Archives for June 2010

Doing it like Fareed

June 9, 2010 by 5 Comments

I’m not a big fan of X-Fm Djs – I find them annoying. But I love my rock, so I’m glued to the station all day.

Fareed Khimani I have massive issues with. He has a nice voice, and he’s kind of cute, but he has this thing: nag-nag-nag-whine. Also, he can be a little rude – which I guess is the whole point of the show.

I like him for one thing though: he got me to like Alice in Chains. Let me explain.

Some weeks ago, I was in a matatu on my way to work. Almost all matatus like to play The Maina and King’ang’i show, or as I prefer to call it, Matatu FM. Matatu FM has great music, but the presenters annoy me. Their call-ins are even worse. So my morning routine is get into a mat, plug in my earphones, tune in to X-Fm, and crank it loud enough to drown the matatu.

Yes, I expect to be deaf soon.

Anyway, I was listening to Fareed, and he started talking about how he was going to play the coolest song ever, and how it would get us all jumping, and how if we didn’t like the song, we were boring.

He hyped the song five more times before he finally played it – twice. It was just a regular rock song, and I didn’t get what the hype was about. But because he’s said it so many times, the name stuck in my head.

The name of the song in Man in the box, by the rock band Alice in Chains.

Later, he picked out his favourite part of the song, which is the riff-and-chant in the beginning. He played that bit over and over again, explaining how cool it was and why.

Then, he declared it the ‘May Traffic Song’, and for the next one month, he  played it two or three times a show, usually after the traffic update. I learnt to expect the song, and within a few days, I’d learnt some of the words.

I still have no clue what the song is about, but when I eventually found myself singing along and enjoying – even loving  it, I was amused. The song in itself didn’t impact me, but hearing Fareed get so excited about it, and having it played so often, I guess it grew on me.

So here are some business lessons we can learn from this cute, annoying man.

1. It’s all about hype

Create awareness of your product, service, or business. Make it a big deal. It can be word of mouth, hot air balloons, luminous rollerblades, a regular twitter account, glow-in-the-dark vuvuzela, anything really.

Your product doesn’t have to match the hype, but it will get noticed. And once prospective clients notice, you’ll have a foot in the door. That’s always a good place to start.

2. Be persistent

Fareed’s song didn’t impact me the first time I heard it – or even the second or third. But on day 2, I noticed it’s great walking music, and by day 3, I liked the words to the song. They are so fun to yell to.

Keep yourself in the client’s mind. Make follow-up calls, get sponsored in prominent places, remain visible.

3. Be consistent

The thing with this song is it doesn’t change. You’ll hear it a million times and it sounds exactly the same. You might pick a word or note that you hadn’t heard before, but the content is the same.

Once your client notices you and starts to like you, be sure that the thing they like is always there. Going herbal can sometimes be a bad thing.

4. Tap into mnemonics

People make links in their heads, often without knowing it. Baby girls get pink, little boys get blue, metro kids wear orange, valentines means chocolates, roses mean passion and love. There isn’t any specific reason for this. They’re all just trends that caught on.

Fareed go me to associate man in the box with traffic. So every time I’m in a jam, I wait to hear the song play, even when I’m tuned to a different station.

Associate your product with something popular, or trendy, or common, something with staying power, something that clients see every day. They’ll become conditioned to your work. That’s why in Kenya, all detergents are ‘Omo’ and all margarine is ‘Blue band’.

5. Stand out

This song has a great riff, rebellious lyrics, and an interesting beat. But more than that, the band has an amazing name. It’s hard to forget anyone called Alice in Chains. Why is Alice in Chains? What did she do? What kind of chains are they? And more to the point, who the- is Alice?

Have your product stand out. It can be as simple as giving it a catchy name or colour, or as complex as making it actually good. You could also pull a saf-com and make it really, really ugly.  After all, cute fades – just look how quickly we get bored of babies.

Either way, pull a Krest with it and stand out from the crowd. Make it memorable.

Speaking of sodas and pop music, there’s a Sprite advert on TV that has teenagers ramming each other and making bubbles. At some point, a really prettylady makes a stage dive.

I have no clue what the advert means, but I love the music behind it. Does anyone know what it is?

Crystal Ading’ is a professional author, editor, rock lover and mother. Her work is available through www.threeceebee.com.

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With:

How To Run a Virtual Business

June 8, 2010 by Leave a Comment

I hate to call our business a virtual one, but that really is what it is. We don’t have a bricks-and-mortar office location (unless the post office counts) besides our home offices. Some clients might consider it unprofessional but by running our business remotely, we are able to operate more efficiently and at a lower cost. We have created systems to allow us to operate our virtual business with the same effectiveness if we had an office full of people.
The Advantages of Operating in a Virtual Business

  • The biggest advantage of running a business is the significant cost savings. Without having to pay tens of thousands per month in rent, we have more flexibility in our cash flow and a much lower overhead costs.
  • We can run the business remotely. We are not tied to a particular location. We can quite literally work from anywhere in the world.
  • No one has to be in the same location. For instance, I study in the US and only come home occasionally but the business still runs smooth! We talk often and e-mail several times a day, but we aren’t forced to be in the same location. We can also hire employees and sub-contractors from different locations.
  • You can live wherever you want. This is similar to the last one but it’s a bit different. When I come back home I do not want to live in Nairobi. If our office was based there, this would not even be an option.

Running our Virtual Business
Creating a virtual business was a necessity based on how we started – part time. If we weren’t working on the business full-time, there was no way that we could have justified creating a bricks-and-mortar office for a business in which we almost never meet our clients. Once we went full-time, there was no need to change what worked. Here are some of the simple steps we took by necessity and now, by choice, to run our “virtual busines”.

  1. Don’t Look like a Virtual Business – A business without an office, doesn’t always inspire the most confidence in potential clients, so make sure that you have all the outward appearance of a professional business. This is pretty easy and usually just means having office phone lines, publicly displayed physical offices (which my actually be your dad’s), normal office hours, etc.
  2. Always Choose Online Software – By necessity, we have always gone with online applications as opposed to desktop applications so that we could access the same information from multiple locations. For example, we are a huge fan of Google Apps over any of the other applications. We are also thinking of going with the online version of Quickbooks over their standard desktop applications. One of the other advantages is that it provides more dependability. Even if a computer crashes, we have nothing to worry about since it’s just a web site away.
  3. Make Sure Your Tools Work Remotely – Similar to the last point but one of the first things that we did when setting up our business was to get a VoIP business line. It’s not that big of a deal now but it was pretty new then. We wanted something that we could operate from anywhere and that was configurable and accessible from the web. We also use tools like eFax so that we can both receive faxes and we have an online version, which is much easier for us to operate with. We also have e-mail accessilbe phones so that we aren’t tied to our computers (which need to be laptops, of course!)
  4. Keep Soft Copies of Everything – Again, by necessity, we have been forced to keep things online instead of printing them out and dealing with them by hand. Instead of filing cabinets, we try to keep everything on an online back-up site.

The Future of Our Remote Business
Someday, we may get a formal office location, and that’s only because it will be more cost advantageous when we bring some of our outsourced work in house. However, that doesn’t mean that we won’t still run a virtual business. Since I’m so lazy, there is no way I will be able to make it into an office everyday or have less than 2 vacations a month. Therefore, we will still need to run everything remotely.

Filed Under: Internet Culture, Make Money, Small Business, Tips Hacking and Reviews Tagged With:

3 Hot Tips For Online Forex Traders

June 8, 2010 by 2 Comments

If you’re just starting trading Forex, there are a few tips that can save you time, work and money.

The first tip is extremely simple:

1. Trade just a single currency pair – Most professionals trade just one or 2 currency pairs at most. However, most beginners tend to try to trade all the currency pairs. If you’re just starting trading Forex, it’s a good idea to trade for example the EUR/USD. Don’t trade anything else unless you already have lots of experience with this currency pair and feel you can start trading 2 currency pairs.

2. Trade the larger time-frames – Other common mistake in Forex is that traders try to make a quick buck. This way they tend to trade intraday charts in order to capture fast profits. This is a mistake. No matter what strategy or system you’re using, there’s a good probability that it will work much better on larger time frames. If you decide to start trading using, for example, a 4 hours chart, you’re way ahead of traders that try to trade on a 5 minute chart. The truth is that in the intraday charts there’s much noise, and since you can’t trade 24 hours a day, you end up losing some of the best movements. If you’re trading larger time frames, you’ll trade with less stress and you’ll be able to capture bigger trends. With these 2 advantages, it will be easier to start making money in Forex.

3. You need to use good risk management rules – Don’t start using too much leverage, because if you do so, a single mistake can make you lose your entire account. If you start by risking no more than 2% or 5% of your account on a single trade, you’re protecting your account in case something goes wrong. This is one of the best tips you can follow in Forex. Most traders lose money because they use too much margin. They end up losing all their account before they even learn how to trade Forex successfully.

If you follow these simple 3 tips, you’ll be on the right track to trade Forex successfully. These rules are simple but highly successful.

If you would like to learn more about online forex trading, please contact Moses.

Filed Under: Make Money Tagged With:

The Four Letter Word That Can Make You and Your Work Irresistible

June 5, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Love is a four letter word in the business world. It makes us uncomfortable. It is inappropriate and even taboo.

It can also make you and your work irresistible.

Download the ebook: [download id=”32″]

How do you like it?

Filed Under: Miscellaneous Tagged With:

How To Increase Revenue By Decreasing Effort

June 3, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Work?When Sergey Brin and Larry Page founded Google, they created the original search engine based on a research project that they did at Stanford. Once they thought they had a real idea to work with, they rented out the garage of a house to begin their business and to continue working on their search engine. This was all occurring around 1997 and 1998. Google didn’t start making any money until almost 5 years later. However, the Google co-founders spent most of that time working on their business and not programming their search engine.

The lesson with their story is that they realized that they couldn’t continue building their product – they needed to build their business, even if there was no revenue coming in (there were investors to provide them with cash to survive on). If they continued to work IN the business instead of ON the business, the company would not have been the success it is today.

I’m not sure what specific actions they took to build the business but they had to implement systems and processes so that other people could work in the business (building and improving the search engine) while they could grow the business (getting financing, hiring people, creating systems to generate revenue).

As a small business owner, the only way you can have a truly successful business is by stepping outside of your everyday activities and create a self-sufficient business. It might seem like it will cost you more money but in the end, it is the only way to drastically increase your revenues while decreasing the effort you put into the business:

1. Create a Manual
No matter what task you are doing for your business, write down the steps you take in a manual. It might seem like more work without any direct benefit but this step is probably the most important thing you can do for your new business. The next time you do the activity, it makes it that much easier because you just have to follow the steps that you wrote down. It also makes it easy to hand it off to someone else to do in the future.

2. Outsource as much work as Possible
This doesn’t mean that you have to ship your entire business to India. It just means that you have to find someone to do a lot of the tasks that you do yourself. It could be something as simple as distributing marketing materials, doing weekly bookkeeping activities, or providing support to existing customers. It’s very easy to hire a virtual assistant to get stuff done for you.

If you completed Step #1, you just have to hand it over to someone else to complete. It might seem like a waste to pay someone Kshs 5,000/- to do something that is so easy for you to do but imagine if you can spend that saved time on 1 thing that will increase your revenue by Kshs 20,000? You increase your revenues and there is less work that you have to do.

3. Define a Sales Process
If you don’t have a defined sales process and just wing it with every new lead or visitor to your web site or place of business, you are missing out on a significant amount of business. You are reinventing the wheel each time you get a new prospect so you are spending too much effort on that initial sales effort.

It also means that you are not perfecting your sales process so that you can increase the effectiveness of your sales process. By finding a system that works, you can constantly apply that and make changes to increase the effectiveness of it. It also minimizes the human element so that you are not as reliant on a superstar sales person (whether it’s you or someone else). By having a sales process in place, you will increase your conversions and increase your revenues without any additional work on your end. You are just replicating what has already worked.

4. Automate Your Sales and Operational Processes
This draws on much of the first 3 steps. Once you have created a manual and have systems that are beginning to work, you need to work on automating processes as much as possible. If you’re automating your sales process, maybe you send the same basic e-mail to potential leads through an e-mail auto-responder. If you call to set sales appointments with leads, maybe you can hire someone to do that part of the process for you.

As far as automating your operational processes, software is often the best way to do this. See if you can purchase a product that will automate part of your process. It might even be worth it to hire a developer to build a program to help you automate part of your set-up or service delivery process.

5. Act on Regular Tasks Less Frequently
Start setting aside time each day, or week, or month for specific processes. I used to get in the bad habit of working on accounting tasks every day. Not that it’s so bad to stay on top of that stuff, but by focusing my attention on it once per week instead of each day, saved me a tremendous amount of time. I love checking on the status of some of my marketing efforts but I must force myself to wait until my regular time each week so that I’m not repeating the same thing every day.

Increase Your Revenues and Decrease Your Efforts
Creating a new business requires a tremendous amount of upfront time and effort. Successfully growing your business means creating systems and processes so that other people can work in the business while you grow it by working on the business. This is the only way that you can significantly increase the revenue in your business while decreasing your effort. In fact, it’s the only way to really build a business. Otherwise, you’re basically just a one employee company and you will never get much bigger than that.

Photo courtesy of eneas.

Filed Under: Make Money, Small Business Tagged With:

Earn From Resume Writing

June 1, 2010 by 4 Comments

At some time, it’s better to leave your brain on the loose – right? It’s better to give it the greatest freedom it deserves and it’s then and only then, that it will pick up many ideas – both dirty and fresh. At this point, you don’t need to care what it picks up, you will sort good from bad later on. It is under this principle that My brain picked up as many ideas as it could and when I started separating the good from the bad, I realized I was almost throwing one important idea to the dust bin, so I quickly picked it back, dusted it and decided to research more about it and I realized, wow, you can actually earn from writing professional resumes – God! ever thought of it?

Come on let’s face it, Times are tough, and we’re moving ever deeper into the age of specialization. Employers are demanding to know more about the applicant – their work record, natural talents and personality traits. They want more information upon which to base their interview selections than just the cold facts on the application form. Personnel managers are placing a higher premium on their time, and delegating to others the job of “weeding out” the unqualified applicants from those whose backgrounds and goals come closest to fitting the needs of the company.

To get in to see the person doing the hiring nowadays, the job applicant has to “sell the short-stopper,” and that calls for a professionally written resume. More and more firms are demanding resumes. Prove me wrong on this one. Most of the jobs worth having will require a written resume before even an initial interview is granted. On the other side of the coin is that Probably 80 percent of the people searching for jobs don’t have a resume. Of the 20 percent who do have resumes, many are ineffective; they simply do not adequately present the applicant’s total qualifications. Everyone – with or without a resume – is looking for this key: A professionally written resume, a sales presentation of their qualifications and experience that will get the job for them – the job they want. The job hunters are wound up in their own specialties and problems. They don’t know how, and they don’t have the time – AND they’re willing to pay you to put it all together for them.The demand for this service is growing daily. Here’s a business you can start for virtually nothing, parlay into a million dollar enterprise in less than two years – trust me!

Setting Up a Resume Writing Business
There is no special knowledge, education or experience required. Knowing the general format of a “modern resume,” and the ability to keep yourself up-to-date on new resume formats is the only qualifications you need. There are so many newsletters, websites, blogs and short courses on resume writing, you can consider signing up for some.

You’ll need a computer, professional quality printer. You can begin, with a lower quality printer but “think big” if you’re to survive in any business. You don’t have to book a big office at the city center or so, just start from the comfort of your bedroom.

Invest in a good book on how to write “job-winning” resumes. Select a book or eBook which discusses both the cover letter and the format of the body of the resume. You can also find free articles on the internet. Also study different types of modern resumes. You can check some here, www.bestsampleresume.com

In addition, you probably, at some point, will need a resume writing software that will help you. If you need a free software to get you started you can e-mail me on resumwriter@gmail.com.

Now that you’re set to go, there comes popularizing your services. If you have an e-mail list, you can send this to your subscribers explaining your services in details. You can also print posters and put them in relevant places. The notice boards at Odeon Cinema is a good example. You could also consider running an advert in the local newspapers or websites like Career Point Kenya depending on your advertising budget. Aside, you can print business cards and circulate them around. you can also create your blog and explain your services.

You’re now done. From there, you should start thinking of how to organize interviews with your future clients and establishing competitive prices that will keep you in business.

If you would like to get more tips on resume writing and frequent updates on online resume writing jobs plus other online money making opportunities, send the word, “money” to 4445.

Good luck!

Filed Under: Lazyweb, Make Money, Miscellaneous Tagged With: , ,