Desty Online -- Online and Offline Businesses, Online Marketing » Meta Business

A Critic Can Be the Best Thing in the World

Desty — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 13:59:07 +0000

When creating a product or service for public consumption, the creator, author, or inventor, does the best he or she can to ensure that the product of service in question is of the highest quality. Proofing, quality control, cross-checking, etc is performed, not only at the personal level, but, hopefully, with the help of others.

Best Friends = Worst Enemy for Your Product

Your immediate circle of influence (your family, friends, network, etc) has developed a relationship with you, either on a personal or professional level. They want you to succeed, but, at the same time, they don’t want you to get hurt.

Sure if there is a glaring problem or concern, they’ll bring it to your attention, but smaller issues, perhaps choices of taste, can be glossed over.

No need to bring that up.

It’s not a big deal.

I’ll get with him later about it.

While your friends and family do have your best interests at heart, for the most part, they cannot be counted on to give critical and, when needed, spirit crushing criticism.

You Might Want to Listen to That Loud Mouth A**Hole

There are millions of critics in the world. You’re a critic, I’m a critic, she’s a critic, he’s a critic. We see and experience products and services on a daily basis, but how much feedback do you give?

Have you ever had a really bad meal at a restaurant? I’m not talking about vomit on a plate bad, but bad enough that you wouldn’t come back to that restaurant? Did you express your concerns to the staff, or at the least fill out a comment card? I’m betting you didn’t.

Feedback is vital in all things, personal and professional. Simply put, if you don’t know that you’re doing something wrong or something is broken, how can you fix it?

Next time you get some jerk mouthing off about something you did or didn’t do, take a step back instead of ignoring him. Ask yourself these questions:

Where is he coming from? Does he actually have experience or knowledge in this and might ACTUALLY know something?
Why is he pointing this out? If he knows what he’s talking about, could he possibly really be trying to help you?

Sometimes a critic’s lack of tact can stand in the way of you making a vital improvement. Also take into account that if the criticism is done via text, there’s a chance that you might be reading more into the comment than was originally emoted.

Step Up and Have an Open Mind

Next time you get that yell from the peanut gallery, don’t dismiss it out of hand. Take a deep breath and look to see if there’s actually an opportunity buried in that pile of dung thrown at you. Shift through it, and you might just find a diamond; but look at the source first. Sometimes, a pile of dung is just a pile of dung.

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Have You Failed Your Business Plan?

Desty — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 06:01:01 +0000

I was reading my ever expanding RSS subscription articles and came across Why My Blog Get’s 1700+ Uniques/Day After 6 Weeks Online (Part 1) from Make Money Online with Snowboardjohn. I first discovered Snowboardjohn back when Blogrush first started; on the dashboard of your Blogrush account, there was a link to an excellent article about how to get the maximum return with Blogrush.

I read two or three more articles and was hooked. I subscribed to his RSS and also sent an email saying how much I liked his articles and that he had gained a subscriber. SBJ (as he likes to call himself) replied and thanked me for the email.

Today I’m going through his entire set of articles and I was stopped short by his article about traffic. SBJ goes through what works for him and how he promotes himself. For some reason, it got me to thinking about my business plan for Desty Online. So I went to pull the plan up and *POOF* it had disappeared! There was a software update last week, and suddenly, everything I had created past July 2nd 2007 was gone!

It was just as well. I hadn’t looked at it for at-least 2-3 months, so what was the point really? I had gotten so caught up in trying to write articles, I had lost sight on the reason why to write those articles. I have ZERO marketing for the last month or so, and my site traffic has suffered for it.

As you see, we had a nice peak on September 21, and then it went downhill from there. What happened after September 21? Well, looking in the archives, from September 22nd on, I wrote alot of “personal” articles, not really writing about interesting subjects, but rather my thoughts on what was going on with the blog and whatnot.

Not only was I not following my business plan but I had totally forgotten it. I was working without a written plan in place. What’s the big deal about having a written plan? A written plan allows you to see, in black and white, what the game plan is. Before doing anything, consult the business plan and determine if the new action / activity fits in that plan.

It’s time to get back on track, get my business plan rewritten, and follow the plan. I have several series unfinished, and it’s time to get them in gear.

Welcome to Desty Online 2.2!

blog, blogging, business plan,

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Must You Scrap Your Business to Make It Bigger?

Desty — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 12:14:55 +0000

How do you know if your business will grow? Can your business grow?

When the business is first created and its plan is formed, this is the critical time to think about the future. Most new business owners think only of the “now” and put off planning the future. While the planning of start-up operations is a highly critical phase of planning, some attention needs to be placed on expansion of future operations.

What Would You Do With a Million Dollars?

There’s an easy way to check the future of your business. Imagine that instead of making $1200 per month, you’re making $12000 per month or even $120000 per month. Now what happens? Think about your current operations; what would you have to be doing to make $120000 per month? Is your business like a pipeline, where all you have to do is fit in a larger pipe? Or, rather, is your business like Lucy and the pie factory, where you’re the only one on the line and the faster the pies come out, the faster they fall in the floor?

My original eBay sales business would have had me, at first, rushing to catch those pies as they came screaming down the line. I had to order product as I would make a sale, catalog, sort, and reship product to customers with each order. One day I had 5 sales of 5 different products, 2 of which were large items. It was not fun trying to carry everything out to the shipper.

How to Expand Your Business

There are two major ways to make your business more efficient and put it on the fast track for expansion:

Business System
Hire More Personnel

Look at your current business plan. Where can you make changes to the system to make it more efficient? Where I made a change was contacting my suppliers and setting up drop shipments. That simple change made a world of difference; no longer did I have to wait for replacement products to arrive so I could ship. The supplier would ship products directly to my customers. It was a huge boost to my customers in that shipping costs were halved and total time from order to delivery was reduced by atleast 1 week.

After making your business systems as streamlined as possible, it’s time to expand your business and hire some help. Despite what you think, you CAN’T do it all, not with business pouring in. Start by contacting your local temp agency. Check into the costs involved to hire a temp; if your business doesn’t make enough revenue to hire some help, even on a part-time basis, look again at your business plan to see if there is any further changes you can make to squeeze out some more efficiency.

How Does This Help Me, the Blogger?

It’s my opinion that you should never totally outsource content creation for your flagship blog. Offering guest spots for writers in exchange for promotion is one cost free way to expand your blog, however you should have tight reins on what goes onto your blog. While someone else wrote the article, it’s your rep. that’s on the line. Go over the submitted article with a fine tooth comb and ask yourself, “is this something I would want on my blog?”

Expansion of blogs could naturally turn into a 2nd blog or the creation of a blog network. Bringing writers in on staff for a blog network expands your business, as long as they are writing on separate blogs; as said earlier, keep a tight control of your own blog. If the network were to fail, you should be able to keep your original blog at its original status.

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Video — Mixing Business with Pleasure

Desty — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 03:20:08 +0000

I found a video that goes into further detail about business expenses in relation to how to mix actual business related trips with any personal time. The main goal is that the trip be actually business related, just squeeze in some personal time on the side. The main question to ask is would you be going on the trip anyway if it wasn’t business related.

I still haven’t gotten the hang of inserting videos into my RSS feeds. It is possible, I’ve seen it. If anyone has any suggestions, I would seriously appreciate it.

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Be Flexible When It Comes to Your Business Plan

Desty — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 19:02:36 +0000

As I mentioned in my business planning article, every serious business needs to have a overall strategy for the business, from beginning to end. Business planning is done not only on a strategic level, but the plan itself should also go into some detail as to what tactics will be employed to reach the plan’s objectives.

A change of tactics is a simple enough task. Normally, a set period of time passes before a change in tactics however; any tactic must have time to run its course to see if it is a valid way towards the strategic objective.

A change in strategy, however, is a more serious task. Depending on the change, it could totally destroy any progress made thus-far with the previous strategy.

I’ll use the example of Desty Online for the differences in the business plan’s tactical and strategic planning.

The strategic goal of Desty Online is to expand the concept of treating and running of all online businesses (be it a blog or a PPC business) with sound business practices. The tactics to make this possible break down into several areas:

Content — the creation of interesting and valuable content is a basic tactic. If the content isn’t useful, there will be no repeat visitors. If the content isn’t interesting, it won’t be read in the first place. A reason, or need as it were, must be shown or created for the reader to see Desty Online as a essential resource for their business.
Promotion — Nobel Prize level articles are worthless without readers. The existence of Desty Online and its mission must be spread far and wide. As the site itself is still fairly young (almost 3 months old) promotion will be done by low cost / free means, such as commenting on related blogs, membership and participation on related forums, and guest blogging opportunities. As the blog matures, more intensive promotional avenues will be explored, such as PPC campaigns, paid reviews (through individual bloggers and through paid post companies).
Revenue Generation — Desty Online must be self sustaining. During its younth, with low traffic volumes, the cost of maintaining the site is negligible. As the site grows in content and traffic volume, additional resources will have to come into play to keep the same level of service currently enjoyed by readers. Also, paid marketing will be required.

As part of my restructuring plan a few weeks ago I was determined to attempt stay away from the alure of writing sponsored posts beyond commissioned business reviews. The tactic in mind to make up for this exclusion of a revenue source was to sell advertising on Desty Online directly instead of through 3rd parties. A blogger I respect had said it was a great source of income and highly recommended it. Something he didn’t mention and I didn’t think about until I got involved on the Digital Point forums was his blog was over 5 years old and had MUCH more traffic than Desty Online. What is a great source of income for him currently has no chance at Desty Online.

So, in order to keep Desty Online self sustaining and to start some minor paid marketing, I’m bringing back the tactic of doing paid posts. I’m still not comfortable beyond reviews I think my readers would appreciate, so I will have to be picky. Hopefully as other forms of revenue reveal themselves over time, paid posts will be used less and less.

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Invest As a Business

Desty — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 02:00:05 +0000

Desty Online is dedicated to business, online and offline. Why, you ask, do I keep bringing up investing and the stock market?

It’s better to invest as a business than as an individual.

There are several advantages to just being a business. If you’re running a serious business, you should already be operating as a separate legal entity, such as a C corporation, a S corporation, a LLC, a LLP, etc. This turns the income of the business into business income instead of personal income.

That is the key.

Personal income is taxed first after it’s earned. Only 401k, flex spending plans, medical insurance, etc are taken out before taxes. You earn, get taxed, and get to spend the rest.

A business doesn’t work like that. The business earns, spends, and gets taxed on the leftover. Mind you, for the business to spend money and not get taxed on it, it has to be a legitimate business expense. Investing isn’t a business expense, per say, but it is income you can work with before taxes. Also, a business is taxed at a lower level than an individual who makes the same amount of income.

Now, why would a business want to invest? The same reason as a person invests: to make more money with the money they already have. A business that is well run and makes excellent returns on capital spent has three options when it comes to profits:

Reinvest into the business. Unless the business it at its apex, there’s always new markets to get into, new R&D projects to fund, new ways to expand.
Reward shareholders with a dividend. Profits go back to the owners of the company. If you don’t mind the double taxation (once at the business level and again at the personal level), most shareholders like actual returns on their investments.
Invest profits in other companies. The company wants to increase it’s income over a long term window will look to stable, bedrock type companies to invest their excess capital. A perfect example of this is Berkshire Hathaway. This link goes to their 2005 annual report. Skip to page 16 in the .pdf file to see the amount of equity investments Berkshire is in.

How does a business determine which of these three options to exercise with their excess cash? Generally it goes down this order of questioning:

Which would produce a greater return, reinvesting capital into the business or investing in an outside business?
If investment inside or outside the company isn’t practical, there is a limit to retained holding before the tax considerations say to distribute the capital to the shareholders via dividends.

This is the Warren Buffett philosophy of business investment [aff] but I try to run my own businesses along the same lines. If it’s good enough for Buffett, why not good enough for me?

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What Happened to All My Money???

Desty — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 04:04:10 +0000

What I’m about to share is real. The names have been deleted to protect the stupid.

BillyJoeJimBob started his 1st eBay company selling flatbed scanners. He had never owned his own business before, but he read a book or two once about businesses so he felt he knew enough.

A coworker was making a killing selling stuff online and BillyJoeJimBob thought he’d take a crack at it. So he started posting ads for products to sell online. He didn’t actually own the products, he found an online store that sold products dirt cheap, so he would just markup the cost of the product, the eBay item would sell and BillyJoeJimBob would get his money. As soon as he got his money, he would then order the product and direct ship it to the customer. The profit was spent on eating out, new computer games, DVD’s, everything thing that BillyJoeJimBob wanted but until then couldn’t afford.

The party ended quickly. A customer sent an email saying they were about to leave the country for a business trip and had bought the scanner as a gift for their brother; could BillyJoeJimBob just ship the scanner to the brother instead? Trying to be helpful, BillyJoeJimBob agreed, and paid for the scanner to be shipped to the brother. Two days later, the customer filed a dispute saying that they never ordered the product and said it was a case of fraud. The funds were returned.

Since BillyJoeJimBob didn’t have enough cash in his PayPal account, the funds were directly taken from his bank account. Never one to be ready for a rainy day, that fund transfer wiped out all of BillyJoeJimBob’s bank account. BillyJoeJimBob called PayPal, but there was nothing they could do. You see, by shipping to the “brother’s” address, it wasn’t a verified PayPal address so there was no seller’s protection. Soured on the whole deal, BillyJoeJimBob stopped selling on eBay.

This happened to one of my buddies, someone I’ve known since grade school. He broke a cardinal rule of business: he didn’t have control of his cashflow.

Profit and cashflow are two totally different things. Profit is excess cash left over after expenses are paid. Cashflow is actual cash on hand. Cashflow doesn’t take into account the debts you have or bills you have to pay.

Cashflow management is one of the main reasons most businesses fail within 5 years. If the business is successful, it’s difficult for the owner to keep their hands out of the cookie jar of cashflow. They have access to all this money, why shouldn’t they use some of it? It’s theirs after all.

Entire books have been written about cashflow management. Here are a few important points to follow:

Keep a cash reserve on-hand. Keeping a rainy day fund handy will save your butt if an unforeseen expense rears its ugly head. A good guideline I follow is to have enough cash on-hand to be able to give refunds to every customer within the past 30 days.
Pay operational costs promptly. It’s your business operations that bring the income. If you can’t afford to keep current operations running, then everything will grind to a halt and no more income.
Don’t think about taking a salary. After all expenses are taken care of and the cash reserve is fully funded, invest your PROFITS (yes, it’s profit at this point) back into the business. Expand the business to make MORE money.

Cashflow management isn’t fun or exciting. Most of the time, it’s frustrating and stressful. Managing the cashflow of the business helps determine the strategy and direction of the business. Follow a conservative course, and your business will grow. Spend the cash like BillyJoeJimBob, and you will fail.

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Something You Need to Do Before You Start Your Business

Desty — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 01:26:41 +0000

Over the past few months, I’ve written several articles about starting a business

Today I had a young lady come to me about starting a new work-from-home business. I do have some experience in this, so I was willing to help anyway I could. She started going into how she was going to make and sell gift baskets. She was associated with several distributors so as to be able to include several products in the baskets. While we don’t make or sell gift baskets, our business is also based off of working with several distributors to offer several products to our customers. So far so good.

After going into the various different products she would have in the baskets, she asked what I thought. Generally, when I’m trying to help someone, I try to see everything from their point of view. I want to know what their plans are and what they’ll do in certain circumstances. So I asked, “Who do you plan to sell these baskets to?” She didn’t know.

How was she going to market these baskets? She didn’t know. I got the feeling that she really didn’t know what I was asking, so I tried again. “How do you plan to let people know that you have these baskets for sale?” She didn’t know, she was hoping that I would tell her what do to.

At that point, I suggested that she really needed to think about to whom she was going to sell to, and how she would get the word out before she actually invested any money into this, beyond maybe a enough materials for a single basket. The conversation went downhill from there, and probably ended up with some hurt feelings and a bruised ego.

It’s difficult when people ask for help with their business. People are extremely attached to their ideas. It’s a huge step just to tell someone that you’re wanting to start a business and to lay it all out for them. For the most part, my experience in talking about starting my own businesses with people who have never owned or ran a business is always the same.

You’ll lose money!
Don’t do it, I know someone who got sued!
You don’t know how to do that!
You can’t do that!

My problem is that I’m not a people person when it comes to advice. As hard as I try, I tend to express myself as blunt and to the point. Ask a question, I’ll do my best to answer it as fully as I can. Don’t expect alot of handholding from me. That’s what my wife is for

As you get the courage to talk to someone about your business idea, stop and ask yourself, are you truly ready for what they have to say? I remember going to my CPA with my very 1st business idea (which never got off the ground). He asked the very same questions, what was my target customer base, how would I market the business, how can you compete with similar businesses, etc. This was several years ago, so I hadn’t really thought things out that far beyond I wanted to start a business and this was what I wanted to do.

After you find a mentor who is willing to help you with your business, be willing to listen to what they have to say. They’re there to help you, not to plan your business for you.

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Business Expenses: Not an Excuse to Spend Money

Desty — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 01:29:40 +0000

Bloggers go to sleep at night, dreaming of their blogs making money. While there are several ways to make money online, the end result is always the same: Blog Revenue!

You just made $5000 last month from your blog. What are you going to do? A trip to Disney Land sounds nice, but really, what are you going to do?

The Reality of Making Money Online

I was listening to a book on tape I bought years ago about starting your first business. It was one of those “idea” books, heavy on the why’s and what to do, but empty on the how to do’s of actually starting your own business.

The focus of the book was to start a part time business and find ways to turn your normal personal expenses into business expenses. At first glance, this could seem to be a good thing. After-all, as a blogger, you have expenses; domain fees and hosting fees are fixed expenses. You know how much you must pay monthly or yearly for the cost of running your blog. Include into that the cost of your Internet connection (a must to run your business). Everything else is free and clear, ripe for taxation! Further business expenses can include paying for an online review, a custom designed WordPress template, and some Google AdWord advertising to target traffic to your blog. A new computer is also a good expense, although it has to be depreciated over a set amount of years.

Don’t get into the trap of trying to come up with creative ways to spend your business income just to get out of paying taxes. Accounts (bean counters) will tell you great ways to expense away your income so you will have to pay little or no taxes. Get this through your head: Everybody pays taxes. As a business you can control how many expenses you have but be warned. If you get flagged for an IRS audit, there is a chance that the more deductions you have and the more creative they are, that the deductions will be disallowed, possibly back for several years, and you will have to pay back taxes along with fines and late charges.

The Safe Way to Spend Your Blog’s Revenue

These are the 4 ways to spend your business income in a real way and won’t get you in trouble with the IRS, as long as you don’t lie on your taxes:

Invest the first 10% of your gross income. There are plans where you can invest tax free (IRA’s, Roth IRA’s, SEP’s, etc) and that good, but we’re looking for flexible investments vehicles where you can do what you want with the money. This includes withdrawing it to fund an emergency. The goal is the have that 10% make more money. You will have to pay taxes on this money, but getting it into the job of creating more money is the true path to wealth.
Pay operational expenses. These are the MUST DO bills that are required for the blog / business to continue to run. If these are not paid, then your business income will come to a halt.
Expand the business. This is the creative side of running a blog. What can you do to bring more readers to your blog? A paid review from John Chow for $400? AdWord advertising to bring readers from other blogs to your blog? Learn and start affiliate marketing to create a new stream of income? Let your mind wander. After making sure the business will continue, the main function of business income is to create MORE business income.
Your cut. Too many bloggers out there want this to be the 1st item on the list instead of the last item. Still want to take that trip to Disney Land? How about taking it 1st class airfare, staying at the expensive Disney Land Hotel in a suite, staying the whole week, and not having to worry about how much it costs? Get to learn these words: delayed gratification. Wait for it. Build your blog’s revenue. Get it increasing month after month. To get to this point you’ve had to invest your time building the blog from nothing. Don’t quit now. Keep building it until it’s making enough money that you can pay for that dream vacation, even after you’ve spent a ton of money expanding the blog to make MORE money!

To make a living and truly become a problogger, you need to treat all your revenue with respect and run things as a business. The main principle to keep in mind is that the blog’s income is to help the blog make more money, not to spend. Keep that in mind and you’ll eventually have more money that you thought possible from blogging.

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