Business Opportunities, Entrepreneur Resources and Tools, Business Reviews

I have written about monitoring your business website performance monitoring and search engine ranking a while ago.

Please allow me to highlight the importance of your online business website monitoring again.

Online business owners often forget what’s best for your online business, especially in the back end - your business website performance. You often focus too much on your marketing effort and designing the look and usability of your front-end, but forget to secure your back end operations.

Database backup, transaction management, bug fixes, spam elimination, security hole fixes, etc - all is important and crucial to support your online business front-end. You need to monitor your website performance to spot such potential problems, fast.

Why you need to centralise your online business monitoring

Either hiring a techie or DIY, consider to centralise your online business website monitoring.

Why centralise?

Logically, you will want to control your website performance - availability, load, responsiveness, functionality, search engine ranking, traffic and user experience - on a single place. This is to cut the cost and complexity of website management.

I use website monitoring services before - I have mentioned above, about my articles in web performance and search engine ranking monitoring.

The services I use are great. However, I desperately need to monitor many, if not all, my web properties, and having multiple tools to do so is quite resource consuming and difficult to manage.

Tool to centralise website monitoring

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About six months ago, I enter the online business and the make money online market as a newbie.

I’m still learning today and all I say is, you cannot stop learning if you really want to get something out of the Internet.

I recommend you to have the right mindset before you start your online entrepreneurship journey.

The right mindset is very important

You might be offered convincing products and services to help you shortcut into online business and make money online market. I suggest you NOT to believe each and every of them.

There is no easy way - “Get rich quick by joining my training program” and the likes are urban legends; “Make $ xx,xxx per month in 30 days easily” is a fairy tale; “No technical skills needed” offer is one of the worst selling proposal I have ever heard.

If you want to make good money from the Internet, your critical success factor is your willingness to work hard and to learn. THEN, you will see results s-l-o-w-l-y.

I agree to Robert Kiyosaki of Rich Dad Poor Dad’s statement - “The first million is the hardest to achieve. After that, the next millions will be much, much easier to get.”

I also learn from the A-list bloggers, such as Darren Rowse and Yaro Starak, that the best way to receive riches from the Internet is by being persistent, being resilient and learning continuously.

Where and how to learn the How-Tos

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Your health is your asset - a bit too often to hear about this, but it is true all the way.

I believe the importance of health is multiplied if you own a business, and the business is heavily dependent on you.

Unless you own a big business or an automated business running with or without you, your health is your business critical success factor.

Business owners - insure yourself

Not only your business need insurance coverage, but also you, the business owner, need one in the form of individual insurance, such as life insurance and health insurance.

Consider this - unless you live alone, your family and your nearest people depend on you. Have you ever thought what will happen if your health failed you?

Yes, they would be sad. But more important issue - who run the business if you are the one who runs it?

Surprising fact about health insurance

The importance of health insurance is well known and well proven. However, there are some surprising fact about insurance coverage.

Person under the age of 65 in US:

• Number uninsured: 43.0 million (2007)
• Percent uninsured: 16.4 (2007)

Source: cdc.gov

Health insurance in the US do not cover its population well. 16 per cent of US population is at stake of having their income ‘on halt’ due to illness.

Being healthy is part of investment plan

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I have involved for at least four months in web properties. Although still new, I learn a great deal from experience, from experts, and from critics, as well.

I started my web property investment by purchasing and starting web directories, as I learn that owning an Internet guide & web directory is lucrative :)

But first, why I join webmaster forums and why I start my web property investment with web directories?

Webmaster forums are to learn the basic from the experts

I joined webmaster forums, such as those of DigitalPoint.com and SitePoint.com, to learn the basic from the experts. From both forums, I land my first web property purchase, as well as my first web property sales.

Both forums have different characteristics and type of experts - Learning from both forums kick-start me into web directories - the ‘playground’ of webmasters.

I am not a webmaster - a wannabe, perhaps, but I always want to learn the basic webmaster skills that are proven to be very useful in my web property investment journey. Well, at least to avoid being scammed by the smarter guys :)

Web directories are (still) important and lucrative today

I wandered around the forums to learn what are people working on to make money online these days. I found several prospects, and one of them is web directories.

Web directory is a listing of things - could be general or niche, could be free or paid. While most people say that web directories are dead today, I still see that web directories are pretty much playing important role and still lucrative today.

How to choose a good web directory to invest in

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Recession hit most small businesses. But of course, there are certain survivors that ace recession, even flourished!

The following is my shortlist of recession-resistant champs:

1. Scooter and bicycle
   The rising oil and gas prices do good to this business. Scooters are energy-saving vehicles, and bicycle, well, human-powered.
2. Direct service to homes
   Gas prices cause more and more people decide to less commuting. As a supply and demand thing, businesses saw the opportunities, and then offering services directly to the comfort of your home. Such business includes home shopping, hair stylist on-call, and many other business opportunities.
3. Discount Store
   A pressure on family budgeting causes people to shop for less. Even I heard about bartering!
4. Online business
   The make money online buzz is not a buzz anymore - it’s a reality that I predict will let people to ‘abandon’ their expensive-energy-consuming business toward work at home and location independence working lifestyle.
5. Job Agency
   Recession causes more and more people losing their job and business owners to close their businesses - all of them have an urgent need for steady income in today tough times. A job agency answers such high demand.
6. Buy and rent back
   Many people face foreclosures, and running a buy and rent back business will actually help them get out of debt faster, and allow you to own real estates at a lower price tag.
7. Energy conservation and alternative energy
   Small business that offer a smart way to conserve energy will see its sales rise in today’s recession. The recent energy conservation buzz, a device that allow to turn water into gas, will shoot the business owners’ sales to the roof.
8. Outsourcing
   Rising business overheads cause many businesses to downsize and turn to outsourcing - hiring virtual assistants, renting a virtual office, etc.
9. Add your list here by commenting on this post :)

Ivan Widjaya
Short listing business opportunities

Online small business owner - what is your most important success factor in running an eCommerce business?

It is your shopping cart system.

Believe me - choosing the best shopping cart software is even more important than getting prospects visiting your eStore.

Why? Because having thousands of visitors without having the ability to serve them right will eventually give your eStore a bad name.

Finding the right shopping cart solution

You see, online shoppers are paranoid - they have all rights to be one. Unfulfilled orders, stolen personal information and other annoying problems will leave your visitors have something hanging at the back of their mind.

It is your job to give your visitor a sense of security.

I learn this the hard way - I started an eCommerce business a while ago with little success. The problem is not marketing, but my back end systems. I developed the website myself, letting my inexperience rule out the great potential of my site.

To cut long story short, my problem lies in my shopping cart system - the underperformed shopping cart system, thanks to my inexperience - caused me losing customers.

How to choose the right shopping cart solution

I have some tips on choosing the right shopping cart solution from my experience running an eCommerce business.

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Ponder the question. Answer yourself honest.

In my case, I think I did in most of my businesses. My off line business relies on several big clients, while my online business relies on several forums, several marketplaces, and one search engine - Google (surprise, surprise!).

Now, let me add one more question that need an honest answer - “If, for somewhat reason, that entity or market you rely on had decided to ‘kick’ you out of the business relationship, what would you do?”

My answer - I’ve thought about that for a while, but I have no concrete plan whatsoever to tackle that. Pathetic - I am.

Consider this - suppose you supply your product solely to WalMart. What happen to your business if due to the recession pressure, they decided to remove your products from their shelves, and put what they think as better potential products, instead?

Another what-if - Suppose you have an online business that rely on Google to bring customers in. All of a sudden, Google penalises you for doing activities that against their Terms of Services, leading to their decision to ban your site from Google search result pages. What would you do?

Diversify, diversify, diversify

In my opinion, as important as location, diversification is key to let your business grow with less dependence on your best clients, customers or markets.

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I wrote about choosing the right web hosting partner for your web business a moment ago, and through this post, I would like to take you to focus on how to look for recommended web hosting partner.

As you might already know, there are so many choices of web hosting today. I ended up changing web hosts several times during my journey in online business, just to waste valuable resources - time and money, that is.

Of course, a web host is better than the other in some ways, but choosing and testing each one randomly would not be the best way, and would not be fair for your business website visitors.

Moreover, doing so might damage your online business reputation, especially in term of website reliability, simply due to the fact that changing web hosting will cause your business website to be temporarily unavailable. And you don’t want that to happen often.

There are better ways.

You need to look for recommendation from the Internet, such as web hosting rating websites and personal blogs, to give you insights on what people think of their choice of web hosting.

Browsing for web hosting recommendations

The best way to choose the web hosting partner for your business is to look for recommendations from the Internet. Here is a tip or two on how to look for the best web hosting partner for you.

1. Personal blogs
   You can read what bloggers recommend from their own first-hand experience. Some giving honest reviews (and critics), some doing affiliate marketing - but all in all, bloggers are one of the best source for ‘unedited’ comments of a product!
2. Tutorial websites
   Webmaster tutorial websites is your source for web developing-related tutorials, including web hosting tutorials. Let the expert recommend you their choices of web hosting.

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This is actually a guest post, but I decided to comment on it.

You see, we always think that it is the home owners who suffer from the mortgages due to credit crunch today. Well, I just learned that the employees in the business are also severely hit by the credit crunch.

I admit, I personally never take a look at mortgage business from bird’s eyes view. Now I see the mortgage business is stretched, if not crumbling, right now - causing thousands of people losing their jobs due to lay-offs and downsizings.

People and businesses ought to be more resilient and creative, these days!

Here is the full story on mortgage business in the UK…

Jobs to go at HBOS mortgage sector

With the mortgage drought in the UK continuing since the onset of the global credit crunch last year, it is not only consumers who are suffering. Many people that work within the mortgage industry have also suffered as a result of the turmoil in the mortgage sector, and recently HBOS has announced that there are to be job losses in its mortgage loan sector. The closure of a specialist mortgage branch by HBOS is to result in the loss of 325 jobs by the end of March next year.

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