No matter the business you start you need to think about the customer base you will be serving. If you design websites, what kind of websites do you want to design? You probably can’t master PHP, ASP and every other language out there. You need to specialize.

That goes for any small business. Not every can be an Amazon or an eBay… and even their reputations are built on a certain market. But the smaller you are the more important a good niche is.

Let’s stick with the website designer. Who do you think will build a reputation faster… the website designer who specializes in real estate websites or the one who will do a site for anyone?

Assuming they both have equal opportunities for advertising, the reputation of the one who specialized is likely to be built faster. People often talk to others in their same industry or who share interests. That allows word to spread faster. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s interesting watching sites try to take advantage of the social web. I just found a search engine that’s trying to do that. You can go to the Sproose home page to see what you think.

I went ahead and tested it to see how it works. I typed in a phrase and took a look at the results. Well, definitely needs more social time, but I can see how it could get interesting.
I also voted on a couple items to see how things worked. It’s pretty interesting seeing the results move about as you give it your opinion.

While certainly not perfect yet, the concept is great. It should be interesting to see how Sproose grows and what users make of it. There are good and bad points to letting users rate things on a search engine, and I wonder how they’ll cope with webmasters trying to game the system, which will no doubt be a problem if they get popular.

I was reading about this over at SEOmoz and pretty much have to agree. Just like any blog, mine get plenty of comment spam. Akismet takes care of most of it, thank goodness, but some does require the human touch… to the delete comment button.

It’s interesting seeing the spam go from blatant to sneaky. I see lots of the “great site” kinds of comment spam, which is nothing more than a way to get your link in where the name goes. It’s easy to figure out that those should be deleted.

But how do you handle comment spam?

Akismet so far works great for me. Catches the vast majority and I don’t have to put in a barrier like CAPTCHA or registration, both of which can decrease legitimate commenting. I also have the first comment by a given user moderated, so if I delete the comment they will continue to be moderated but otherwise their later comments appear promptly. And of course, if they start to spam then I can take care of it.

I don’t like using the NoFollow tags, and use a plugin to keep it off my blogs. Since I’m doing what I think is a pretty reasonable job of controlling spam on my blogs, why use it?

It’s a big question for any blogger who accepts payment in exchange for posting about a particular website, product or service. Are they losing the trust of their readers?

Although recent comments from the FTC have brought up the topic of proper disclosure, this goes far beyond PayPerPost and other paid blogging models. The potential is there to impact affiliate marketers as well, since they get paid when someone buys a product or service they recommend. Very nearly the same thing as getting paid upfront if you think about it.

There are some really interesting articles on this topic if you search around. Flat out fake blogs, people trying to get others to flat out shill for them in reviews on sites such as Amazon and more. Where should that line be drawn? Read the rest of this entry »

This is one of those skills I really need to update. I want to learn PHP as that’s the kind of blog and forum software I tend to use, but I have only the most rudimentary knowledge of it. Back in high school and college I took languages like BASIC, Fortran and Pascal. Not exactly popular web languages. But it does give me some feeling for the logic.

While the main thing I need to do is buy some books and dig in, I just learned about a forum that can help you to learn programming. Appropriately named Programming Help, it has about 20,000 members and reasonably active forums.

As I make the time to get more serious about this, no doubt I’ll be doing tons of reading in the PHP forum. One language at a time, so don’t expect that I’ll look beyond that for a time. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been learning just a little bit about how to get videos online. You know what? With a camcorder and software already installed on my home computer it isn’t that hard at all.

Probably the hardest part is talking naturally to the camera. My speaking voice isn’t that great; in fact a guy in college one time told me that my voice wasn’t as annoying as usual one day. No, he and I were not good friends.

But I think video has a lot of potential. If you sell a product, making a video showing how to use it can work well. Just look at some of the ads over on YouTube. Make your own infomercial, if you will, showing a clear website address for more information at an appropriate point, and give it a try.

Think you’re funny? Try making a humorous video about your field.

I haven’t given this enough thought or produced something I’d be willing to demo at this point, but give me time. When it’s the work at home/home business field it’s not easy to come up with a solid how-to video.

Have you given thought to using video in your home business? Why or why not?

Technorati Tags: video, marketing

Saw this video over on YouTube and thought it was a good reminder to keep an eye on how things are going with Net Neutrality. It’s also not too bad an intro if this is an unfamiliar topic:

Read the rest of this entry »

If you haven’t even started on your home business, you might want to check this Business Opportunity directory out. It looks to be pretty big.

Now, this is not a home business specific site. But they do have a home business section. Some opportunities in some of the other categories can work with home business too.

The one problem I had was that the site didn’t work right for me. I’m an odd one when it comes to browsers and use Netscape. The expander for the opportunity descriptions didn’t work for me, so I went over to IE to get a better look. Always disappointing to have to do that, but this is far from the only site where I have to switch browsers.

You can even get your own business listed, but it’s pricey.