Online Business Adviser

The Forum For Online Business Success

Well, it’s finally here. The end of the noughties, and what an amazing decade it has been. The technological advancements that have fundamentally changed the way we do business are now within the reach of everybody to take advantage of and create an online business.

My mission this year has been to share the knowledge and advice that I have to give to help give you the best chance of success. Next year, I have two business resolutions that I am making. One of those is to be more personal, which I covered in my last post. The other – take bolder actions. 2010 will be the time to make the most of the moment in order to get ahead of your competition.  Read more...

I’ve posted before about practical tips for generating traffic to your blog site, but wanted to talk further about some specifics that should see you lift your blog traffic.

Firstly is a numbered list of something. By far and away my most popular blog posts in terms of traffic have been around topics that begin with numbers – 27 People To Follow On Twitter, 3 Practical Tips for Traffic Generation, 4 Steps to Managing the Information Flood of the Internet etc. This isn’t a new thing, as I have often read it from many other bloggers, but it is certainly a great step in generating interest in your content. Why? People love lists.  Read more...

The internet is a big place – information coming from everywhere, all the time. To get ahead in your online business, you need to keep up to date. But how do you manage this constant flow of information to make sure you get what you need out of it? There is a process that I work through each day to make sure I extract maximum value from all of the information. Think of these in reverse too – giving your customers these tools make it very easy to find and distribute your content:

Email - This is my start point. It might sound obvious, but the information I want to read every day I get delivered straight to me. A lot of blog sites have the option to subscribe through feedburner, which essentially takes all the new posts from a given period and delivers them in text format to my inbox. I get it on my iPhone which means I can take it with me and access when I want, even when out of range.  Read more...

I think it’s true for everyone that no matter where you have worked, you will come across people within an organisation who are just really, really good at what they do. Certainly for me, having worked across a number of different media companies, I have found people in all sorts of departments (not just mine) who know their stuff inside out and astonish me with their knowledge.

I consider these people as my Fantasy Business Team – the people that if I had was to go into business for myself and had the scale, I would want to recruit and have work with me, because they each bring something special to the table. It’s the kind of team that you think you could accomplish anything with.  Read more...

My collection - yes, I'm a fan

Paid versus free content is really under the spotlight at the moment, and I wanted to take a look at one of the most successful brands of recent years and demonstrate how providing information and services at no charge can lead to revenue and more on the back end. This is a post that I have been wanting to write for a while, but with a TV show on air in a couple of weeks, it is timely.

Since being discovered on a TV show, Jamie Oliver has become one of the most successful brands of the last decade. I am a huge fan of everything he does in both cooking and business. Notice I said brand, not chef. Sure he deals with food, but Oliver’s real business? Education. His positioning? Simplicity. The Naked Chef moniker of his early days was derived from the simplicity and accessibility of his food, that you can create something great without too much fuss.  Read more...