Photography: Dayna Bateman
Working in cafes might be as trendy as typing on a Macbook Air but it does come with one distinct disadvantage. You can’t do it for long. As we described in our rules for café-working, more than two hours on single brew makes you look cheap while pouring down latte after latte to keep your seat warm won’t just be pricy, it will also mean frequent toilet trips while your laptop sits on the table making eyes at strangers.
In reality, the new working nomads tend to spend most of their time not in Starbucks or any other local bean bar, but at home. To someone who has to sit in traffic for a couple of hours a day, who has to share an office with a guy who eats the world’s whiffiest cheese sandwiches and who has a spare room with a view over the bay, that sounds like a dream come true.
For any entrepreneur there’s only one thing worse than a blank page. Yes, it’s even worse than a blank bank account (that can always be fixed).
Nothing is more frightening than a blank mind.
Run out of ideas, whether it’s for a blog post, a killer app, or a company that’s going to let you buy a small Caribbean island one day, and you’re dead in the water. Without a plan of your own, you’re back to working for The Man and living off someone else’s dream — while they take the bulk of the cash.
For iPhone owners who aren’t paid-up members of the Church of GTD, life can be hard. Browse through the productivity apps on Apple’s website, and it seems that every other offering is based on David Allen’s system.
It’s almost as though it’s not enough to have a mind like a filing cabinet to get the most out of GTD. You also need a pocketful of whiz-bang gadgetry and all the electronic gizmos you can think of to keep your lists in order.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. While David Allen might have managed to turn a simple list into something more complex than the control panel of the space shuttle, it is possible to keep them organized using nothing more futuristic than a pen and a sheet of paper.
If you have been blogging for a while, I am sure you have experienced the blogger’s block. There are times when we sit in front of the computer with a rock solid idea but find it hard for the words to flow. The stress and the need to update your blog with yet another valuable post starts taking it’s toll on you. This post contains some insight from some of the most popular and influential bloggers on the web. They write posts that are valuable and offer great deal of value to the readers, time after time.
During this interview we asked the bloggers just one question: How can bloggers be productive in their blogging? I am certain that if we follow the strategy they follow, we won’t have to deal with the blogging stress or the bloggers block
The Question:
How can a Blogger be the most productive in their Blogging?
Photography: shapeshift
It’s not likely to be a question you’ve ever asked yourself. Unless you were thinking of taking on AT&T and had a few spare billion bucks lying around to buy up the licenses, then whether you should start your own mobile network was probably not very high on your agenda.
But what if we told you that you could do it for free? And within a few minutes? And that while you wouldn’t get all of the profits generated by your customers’ calls, you would pick up a cool $50 cash for everyone who joins the program and a cut of up to 8 percent of their phone bill.
It seems like list posts are all the rage on the web lately. Although providing lists have become one of the most popular way to convey a message through a post, there are problems that are often ignored by most bloggers. The saying “There is a good and a bad side to everything” holds true in regards to these kind of posts as well. Posts that are numbered or have the central idea as a list have been one of the most tried out methods to gain social media traffic and back links, and it has without doubt seen huge success. So how exactly writing a post in a way that brings in traffic and back links can hurt over time? That’s exactly what we will discuss in this post.
Before we get to the details why list post sometimes can pose a threat rather than support, I would like quote Darren Rowse from Problogger,
“There is obviously a pretty good case for using lists in your blog writing. Of course you can use them too much - sometimes a topic calls for something a little more meaty and in depth than a list - but overall I’d recommend that using lists on your blog as part of your writing mix is an worthwhile strategy.”
Photography: Margolove
Time-sucks come in all shapes and sizes. Google Earth, for example, is a planet-sized time-suck that could draw in hours if you were to allow it to — and especially if your Internet connection is running a little slow.
Following Twitter tweets can be a pretty big time-suck too, but they at least come in bite-sized chunks letting you look up and remember that you’re supposed to be doing something more productive.
Photography: Diego A. Marino
For Proust, it was famously the taste of a Madeleine dipped in limeflower tea that sent him spinning into an involuntary memory. He needn’t have worked so hard. Just sniffing the biscuit would have been enough to spark those associations and make him indifferent “to the vicissitudes of life… its disaster innocuous, its brevity illusory.”
Even more than taste, smell has the strongest connection to memories and mood. A quick whiff of something familiar — fresh bread, wet leaves, the sort of rice pudding we ate as children — can quickly affect how we feel and what we’re thinking.
Photography: Leo Reynolds
No two businesses are ever completely alike but all entrepreneurs have at least one thing in common: they all have to decide on the amount to charge their customers. That’s never easy. Pitch too high and you’ll struggle to pick up customers. Pitch too low and while you’ll pick up lots of business, you’ll struggle to make it pay.
Even before you decide on the amount you want to charge though, you first have to decide how you want to charge. Do you want the client to pay according to the project or do you want to set a fee that depends on the amount of time it takes you to complete the work?
It took David Allen about 250 pages to explain his Getting Things Done productivity system. You’ll have to read each page at least twice to understand it, spend several hours wondering how to make it work and fiddle around with 43 folders before realizing you don’t need a book to teach you how to procrastinate.
The UNO system provided by Metrostate University comes free on two PDF pages. It will take you about three seconds to figure out and unlike GTD, you might actually use it. It’s a perfect example of how often the simplest designs can bring the biggest benefits.
When it comes to productivity tools, nothing seems to be able to beat the old fashioned list. Take a look at the Productivity Web Apps available for the iPhone, for example, and almost every other page seems to point to yet another way of putting one item after another so that nothing gets forgotten and everything gets done at the right time.
From Tadalist’s simple type-and-check list to the sophistication of RememberTheMilk, there’s no shortage of ways of organizing your work — and feeling that you’re doing some even when you’re not.
It was the concept that should never have taken off. Before 2006, the notion that it would be possible to write a message that would be both meaningful and thought-provoking in just 140 characters would have sounded far-fetched. That complete strangers would be interested in reading those messages would have seemed even odder.
In fact, the idea that anyone at all would care to read an answer to the question “What are you doing now?” has always appeared downright bizarre — especially when those answers are published several times a day.
It’s a problem that just about every rising entrepreneur has to face. You know that if you could just get your name out there, the public would recognize the genius of your idea and the quality of your talent, and line up to buy your products or hire your services.
It’s just a problem of communication.
Image by: lumaxart
That videoconferencing, email and chat have made it possible to work with anyone anywhere has opened up all sorts of fantastic opportunities. An entrepreneur in California, for example, can team up with a programmer in India, as well as a designer in England and a specialist in Spain to create a unique product in which they all have a share.
And they could work together for years without ever buying a plane ticket to fly halfway around the world, stay in a hotel and meet in person.
If you are wondering if there is already a market for what you want to offer and in case there is, get to know more about it (price, quality, etc.) you can’t trust only on Search Engines, instead we suggest you use Stumbleupon as you will probably find what you want to find if it matches your interests. The good thing is that the site doesn’t need to be search engine optimized or high quality, if other users recommended it you will find it.
Pros of using Stumbleupon for Marketing Research:
- Find websites you never saw when doing the same search on search engines: search engines sort the websites by relevancy (and they have to be optimized), so if you do a search for “web design firm” you will find a list of websites that just have got lots of links pointing to that page, this doesn’t mean they are quality websites. When using stumbleupon and using the search function, you will find webpages that users like (lots of value, this means that the website is either really high-quality or has something that people love) and that are relevant with what you were looking for.
- Read what people think of a website: this can be seen on the reviews of webpages, this will help you learn what you should and shouldn’t do when creating the website for offering your product/services. You will also be able to check the user’s age, gender, etc. to see how they react to different things and find different patterns.
- Find other people who are looking for the same thing you are: when you check the review’s page, you will see all the stumblers that reviewed a website and you can as well check all the reviews that users made. You may find out that another stumbler is reviewing all the businesses in the niche you want to target and that he might be working into it (possible business partner).
- Find what you look for: if you use other tools to do the research, you might find websites that were designed and optimized to be found by using that tool, on Stumbleupon you won’t find Stumbleupon optimized pages as it is impossible. It will just list what is relevant and people like at the same time.
- More Reality: using Stumbleupon would be like making a public poll to lots of people, you will get the real thought of people on the topic of your desire.
It’s the challenge that just about all entrepreneurs stumble over — knowing when and how to hand over some of their responsibilities to someone else so that they can focus on the most important stuff.
For a growing company, it’s a vital move. For the company’s founder, it’s as difficult as lending their Porsche to their teenage son. There are all sorts of ways to delegate though, some of them easier and more likely to bring success than others.
Here are some of the best:
Listen to the rumors and you might believe that geeks are pale, spotty, have the social skills of Klingons and less chance of finding a mate than a panda bear with an attitude problem. But we all know that’s not true.
In fact, geeks are sexier than Madonna in her prime, more desirable than a Macbook Air, cooler than a polar bear in shades, and know exactly what to do when it comes to partnering up and finding love.
Photography: 2 Dogs
They’ve been called “new Nomadics,” “new Bedouin,” “mobile merchants,” and for the top earners, “the kinetic elite.” But to waitresses and baristas everywhere they — or we, because yes, at Geekpreneur we’re part of the zeitgeist — are simply customers. And not very good ones at that.
We sit in front of our laptops in cafes, chatting on our cell phones, surfing the Web and doing the sort of work that would once have required a fully equipped office. And we do it all for no more than the price of a cup of coffee every couple of hours.
