getting started

Five Common Pitfalls to Avoid When Starting an Online Business (Sponsored Post)

Starting an online business is not easy. It takes time, discipline you never knew you had and requires a herculean amount of effort to stay focused. But you did it! Congratulations! You got the word out, are great at what you do and are growing your online business. You have leapt far over all of the hurdles that have stopped lesser businesspersons in their tracks and are on the way to total world domination.

But even the savviest start-ups can have a few hiccups. Lucky for you, most of them can be avoided. Here are five tips to help make your online business a runaway success.

Tip #1: Separate your personal and business social media accounts

We know it’s a pain to have separate accounts for your business and personal life, but your business will thank you. Let’s face it; not everything that is appropriate to share in your personal life sends the right message for your business. Photos of your breakfast and angry rants about the postal system might not mix so well with a repost of a great review of your services. Also, a change in your relationship status might be more information than your customers need.

Keeping a separate business and personal identity also allows you to evaluate what social media platforms are best for your business, which brings us to the next point:

Tip #2: Remember that not all forms of social media will be appropriate channels for your business.

Your business doesn’t have to have a presence on every social media platform. In fact, forcing engagement where it doesn’t naturally occur can do more harm than good for your brand. Twitter might be a great way to get info and updates out to your customers as well as a fantastic avenue for direct customer service. However, you might struggle with how to position your business on Instagram or Vine.

A good rule to determine whether a social media platform is right for your business is to consider the ease at which you can create content. If you find yourself struggling to make your messages fit the platform, it isn’t right for you.

Tip #3: Register a good domain name.

Just putting up a Facebook page and calling it a day is a rookie mistake, and you run the risk of losing all your content and engagement with customers if your page gets taken (permanently or temporarily) down due to a mistake in following Facebook’s guidelines or a malicious report. Your business needs a website and a domain name. When you control the website for your online business, you control your business. We recommend something personal, memorable and catchy: .ME offers the ability to truly get connected with your customers with a URL they will keep coming back to.

Tip #4: Don’t make promises you can’t keep.

The best lesson about starting an online business to not learn the hard way is to not make promises you can’t keep. Whether it is a vacation for your significant other or a job for a friend once you can afford to expand, don’t say it out loud until you know it is a reality. We get it. You’re doing well, you’re proud of your work and you’re on track to having a better year than you projected but you have to keep it a secret until you are 100% ready to follow through on your promise. If you announce and then fail to deliver, it will haunt you and make you feel BAD. Don’t let this happen to you.

Tip #5: Control your momentum.

If done right, your business will gain momentum. Make sure you constantly check-in with yourself about your work load and control the pace at which you are growing. Since you are a human being and not a machine, there is a finite amount of time in a day to get things done. Take on only the projects you know you have time to well. Saying “yes” to everything and failing to deliver will hurt your business and brand far more than saying “no” politely.

With these five tips under your belt, you are ready to go out and conquer the online business world. Also, we would love to hear from you: What tips would you add for navigating the rough waters of online business?

Podcasting: Added Value

Author: julianeharmon58

People hear my podcasts, they hear about the way I’ve set myself up, and they invariably ask me how much work I put into it. I tell them that in the beginning, it wasn’t much work at all. After a while, it became a lot of work. These days, I’m back to it not being much work at all, even though I’m producing more shows than ever. In conversations that I have with clients and people interested in podcasting, one of the most common fears that prevent folks from getting started is that podcasting—the way they see me and other full-time podcasters doing it—will take up too much of their time.

And it would. It totally would.

Podcasting is my primary gig, and other interests feed into it. I’m also an affiliate marketer, so I’ve done some things in that space that feed into my podcasting efforts. If podcasting isn’t already your primary gig, though, I can see how looking at someone who spends many hours a week podcasting (along with dozens of hours of prep work, website work, marketing and all the rest) can be daunting. You have a job. You have a business to run. You have other things that keep you busy.

But. You had to know there was a “but” coming.

You do have 30 minutes a week. You can fit podcasting into your overall business plan. Your podcast will be added value; it will be something your competitors don’t do. When I was a t-shirt designer years ago, I noticed that most of the successful people selling print-on-demand t-shirts were the ones that weren’t making “selling shirts” their primary gig. It was just something they added for extra value to their existing business. Podcasting can work the same way for you.

Maybe you run a site that sells blue widgets, along with a dozen other people that sell blue widgets. You’ve all got roughly the same quality website, roughly the same prices, but you do a half hour show every week about how people can use blue widgets in their everyday lives and you give one away to a lucky listener to boot. See the potential there? You’re giving people a reason to stick around your site.

If you’ve been shying away from podcasting because you’ve thought that it requires doing a show with a heavy commitment or schedule, try thinking of it in terms of added value to an existing enterprise. You might be surprised by what you can do.

Oh, and about the part at the beginning where I said it wasn’t a lot of work, then it was a ton of work, and now it’s not again? When I began, I was one of three hosts of an informal podcast. We didn’t care if we had listeners, and I don’t think we even submitted to iTunes until we were several shows in. We were doing it more for a goof than anything else. After a year, I started to take it seriously, and seriously started learning more about the craft, experimenting with new software and tools, and spending way more time on podcasting. I started up three more shows, rebooted the first one, and launched QAQN.com. Only in the past few months has it gotten a lot easier, as I scheduled all my shows for the same day and wrote an automation script that handled 95% of my post-production.

With experience and the right tools, what seems like a daunting amount of work is actually quite… not. Something to maybe keep in mind.

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Podcast Myth Busting

Author: julianeharmon58

Podcasting as a medium has been around for a long time. Podcasting, the term, was coined in 2004. Like any cool thing that’s been acknowledged by more than two people, certain myths and misunderstandings have cropped up around podcasting over the years. I’m here to dispel a few of them. Here are eight podcast myths ready to be busted!

You need an iPod to listen to podcasts. No list about podcasting myths would be complete without the all-time number one. No, you don’t need an iPod. This myth is not extremely widespread anymore in my experience. With the explosion of the iPhone since 2007 and the iPad since 2010 (not to mention the slew of popular Android and Blackberry devices), the “pod” in “podcasts” isn’t quite as linked to the i”Pod” as it used to be.
Podcasting has only been around since 2005 (or 2004 or 2006 or 2003). Depending on who you ask, podcasting has only been around for about six years. Some consultants use this myth as a selling point, telling potential clients that they’ve been podcasting since it was invented in 2005. While the term was coined in 2004 and support for it added to iTunes in 2005, recording and placing audio files on the internet in a serialized or chronological way has been done since at least the late ’90s. The basic ability to distribute recorded audio online has existed since the dawn of the internet (or even earlier if you consider Usenet). Nobody woke up one day in 2005 and said, “hey, I think I’ll invent doing radio-style talk shows on the internet!”
Podcasters are all amateurs. Kevin Smith, Ricky Gervais, Adam Carolla, Joe Rogan, Marc Maron, Kevin Pollack, Greg Proops, ABC, NBC, CBS, Discovery, BBC, ESPN, TMZ, Science Magazine, Vanity Fair, CNN, E!, The Onion, HBO, Showtime, NPR and probably every major radio station where you live. All podcasting.
Audiences expect perfect audio, like on the radio. It seems like if a person isn’t of the opinion that it’s all amateurs, then it must be all about having pefect radio-quality audio. While it’s true that it’s becoming cheaper and easier all the time to sound professional, there are many successful podcasts that are produced using nothing more than a cheap USB headset and the free Audacity recording/editing software. Moving up to pro-level podcasting hardware can improve your sound but it’s not a requirement for success.
It’s expensive to produce quality audio. Let’s talk about a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being your voice recorded through a tin can and 10 being perfection. With a $30 USB headset and free software, you can sound like a seven, maybe an eight. That’s not expensive. True, if you want to sound like a nine or a ten, you’ll need to pony up some cash, but even a budget under $1,000 can get you all the way to the top of the scale.
You can’t make money with a podcast. Leo Laporte. Next?
You need to listen with iTunes. Listeners have always had at least one other option in addition to iTunes: listening on the web. Podcasters have nearly always posted their episodes on their own websites for consumption. These days, it’s even more spread out with Zune, Juice, and Winamp, and phone apps like Downcast and Podceiver to name but a few.
It takes too much time. Do you have an hour a week? A fifteen minute podcast with 45 minutes of pre-production and post-production can be very successful. Once you’ve gotten the hang of it, you can reduce your pre- and post-production time and spend less than half an hour on each episode. My post-production, regardless of the length of the episode, is less than 10 minutes because of the experience I have and the automation I’ve scripted. Does that sound like a lot of time? Not to me!

Those are my top eight podcasting myths. What are some that you’ve heard? Want to bust a few of ’em up with me?

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Blogworld Expo Speaker Interview: Rich Brooks

Author: laurensaenz64

Another of our speaker profiles for the upcoming Blogworld Expo. It’s not too late to join us in Las Vegas and hear amazing speakers like Rich Brooks!

Q: In two sentences, highlight your background and professional experience to date. One bonus sentence: how’d you get started blogging?

I started building Web sites back in 1997 because I didn’t want to work for the man any longer. As time went on I got more involved with Web marketing to help grow clients’ businesses: search engines, then email newsletters, and finally blogging.

I had a client enamored of Howard Dean and his Web marketing savvy; he asked me to start a blog for him, so I tried it out as well. Never looked back.

Rich Brooks, Flyte New Media

Q: How often do you blog? What platform do you use? Why?

I blog three to four times a week in four primary blogs. Most of my posts are at the flyte blog, but I also write a more basic Internet Marketing 101 blog for the local newspaper, which helps me reach a different, more localized market.

In addition, I started an SEO blog with our new search engine marketer at flyte, and we have an internal, not-quite-ready-for-prime-time, NSFW flyte crew blog as well.

The flyte blog is on TypePad, which I still feel is a great blog for business people who don’t have a coder on site and just want to blog. The Maine Business blog is on a platform they coded themselves. The Maine SEO blog and our flyte crew blog are both on WordPress.

I’ve always recommended TypePad or WordPress, but until recently I found TypePad’s UI to be better for the average user; cleaner, easier-to-use. However, the last few iterations of WordPress have made it a favorite of mine.

The bottom line is I can strongly recommend both TypePad and WordPress; both have nice features, both are great for business blogs, and neither will prevent you from succeeding on your blogging career.

Q: Point us to one or two recent postings on your blog that you think were superb, and tell us a bit about your writing process. How long did it take for you to come up with the topic? How long to write?

Geez, superb? Now you’re making me self-conscious. How about just solid?

I wrote about Technorati Tags here: Do Technorati Tags Matter Anymore?

I liked this post b/c for years I’ve been promoting the benefits of tagging along with a great anecdote. However, as I looked at my own stats, I realized I got very little traffic from tagging. So, very publicly, I questioned myself and what I had been telling people.

That goes towards my “warts and all” belief of blogging honestly, plus I hope it will help a number of small business owners with their own blogs.

Q: How often do you leave comments on other people’s blogs? How do you find their entries in the first place?

A few times a month, not nearly as much as when I started. I find it’s a great way to generate more traffic to your blog, and it shows an interest in the networking aspect of blogging. However, it’s tough to find the time to publish my own material, run a company, be a dad and find time to respond to other people’s posts. These days my commenting is more organic; I comment if I feel an urge to voice an opinion, and less as a marketing exploit.

Q: Tell us a bit about your talk at Blogworld Expo. Topic, key points you’ll cover, etc?

I’m looking forward to both panels. The first I’ll be moderating on How to Plan, Build and Promote a Business Blog. I’ve got three great panelists with me, John T. Unger, Des Walsh and Denise Wakeman. We all have experience working with businesses on a consulting level on building a more effective blog. We’ll be talking strategy and answering questions on how blogging fits into a broader marketing campaign.

The other panel is about getting buy-in from decision makers. I think this will be helpful to internal marketers who realize the values of blogs, but need ammunition to convince their company’s decision makers.

Q: How do you recommend new folk best experience a major conference and expo like Blogworld Expo?

Get off your track. Experience at least one seminar that you would never think of going to. Business bloggers should check out a milblog seminar; Godbloggers should go to a monetization seminar. Plan to have your eyes opened and your mind expanded.

Q: Easy ones: Mac or PC? Ipod or Zune? Iphone or Blackberry?

Mac, iPod, and iPhone. Are they still making the Zune? Didn’t it turn out that it led to tumors?

I don’t know about that tumor part, Rich, but thanks for sharing with us!

Interview by Blogworld Expo co-host Dave Taylor, who is also going to be giving the opening keynote speech, a talk on blogging and SEO, and popping up elsewhere during the show. Dave is a prolific blogger and writes about tech support and business blogging, among other topics.

Podcasting: Added Value

Podcast Myth Busting

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