Online Business Adviser

The Forum For Online Business Success

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...

I wanted to take a rest from talking about social media within your online business, as I seem to have done for the past few posts, and take it back to some basics about setting up an online presence

With the proliferation of DIY website tools like Wordpress, anyone can have a site up and running in less than an hour. I visit a lot of sites every day and read a lot of content, and sometimes there can be a real fashion over function mentality to the design – that is, it might look good, but the usability and functionality are terrible.

This can make people put your information in the too hard basket when it comes to finding what they want, or interacting with it how they want. As an online business owner, how your site looks, feels and most of all functions are key to success. Your content might be great but if it’s too hard to digest, it doesn’t matter.  Read more...

In the great wide social tapestry, a lot has been written about the appropriation of the word “expert” by people looking to leverage the web for a return.

I’ve mentioned my opinion on these in passing previously, but I got a DM on Twitter that I thought needed its own post to discuss the pitfalls of the word. It was along the lines of “So I Can Be Your Social Media God, check this out” (I’m paraphrasing because I deleted the message and stopped following them), along with the ubiquitous link to their e book. Now, calling themselves a ‘God’ is a pretty extreme (and risky) example but it highlights the point.  Read more...