How To Start A Movement

October 16, 2010 by 2 Comments

If you’ve learned a lot about leadership and making a movement, then let’s watch a movement happen, start to finish, in under 3 minutes, and dissect some lessons:

A leader needs the guts to stand alone and look ridiculous. But what he’s doing is so simple, it’s almost instructional. This is key. You must be easy to follow!

Now comes the first follower with a crucial role: he publicly shows everyone how to follow. Notice the leader embraces him as an equal, so it’s not about the leader anymore – it’s about them, plural. Notice he’s calling to his friends to join in. It takes guts to be a first follower! You stand out and brave ridicule, yourself. Being a first follower is an under-appreciated form of leadership. The first follower transforms a lone nut into a leader. If the leader is the flint, the first follower is the spark that makes the fire…

What’s the lesson here? To be a leader takes guts, but you are not a leader if you are alone – you need followers and you need to embrace your first followers as equals – you need to make them as visible as you are because they validate you.

Filed Under: Internet Culture, Miscellaneous Tagged With:

New Media Vs Traditional Media

October 12, 2010 by 1 Comment

Inari Media has a really interesting post about the Nation Media Group. The article is worth a read, please have a look.

In case you haven’t read that article, it is about an article by Charles Onyango-Obbo (one of the big wigs at NMG) who wrote an article that lacked logic and should not have been published, much less by what many consider to be an authoritative newspaper. Inari concludes by saying, “this is the moment when Kenyan blogs became better than traditional media.”

Is this so? Where do you get your news, the Kenyan papers or Kenyan blogs and other sites? Which do you trust more?

Personally, I think the only reason why Kenyan newspapers, as they are, still survive is because a lot of the country still cannot access the Internet. When that happens, it’ll be definite doom. Why? Because our papers, to me, are seldom interesting. For example, I regularly go through the Daily Nation and I find only one or two articles that really really hold my interest. But I can go to Kenya Moja (which aggregates a lot of Kenyan sites and blog) and spend a couple of hours reading very interesting stuff written by passionate people (often experts in their fields).

Is Kenya’s traditional media doomed?

Filed Under: Internet Culture

Earning More Money Has LITTLE to Do With Uni Degrees

October 4, 2010 by 2 Comments

Let’s play pretend. Let’s say you are a woman, with one beloved son. Just play along. So your son is in From 3 and is having REAL trouble with Math at school. So for the school holidays, you decide to find a tutor for him. Who would you hire:

  1. Mr. Mike – a math professor who teaches at the University
  2. Mr. Bob – a down-to-earth math tutor who specializes in high school math and all your friends and neighbors testify to his ability to tutor high school math.

Who would you hire? My guess is that you, and almost everybody else, would hire Mr. Bob. Would it matter if Mr. Bob never went to uni? I think all that matters is that Mr. Bob can get your son’s grades up, no? How many kids would Mr. Bob need to teach to make huge sums of money at today’s rates?

“Most people are looking for a magic bullet, and rather than trying to figure out how to earn money themselves, they ‘outsource’ it to some university or degree program. That way, the reasoning goes, they can read some books, take a couple tests, get a degree, and…then what? Money falls down from trees?” – Ramit Sethi

Sorry, but it doesn’t work that way! So what if you get a degree? If you want to earn significant amounts of money you have to WORK. You have to work hard at understanding your customers, and presenting yourself in such a way that they will just come to you. Like Mr. Bob did (above).

The alternative is to dream about earning money and do nothing about it. Or worse, get a worthless degree that costs you lots of money but doesn’t help you increase your earnings.

Filed Under: Miscellaneous

Just Earn More Money!

October 2, 2010 by Leave a Comment

I got an interesting email from Ramit Sethi:

“Kelly, have you ever noticed how every financial “expert” says the same thing over and over?

“Stop spending money on lattes!”
“No, you can’t afford those jeans.”
“Keep a budget! Really!”

None of those tips work. In fact, they’re inherently flawed because they try to RESTRICT you from doing what you want to do.

Here’s something interesting.

Ever wonder why no personal-finance “experts” write about earning more?

Because they don’t know how.

That’s right — 99% of them have a 9-5 job and have no idea how to earn more money. So they focus on bite-sized tips that they think will satisfy most people…but these tips are the same old things you’ve heard for the last 20 years.

Today, I’m going to help you focus on the Big Win of earning more money.”

Follow the link: 5 Reasons Why Earning More Is WAY More Powerful Than Frugality

Interesting, eh?

Filed Under: Make Money

3 Steps To Internet Business

September 29, 2010 by 1 Comment

Step 1: Content
Good Content is the key to a good long-term online business. Why? Because marketing costs time and money. You want to have content that gets passed on naturally through the internet. You still need to do marketing but you’re hoping much of your marketing will be done freely through word-of-mouth. And to leverage word-of-mouth, you need to have quality content worth talking about.

So, spend a lot of time planning and producing your content. Create a ‘content blueprint’ to organize your content ideas. For me, this blueprint is a list of different types of content. For example:

  • Tutorials
  • Interviews
  • News
  • Commentary on industry happenings
  • Videos
  • Series of articles on one topic

Step 2: Marketing
Next comes marketing. With the growing amount of information on the internet, marketing has become more important. There are many sites with great content that don’t have much traffic because no one knows about them. Marketing is simply the activity of letting people know about your site.

I would create a ‘marketing blueprint’. However, I spend most of my marketing time in a few marketing channels. It’s not advisable to stretch your marketing efforts too thin. Marketing channels take time to cultivate before they’re fully effective. Of course, if you have a lot of time for marketing or the money to outsource, go ahead and use more marketing channels.

Here are some marketing methods that have proven effective for webmasters:

  • Blog commenting
  • Social media sites
  • Press releases
  • Forum posting
  • Guest blogging
  • Article submission
  • Video submission

Step 3: Monetization
Finally, we have monetization. Now that you’ve thought about content and marketing, you can focus on converting your traffic into dollars. The key here is understanding your traffic. Why are they coming to your site? What are their problems? What can you sell them that would solve their problems?

Also, think of advertisers with products your audience would find useful. Contact those advertisers and see if they would be partner with you.

Here are some methods for monetizing your site:

  • Contextual advertising
  • Advertising through a broker
  • Direct advertising
  • Reviews
  • Affiliate marketing
  • Sell your own product or service
  • Donations

That’s it! Do you have any questions? We have answers!

Filed Under: Make Money, Small Business Tagged With:

The Perfect Business

September 26, 2010 by 1 Comment

I’ve always disliked multi level marketing (sometimes derogatorily called ‘pyramid schemes’) like GNLD. But today, I watched the video below and it changed my perception of these models. Allow me to explain.

In the business world, there are four types of people:

  1. Employees
  2. Self-employed people (solo acts)
  3. Business owners
  4. Inverstors

The poor people of this world are employees and self-employed people. Employees work hard to build businesses that they will never own and are always at risk of losing everything. Self-employed people are safer than employees – what they build, they own but the business depends wholly on them and if anything happens to them, the business fails and financial doom ensues.

Business owners and investors are the rich people of the world. They do not work for money, their money works for them. Clearly, we should all try and learn how to build businesses and invest wisely. It is a subject that should be taught in every school, but sadly is not. Therefore, an overwhelming majority of the population of any country, Kenya included, grows up into adulthood with little idea of how to actually build and grow a business.

Because we should all learn how to build businesses, a great challenge exists for the majority of people – how do you learn how to do business? In the video below, Robert T Kiyosaki, author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad says that the simplest, fastest and safest way to learn how to do business is through companies that offer multi-level marketing. Think about it. If you join a company like GNLD to sell their products, they will support you in all sorts of ways to make sure that you make sales and become successful. While you are doing this, you are learning how to do business in a safe and supportive environment. You could then easily stop the GNLD stuff and set up your own venture using your newly acquired skills and experiences. Makes sense? Watch the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGMUspZyNuo

What do you think?

Filed Under: Make Money, Small Business

Do You Also Make This Mistake In Business?

September 14, 2010 by Leave a Comment

As the person who has the last say in everything that happens in my business, I, like all other business owners, run the risk of trying to micro-manage every last detail. One of the greatest lessons that I am learning is that I must simply let some things go. Having my “signature” on all matters of my business is one thing; having my hand in every single task and function is quite another.

Because this business is my heart and soul, I want to ensure that everything is done right. I want to oversee all these aspects because I know the way in which I want things done and I want to make sure that tasks are completed in a way that reflects my business and personal philosophy. This only makes sense—like most other business owners, I have saved and scrimped and fretted. The responsibility for success is most assuredly on my shoulders, so I want to make sure that success will come.

The only problem with this is that overseeing every little aspect of the business can become a full-time job in itself. I find myself staying late at night putting check-marks on my employees’ work and ensuring that it all comes up to snuff, when I could be allocating time to the tasks that I am actually responsible for as the owner of my business. Not only does this kind of task control take over my professional life, it also hurts my personal life as well.

For example: if I had it my way, I would have a clean list of prospective clients in our database, but the fact is that it really doesn’t matter. I can clean the list or just delete the questionable ones. Yet, this is just one example of how I realize that I need to keep my hands out of each of these aspects of my business. As the owner of my business, it is not my job to keep a fresh list of prospects in our database, nor is it up to me to hire entry level staff and interview interns. The time that I spend cleaning something up is time that I could be spending on larger questions facing my business such as future considerations and the overall functionality of the organization.

Really, when you think about it, this micro-management style really comes down to a lack of confidence in my staff and a belief that only I am aware of how to do things the way that I think they should be done. It is a controlling style of management, and it is not the most effective personnel management style. How inspired will my employees feel if I don’t show them even a modicum of trust and respect in their decision making . They will likely not feel too eager to take initiative or to make suggestions, if they feel that I will inevitably shoot down their input, or alter it severely in most cases.

In this respect, it is important to find that necessary balance between having your say and vision obvious in your business, but also allowing your staff to work for you, not against you. You need to firstly hire staff that you believe share your vision and are capable of delivering that to your clients, and will make decisions similar to your own, in your absence. This will leave you time to focus on the bigger questions facing your business and you can feel rest assured that your staff are looking after the “little problems” on your behalf.

Filed Under: Small Business