business tips

Nothing to be brag about, but this is an achievement to me.

Like many authority bloggers a.k.a. probloggers suggest, perseverance is key if you want to blog for a living.

Thanks to those who have paved the road

I honour Yaro Starak and Darren Rowse, whom I considered role models in today’s blogging. I try hard to follow their recommendation and suggestion, and today I started to see results - thanks to them.

I learn that continuously write posts on topics you love is difficult. Inspiration is hard to find sometimes, and other responsibilities in life - family to take care, business to manage, and other personal endeavours limit my passion for blogging.

But now it’s different - I learn that writing is actually help you overcome your offline life issues, as well as train your brain for creative thinking. I also learn that blogging is actually helping myself, as well as - hopefully- my readers to give an insight or two about issues, in Noobpreneur.com case, business issues.

Noobpreneur.com blogging tips

Tips that work well for me, that might also work well for you:

• Write a post every day, at a constant pace, the more the better.
• Social bookmark your post yourself - A bit narcissistic, but if you don’t do it, don’t expect others to do it for you.

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Looking for a candidate to fill an important position in your business is important, as well as tricky.

Online job market has been a constant provider of qualified candidates, even more with the blurring boundaries between online and off line world.

Why you should consider online job listings

There are several reasons why you should consider online job listings:

• Fast - sign up, pay, and list right away.
• Listing fee is only a partial of job listing in newspapers.
• Everybody who is computer-literate can access and apply your job openings - this is naturally select candidates that have basic computer skills.
• If you choose your online job marketplace right, you can get faster responses by candidates, which means a hefty number of candidates in a short period of listing time.
• You can post, edit or update your job openings yourself, right away.
• You can get candidate screening services fro online job marketplace that offer such services, helping you ‘throw away’ unwanted candidates that fit in a certain criteria.

Where to list your job openings online

You can post jobs almost everywhere on the net. Blogs, forums, job marketplace, classified ads site, and other places can be the right place to advertise your job openings. You can post yours either for free or paid.

However, in my opinion, posting your job in online job marketplace offers more benefits for business owners. Listings are more trusted, as service for job posting is usually not free - thus selecting companies that are legitimate, to the least.

New online job marketplace, such as Fresho.com has emerging with a rapid fashion today.

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You have a great idea. You have chosen an excellent business name. You have created all the concepts and the systems to run your online business to success. You have the team to run the online business.

Next - you have to choose a great domain name. If it’s merely ‘good’, your online business is only half the potential. Period.

Choosing a great domain name is just as important as choosing a great business name. Fail to do so in the first place will damage your business potential.

You might ask, what’s in a name? In business, as well as in our daily life, a name can command respect, trust, and worthiness. Just to make my point, you simply don’t want to name your child Lazy or Stupid, do you?

What to look in a domain name

Having your business name as your domain name is not always a good way to go.

If your business name is Amazing Retail Company selling laptops, choosing AmazingRetailCompany.com might always seem logical to do.

However, in my opinion, this is not the best route to take.

I recommend you to have keywords in it.

What’s in a keyword? Choosing the right one for your online business will almost always guarantee more organic traffic and better position in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

For the above example, I would prefer to choose AmazingLaptops.com than AmazingRetailCompany.com.

Where to look for a domain name for you

I highly recommend you to use domain name suggestion tool, such as AptDomain.name.

I use AptDomain.name to look for domain names with the keywords of my choice. The site will suggest you the domain name filled with the keywords you specify, if any. If yours is available, you can buy the domain name from the site.

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International business is truly a complex and exciting way to do business.

However, you might already understand that businesses always involve tax issues, and doing business overseas adds the complexity of tax issues. Such tax issues include tax law, such as export-import tax laws, local area tax regulations, and other tax issues.

You need to have as much tax law help as possible

Understanding international tax law is one of the key success factors in determining your success in doing business in other countries.

You certainly need all the help you can, as you definitely not knowing the details of local area tax issues, no matter how expert you are in international business.

Have international tax law specialist as your team member

I recommend you to look for international tax law specialists, to join your international business team.

Why forming a team? What is a team, actually?

Your team is not only your internal management team. Your team involves lawyers, public accountants, and tax consultants, to name a few.

Having a complete team with a tax consultant specialising in international tax law will aid you in your go international business mission.

How to choose an international tax law specialist

Basically, you are recommended to choose an international tax law specialist that:

• Has dealt with clients that are successfully go international
• Has dealt with local authorities overseas, focusing on the country you target your business expansion to.
• Has a local area partner overseas.

If you have any other ideas, please add to the list :)

Good luck going international.

Ivan Widjaya
International business

If you rely your business online, especially if your business is 100 per cent online, you need to better place your site in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), that will lead to better exposure.

Why SERP? Because, although direct traffic from your advertisement is nice, most of your potential visitors and clients are coming from the search engines - the more the better - this is called organic traffic.

Strengthen your online business is different from advertising and promotion. It’s more Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) than advertising and promotion process, such as ads placements and campaigns.

The most common term referring to strengthening your site is link building.

How to strengthen your online business

I recommend you to strengthen your online business through:

• Directory submission
  Submit your business website to web directories, both free and paid. In my humble opinion, submitting yours to free directories have almost no different in your SERP placement, but will expose your links more to the directory’s visitors.
• Getting reviewed
  Have your site reviewed, by free or incentivised reviewers. This is big in exposing your site better and pushing your site to higher SERP placement. Choose your reviewers wisely - choose those that offer you high quality and traffic sites, not Google PageRank. Be warned, Google doesn’t like you do this :)

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If you are dealing with multiple business units, you always could use a help or two from others.

The basic rule of thumbs is not to be a control freak - that is, having all your business under your sole control.

Why?

The best idea of entrepreneurship is to delegate, delegate and delegate. This way, you preserve your most valuable resource - time - and use it either to build more businesses or to have it yourself - a privilege most people don’t have.

Business delegation and business process outsourcing (BPO) can be achieved through my favourite outsourcing method - hiring a virtual assistance.

Virtual assistant help you build a real business, not another job

The idea of starting a business is to make it grow, becoming a real business, not another job.

Job?

Yes - many business owners are sole proprietors. They operate their own one-person company.

If the owner is having problems, so is the business. If the owner stop working, the business stop running, too. If this is your case, then you are having a job, camouflage as a business.

Virtual assistant can ‘redeem’ you from your job-business.

A virtual assistant (VA), hence the name, is your independent assistant, helping you with various job functions and work, such as office administration work, personal assistance, data entry, bookkeeping, and even website design.

The benefit of BPO to virtual assistant

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If somebody told you that you need a lot of money to enter the business and investment game, they’re wrong.

You and I can be an investor, that also is a bootstrapper. I called it Bootstrapper-Investor

You can invest in business, real estate, paper asset, and other investment vehicles with limited resources.

How to be a proper bootstrapper-investor

Here’s a tip or two on how to be a good bootstrapper-investor:

Do online business - enter make money online market

Today is a good time to make money online - the market is there and the demand is very much higher than supply, in my opinion.

You can learn about this from the real life make money online expert, such as Yaro Starak, John Chow, and Darren Rowse. Please notice, that all that I mentioned is bloggers.

Why? Because the bloggers I mentioned are business owner, and they are more accessible than any online business owners - thanks to the nature of the blogosphere.

Find info on ‘cheap’ real estates

Despite today’s recession, real estate is pretty much still accessible. The idea of real estate is by investing 20 to 30 per cent of the property price tag - some even offer no down payment - you can own the property.

Just make sure you don’t assume that the property will go up in value - most of the time, yes. But today, not really. Invest properties for cash flow. Or, at least on the future potential of the properties.

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The best thing happening to entrepreneurs is unlimited options.

Being an entrepreneur makes you break traditional boundaries and go with the best options and opportunities offered on the deal table.

In business financing, as an entrepreneur, you are often offered (and doctrinised) by the common financing options - using bank loans, borrowing from friends and family, searching for venture capital, factoring, and using credit cards.

But what if your previous bankruptcy is haunting you? What if you don’t have collaterals to take bank loan because you are in bootstrapping mode? What if you are having a mediocre credit score?

Some would suggest you to take a job and get into the workforce again. Some would suggest you to stop trying to be an entrepreneur at all. Some would even suggest you to borrow from loan shark!

If you are in such position and bothered by those suggestion, then consider other, non traditional, financing options.

Personal short term loan

You might have heard about payday loan, cash advance and other alternative route to financing. If you are considering those options, please also consider personal short term loan.

Personal short term loans, in simple, are personal loans that don’t require paperwork and long approval process, like the traditional bank loans, and do have a lower APR than payday loan, along with a convenient payment options.

Short term loans, or installment loans, allow you to pay off your loan in installment fashion until your balance is paid off. This way, your loan payment and due date is predictable.

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Shocking, against the mainstream believes, but true.

It is a statement from Mike Myatt, the writer of The Problem with Best Practices, a knol I just stumbled on in Google Knol today.

In fact, I blogged about it on my new blog-magazine, Knol Today - and I think I want to share his and my view regarding the problem with best practices.

The following is what I found interesting with Mike’s insights on best practices.

Best practices are not always the best for your business

Mike state that best practices are only a collection of methodologies, processes, rules, concepts and theories that have previously achieved success. This previous success cannot be regarded as universal truth, which unfortunately, many business experts, consultants and coaches insist you the otherwise.

Many so-called experts develop a book, training or software products that ’solutionised’ the best practices in the form of methodologies, concepts, theories and all things above. I truly agree to what Mike explained, that once this best practices become productised, that when objectivity is removed from the equation.

I am not saying that those books, training or any products that focus and utilise on best practices are bad. Many of them are actually excellent products, that if implemented correctly will yield the expected results.

However, you must remember that business issues, although similar, is not the same from one business to another. Together with the fact that business world is ever-changing and dynamic, it would be wrong to take the best practices as they are.

Best practices make you change into ‘me-too’

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