Web Business For Shrewdies

Managing Your Web Business Health

January 7th, 2012 by kct from shrewdies | Comments Off | Filed in Web Business

Managing your web business health is vital for all site owners. Let’s resolve to get healthier in 2012.

As the owner of a website, you have the responsibility for ensuring that the health of your website is the best it can be. There is a good business advantage to this, and there is an added business bonus that I will cover later.

Is Your Web Business Fit For Purpose?

I have written at length about the importance of producing your website in accordance with a good websites business template founded on a clear Internet business purpose. You need that to develop a healthy web business, but you also need to check that it is being produced in a fit and proper way.
Read how to manage your web business health

Information Web Business In Hours Not Months

July 20th, 2011 by kct from shrewdies | Comments Off | Filed in Web Business

I’ve written lots about the importance of planning. I truly believe the old adage about failure to plan equaling planning for failure.

But sometimes you just want to get on with it.

So here is a quick guide to setting up a web business from scratch, which I am writing as I do it for a new project.
Continue reading Information Web Business In Hours Not Months

What’s The Best Search Phrase To Match Your Broad Internet Business Strategy?

July 19th, 2011 by kct from shrewdies | Comments Off | Filed in 4. Strategy

When we analyze our potential Rewards to assess market size and profitability, we use broad matching criteria. This gives us the best possible view of the market that we will try to reach.

Broad match searching will match Internet Business to Web Business, which may seem obvious, but it also brings other benefits. Broad match search results include synonyms and related terms that add richness to the site. If nothing else, it saves us a few trips to the thesaurus.

At the Strategy stage, this gives us a problem. Do we create categories for web business, Internet business or both? If we revealed 4,000 topics in our potential Rewards assessment, do we categorize all of them and produce thousands of content and indexing pages?

No we don’t!
Continue reading What’s The Best Search Phrase To Match Your Broad Internet Business Strategy?

Tags: Internet Business Strategy

Will Internet Business Strategy Shortcuts Kill Your Websites Business?

July 18th, 2011 by kct from shrewdies | Comments Off | Filed in 4. Strategy

As I wrote about the rare possibility of shortcutting the strategic planning stage in a websites business, another idea for a planning shortcut came to mind.

What if you had a really simple business model that was based on targeting a competitor or following the steps to success of a market leader?

I certainly would not recommend this as a first project. You really need to build some experience and success following the right procedures before venturing “off-piste.”

Since I have that experience, I’m tempted to try it myself. One of my projects replaces and extends a well known marketing company that encourages newbies to build their own business sites. All their pages are clearly targeted to specific search phrases, though I’m worried that the site structure will prove to be poor.

I’ve got time to think about this, and assess the risks, because I’m far too busy on other new projects to start another new site. However, the demand for my Freeche traffic generating tools is building, so I may have no choice. On second thoughts, there is never any excuse for basing your web business on an inferior product.

Copying something successful has some attraction. As I focus on markets where there is lots of confusion, myths, and misinformation, I cannot think of a good example. If you’d like to challenge me to assess a site that you have in your sights, please raise it in the Websites Business Forum.

Strategies In The Websites Business

July 16th, 2011 by kct from shrewdies | Comments Off | Filed in 4. Strategy

When you’re in the websites business, clients expect their sites to appear overnight, forgetting that before you start producing the site, you must have a plan.

My pages on how to develop detailed strategies are a bit sparse, but I will be rectifying that shortly. I have been busy creating site plans for clients, and I’ll share the details soon. This is one management task that is difficult to pass to others, but I have developed methods that make it easy for you to direct, even if you do not want to do the detailed number-crunching.

In fact, I am introducing this as a web business service, as it seems many budding web business owners find it difficult to spare the time. This is particularly true when the purpose of the business is to promote and extend an existing off-line business.
Continue reading Strategies In The Websites Business

Where’s The Passion In Passive

March 10th, 2011 by kct from shrewdies | 4 Comments | Filed in 1. Purpose

I’ve been discussing passive income recently, but the debate hangs on definition, and the passion of purpose gets lost in the passive.

It all started when Leo told Lis that there’s no such thing as passive income.

On the one hand, we have Leo with a fairly woolly view of what passive means, an unresearched view on what advertising revenue is, and a slightly silly conclusion that slightly passive is the way to go. Followed up by a non-existent debate with his mates (or Twitter alter-egos).

On the other hand, we have Lis, with a clear view of what passive means to her, concrete examples of what advertising revenues, and other passive income streams really mean, and a clear (but wrong) conclusion about the type of people who suit passive income. Followed up by a lively and interesting debate focusing mainly on what passive income means to different people.

(The debates on both sites may have moved on by the time you read this)
Continue reading Where’s The Passion In Passive

Shrewdies Still Open

February 24th, 2011 by kct from shrewdies | No Comments | Filed in Web Business

Despite the lack of activity here and on shrewdies.net, I am still open for business.

In fact, business is booming, so I just do not have time to develop these web business help sites.

If you are desparate for help, I’m still around, so I can soon answer questions – I just can’t get involved in more projects at the moment. Add comments anywhere here or on shrewdies.net, and I’ll follow up.

What’s It All About, WordPress?

December 13th, 2010 by kct from shrewdies | No Comments | Filed in Web Business

Though I try to avoid technical issues here, I feel that business owners in general, and web business owners in particular benefit from seeing the context of important technical tools.

The most important tool in my business is WordPress. I know that there are many other tools for developing websites, but experience tells me to consider WordPress first, and only consider other options if the planning stage reveals a level of complexity beyond the capabilities of WordPress.

Prompted by a message from a client today, I realized that the context of WordPress is important to business owners looking for new or improved websites. You can only get the best tools for your business if you are aware of their existence. Though you might direct those tools by hiring appropriate professionals, you need a broad understanding to avoid your technicians directing you. Of course, if you are a one man band, you have no choice about learning – but approach the project with your management hat on at this stage.

The message I received (from an email to my client) was:

I also wanted to ask you about your site and Shrewdies.net — what you use for WordPress. Are you able to use this yourself, or is this a developer tool? I’m looking to update my website and am searching for the best solution…

Continue reading What’s It All About, WordPress?

Tags: WordPress

Web Business Safety

October 23rd, 2010 by kct from shrewdies | No Comments | Filed in Web Business

Though I’m most concerned with your web business safety from the commercial sense, I’m also concerned that you do not wreck your web business by losing important data.

In some senses, this is a technical issue that belongs on shrewdies.net. However, the commercial implications are so big, and the technical requirements so simple, that this remains a management issue.

Safety Of Office 2.0

I’m sorry to have lost the link to the site that inspired me to think “Office 2.0.” That site, long before Google Docs became the hot productivity tool that it is today, extolled and promoted several web based office services.

This is not really the time to discuss the benefits and disadvantages of Office 2.0 services except to state the obvious conclusions:

Using online applications to manipulate and store your information saves you time backing up data.
There will always be some data that you need to store locally. In my case, mainly images and PDF files that I am editing and some financial and business information that is too complex for Google Spreadsheets.

Web Business Data Safety

So we all have vital web business data on our hard drives, but is it safe? The reliability of modern hardware can make us lose sight of the disaster that will happen if the computer crashes or gets stolen. Even with local backups, it can be time consuming to restore data from local backups.

My best solution is to use an online backup service. I prefer Dropbox because it is so easy to use. I get immediate benefit from:

Automatic backup of my data to a secure remote server.
Instant access to the backup data from any Internet connection.

So wherever I am in the world, if I can get an Internet connection, I can retrieve a copy of all the data on my office computer.

And it’s free! But more about that in a minute, after I’ve explained the final benefit.
Continue reading Web Business Safety

Tags: Dropbox

Web Business Retirement Plan: 50 Is Too Late

June 3rd, 2010 by kct from shrewdies | No Comments | Filed in Web Business

Business Retirement Plan

I need a good business retirement plan!

Not too long after one personal milestone^[1], tomorrow brings another – I’m retiring.

Four years ago, I moved from full-time to part-time employment. During that time, I also shifted careers to a job in PR^[2]. Tomorrow sees an end to paid employment for me. An end to work.

But not an end to income, because playing on the Internet is my new income source. My best web business retirement plan.

The way I do web business is to find something I enjoy – something I would still want to do if I won the lottery. Maybe it’s something I enjoy, like programming and configuring computer applications to get the most out of them. Tinkering is a great way to pass time between social visits. Maybe it’s researching subjects that interest me and presenting good knowledge to others. Teaching is a great way to pass time between trips to the coast and beyond.

I’m writing this between sunbathing sessions. Nice to get a cooling break every so often.

Retiring from working for others to spend time enjoying making money is a pleasure. Having time to spend it is a joy. It’s too good to rush, so things will develop here very slowly.

Yes, this site will teach you how to plan and manage your own web business. Yes, my WordPress Web Hosting site will teach you how to handle the technical issues if you don’t want to pay someone else to do them. But it might be a few months before there are comprehensive step by step plans. My priority is to run my existing sites to fund my retirement plan. As time allows, I’ll pass on the best tips for you to enjoy your own retirement.