THB Insider :: Thinking Home Business | Practical Tips For People Who Work From Home

In a message to subscribers to this ezine, I promised to talk about how new Web tools help level the playing field for today’s small business owner.

Search tools at our fingertips, such as Google and Yahoo!, provide a clear example.

These days we take for granted how easy it is to access information, instantly, and at little or no cost, that once would have required paying a visit to a city library, or hiring a research assistant or research firm to do the search for us. And even hiring someone else had its problems.

I recall once when I had responsibility for some national education programs, organising a library search and being dismayed on going through a foot high pile of computer printout, only to discover that the search terms had different meanings in the education systems of different countries and I had a pile of results that were of no practical use for my project. It was before the ‘user pays’ obsession caught on in the public service, so there may not have been an actual charge on my department’s accounts. But there was not much, if any, re-cycling of paper in those days, so there was some tangible cost.

Several years later, while managing a media company, I arranged an online search at the State Library and was somewhat peeved to find that there was not only a charge of several hundred dollars for the search but an equal amount for the Library staff’s time, with results that seemed less useful than the cost indicated.

Nowadays I would google the terms I was interested in and if the results were clearly not what I was looking for I would modify and refine the terms till I started to get relevant results. And I would not need to print anything out, at least until I found what I wanted. Cost? Nothing beyond my time and the Internet connection cost already incurred. Sure, there might be a need for more sophisticated research which might cost real money, but at the basic search level a small business with a limited budget will often have the same power as a large business with a large research budget.

And there are other Web tools that are helping to change the power relationship and marketing reach relativities between small and large businesses.

With Skype for example, the downloadable “Internet telephone”. I wrote about Skype in some detail last year and I continue to frequently talk with colleagues around the country and around the world for no cost other than what I’m paying for my Internet connections. In various configurations and from a range of providers now, Internet telephony enables small business (and large) to slash their telephony costs, one of the most obvious expense lines in any business but historically a very limiting one for small and micro business.

But the new web tool which I am most passionate about in terms of helping small business level the playing field, is weblogging or blogging. In my e-book published earlier this year, 7 Step Business Blog, I explain how, for no setup cost and a hosting fee of less than $10 a month, any small business can have a professional-looking, accessible, readily updatable and interactive website and content management system, with a range of features that ten years ago would have cost thousands of dollars to incorporate in a website.

Here are a couple of examples of blogs for small businesses that have enabled the owners to dramatically extend their reach beyond their local bailiwick and create what cartoonist and blogger Hugh Macleod has called a ‘global microbrand’ (thanks to Debbie Weil’s The Corporate Blogging Book for the link). Signs Never Sleep, the weblog of the Lincoln Sign Company, helps the owner tell his story way beyond his small town in New Hampshire, and English Cut, the blog of Savile Row bespoke tailor Thomas Mahon has helped him grow international demand for his suits. Each of these bloggers uses the Typepad technology that costs just $8.95 a month for its basic professional site. $8.95 a month for a global brand has to be good value – same entry price for the BlogHarbor service I use.

Next week, in response to requests from some fellow coaches, I’m starting a teleclass series ‘Your Business Blog Now’, which as the title suggests is to enable participants to get started with their business blog, incorporating the blog into their business strategy. There is a cost involved, or an investment I should say , of US$125 for the course – details at http://www.startbloggingtoday.com/ybbn.html

Blog From the Beach

In a previous message I indicated I intended to change the name of this ezine. I also want to combine the ezine with another occasional ezine, which is more related to issues about work-life balance and lifestyle choices.

The name I’m working on is Blog From the Beach, which is likely to be the one I use unless in the meantime someone comes up with something more interesting. Blog From the Beach is about my goal to have a global business from the beach, although it’s more an aspiration just now as I’m not yet physically blogging from the beach – no wireless at our local beach right now. In the meantime I settle for blogging from near the beach! If you have a suggestion for a name you think would be better, please leave a comment at the blog post version of this ezine.

Till next time

Warm regards from Australia’s generally sunny Gold Coast

Des

THB Insider is an online publication, with information, tips and links for the home based business entrepreneur. The publisher is Des Walsh, business coach & blogging evangelist, also publisher of the Thinking Home Business blog.

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This is the second issue of Thinking Home Business Insider, or THB Insider for short. The first issue can be read here.

In this issue, I focus on the idea of creating a Big Dream or Vision for a home based business.

I’m a great believer in the idea that, as people in home based business, we have the opportunity to dream big. And the more humble or limiting the physical and economic circumstances we may currently be experiencing in our business, the more necessary it is to make a conscious decision to create an attractive, exciting, totally engaging vision of where we are headed. We need to ask ourselves, ‘What’s the dream I want to fulfil?’

The alternative is to accept for our own business the prevailing attitude in society towards home based business, that it is necessarily an activity with a narrow scope and limited prospects.

Yes, I’m talking about ‘the vision thing’, which lots of people talk about but very few put into practice. It’s not just something for big corporations to have. It’s something every business needs. So if I want to have a home based business that grows, flourishes, and goes on rewarding me, I need a vision, just as much as any corporation does. I like to use the word ‘dream’ because when we were young most of us probably had big dreams. If we’d said we had big ‘visions’, people might have wondered about us!

But in business these days, people seem to use the word ‘vision’ for what I prefer to call a dream. I’m not going to hold up progress over a word. So let’s stick to ‘vision’ for this exercise.

Now, once we decide to have a vision for what we want to achieve with our business, why not make it a big vision? We may need to exercise our brains and our emotions a bit more, but what if a big vision could turn into a ‘big reality’ for us?!

This is not just about ‘positive thinking’, although for the life of me I’ve never really understood why some people are so down on positive thinking. Maybe some people are so inclined to be pessimistic that they are suspicious of people who are habitually optimistic. Be that as it may, it’s very practical to have a big vision, because that can unlock potential in us that we may have buried or kept in reserve.

In the vision department, I often think of Nelson Mandela, in a prison cell, with a vision, against all the odds and any sort of ‘practical’ thinking, of liberating his people and his country. We know *now* that this was achievable, but back then?

Too often I meet people in home based business who can recite from memory all the reasons why their business can’t grow. I also know people who are putting into effect, on a daily basis, the actions needed to grow their home based business into something much bigger than would appear realistic on a uperficial examination.

One of the best ways I’ve found to develop and sustain a big vision for my business is to find others who are keen to do the same thing and to work with them. Would you be interested in working with some people who also wanted to create and sustain a big vision for their business? People who are up to ‘dreaming big’? To help with that, I would like to take this opportunity to ask you whether you would be interested in participating in a short series of teleclasses on ‘Creating a Big Vision for Your Home Based Business’. No details are available yet (I just thought of it now!), but if you are interested in participating, please let me know by email to deswalsh@gmail.com with ‘the vision thing’ or similar in the subject line. By the way, I don’t expect to charge for this teleclass series, not this time around anyway I promise to get back to you to let you know what the response has been and, if there’s a good response, to provide details of how to connect.

________________

Thanks to those who sent me good wishes about the interview on Conversations with Experts.
Much appreciated.

I’m using Skype more. Had a couple of three way calls the other day, one of them with an international link. I notice other companies vying for attention in this free calls via the internet or ‘VoIP’ space, but my reading at the moment is that there’s daylight between Skype and the rest of the field. To download and install Skype, click on this link: http://www.skype.com

Till next time, all the best

Des

Published every two weeks (from now on), THB insider can be read:
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