurk, Facebook, MySpace, etc. The writing’s on the digital wall, and a lot of opportunities are found through social media.

The key to surviving the work force changes is to embrace them, embrace the online age. In face, it’s utter crucial. Older workers who are not comfortable with social media or even just searching for work online will lose job opportunities to those who make it part of their career improvement toolkit.

Learn to leverage your networks. Newspaper career sections are thinning out where they are not disappearing altogether. Sure, it’s not easy searching online for work that you don’t even know is there. It’s not like grabbing a newspaper and a red pen to circle possible jobs to apply to. That’s why social networks are so valuable, allowing people to pass on job alerts.

Use an RSS job search Radar. Most job listings websites allow you to either receive alerts by email or to subscribe to an RSS feed. You can go one step further by employing a tool such as Yahoo Pipes to build a custom RSS Radar for your job search RSS Radar. An RSS Radar is a web agent that aggregates and filters the RSS feeds of multiple websites (in this case job sites). Supply your own filtering criteria (location, salary, title, etc.) to  only produce the job listings that you really want.

Alternatively, you can use Google Alerts to search the web, or something like Google Reader to subscribe to various job site RSS feeds.

4. Build your own business. Moonlighting used to be widely frowned on, but having a side business is so much more common now, especially since job security is dwindling. There are many opportunities online, though this approach has negative connotation thanks to the hucksters. If you’ve been reading Geekpreneur in the past, you know that there are legitimate ways to earn money working online.

5. Write about it. If you happen to be one of those fortunate types who saved enough money to coast through a period of joblessness, put it to good advantage. Take some time off, maybe even write about your skills, to share your knowledge with others in online articles. Depending on what and how much information you share, not only might you get a regular following of readers, you might earn some income from it, either as a freelance writer or by monetizing your own website. It’s not for everyone, but it is possible.

Job Search

Here are a few more specific approaches to career planning.

1. Make a list of terms used in your industry. Are there any types of jobs directly or indirectly connected with those? For example, “health” has work in the medical field, pharmaceutical, and even fitness. There’s a lot of room in there to find a career.

Explore work that’s peripherally related to niches you like. There might be something you’ve overlooked. Brainstorm a list of the types of jobs in your current industry. Think also of related niches not being satisfied, and what kind jobs might be there for the filling. You might even be able to create your own job – that IS the entrepreneurial mindset.

It’s been said that sometimes you find your dream career quite by accident. But in fact, it’s often not what you’d set out to do.

2. Track trends. There are many ways to track trends (job, technology, consumer, society), and doing so could lead you to opportunities that you hadn’t thought of before. Some tracking tools to consider:

1. Headlines. TV, newspaper, websites.
2. Google Trends.
3. Digg, Reddit, Mixx, and other social media voting sites where fresh articles are headlined.
4. Job boards.
5. Freelance job listings.
6. Yahoo Pipes for custom filters.

3. Brainstorm opportunities. List 100 possible ways to make money in the niche/ industry that you are interested in. Write down everything that comes to mind without judgement. When you have 100 items, filter out those that don’t interest you or are not feasible. With what’s left, compare to any trends you’ve been tracking. Opportunities might reveal themselves.

Whatever approach you take, and whether you’re looking for a salaried career or something more entrepreneurial, learn to be resilient and pragmatic. Consider multiple sources of income instead of relying on just one, and you might find far more opportunities suitable for you than you had considered.

Many of you Geekpreneur readers are probably dreaming of a successful entrepreneurial career. If you haven’t started, what’s stopping you? Sure, funding isn’t exactly easy to find, especially with current goings on in the market. However, bootstrapping a business is just as relevant as before, maybe more so, and the Internet makes it easier in many ways.

What Is Bootstrapping?

Bootstrapping, in a nutshell, is a simple business self-financing process whereby an entrepreneur spends only what is absolutely necessary and reinvests most or all of the profits until the business is self-sustaining. Or sold. I.e., little or no outside capital is used, at least initially.

By bootstrapping, entrepreneurs have built many successful businesses. If the business means enough emotionally or financially to the entrepreneur, the lack of capital can be the impetus to run the startup as efficiently as possible. Or they can go broke trying – which does happen, of course.

One of the most entertaining examples of the application of a bootstrapping mindset comes from the website One Red Paperclip. The right-hand sidebar has a pictorial explanation, but it goes something like this… Canadian Kyle Macdonald started with one red paperclip and, through a series of swap transactions across North America, managed to end up with a house. He started with essentially nothing and kept trading up in each transaction.

The fact that other people participated made a huge difference, of course, but these people were likely fascinated by his mindset and were glad to participate. Now this is not exactly how bootstrapping works, but the mindset is similar: start with what you have now and build it into something better. Kyle Macdonald did “work” for each transaction by starting conversations with people and promoting his “cause”. This helped him achive the transactions he needed to increase his “value” until he got what he wanted.

You can apply a similar bootstrapping mindset to a business startup. Even for an offline business, you can leverage the Web to promote and build your startup.

Mind Mapping Your Bootstrapping Plan

Notes
For this article’s example, I’ve used MindJet MindManager Pro software to create the mindmaps. You can get a free, fully functioning trial of MindManager Pro for Windows (30 days) or Mac (21 days).

Alternately, you can use any other mind mapping package, including FreeMind (multi-platform), Mindomo, MindMeister, or Comapping. (The latter three are web-based and only basic or trial versions are free.) Note: Mindomo has a desktop version which actually runs on Adobe Air.

If you prefer not to use mind maps, also consider using a spreadsheet (MS Excel, Open Office Spreadsheet, Google Spreadsheet) or diagramming software (MS Visio, SmartDraw, Gliffy).

Mind Mapping Process Overview
The assumption here is that you are picking an entrepreneurial opportunity that has some potential, and that you’ve done your research already. You’re simply going to map out your current status and some of the goals that you hope to achieve. The example I’ve used below is for building a web video publishing business.

Step 1
Start with two nodes: here/there, start/end, now/then or whatever you prefer. I’ve used Now/ Then in the example.

Step 2
See the diagram above.

For the “Now” node, list what you have to start your business with, including equipment, skills/ knowledge, leads, partnerships, startup funds.

For “Then” node, list what you aim to achieve. Include a time frame if possible (but be flexible), what revenues you’d like to be earning and how, whether you’ll have any staff or freelancers, equipment, etc.

Step 3

This is an administrative step I’ve added simply for reader clarity. Here, I’ve split up each list to prepare them for Step 4.

Step 4

Pair up current and desired items as best as possible, using a “strategy” node between pairs. In some cases you might have multiple lines in or out of a “strategy” node, as per the diagram above. Use what’s appropriate for your business scenario.

Step 5

Now fill in each strategy node with a brief note about what approach you might take. Don’t get too detailed just yet. Keep bootstrapping principles in mind: spend only what you have to; reinvest as much of the profits as possible.

Final Thoughts

You now have a very basic roadmap for working towards what you want business-wise. By breaking down short- and long-term tasks this way, the process should feel less intimidating than, say, “achieve success in this venture”.

Of course, you’re not done yet. This is only a starting point.  You still need to produce a more detailed plan for each strategy node (not to mention perform all the necessary tasks over time.) If you’re using mind mapping software to produce the detailed strategy mind maps, you can link each strategy node to a sub-map. So your master map will be organic, growing as necessary, or linking to new sub-maps.

To produce the detailed strategy maps, use whatever methods of problem solving (e.g., brainstorming, visual thinking, etc.) that you prefer. Use diagrams and images in your strategy maps, to help visualize what you are working towards. Try listing multiple options and later filter out those which are not feasible. Let your overall bootstrapping plan develop.

Photography: Tracy Russo

Much of the Web today seems to be focused on making friends, keeping them close – and making something out of them. Ironic perhaps, for an activity that is essentially done alone. MySpace lets everyone see a communication thread so that talking feels more like an open café chat than a private phone call. Facebook offers gazillions of daft apps intended to help its members play together in the hope that they may eventually build something in common with each other.

But despite the plethora of fancy tools and games, what they all lack is a common goal. Members of Facebook, MySpace and Bebo are always individuals looking for a reason to stay on the site.

That’s slightly different for Digg, where contributors are a more homogeneous group united by their enthusiasm for certain websites and their belief in Ron Paul as the new messiah. That might give the site a cliquey feel – you’re either with them or with StumbleUpon – but it does create a sense of community, which as singing Digger Kina Grannis found when she competed and won a competition to perform at the Superbowl, can be extremely powerful.

So how much more power might be packed into netroots – the sort of online collaboration in which participants are united by similar ideas and a desire for political change?

It’s All Down to Dean

Participants in sites like MoveOn.org and the DailyKos have the advantage of being self-selected. They’re all politically active and share similar points of view. If Howard Dean’s campaign – the activity that put netroots on the map and even coined the term – is anything to go by, they’re also mostly young and educated. That should make the connections easier to build and more likely to stick. Unlike the more general social networking sites, netroots focus on one group and attract people who already have something in common.

And the participants work together too – an important difference. There’s only so much that zombie-biting can do to unite web surfers, but organizing campaigns, registering voters and getting people to turn up to rallies and events will always be much more effective at creating a sense of shared history and achievement. Netroots don’t just put people in touch. It also creates teams, the sort of bonds that are most likely to remain even after the goal has been reached.

The degree of activity can vary. Leaving an occasional comment at the end of a DailyKos thread is fairly simple. Leaving them regularly takes a little more effort but does bring you into the site. After a while, commenters become known, their views expected and sometimes even respected too. It’s not unusual to see commenters naming each other more than the author of the original post. The site’s user diary can then let you toss in references to your non-political activities so that other people can see who you are and what you do when you’re not trying to change the system.

The real power of netroots though comes when you shut the computer and hit the streets. MoveOn might be great bringing people together but it’s when everyone meets together through MeetUp that things can really start happening. This requires a different level of commitment. You’re no longer a blogger, commenter or someone with a general political interest. You’re a political activist.

Save America, Win a Client

The networking advantages here have the potential to be huge. You’ll be working with a close group of people and have access to a series of new networks that stretch into other activists’ workplaces and social circles. Those networks are even likely to reach into the world of politics. While it wouldn’t be advisable to become politically active for the sole purpose of finding a new job, hunting down an investor for your new business idea or landing a new client, it’s not unreasonable to believe that a small group united by a sense that they’re battling for the common good would lend a hand to a member in need. You can’t demand but you might be able to expect that as word spread along the network about what you can do – and what you want to do – offers would come in.

That’s especially true if you use your skills to help the campaign. For graphic designers, netroot campaigns are a fantastic opportunity to show off the quality of your work to millions of people and contribute to a cause they believe in. The same is true of copywriters and even programmers and technicians. Giving away free samples to win business isn’t new. Netroots just put those samples into the hands of more people – and people who will appreciate them too.

There are disadvantages as well, of course. When you become a leading contributor to a netroots campaign, you nail your political colors to the mast, a position that might put off some potential clients. You also have to commit a certain amount of time depending on your level of activity – a cost which needs to be weighed up against the business benefits.

And you have to work people who might be a little, well… strange. Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, founder of Daily Kos, has called netroots people “the crazy political junkies that hang out in blogs.” That can make the experience a little overwhelming. On the other hand, they’re still likely to be better company than the rabid zombies on Facebook.

It might be the first goal of many a budding entrepreneur: to find someone with more money than he knows what to do with, explain why your idea can make him richer than Beverly Hills and accept a seven-figure check from him in return for a tiny little stake in your company — one that’s now worth several million dollars. Whether the business ever makes a dime, you’ll always be able to say that you were worth a mint and that you ran a large corporation.

In practice of course, it’s never that easy. While venture capital may well provide the sort of launch pad that’s sent many a business into the stratosphere, finding the money can be as laborious as building the foundations of the business in the first place. Time that could have been spent talking to potential customers, perfecting the product and developing new service ranges will be spent creating business plans, contacting investors and creating Powerpoint presentations to land the capital.

The chances of success are fairly small too, although they depend on the industry. Entrepreneurs with an idea in the healthcare field, for example, are said have just a 3 percent chance of landing an investor. Those odds may well be higher for entrepreneurs with Web ideas and based in Silicon Valley, especially if they have a proven track record, but even they can expect a long wait, lots of meetings and plenty of responses that begin “We think it’s a very interesting idea but….”

The Price of Investment
And even if you’re successful, the money always comes at a price that goes beyond the time taken to find it. Accept money from an investor, and you give up full control over your company. You don’t get to decide on your own whether to sell up, go public or even close down. When Bryan Zmijewski, founder of microstock photography company Lucky Oliver, announced his company’s closure recently, he made clear that the move came from “the investment team” who had decided “that it was in the best interest of all stakeholders to shut the company down.” That’s a serious loss of control over a business that’s taken someone else’s money but all of your hopes, dreams and efforts — and a sizeable chunk of your life too.

So what’s the alternative?

There are quite a few. BusinessFund.com lists 25 Alternatives to Venture Capital and offers some interesting, if conventional ideas. (One suggestion, for example, is to use personal credit cards, a route that carries a high risk of punitive interest rates.) Mark van Osnabrugge and Robert J. Robinson point out in their book, “Angel Investing” that in the first round of investment, 74 percent of entrepreneurs use personal savings to fund their business. In the second round, just over a third use angels and by the third round, a quarter are established enough to use a public share offering.

How Joint Ventures Can Beat Venture Capital

But there is another option that’s less frequently taken, offers many of the benefits  provided by investors and lets you retain full control over your business too. You can create joint ventures with other entrepreneurs.

You would still be able to receive the professional support and advice that’s often as valuable as the numbers on a VC’s check. But instead of selling part of your company to someone else, you’d be partnering with someone on one particular aspect of your business.

While you wouldn’t be receiving a giant sum of money regardless of whether you succeeded, you would be able to receive income and grow at the same time.

Joint ventures though come in all sorts of forms. One option is to team up with a big company or even a group of big companies. MySpace’s deal with Universal, for example, may have helped to settle legal action but it provided clear benefits for both the social media site and the music companies. MySpace was already well-established but had it lost the court case, the site might have required a new injection of cash from owners News Corp.

Of course, joint ventures don’t have to be that complex. Joel Comm, an Internet guru with a popular following, invites entrepreneurs to submit their joint venture ideas to him… but charges $497 to review them. The fee is intended to put off all but the most confident of entrepreneurs from asking for help but it also suggests that the value of a partner with a large audience can be high.

Perhaps the best way for a new entrepreneur to form a joint venture though is with another company at the same stage of development. Two businesses that agree to recommend each other’s services or which uses each other’s products can cut their expenses while still growing and bringing in new customers. Conferences can be good places to meet these kinds of entrepreneurs, and in fact it’s the opportunity to create those partnerships that is main reason people attend them. The presentations are often just helpful extras.

Every joint venture though, whatever the business’s stage of development, has to provide real benefits to all parties, and like any deal that means selling the idea with an emphasis on what the other side will get out of it. Yes, that’s like pitching a business idea to a venture capitalist. This time though you’ll be talking to someone with as little money as you but with drive that’s just as big — and dreams that are the same size too.

Photography: orphanjones

In the financial year of 2006-7, Japan broke a record. Around 355 workers fell ill from overwork. Of those, 147 died, usually of heart attacks or strokes. It was Japan’s highest figure ever and an increase of 7.6 percent from the previous year, despite a government campaign to cut work hours.

It’s such a Japanese phenomenon that they’ve even termed a word for it: “karoshi,” which means “death from overwork.” The term dates from the 1980s when the economy was bubbling and several –  apparently healthy — top executives suddenly keeled over.

The cause is Japan’s painfully long work hours. Officially, Japanese employees put in an average of 1,780 hours a year, just 20 hours less than Americans (although 340 hours more than Germans). But those figures don’t include unpaid overtime, which Japanese companies take for granted. According to a report in The Economist, a third of Japanese men in their thirties work more than 60 hours a week, but half receive no overtime pay at all. Shortly before he died, Kenichi Uchino, a 30-year old Toyota employee who collapsed at work at 4am after racking up more than 80 hours of overtime a month for six months, told his wife that he was happiest when asleep.

Clearly, that’s no way to go through life and the country is trying to change things. Courts have increasingly placed responsibility for workplace deaths at the feet of employers so that now almost half of claims are declared karoshi. The ruling grants the surviving family government compensation of around $20,000 a year and up to $1m in damages from the company.

Californian Karoshi

It all sounds as Japanese as porno comics, thigh-length school socks and Hello Kitty  but for anyone who worked through the dotcom boom, karoshi does strike a sickening note of familiarity. When Silicon Valley was stuffed with new Web start-ups, high-tech employees too were expected to work all hours, often by the midnight glow of a lava lamp. But even in the early years, no one believed they would be doing it forever. With a pocketful of stock options, the dream was to work yourself into the ground for a couple of years, then go public, cash in and spend the rest of your life gloriously doing nothing.

Of course, many of those who didn’t reach that finish line found that the end of the road came to them. The bubble popped and they got a P45 with more free time than they wanted.

For employees then, even in the hi-tech sector, the threat of self-sacrifice is less that it might be lethal than that it will be pointless. Even then though, as soon as it becomes clear that the company they’re working for isn’t going to make them rich enough to retire before they’re 40, non-Japanese employees are free to move on. They can either start their sprint again at a different company or take the benefits now in the form of a regular 9-5 at a different firm.

How to Work Harder and Be Happier

That’s harder to do for the self employed. Even if they’re not at risk of collapsing at their desks, studies have found that entrepreneurs consistently work longer hours than employees, partly to offset the greater risk of running their own business but also because they can set their own schedules. It’s that freedom – and presumably, the knowledge that they get all the benefits of the longer hours – that makes the difference. The same surveys that find the self-employed work more than staff also find that they’re generally happier.

But there are ways for anyone to reduce their work hours and lower the risk of death by keyboard. Japan is opting for a combination of hi-tech and rest. Workers are being encouraged to telecommute (which might suggest they’ll be dying at home instead of clogging up offices) and to take breaks when they start a family or to look after aging parents.

Against that pressure though is the perhaps stronger threat that downsizing their jobs will reduce them to temporary positions – a growing trend in Japan — removing the automatic promotion prospects and enviable retirement packages that are the closest thing to rewards for the unpaid overtime.

Outside Japan, the same risk can be seen in lower average pay for women as mothers take time out to raise small children.

Perhaps the best approach though is to look at what the French do. Despite their comparatively short workweek, French employees consistently top productivity surveys. They might spend less time at the office than Americans and Japanese do but they use their time there much more efficiently. Old-time Web workers who look back fondly on company Yoga sessions and daytime dodgeball might wonder if they wouldn’t have been happier giving the games a miss, knocking off at six, and spending more time with the family.

Part of actually doing that comes down to careful time-keeping. If work expands to fill the time available, cutting the number of hours you give yourself to complete tasks should help you to get them done faster — and home earlier.

Unfortunately, as unions claim, this might be what lies at the bottom of another trend: the rising rates of workplace suicides in France. However you do it, it seems, hard work will get you in the end.

[tags] karoshi [/tags]

Photography: Vicki’s Pics

Create a professional website and inevitably, you’ll have to do it. You’ll have to write an About Us page that tells a lead who you are, what you do and how you got there. It’s the story of your company and while that account might not be as important as your product or your services, your business’s narrative is an important part of your image and your branding – especially when you find that it plays the role of the bad guy. Google, after all, would still have a world-beating search engine and advertising system even if it didn’t come with a story of two noble geeks who promise to do no evil. Microsoft, on the other hand, has produced a standard-setting games console but its competition-squashing has made it the computer world’s Lee van Cleef, a characterization that only inspires young virus-writers to call the company out.

It’s up to PR firms to create – and change — the stories that the public believes about large companies. Small firms just setting out start with a clean sheet have a much easier time. They can produce a tale that explains where their idea came from, how they’re trying to make life better for customers and why they’re the best qualified firm to do it.

Wear a White Hat

Whether they hold on to that story though will depend on the quality of the products and the services they provide, and their behavior too. Poor customer service is always one good way to send a white-hatted business character over to the dark side.

But stories about companies aren’t just held by potential buyers. The attitudes of employees towards their place of work can also be dictated by what they believe about the behavior of its management and the company’s attitude in general. Tales told around the watercooler might be a way of shooting the breeze, but when those stories are about managers who don’t care and products shipped with known bugs, the effect on motivation could be lethal. In fact, an entire academic discipline called “organizational storytelling” has grown up to capture those tales and help managers use them to train staff, share ideas, transmit values and battle negative rumors.

Controlling the stories told within businesses is always going to be difficult, especially once the company has grown to a size that separates top management from entry-level staff. Moving close enough to hear the stories – and demonstrate that the characterization owes more to someone’s imagination than the CEO’s actions – might help. Much easier to control are the sorts of tales that are told directly by company officials as they promote their businesses.

What Makes a Good Tale?

Shawn Callahan of Anecdote, an Australian firm that specializes in “business narrative services” has described some of the features a good anecdote should contain: a clear date, he suggests, makes the story sound credible; a conversational tone is important too; and if it’s possible to include a main character on a transformative journey so much the better. “It’s how we learn without having to experience something first-hand,” he writes.

For sales staff making pitches, that’s all useful information. Experienced marketing executives understand the importance of selling benefits, not features, but those benefits become even clearer when they’re placed in contexts that show their effects. A sales script that included a narrative describing how an executive was able to help a business overcome a number of challenges would be much more interesting — and far more persuasive – than reading a checklist of program features.

The listener should be able to identify with the company in the anecdote in the same way that a salesman tries to create identification between the lead’s problems and the solution the product offers. By the time the story has reached its happy ending, the listener should understand that his company too could be enjoying that success.

With conference speeches now an important part of many companies’ promotional programs, being able to weave anecdotes into presentations is also much more likely to leave audience members with a positive impression – or at least a narrative they can remember in a weekend of similar speakers.

And perhaps that’s the most important feature of business stories: their ability to stick in the mind and in the process, to leave important messages in the listener’s memory. “Who Moved My Cheese,” for example, contained a very simple narrative but it’s one whose details most readers would struggle to remember. What they don’t forget though is the book’s underlying message of the importance of adjustment to change.

When you’re struggling to produce an About Us page that portrays your company in a good light, you don’t have to create a tale about a hesitant mouse and his go-getting friend. But if you can create a story with a beginning, a middle and an end — one that talks directly to readers – your company should stay in their thoughts and lay the foundation for a profitable future.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just pop a pill and hey presto!… you’re Bill Gates? Well, maybe not that pill. But how about one that turns you from entrepreneurial dreamer into successful business person, from someone with ideas to someone who takes action, from someone who wants to someone who achieves?

Usually, those sorts of transformations require massive amounts of hard work, long investments of capital and sometimes a complete personality change too. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Popping placebos has long been known to end even the toughest illnesses and it’s possible that there are a few little sugary confidence tricks that can have an equally transformative effect on a business’s growth.

Take one Sales Pill After Meals

Seth Godin, for example, has talked in the past about marketing as a kind of placebo effect. A product that’s no different to any other on the market and only a little different from its previous model suddenly becomes the most incredible innovation since… well, the last most incredible innovation. The item itself is nothing special. What makes the difference is the status of its source or the sound of the sizzle:

“We don’t like to admit that we tell stories, that we’re in the placebo business,” he wrote once on his blog. ” Instead, we tell ourselves about features and benefits as a way to rationalize our desire to help our customers by allowing them to lie to themselves.

“The design of your blog or your package or your outfit is nothing but an affect designed to create the placebo effect. The sound Dasani water makes when you open the bottle is more of the same. It’s all storytelling. It’s all lies.”

Or not lies so much as packaging, but Seth does have a point. The marketing itself is valueless; it doesn’t make the product any better. But it does make it more desirable which means that the buyer appreciates it more, uses it more, finds it more satisfying and pays more for it.

The best example of the placebo effect on a product has to be the iPod which didn’t offer much more than any other MP3 player, and might even have offered a lot less. But it had a clickwheel, came in a beautiful shade of white and everyone had one. So Apple was able to move them by the truckload while charging twice as much as everyone else.

Placebos that effective don’t come along every day (unless you happen to work in an Apple store) but we do see less powerful placebos all the time, even when we don’t want to. Every television laundry detergent ad, for example, promises that thanks to the addition of some new enzyme/hormone/whitener/ whatever, it now washes clothes a purer shade of white than you’ll find in an angel’s underwear drawer… and impressed by the animated grime molecules, we conveniently forget that that’s what they told us about the last version which, the company now effectively concedes, left embarrassing stains.

For anyone with a need to market, the formula should be clear: good marketing might contain nothing but air, but when pumped into a product it can dramatically inflate its apparent desirability.

The Placebo for you

Marketing then is the placebo for products. But a placebo also exists for the creators of those products, the entrepreneurs with the twinkle in their eyes and the dreams of passive income. The formula isn’t quite as complex as the magic mix that goes into successful marketing but it can still be just as transformative.

You can think of this placebo as acting like a steroid. It doesn’t pack testosterone, but it does have the power to turn a seven-stone business weakling into a hard-punching heavyweight.

Or at least to feel like one, which is half the job.

The idea is simply to hang around with people who have already achieved the success you’re looking to build.

They’re not always easy to find, of course, which is where the mix gets hard to put together. If you’re located in a center of entrepreneurship like Silicon Valley or Seattle, then it might just take some brave networking. If you’re further afield, hanging out in some carefully-selected online groups might be enough to do the trick.

The result though should be a feeling that you’re already part of the club. You might not be the CEO of your own company yet but when you spend a lot of time with CEOs, you should start to feel like one – or at the very least, someone who should be one. That might just be enough to give you the boost you need to take action.

You can think of this as really a type of peer pressure but it’s no less effective – and the cause of the change no more concrete – than the influence that turns a touch-screen telephone into an iPhone.

It’s all false but the effect is real and powerful.

Placebos have been known to work in medicine and they can work in business too. Ultimately though, their success can only be measured by their results, and they’re only going to come if the product – or the person – is effective anyway.

Even the best marketing will have limited effect on a poor product (as Coca Cola discovered with Dasani) and even shopping for turtlenecks with Steve Jobs won’t turn you into an electronics tycoon.

But combined with a good product and determined action – like a healthy diet and plenty of exercise – the right placebo might well cure the ailments hampering your business development.

Photography: vidrio

It’s an old saw popular with business coaches. If you want to be successful, your first step isn’t to write a business plan, spot a niche or create your product. It’s to create a mastermind support group – a team of cheerleaders who’ll buck you up when you fail to land a client, buy you coffee when the VCs turn you down and give you a shoulder to cry on when your business goes belly-up and you’re wondering how to explain the last two years on your resume.

And they’re quite right, of course – although it does help if that support group can actually offer some sound advice rather than just a mocha frapuccino and an extra-large cookie.

In practice though, no one ever actually finds a group. Call a bunch of people and invite them to get-together for a you-boost session and you’re not likely to get many arrivals. What we all really need isn’t a mastermind support group so much as a bunch of trusted individuals who can offer help in different ways.

They’re Like Mentors but Smaller and Easier to Find

You can think of them as mini-mentors if you like but the good news is they’re much easier to find than a cohesive group of masterminds.

The first place to look is your family.

They’re likely to provide a relatively small pool of people to choose from and unless your surname is Rothschild, they’re also unlikely to offer too much in the way of powerful business knowledge.

But you won’t find better emotional support anywhere, and that’s important too.

When you’re building your own firm, there will always be moments when you wonder if it’s all worth it, whether the idea is sound and whether you’re the right person to do it. At that point, you will need someone you love to clip you round the ear and tell you to stop being such a cry-baby. It requires a special kind of knowledge – a knowledge of you and what makes you tick, and it’s something that you can only find in your closest circles.

When you have at least one person that you can turn to for those crises of confidence, you can look further afield. Unlike relatives, your friends are people you’ve chosen to spend time with. That’s usually because you think alike, have found something you admire in each other and you respect each other too.

But because we tend to choose friends with whom we have something in common, it’s also possible that at least one of your friends will have knowledge that has some bearing on what you’re trying to do.
If you were trying to create a software program for property lawyers, for example, you might not have friends who are property lawyers. But you might have friends who are software programmers, who can understand the challenge of debugging and can help you to think of ways to make the coding faster.

They might not be as good as your spouse or a sibling at bucking you up when you’re feeling down, but they can give you some pretty creative suggestions for handling a database.

Know Anyone with a Bag of Money?

It’s still unlikely though that even your best friends are going to have the sort of in-depth knowledge you’ll need to crack particular problems. You might want to know what angels really want to see in a business plan, for example, or which companies you should approach with your idea first.

Unless you know someone who has already started their own business – and swapped it for a giant sack of Google cash – then your immediate circle of friends might be little use for those special sorts of problems.

That’s when you need to work your network. Asking your friends if they know anyone who can provide that sort of specialized advice is a good start but these days, profiting from extended networks is easier than ever.

Pull open your pals’ Facebook or LinkedIn profiles and start following the lines until you come up with someone with the right knowledge. Ideally, you won’t have to go further than a couple of places removed but if you extend your definition of “friend” to include people in groups you’ve joined or networks you’re already a part of, it shouldn’t be too hard to find someone whose brains you can pick for some special advice.

The result of all this won’t be a mastermind group. It will be a collection of people you can call on to solve particular problems as you’re building your business. The frapuccinos you’ll have to buy yourself.

[tags] mentor, mentors, mentoring [/tags]

“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail” – experience notwithstanding.

Such words have been presented to us by one of the founding fathers, and their validity is still remarkable, nowadays. Granted, experience is an extremely important asset, and it’ll take you far along the cyberspace snakes and ladders; however something else is required to ascribe the far shores of being a true master. You should always keep in mind that genuine mastery is a by-product of experience enhanced with strategy.

Experience is what you get through practice: doing something over and over again, thus improving your skill. Strategy, on the other hand, is a mindset which provides for optimization and expansion of the learning processes. You can think of experience and strategy as analogs to practice and theory; while the former is all about doing things, the latter is exclusively concerned with optimizing everything we do. When you learn how to balance theory and practice, strategy and experience, rest assured: you’ll be on the high road to mastery of your craft.

When it comes to the power of networking, one of the most striking examples that comes to mind is the popular author Maki, of DoshDosh fame. This young Canadian writer has become a leading authority in on line entrepreneurship, and he’s quite a shining example of someone who effectively articulates experience with strategy. With his clear-cut dissections of the multi-layered mechanisms behind on line marketing, this author consistently bridges the gap between theory and practice:

“I’m using this blog as a journal to record down the experiences and observations which result from efforts on some of my other websites.”

Build Reputation Through a Strong Network

No man is an island, we’re all part of a vast continent. If this is true for the physical world, it’s arguably even more so within the realms of on line entrepreneurial. When it comes to building a reputation on the Internet, networking is instrumental. By getting to know people and exposing your content, your thoughts, and even your personality, you’ll be creating bonds that will strengthen your roots and help grow both your reputation and your business.

While building a strong network of friends, associates and followers, you’ll actually be creating a human structure that will allow you to gain exposure and influence, as your reputation builds up. Getting a unique voice is half way done towards success; once you’ve secured your identity and purpose, it will take people to listen and help spread your message. By combining effective networking with engaging content, your success will come naturally.

Delivering a consistent supply of high-quality articles thriving with meticulous yet engaging analyses, DoshDosh has grown notoriously more influent in the over-crowded niche of on line enterprising. As natural consequence, the author has been endowed with increasing editorial power, and a growing legion of followers and supporters. In just a few years, Maki has succeeded in captivating thousands of readers (his website currently boasts 16630 subscribers, from FeedBurner alone).

Be Seen Everywhere – Literally

Certain individuals are capable of amassing such a huge influence through their networking efforts, they can actually be compared to vast continents of the cyberspace, in their own right and merit. As we observe the examples from the great moguls, it becomes clear that who you are and what you can do is secondary to who you know. Not only that, it’s crucial to get around a lot, and participate in all available activities, events and meetings.

By taking active part in the on line communities, you’ll cement your commitment to your work, which in turn will strengthen your influence. As you get around and meet other people, you’ll also make sure people also get to know who you are, thus paving the way for a future thriving with influence and recognition. However, you should keep in mind there’s a fine line between promotion and spam. You should move yourself naturally around the social commitments, showing what you can  do, but never pushing it around.

Within a recent article on strategic collaborations, Maki has written that

“One of the best ways to promote your website or business is to work together with others to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes.”

The author clearly demonstrates his understanding of the power of networking, and through his body of work, a central cornerstone translates the importance of getting familiar with the new Internet landscapes – including social media, social bookmarks, micro-blogging websites – all of which should be regarded as important business tools, and used responsibly.

Be Unique, Be “The One”

In order to be able to stand out from the crowd, you need to be able to offer some unique distinctiveness. No one will look up to you if you’re just like everyone else, since people keep looking for the next best thing available. This is what you should try to deliver – while avoiding to compromise who you are. If you want to be regarded as an authority, you must put your undivided efforts into acting like one; not just pretending, but actually being. Get ahead in your game, learn all there is to know about it, and keep expanding both your skills and networks.

Try to find your own unique voice, and work actively to make all the things everyone does, in ways no one else has thought of doing – yet. Quite often the most brilliant solutions are also the simplest, and yet people tend to get constrained with complicated lines of thought. By learning how to nurture your uniqueness and spontaneity, you’ll easily find yourself being looked up to.

It’s not by accident I’ve chosen to use this author as a case study to illustrate this specific article. For one, I’ve personally been led to several insights through his writing, and second the author really is a living example of the principles this articles intends to demonstrate. I once approached him via instant message asking for some advice for a new web host. Much to my surprise, he refused to make a simple suggestion (which could easily have turned out in $100 profit from affiliate sale). It was from then my suspicions were confirmed; there’s something to this author that truly sets him apart from the crowd.

Spread Out – Branch Your Service

When it comes to networking, it’s not just about people – it’s also about products, services and business. Just as you should work actively to expand your network of persons, you should keep trying to find new ways to expand your business networks. This is something you can do by finding new business, as well as just coming up with creative ways to make business; a good entrepreneur is always on the lookout for opportunity.

The modern technological days we live by are thriving with new opportunities which quite often go by unnoticed because people still think excessively inside the box. If you want to go a long way, make sure to take a step back from what you’re doing every once in a while, and figure out ways to make your service more competitive and exciting.

There’s an old saying around the realms of on line entrepreneurship that cautions us never to put our eggs in a single basket. On line marketing is not unlike a joint puzzle where all kinds of pieces are required; by developing new skills and delving into new opportunities, you’ll be actively increasing your odds of success. For a thorough demonstration of this principle, you should read this article about niche blogging:

“I’m a big fan of diversity when it comes to making money on line and I seldom focus exclusively on one niche or target market.“

Confidence – Develop a Guru Attitude

If you think for a moment about the most common trait uniting all guru types, you’ll probably realize that it’s most likely a pervading sense of unabashed confidence. They are special individuals who remain invariably confident in what they are doing, even when faced with adversity. They are highly creative and self-assured, without much need for boasting: this is the balance you should strive towards.

Going around telling others you’re a guru of something or the other really won’t cut it – not by a long shot. You need to do just the opposite: mind your own business, and do your best efforts; work actively so people will notice just how different you are from the pack, and try to remain in perspective. Cherish your experience, and nourish your planning skills. The road to being a guru is doubtlessly the road less traveled, because it requires a special kind of effortless effort and undivided commitment that not everybody is capable of. How about you?

The term “guru” is one of those words that gets thrown around a lot, to the point it’s almost pejorative. A guru is by definition a “Meditation master who has attained oneness with God and who initiates others into the spiritual path and guides them to liberation.” When dealing with Internet Entrepreneurship, one could adapt this definition as “a master of strategy who has attained understanding of the Internet, who initiates others in the transcendent path, and guides them to self-sufficiency”.

Provided one would take such adaptation as accurate, then one should keep an eye out for the Canadian author who goes by the Internet handle “Maki”. To the best of my knowledge, he provides a good example worth learning from, and DoshDosh stands proudly as a leading haven for up-and-coming Internet entrepreneurs.

[tags] doshdosh, maki [/tags]

Photography: Paul Keller

For businesses, it seems to be all the rage. Identify your core competencies and outsource everything else to a company far away, ideally in India. Customer service units are famous for it but outsourcing has also come to include production units as well as backroom accountancy departments.

Even individuals can do it. Tim Ferriss has built himself a career teaching people how they can outsource their lives until there’s little left to do but eat and sleep — and there are plenty of people in Mumbai who would be willing to do to both of those for you too.

The result is that anyone watching CNN could be forgiven for thinking that the entire US economy is now located somewhere south of the Himalayas.

Of course, it’s not quite as simple as that. Even as call centers are filling up with South Asians learning to talk like Canadians, jobs are flowing back to source countries. In November 2007, InformationWeek reported that 20 percent of its top 500 companies had taken back offshored tasks in the previous year.

America – Europe’s India
Much of that trend is likely to be a result of dissatisfaction with the quality of the work but just as jobs flow out of the United States and into the sub-continent then back again, so new work is pouting into America from foreign companies. A report by Prof. Matthew Slaughter for the Organization for International Investment notes that the number of jobs at US subsidiaries of foreign — usually European — companies had risen from 2.6 million in 1987 to 5.4 million in 2002. And many of those jobs came with pleasant European standards such as four-week vacations.

That sort of insourcing though is really another form of outsourcing. It would certainly look that way to a European. The same could be said of the type of insourcing described by Thomas Friedman in “The World Is Flat.” Explaining how UPS has moved from basic parcel delivery services to a general logistics company that makes international business easier to manage, Friedman reveals that UPS doesn’t just bring broken computers back to the company for repair. It repairs them itself under Toshiba’s supervision and ships them back to the computer firm’s customers.

Again, for Toshiba, that would be a simple form of outsourcing. For UPS though it’s precisely the opposite. Fixing silicon isn’t the company’s forte but it does it because it can and because it’s in everyone’s interests: Toshiba’s customers get their machines back faster; Toshiba can focus on production and design rather than repair; and UPS gets to supply an extra service.

Insource or Outsource?
For entrepreneurs and small business owners though, this mixture of inward and outward job flows, of insourcing within the business and outsourcing to other firms, is fairly confusing. When should you outsource and when should you keep the work close to home?

The criteria usually quoted for a job that can be outsourced include significant wage differences between the source company and the outsourced firm; work that is easy to set up; and perhaps more importantly, work that is repeatable so that once the system is in operation it doesn’t need constant supervision and re-training.

There are other factors to consider as well though.

Logistics, for example, could be one reason either to pass the work to someone else or keep it to yourself. The workers at UPS’s Louisville hub tasked with resoldering chips are unlikely to be cheaper than those anywhere else. But by allowing UPS to do work that was essentially mundane, Toshiba was able to cut out some of its logistics, speeding up repairs.

That could only work though because the outsourcing cuts effort rather than adding to it. It also works because customers don’t really care who fixes their computer as long as it comes back like new. (Similarly customers do care if the customer service person has an accent so impenetrable they can’t understand a word they say.) While Toshiba will get the blame if UPS doesn’t do the job properly, it’s not the sort of work that the company has to do.

But customers might feel differently about buying a Toshiba computer that was actually designed and manufactured by Lenovo. Or watching a Tom Cruise film in which the star had outsourced the acting — but not the stunts — to a stand-in (although then again, maybe not.) There are some tasks — in particular, those tied closely to the company’s core field — that the firm has to do itself. Tim Ferriss might be an expert on outsourcing, but even he does he insources his own interviews… to himself.

One general rule then will be to understand not just what you consider to be your core competencies but what your customers consider them to be too.

And finally, outsourcing has to be cost-effective. Wage differentials might be attractive but if the productivity levels are significantly lower or the time and expenses involved in managing the outsourced work much higher then you would still be better off following InformationWeek’s top 500 companies, and follow the new trend of bringing the work back home.

[tags] insourcing [/tags]

It’s hard enough to think of a powerful business idea. It’s harder still, once you have dreamed up a concept that keeps you buzzing all night, to find that some big company has the main market sewn up leaving you to fight for the scraps they left behind.

That’s no bad thing though. Choosing a finely focused niche rather than a general market area is usually the best way to build a successful business. Start a company that sells laptop computers, for example, and you’ll need a production line more efficient than Dell’s. Start a company that sells designer laptops for students or for gamers or for people who work in cafes and all you’ll need to do is be able to meet their needs. You’ll have fewer customers but the customers you have will be happier and you’ll have a shot at being that market’s main player.

Niches let small businesses fill the spaces left by companies too big to squeeze into every corner of the market. They give entrepreneurs a foothold, a place to start and room from which to grow.

So how do you find your niche?

Spotting your Niche
There are a number of different ways. The most obvious is to focus on the activities you love. It’s always going to be easier — and a lot more enjoyable — to turn a hobby into a business activity than to spend time learning about a specialty in order to make sales.

You’ll begin with a knowledge of the industry and an understanding of what the market wants — after all, you’re part of it. It’s a fun thing to do and a fun way to work too.

An alternative route is to look at your work experience. Creating a piece of software that makes life easier for graphic designers or a tool for better home repairs might not be as enjoyable as building a company that makes custom surfboards or strange lenses for cameras but again, as a professional user you’ll understand the market — and you’ll know there’s a demand for it.

Perhaps the worst way to identify a niche — although that doesn’t stop it from appearing to be one of the most popular, and even occasionally succeeding — is to feel that you’ve spotted a gap in a market that you use occasionally, and try to fill it. LookBetterOnline.com, for example, matches online daters to portrait photographers so that they can improve their appearance on dating sites. The service was formed by a couple who met on a dating site and had grown fed up trying to pick dates based on blurry holiday snaps.

The problem here is that an occasional buyer will have limited familiarity with the market. If a service isn’t available, the reason may be that you’re the only person who wants it, rather than that no one else has thought of it.

Wherever the niche idea comes from though, there’s always a second stage to go through before work can begin on the business plan and you can start looking around for employees. An idea might seem promising, exciting and destined to make you wealthier than Simon Cowell, but the real test will only come when you open up to customers and start selling.

That means asking a number of questions and making sure that at the very least you have answers — and at the most, the answers you want.

The first question you’ll need to ask is how big is the market. There’s always a danger of assuming that because you want something or think one way, that everyone else does too. While some people might agree with you, you want to be sure that there are enough people on your side to be able to provide a steady stream of sales.

There might well be a market for vegan wallets, for example. Vegan wallets for children could be a market too small.

Climbing the Wall
And the second question is how big is the niche — or rather how widely can you broaden it. A niche should be a place for a business to plant a seed and put down roots but most entrepreneurs want their company to grow. They might not be able to take over the entire building but they do want to be able to use their foothold to expand into other products and the servicing of related needs. Lensbaby may have produced a lens with a moveable sweet spot but the company has also produced a range of other lenses that build on the same idea.

Before you get to work on filling your niche, it’s worth spending a little time looking beyond your first idea to consider your company’s future direction — and whether it’s likely to have one.

No less important than the product itself though, is the way you’re going to market it. Specialized products can sometimes demand specialized marketing methods. LookBetterOnline, for example, relies in part on joint ventures with several leading dating sites to bring in customers. It’s important to understand the product and the market, but you should also know how you’re going to bring the two together, and whether you’ll need any special techniques to do so.

Ultimately, a niche is always the best way to start a business, but spotting one is only the first step towards filling it… and growing out of it.

Photography: Jim Frazier

The Internet, the Blackberry and the ability to telecommute from a home office, a café or a beach hut in Koh Samui has freed all sorts of people from the tyranny of cubicles. These days, Starbucks is as likely to be filled with graphic designers and bloggers churning out websites and creating their latest posts as with foot-sore shoppers giving their credit cards a rest with a green tea frappuccino.

But while the list of jobs that could be done anywhere with an Internet connection has now grown to encompass almost everyone but massage therapists and hairdressers, when you get right down to it, freelancers — whatever their field — only do two kinds of work: billable work and non-billable work.

Only one of those pays.

The challenge for freelancers then is always to try to fill as much of their day as possible with tasks that end in invoices while only doing enough non-billable stuff such as selling, quoting and filing — to keep the money rolling in.

Marketing without the Effort
FreelanceSwitch has some interesting advice about how freelancers can indulge in passive marketing so that they can focus on the paying stuff. Much of their suggestions seems to be based on referrals and having a good website with a solid portfolio.

Those are all sensible ideas, of course, but in practice, passive marketing has to go a little further than that. You could have a perfect set of samples and a website good enough to win a Webby but if no one sees it, you’re not going to pick up much work. Websites, like your services themselves, have to be actively marketed.

Unless, of course, you market smartly at the beginning.

The temptation here is to go for good search engine optimization which relies on a mixture of careful keywording and plenty of linking. But that can backfire. Answering emails from loosely-targeted leads might win you some new jobs but it also increases your amount of non-billable work. Only a small fraction of the people who Google “Web designer” and ask for a quote will actually become your clients. You’ll have to spend time writing to all of them.

A better option then might be to target your incoming links carefully rather than spreading them widely. While that might affect your SEO ranking, it could give you much better traffic. More of that non-billable work would be likely to become billable later on.

A freelance coder, for example, is likely to find that a recommendation and a link on a site selling software plug-ins generates fewer enquiries than a high page rank. But it could well generate more sales overall and less wasted time.

Happy Customers Come Back
Perhaps the best form of passive marketing though is to keep your old clients and continue working for them. Rubiqube recommends delivering work that makes buyers happy and being completely honest so that each side knows exactly what they can expect… even if that means losing the job in the short term.

Get that right, the site says, and you’ll be able to create an addiction to your services.

If only. Pleasing your clients is key, of course, and it’s always important to meet expectations (and even better to exceed them). But an addiction suggests constant demand and that’s something that isn’t created by quality alone.

If it were, Apple would never have to market an iPod again and music-lovers would buy a new one every week.

The best way to keep old clients is to turn one-off jobs into continuing work. A writer hired to produce a sales page, for example, could offer a discounted rate if the job also included a monthly newsletter that would promote supplementary products.

The initial act of upselling wouldn’t be passive. But the continuing work would come in by itself and as long is it does actually generate profits for the client, you can be certain he would become addicted to the income your work creates.

And that’s really the key to minimizing non-billable marketing work. Fill your book with satisfied clients who earn from what you do and you won’t need to spend any time looking for new gigs.

You might though have to spend time looking for people to outsource it to.

Search for a high school, and it’s likely that you’ll find plenty that offer special emphases on art, theater, craft or sciences. Look for one that promises to wake your child’s inner entrepreneur though, and you could be looking for a long time.

While creative and technical types can be encouraged in a classroom, business-minded children are expected to learn their skills trading baseball cards – or more likely, pirated Playstation games – in the school playground.

That lack of support creates a problem for parents who would like to see their children gain an understanding of business before they head out into the big, wide world… and ideally without having to pay for the privilege of putting “MBA” after their name.

Mind your own Beeswax
It’s a gap that Franchild tries to fill by allowing parents the opportunity to set up their children in business, and for little more than $25. For that fee, they receive access to inventory at below wholesale prices, sales advice, business cards, a marketing system and even a Web page for an extra $2 per month.

The products themselves are not particularly revolutionary. Franchild helps children to sell, soap, beeswax candles, jewelry and clothes, with more products on the way. Some, such as the candles, require a little assembly, which forces the children to get involved in the production as well as marketing — or teaches them about outsourcing and employing assistants. But the products themselves are high quality and capable of selling even without the buyer knowing they’re increasing a child’s allowance.

According to Ralph Williams, Franchild’s founder, the system teaches children a bunch of useful entrepreneurial skills:

Children learn business principles like manufacturing, packaging, private label, sales and marketing – by doing them. In addition they learn about using their money to be good citizens in the communities by donating 10 percent of profits, and they gain concern for the environment by offering products that tend to be natural, like beeswax candles and organic soaps.

All of those are important traits to develop, and it would certainly be better to make your first marketing mistakes with an investment of $25 – especially when it’s donated by parents – rather than with your first business, financed by a bank which is less keen to write your debts off.

In fact, that was how Franchild was founded eighteen months ago. Ralph Williams helped start a small hand-rolled, beeswax candle business for his children, aged 8 and 6. In their first month, they made $500 in sales, mostly by offering the candles to retailers at wholesale prices. The $125 profit was equal to ten months of allowance from work that took the children between ten and fifteen minutes a day – all that Ralph and his wife would allow the children to do.

Where’s the Creativity?
It was the idea of Patrick, 8, to expand the business into a franchise that would let other children enjoy the benefits of building their own business. Although Ralph wouldn’t say how many people are now using Franchild, he did mention that it has spread around the world with new franchises in Ireland, Canada, Austria and Australia.

The easy replication though is perhaps the biggest problem with Franchild. Patrick’s idea of turning a simple business into a franchise was his own; the businesses that children grow with Franchild isn’t. While creating a franchise can teach children important techniques that are best learned in practice rather than in an evening business school, they can’t teach children those most important of skills: the creativity to spot a niche in the market; and the organization needed to start a business from scratch. Franchises are always for managers rather than for entrepreneurs – people who are ambitious enough to be the boss without having to take the risk of developing something new for themselves. Of course, all of that might be too much to expect from an eight-year-old but it does remove some of the most important fun of business-building, replacing it with an easy start-up and some more fundamental business skills.

The role of parents in the project is important too. Ralph and his wife help their children’s business by cutting the wicks and the wax themselves. They do it to be helpful, he said, and for the bonding time, although the question of letting a six-year old get friendly with a box-cutter might be a factor too. It’s a sensible decision and while it might not be strictly business-like, it could provide the basis of a lesson in the market-distorting effects of subsidies and tariffs.

Perhaps one of the most interesting lessons that children have learned by using Franchild though, isn’t how to make a cold call or knock down objections. It’s how to buy. According to Ralph, since his children started earning their own money instead of asking Dad for handout, they’ve become a lot more selective about what they do with the cash they earn.

“[I]f a product does not meet their expectation, they want to take it back,” he told us. “Prior to running their own business and generating their own profits, I would buy things for my kids (I still do) and after a few uses, it would end up on the floor, under the bed or in the garbage. By better understanding the value of money my kids have learned to make smarter purchasing decisions.”

That’s a lesson we could all do with learning.

Photography: Dalboz17

It’s a really neat trick. Tell someone that you’re your own boss, that you usually work from home but that your office is a regular table at Starbucks, and you can watch them turn a shade of puce slightly lighter than your morning green tea frappuccino.

It sounds like a dream way of working. You get to sleep in late, knock off when you want, set your own vacation time and if it’s a sunny day, spend the afternoon at the beach instead of your local bean bar.

As an envy-sparker, successful freelancing is almost as powerful as a yellow Ferrari… parked right outside the Apple store.

Tell the same person that in practice, you’re at your desk at 7am, don’t turn off the computer until 11pm and that Saturdays and Sundays are just another way to make the working week longer, and you’ll soon bring back their smile though.

Freelancers are Tyrants
That old saying about the person who works for themselves having a tyrant for a boss is, for most people, sadly true.

At least part of the reason for that might be down to what Tim Ferriss, author of “The 4-Hour Workweek,” has described as the shift of work from being a place to go to being a thing to do. When you know you have to be at the office from nine till six, you don’t really care too much what happens between those hours. Time is no longer your own; you’ve already sold it to a company.

When you work for yourself though, each hour is valuable to you and you can measure that value. Take a couple of hours off to go to the beach, and you can calculate exactly how much money you’re losing. If you’re earning on average $40 per hour, then that beach trip has cost you $80… plus gas, ice cream and sunburn lotion. It’s not hard then to justify staying at home and making that money back.

And you can extend that principle almost endlessly. Coffee with a friend? $40, caffeine not included. A two-hour TV movie in the evening? $80, plus cable fees. A weekend trip with the family? Are you kidding?

It’s the danger that all busy freelancers struggle with, and it goes beyond maintaining the sort of good work-life balance that everyone battles to create. Because freelancing is inherently unstable — even rock solid clients can quickly dissolve away — it’s tempting to take on as much work as you can now before the hard times come back.

A big part of Tim Ferriss’s solution is geoarbitrage — outsourcing as much as possible to qualified assistants around the world, freeing up your own time for only the most essential tasks… and creating spaces to do the things that make it all worthwhile.

Outsourcing isn’t new of course. Lou Dobbs has managed to build an entire career at CNN explaining why it’s going to destroy America. But Tim Ferriss takes the idea of farming out tasks much further than anyone has ever done before.

As far as he’s concerned, any task that can be done on the telephone or by email can be done by someone else.

Apply the principles of geoarbitrage, and it can be done for a profit too.

What’s a Buck Worth?
The idea is to make use of the different relative value of money in different places around the world. Ten dollars for an hour’s work will barely buy a sandwich in London; in Mumbai, it can buy a week’s groceries and could therefore be a reasonable fee for a day’s work. That’s especially true if you’re selling services to clients in California who pay American prices while you’re wintering in Thailand and paying $300 a month to rent a house on the beach.

It’s a way of allowing anyone to make use of the benefits of globalization, spread wealth to developing countries and raise your own standard of living as well as your income.

And finding international assistance isn’t particularly difficult. Tim is known to use Elance, a freelance jobs site, to post requests and field bids from people around the world who are willing to help. Sometimes, those bidders can even be well-educated Americans benefiting from geoarbitrage themselves by living in low-income places and charging a smaller amount than they would do if they were in the States.

It sounds ideal, but it does come with a few considerations.

The first is the sort of work you can outsource. Tim believes that almost everything can be passed on to someone else, and he even once set up teams to organize his online dating for him. But he recommends hiring specialized teams that can do “repetitive time-consuming tasks.” That’s because outsourcing is a form of investment. It takes time to find someone suitable, explain what needs to be done and make sure they’re doing it right.

Once the system is up and running, you can leave it. But you have to trust your assistants first and keep things exactly the same so that you don’t have to retrain. In an interview with Lifehack, Tim explained that he has separate teams for Web design, online research, and finding buying solutions.

That initial set-up expense might not be enormous but it does have to be included when you calculate the return on investment of paying someone else to do a task that brings you revenue.

It’s also important to make sure that you and your helpers are on the same wavelength. A good principle in business is to find talented people and let them do what they do best. For outsourcing, a tighter control — or at least regular supervision — might be better at preventing expensive mistakes.

Tim, for example, describes how when he set up teams to handle his online dating (a task he outsourced as a joke), awarded each group a small budget to improve his chances of getting dates. One team then created a MySpace page for him and marketed him a little too well. When the date turned up, she was disappointed to find that he had “forgotten” their in-jokes.

That incident was fairly harmless, but it might suggest that keeping your assistants within clearly defined guidelines is important if you want to avoid nasty surprises.

Clearly, outsourcing can always be helpful. It’s what keeps freelancers in work, after all. But spreading tasks around the world so that you can benefit from price differences can also make it cost-effective and give you a life too.

Now all you have to do is find someone to outsource the outsourcing for you.

Check out Tim’s blog here and watch this chat with Google for a fascinating look at Tim’s productivity system.

There are two kinds of entrepreneurs. There are the people who set up stamp-trading schemes in school, who drop out of university when they realize student digs don’t have garage incubators and who just know they’ll be millionaires long before the last of the teenage acne has disappeared.

Entrepreneurs like these are never employees. They’re always their own boss and always learning as they go.

And then there are the self-starters who are little more cautious. These entrepreneurs-in-waiting dream of starting their own business but decide to learn the ropes of industry first. They join a big company, take a salary, try to understand how the different departments work and prepare constantly for the day when they’ll quit and apply their lessons to their own big idea.

Both those types of entrepreneur can benefit from talking to people who have been there and done it. They can always grow their businesses faster by skipping the mistakes and working with a mentor who can answer their questions, point out the holes in the road and show them where they’re wasting time and money.

Finding a mentor though isn’t easy. It’s a relationship of trust in which one side benefits more than the other. The entrepreneur needs to feel that his mentor understands his business and cares about it almost as much as he does, while still being objective. The mentor wants to feel that his advice counts and that when the business succeeds at least part of that success will be down to him.

The best kind of mentors, of course, are people you know and trust already. Family friends are ideal, even former bosses — if you managed to maintain a good relationship with them — can work. But the Web now offers a number of places where those starting up can seek help and advice from those with more experience.

Who will you Score at Score.org?
Score.org is the most obvious place to look but it shows just how hard finding a good mentor can be.

The idea sounds perfect. Retirees with time on their hands offer their knowledge and experience to those following in their path. Entrepreneurs can submit a question for the site’s mentors to answer or they can search by industry category. Communication takes place online or the two can choose to meet and chat in person.

The problem is that a system like this works best only on the most simple levels. Mentoring relationships need to be deep. The mentor has to know not just the business but the entrepreneur too. He needs to understand the business owner’s attitude towards risk, his level of flexibility and his capacity to make changes. That sort of knowledge takes time and openness to develop.

While it’s possible to ask one of Score’s pensioners the occasional question and get intelligent, helpful answers, you won’t get the sort of long, detailed chats that characterize the best mentoring relationships. Score is too impersonal for that.

Mentoring in 140 Characters
If Score is too superficial to deliver more than the general advisory part of mentoring, then surely Twitter, a site that restricts messages to just 140 characters, would be even worse.

But actually Twitter can be a great place to find mentors because the relationships between users can quickly become very close.

It still takes a little time, and you’ll have to choose carefully, but even that becomes easier when you can see what someone is thinking throughout the day.

Start then by finding the right people to follow. Tweetscan makes the searching easier so track down people who work in your field and who tweet about what they’re working on. Don’t just follow them though. Ask them questions and comment on what they’re doing. Try to make your own tweets interesting enough for them to want to follow you and use that communication to build the bedrock of a relationship.

If you can find someone local, then you can arrange to meet and make the relationship personal but even if you can’t, the friendliness of Twitterers can make Twitter-mentoring fairly effective.

There are drawbacks however. The first is that if you’re communicating through Twitter, your messages will be public. That will limit what you’re willing to say although you can ask to make contact outside the site. More problematic is that while Twitter does contain plenty of CEOs and other successful types, it’s still primarily young and geek-oriented. Jack Welch is not known to tweet.

If you’re building a tech-oriented business, you should be fine but entrepreneurs with more traditional visions might have to look elsewhere.

Pressing the Flesh
And they might look towards conventions. While these have always been popular, today there’s a huge number of conferences and meetings designed to help entrepreneurs get the tools they need to grow and — more importantly — find the joint venture partners to help them do it.

Cozying up to someone who is already successful at one of these events is fairly straightforward — once you’ve bought their product.

At that point, the mentor has a stake in your success — you become a testimonial and proof of their ability to help people succeed.

You’ll still need to base the relationship on trust, so as Joel Comm, an Internet marketing expert and mentor himself, points out, it’s important to choose someone who really appeals to you. Take that mentor’s advice, use his materials and you should become not just another student, but someone the guru can boast about. When someone experienced genuinely hopes that you’ll be successful, you should be on the way to picking up some very valuable advice.

Ultimately though, it doesn’t really matter where you find your mentor; where they take you is always going to be much more important.