Business Online

In my previous post I discussed the fact that ‘going solo’ or trying to run a profitable online business on your own may not necessarily be the best thing for you. There are , and I do not deny this fact , people who have the discipline and perseverance to stay at it and build their online business empires no matter how long it takes. But for a lot of people it can get pretty discouraging. So how do you still manage to get your online business running, and ’stay the course’ in those slow but unavoidable periods ?

From the title of this post you can obviously see where I’m headed on this and so I’m not attempting to spring up some excellent ground-breaking new idea. Its clear that the successful online businesses do this. They find people who have expertise in areas that they need , they employ them, and then they pay them to bring their expertise to the table. That way they keep getting bigger and better. So how does a guy like me get his online business up and running in as short as possible making as few mistakes as possible ?

SYNERGIZE . When I decided to start up this online business blog I took a whole lot of time reading everything I could lay my hands on. It was true that I had a lot of lovely ideas , a lot of which I will be sharing over time on this blog ( wouldn’t be a bad idea to subscribe to my feed ) , but I still needed to understand what the whole thing was about. Looking back now I can’t imagine how many hours I could have saved if I had found someone who was willing to help me out with an area of blogging that didn’t necessarily have to do with writing posts on starting and growing your online business.

I’ve chosen blogging as my example of an online business because

• it’s one of the things I do
• it suffers terribly from the a-million-and-one-rules disease

I can’t tell you how many times I came across 101 do’s and don’ts for the blogger. How on earth am I to memorize 101 rules ? And for every business online its the same thing. So many things to keep up with , most times we end up filtering them. So what’s the problem with filtering ?

• First off, you’re new to the whole thing so how do you know how and what to filter ?
• Second, you can’t afford to make certain mistakes. While the same mistakes for an established online business may mean the loss of a few deals or clients, it could totally nail you for good
• Third, there’s a tendency to go with popular beliefs and trends and the crowd is not always right especially when that crowd is mostly made up of newbies just like you

In my world there are only 2 ways to learn when starting up or growing your online business :

1. Experience : A wonderful and long lasting way to learn but has the unsavoury characteristic of leaving a lot of casualties in its trail, and the only way to ensure that you aren’t one of these is to
2. Learn from others : Personally this has always been my preferred way. Difficult but safer in the long run.

But to learn from others doesn’t necessarily mean you have to buy some expensive ebook, spend time scouring through dozens of web pages or something in that league. All you have to do is find the right people with the right skills. But to get the best usually you must offer something - even if you visit a very educative blog like this one , you’re offering 2 things in return - much needed traffic and intrinsically yet distinctly the probability that you might click on an ad. So you must have something to offer in return if you are going to get the best out of synergizing. How do you find out what you have to offer ?

If you’re thinking of starting your own online business you have something to offer. At the very least you have a business idea. If you think you don’t just click here and let me show it to you. Now there are a lot of people who know so much about SEO ( Search Engine Optimization ) who don’t have a clue as to what to do with the knowledge. I said I was going to attempt to divide blogging as an online business into constituent areas of specialty so I’ll start right now ;

• writing content
• Search engine optimization
• traffic generation
• social media and bookmarking

This is not a comprehensive or wholistic picture, just a basic idea of some of the things a blogger would usually have to do to grow a successful blog. Each of them is a FULL-TIME job. For example, if you’re going to maintain a strong and useful prescence on social media and bookmarking sites, it takes time and effort, first to understand the unique intricacies of each of them and hence how to get the best out of them, and then to continually and consistently build long lasting relationships and networks. Most bloggers who run their blogs alone have to stick to some pretty rigid time management rules to be able to achieve any three of the four listed above - and remember that’s not an entirely comprehensive list ( doesn’t even look like one ). It is at this point that synergy comes in.

We’ve all heard the stories of how an up-start gets mentioned somewhere on a blog post and all of a sudden goes from struggling blogger to super star. Irrespective of your perspective on this the underlying principle is influence. If someone with the influence can put you in the spotlight - if you’re good at what you do - you’ll be there for a very long time. So what happens if someone with excellent writing skills ( a dash of wit and humour too ) teams up with some guy who’s got a load of friends on myspace ?

Your guess is as good as mine. I’ll be writing on how to make these connections and enhance your own skills . Even though I’m focusing on blogging as an example the principles apply to any sphere of the online business world. Find the right people who are on the same rung of the ladder but have different fields of expertise and SYNERGIZE .

I’ll be rounding this up in my next post - I hope .