Thinking of starting a web-based business? Here are 100 ideas to wet your appetite and, possibly, inspire you.
100+ Web Startup Business ideas
So, what do you think of them?
The 80-20 Rule
October 12, 2010 by 1 Comment
If you have a blog and want to grow it to be huge, there are several tried and tested things that you can do:
- write quality content
- promote that content
- use social media (e.g., Twitter and Facebook)
- use social bookmarking sites (e.g., Digg and Reddit)
- tweak your design
- chat with readers
- create Youtube videos
- article marketing
- submit your blog to directories
- search engine optimization
That’s a lot of stuff, eh? Can you imagine that a lot of the bloggers do all this for their blogs? How hard do you work on yours? The interesting thing is that for many, many bloggers doing just two of the above produces 80% of the gain. If you just wrote quality content and promoted it, you would be good. Think about it, 2 out of ten of the activities above lead to 80% of the gain.
The Pareto Principle
An Italian economist once observed that 80% of land in Italy was owned by 20% of the people. His name was Vilfredo Pareto, and that is where the principle got its name from. The Pareto principle, which is also called the 80-20 rule, states that for many events and things in life, 80% of the effects come from just 20% of the causes.
Did you know that Microsoft once found that by eliminating just 20%
of the largest bugs in its operating system 80% of the crashes
would stop? Interesting, eh?
Applying the Pareto Principle In Business
We all waste lots of time on trivial, repetitive tasks. This often means people are kept busy whether it is important or not, equipment is running whether needed or not, sales are made whether they are profitable or not.
“The value of the Pareto Principle is that it reminds you to focus on the 20 percent that matters. Of the things you do during your day, only 20 percent really matter. Those 20 percent produce 80 percent of your results. Identify and focus on those things. When the fire drills of the day begin to sap your time, remind yourself of the 20 percent you need to focus on. If something in the schedule has to slip, if something isn’t going to get done, make sure it’s not part of that 20 percent.” – About.com
Event Management 2.0
October 9, 2010 by 7 Comments
So, suppose you run an event management business. How do you market it online? Do you just slap on a website and sit back? I think not.
For you to get meaningful and sustained business online, it is not enough to have just a website, you need to have a website that establishes you as an authority in your field of business. You want it to be that if someone is online and thinking of event management in Kenya, they will not miss to think about you. Now this is quite hard to achieve, do not get me wrong. However, the Internet is an equalizer and you can accomplish this by pursuing a steady well thought out and bold plan. In my estimations, it can turn out to be a really cheap (relatively) but efficient marketing strategy and while you may not be the biggest in the industry, your marketing will make you seem just as big if not bigger than anyone else.
The big idea
If I was planning my wedding, I would be so very excited and I would want the whole world to know about it. If I could, I would have a column in the newspaper about my wedding plans and the day itself would be splashed all over the papers so that the whole world sees how wonderful my big white wedding was. And my relatives all over Kenya and possibly the world would see.
Of course I am not some Prince so I cannot have my way like that. What may work to achieve similar objectives, is a simple website. What if I had a very simple site, like a tiny blog, where I could update the whole world – including all my friends and family all over the world, of my wedding plans and share photos as I move closer and closer to the big day? Then on the big day itself I would chronicle the whole day on my little site (vua a live blog or live tweeting). That little site will live forever on the Internet as a “digital journal and photo album” of my wedding. I will tell almost everyone about it and they will all come visit – probably even my kids’ kids.
Now, most people aren’t web savvy enough to do this, and they may be too busy to do it anyway. What if you, as their event manager, offer such a service for all the weddings and other events that you organize? You would immortalise your clients’ events on the Internet and they will probably share the links to those mini sites with all their friends. Now, of course, on each mini site you will make it clearly known that the event was organised by you. The more events you immortalise this way, the more people share the mini sites with their friends, the more your name spreads on the Internet.
On the wedding/event days themselves you could even announce that the day’s proceedings and pictures will be available online at some web address, on Twitter, Facebook, etc so everyone will go away thinking “wow, these organisers are thorough” and they may visit the sites and find a link to you, and so on.
You will probably also be one of the very few event organisers that do this and it may turn out to be a major selling point and perhaps even a source of additional revenue – not to mention that once you get a number of event mini sites up, you will establish your name online and get precious “viral” marketing.
Can you imagine a gleeful bride showing off her wedding on Twitter and facebook and in all the conversations your name as the event organisers comes up again and again? Can you imagine one of the really really hot parties in town having a website where there is a live update for all that is going on at the party (with pics, music and snippets of video) – won’t the people who did not make it wish they were at the party?
What would it take to do this?
Contrary to what you may be thinking, all the above is quite cheap and easy to do, if you partner with someone who knows what he is doing. Believe it or not, making this happen can be done for under Kshs 15,000/- per event (at least going by Nickel Pro rates). The idea is to make a mini-site for the event, and offer live blogging and live socail media updating on the day of the event itself.
Benefits
- After doing a few such events, you may actually be able to charge extra for this
- Your customers will be probably “wowed”
- You will get material cheaply for your company blog
- You will be an event organiser at the forefront of technology
- Your customers will be effectively recruited as people who market you online by telling their friends and family about the mini sites you created
- You will quite possibly get “viral” marketing effects
- Your name will spread in the online space
- It is quite probable that you will get many new customers who learn of you solely online
Caveats
This is not a short-term marketing strategy.
What do you think of this idea? Could it work? More importantly, who has the guts to try it out? No balls, no babies!
Photo courtesy of AZrainman.
Some Interesting Kenyan Sites #7
October 3, 2010 by 6 Comments
Nairobi Swahili – this is the website of one Oloo, a Swahili teacher in Nairobi. I think the site is very well done and a rare gem in the (sometimes shocking) Kenyan web design industry. The site is pleasing to look at and does a good job of selling Mr. Oloo’s Swahili courses. Kudos to him, and the web designers.
Mara Enkipai – there’s a big drive to “sell Kenyan tourism” online spearheaded by the government. The sad truth is that 99% of all tourism related sites in Kenya are rather shoddy jobs that may actually detract from Kenya’s image. This is NOT the case with Mara Enkipai – the site is extremely well done and something that I’d be proud for people all over the world to see as the first glimpse of what Kenya has to offer. May other tour firms and operators follow suit!
Flops
Kenya Teachers’ Service Commission – for an organisation as big as the TSC, this is a pretty shameful site – it looks unfinished and the design, well, is poor at best. It looks more like a student’s high school project than a professionally done website of a national organisation.
Free Internet Marketing Textbook
September 27, 2010 by Leave a Comment
In this day and age, it is almost suicidal to ignore the Internet’s role in marketing. If you want to do any kind of online business, Internet marketing is, of course, critical. The strange thing is that even for normal, “brick and mortar”, businesses, it is folly to ignore the Internet.
“We live in an era where companies that are not positioning and marketing their brands online are suffering for it. Alas, the Web is a scary place for traditional marketers, whether they work on the agency or client side. After years of successfully relying on conventional media, there is suddenly a technological monster that demands to be addressed. With eMarketing: The Essential Guide to Online Marketing, marketers everywhere can become skilled at harnessing the power of the Internet and using it for the benefit of their brands. With a little help from the experts, it’s never too late to learn.” – Quirk eMarketing
How Not To Get Lost In Business (or Anything Else)
September 24, 2010 by 1 Comment
Have you ever sat behind the steering wheel of a car without knowing where you are going? Sounds bizarre, right? What is more bizarre is that we do this every day in our professional lives without finding it disturbing! If you are smart (which I am sure you are and that is why you are reading Like Chapaa!), then you would have figured out that we are talking about GOALS which are important when we leave the house as well as when we want to go ahead in our personal and professional lives.
In fact, my take on this is that having a goal makes life easier by giving us a direction and sense of purpose. If you want to be successful, then one of the things which you need to do is to set goals in EVERYTHING YOU DO. This may seem like a lot of work, but goal setting a habit forming activity and when you see the results, you will not regret it.
So how do you SET goals?
Goals are usually things which we want to achieve in life. Personally, you might have a goal to lose weight (ouch!), professionally it can be to increase turnover, employee productivity, customer satisfaction etc. Once you have a broad goal…you pretty much have a direction which then needs to be broken down into activities that lead towards that direction.
How do you DOCUMENT a goal?
You can have long term or short term goals and their categorization is dependent on the time frame it will take to achieve them. For example, you can give yourself two months to lose four pounds or twelve months to increase customer satisfaction. Once you categorize this, you need to backtrack a bit and break it down into activities which will lead you to the goal.
Remember my analogy about the car? Activities to reach a place, usually involve, starting the car, checking the route, driving, parking, etc. Similarly, you need to document steps which will help you get to this goal.
After documentation comes EXECUTION
This is actually the most difficult part of achieving your goal….you can only get it right if you execute the various steps correctly. This is the place where the difference between KNOWING and DOING can be understood well. Good planning makes it easy to reach a goal. Each step should be understood properly as that will influence the overall quality of the results of achieving your goal. For example, a well planned campaign for higher customer satisfaction is likely to get you close to 80% of your goal while a poorly planned one may get you only 10%.
A goal is only as good as its metrics!
Metrics are nothing but numbers which can help you measure your goals and are as important as setting a goal in the first place. I have to lose weight is a meaningless goal if you don’t tie it with a number. Similarly, a goal to increase sales numbers is unlikely to be of any point if you don’t attach a number to it…let’s say a 30% increase from current levels. In fact, it is only with metrics that it makes sense to have goals in the first place.
There…I have put up my strong feelings towards goals and their measurements and hope to cover metrics in a business in another blog very soon!