All posts in Business

Mobile website for your business in 2 minutes

by Chris M on February 6, 2012 in Business, Mobile with 6 Comments

Yesterday I gave you 5 tips for website owners and today I’m going to show you a really simple way to put together a mobile website for your business using Google Sites.

Google Sites allows you, as a business owner, to create a mobile website for your business in a few simple steps and the best part is that it’s free. The process should only take you a few minutes as there are only 2 steps: selecting a template and choosing a colour. Once you’ve selected a template and chosen a colour, your next step is to alter the template to suite your needs and that only takes a few minutes too.

Here’s a quick site I put together – easy search, quick call to attentions:

Please click to enlarge.

This only took a couple minutes and you could get one too. When you’re done, your website address would be something along the lines of: https://sites.google.com/site/yourcompanyname/

Get started here.

How To Get A Job Using LinkedIn

by Chris M on January 26, 2012 in Business, Networking with 2 Comments

We usually use social media to hang out with friends and be social. Social media is also about networking, and getting to know new people. Social networking is also about making connections with people that we would not normally meet, but whom we share mutual interests with.

The most obvious place to start would be LinkedIn, the professional social network. It allows you to add professional and personal information to your profile, add your CV or resume, and lets you link your Twitter and Facebook profiles, which, if handled correctly, can be a good idea. It is important that you keep your professional information relevant, up to date and comprehensive. In fact, LinkedIn also has a recommendation feature, whereby you can ask your contacts to recommend you for a specific job you did. This contact can be an employer, a colleague or even a customer.

With LinkedIn, there are many ways of tackling your job search. The most obvious of these would be to go directly to the Jobs tab in the LinkedIn navigation bar, or the Jobs You May Be Interested box in the sidebar. These job recommendations are based on the keywords in the information that you’ve provided regarding your current and past work experience.

Another option would be to target specific companies that you would like to work with. You can search the company’s employees to see if you know someone within the company, or perhaps any mutual connections and request an introduction.

You could also choose to send an email to your LinkedIn network, informing them of your availability, but I would advise against this, as it could come across as spam. Remember, you want to keep your LinkedIn connections and grow your network to advance your career, not jeopardise it.

LinkedIn also has status updates. It would be a good idea to update often, as it shows that you are taking time to develop your professional networks. Keep your updates relevant to your industry and keep them professional.

It is also recommended that you join groups that are related to your career interests. Play an active role within those groups, take part in discussions and build relationships. Once you’ve built solid relationships, add those people to your contacts and grow your network.

LinkedIn also has a Questions and Answers section that can greatly work to your advantage. Look for questions that are relevant to your industry and answer as many of them as possible. By answering questions and helping people, you will come across as an expert, making it particularly attractive for potential employers to take a look at your profile and possibly contact you with a job offer.

LinkedIn is a particularly useful tool while searching for a job, but you should keep in mind that you should take some time in cleaning up and maintaining your online persona. Anyone can do a Google search of your name and most times it will return results from social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

Have you got any other tips for getting a job using LinkedIn? Tell us all about it in the comments below.

Business owners, get that Google+ Page going

by Chris M on January 25, 2012 in Business, Search Engine Optimization with No comments

Google has announced that it will be combining social and search – what this means is that when you perform a search on Google, you’ll see two sets of results, those normal top 10 organic results, but also results based on your connections; by connections, I’m referring to your Google+ circles that you’ve built up.

I wrote a post about creating a Google+ page and I’ve received some great feedback from readers, so I wanted to take this a little further and share some of the things I’ve picked up since Google announced the combination.

Google+ is not really any different to Twitter or Facebook in the sense that building an audience is important, an audience shows credibility, trust and leadership, so the same applies for Google+ – grow your circles. The easiest way to grow your circles is to place a Google +1 button on your website (http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/), this allows people to automatically add you to their circles. As a side tip, I’ve seen a lot of the big news websites doing clever things like encouraging readers to join their circle on posts that are related to any topic around Google – The same applies for posts about Twitter or Facebook, if you think about it, someone who’s reading a post on Twitter, for example, would be more inclined to follow you on Twitter than like your Facebook page, so be clever, encourage your audience to “join” your social networks relative to the content they are reading.

Of course, one of the most important things about your Google+ page is to ensure that you have a plan of action, that you’ve thought about the content you want to produce and share, and that you have a long term goal that you head towards. Like any form of search engine optimization, when it comes to writing content, make sure your content is unique, make sure it’s carefully thought out and communicated in a manner that might attract other Google+ users to share your content – this really is the powerful part, getting people to share your content (along with a good SEO strategy) and you will find yourself dominating the SERPs once again because you’ll have organic search and social search covered.

Something I’ve started looking at is the different types of circles you can create and thus group people together. Just like Twitter lists, in Google+ you can create your circles, fill them up with relevant people and then engage with the different circles with content that would probably interest them – this segmentation of users is highly effective.

It’s really important to recognize what Google is doing, how they are shaping things and how to keep up to date with all their changes.

Please feel free to add iMod to your circles by clicking here: https://plus.google.com/b/107825047085291830888/

A story will help you with your startup/venture

by Chris M on January 18, 2012 in Business, Marketing, My Life with 3 Comments

Last week I was catching up on some shows on This Week in Startups and in the one show a studio guest mentioned that having a story behind the startup is important, he didn’t elaborate much and if I recall correctly, he merely mentioned it in a sentence, but I didn’t hear only a sentence, I heard an entire discussion and was intrigued to write about what came to my mind.

So I’m no expert in the startup world and I wanted to get that out and about, but what I do do is read a lot and I love entrepreneurship, so I do feel that my opinion is built on relevant material at least.

Right, a story behind a company – I think in every entrepreneur’s life they’ll attend a conference or an industry event in which they’ll meet other people, in fact, I doubt any entrepreneur wouldn’t, it’s one of the best ways to build contacts. Whilst you’re at an event you’re more than likely going to ask someone what they do and you’ll no doubt be asked to tell them what you do. Now if someone asked me, what do you do, I would more than likely tell them that I do digital marketing and search engine optimization. Do you think they’ll remember me? Possibly, but I highly doubt that everyone will, unless I slip them a business card (which I still don’t think works too well if a person’s just meeting people, the business card goes into a wallet and dies). Imagine I was asked what I do and instead of saying digital marketing and then going onto explain what SEO is (haha, trust me, it happens over and over), I instead tell them a story, a story about myself and how I started the company, or a catchy story that explains what SEO is, something different and unique, something that might increase the chances of that person remembering you, and most importantly, the service you offer – See, you want your name to be associated with a service and remembered, that’s one of the biggest things I’ve worked on for many years when it comes to “Christopher Mills”, “iMod Blog” and “SEO” – I like to categorize it as personal branding, and to be honest, it’s changed my entire life, but that’s a story (see what I did there) for another day.

Talking about SEO and how to get people to remember it, I can tell you a little trick that I do from time to time which appears to work well; it’s by no means a wow story, but it’s a little more than just talking about search engine results pages (yawn). About a month ago I was getting my tires replaced at Tiger Wheel and Tyre, and a gentleman walked over, introduced himself and asked if the SEO on my license plate stands for Search Engine Optimization to which I confirmed his guess. He then went on to ask me what is was exactly and what I did (and asked for him to do so in one sentence). Instead of talking about myself, I asked the gentleman what he did, this moved the conversation back over to him and he told me about his business in a sentence, let’s say he said, “I am a plumber”. I then went on to say something like, “SEO is the practice of having people find your website in Google when they’re searching. Wouldn’t it be awesome if a person went to Google and searched for “Plumber Cape Town” and your website appeared right up top?” The man paused for a second and said, “That would get me a lot of leads” to which I smiled and told him that that is exactly what I do and that I was put here on earth to make other people money.. he laughed and smiled. Long story short, I received an email from him a couple days later, he’d looked for me online (remembered my name) and said that he would like to discuss SEO with me in March.

It’s not an amazing analogy or story, but the point I’m stressing is that I interacted, and I used his knowledge to point a point across that is otherwise often misunderstood. No point giving an SEO example about development software to someone who might not have a clue – but it really was the interaction that made him remember what SEO was as well as remember my name, I know because I asked him – I like to close loops :)

There are companies with really awesome stories and such, a great example was spoken about on the KISSmetrics blog, where they tell a story about a company called 52 Teas, here’s the story:

“52 Teas is just another tea brewing company, until you realize that each week, they brew a completely new tea.

With teas such as the Red Hot Cinnamon Chai Tea, the Oatmeal Raisin Cookie Black Tea, and the Cranberry Black Tea, 52Teas is telling a unique story to the hard core tea connoisseur.

One of the most impressive parts about the story that 52Teas tells is that they let their customer participate. They brew new teas based on suggestions they get from Twitter and emails.

Most businesses aren’t going to be able to change their product every week to accommodate the taste of their customers. However, if an industry as old as tea brewing can have a new twist, then chances are your company can as well.”

Think about that, “We make tea flavours” compared to “We make tea flavours based on what people suggest on Twitter” – one has a much higher chance of being remembered than the other, I bet you can guess which one.

So that’s what I wanted to share with you tonight, hopefully it’ll inspire you to speak differently next time you’re asked what you do and perhaps it’ll even lead you to more business and I can once again say I was sent to earth to make other people money ;)

An interview with the Airborne founders. Local startup

by Chris M on January 13, 2012 in Business, Cape Town, Guru's, Internet with 5 Comments

Some good friends of mine have just launched their startup, Airborne, and there’s already some great hype around it. I’ve been fortunate enough to hear about the startup over the years whilst they’ve been building it and I’ve been dying to tell you all about it because I think it has legs, in fact, I think that with the right marketing they might be onto something really big and the awesomeness is compounded by the fact that it’s local!

Casual one sentence: A way for musicians to share their music and for fans to receive it – for only one dollar!

The idea in a video:

I sent some questions through to Justin, Ruark and the crew, and here’s what they had to say:

What made you build Airborne Music? Do you have a passion for music, was it a gap, did you see a system that you thought could be bettered?

A tricky one to answer. Many have suggested that the two industries most ripe for disruption are the banking and music industries. It’s no secret that the music industry is sick, so the opportunity to do something revolutionary is there but I think Airborne happened to be one of those right idea, for the right people, at the right time kind of things.

It doesn’t hurt that music is a pretty damn fascinating business though.

How many people work for Airborne Music? What does everyone do?

Our full-time staff in Cape Town is 5. As with most start-ups we wear many hats day-to-day but we comprise of specialists in roles like product design, Artist acquisition, Carrier growth, marketing and strategic planning. Our ‘extended family’ includes 12 others dotted around Europe where our heavy lifting engineering unit and corporate structure is based.

How did you fund the project, who paid the salaries and did you do client work or salaried work to fund it? Do you have investors?

For the first 3 years, while Airborne was a dream, we paid the bills (mostly) through our work at RUBIKS ROOM which built up a somewhat impressive roster of client work over the years. It was a good for us to experiment with various design and build methodologies before we started building our baby. In 2011 Airborne finally got traction when I managed to convince a beloved band of friends and fools to back the company and development of the first version of the Network (A0M1).

How long did it take you to conceptualize the platform?

Airborne began as a tag-line (music is the virus and the virus is Airborne) and design concept about 4 years ago. We’ve constantly refined and distilled the dream into an idea, and from an idea into a plan which is now a dream, realised.

If I might humbly espouse some advice on this point -

Take considerable time to mentally prototype your idea before jumping out of an aircraft with your first idea for a parachute. Discuss it with interesting people, draw pictures and model things. You can have many ideas about one idea.

How long did it take you to build the platform?

Start to finish, probably about 6 months. It’s just the first version of the Network though, we call it A0M1. We’ve received a lot of thoughtful and constructive feedback about the interface in particular and we’re already developing an enhancement update which will include a proper discovery mechanism and some pretty cool enhancements for web and mobile.

What are the 3 most important lessons you learnt from building Airborne Music?

Always have a plan B (and C, D, E, etc.) – it’s important to be responsive to change and always think a few moves ahead. Things seldom turn out the way you planned.

Fairness is the best foundation upon which to build your house. Be fair with your Crew, Investors and Partners.

Be open and communicative.

What 3 things would you change if you could do it again?

I thought about this for quite a while, there isn’t anything I would change, even the difficult times were good learning and growing experiences. If I could pick one thing -

I would start the setup of the corporate structure and payment gateways sooner (never under estimate the ability of bureaucrats to piss on your parade).

Did anyone inspire you to build Airborne Music?

No one individual stands out in this regard. If anything the passion of the team behind it and feedback from Artists and fans was the most inspiring for me.

Are you aiming to capture the local market first and then the International, or the other way around? Why?

We have our eye’s set on the worldwide market from day one. Music is universal and one of the things we want to do with Airborne is to open the biggest music market the world has ever known. That said, we’re working very hard in the local scene but with the view to expose local Artists to international fans and local fans to international Artists. If that makes sense?

Would you sell a portion of the platform to a 3rd party or do you want to hold 100% shares? And, why?

There may come a time when we decide to sell Airborne but for the moment we are focused on building something of value, something that can make an indelible mark on the future of music.

Where do you see Airborne Music a year from now?

Ready to scale, 2012 is the year of refinement, preparation and bridge-building. We’d like to see a quarter million Carriers by year end but the focus is definitely on preparing for aggressive worldwide expansion in 2013.

How many cups of Vida coffee do you think you consumed, as a team, over the months/years of building Airborne?

Good Lord, we probably burn through a 100 cups a month between us. Over the years… that’s a scary thought.

When you aren’t working, how do you switch off?

Good question, not exactly sure. Sometimes the best thing to do is to try and achieve balance by exposing yourself to new things outside of the working cocoon but when you love what you’re doing, and it’s new every day it doesn’t feel like “work”.

Are you hiring?

Yep! We’re looking for interns to assist with Artists Acquisition in the short term but if there are any sheet-hot designers out there, drop us a mail on iwanttowork@airbornemusic.com.

- end

Really awesome team, really awesome project, I wish them all the best and hope that their dream comes true!

PS. I’ll be getting some free vouchers to try out the system, so keep posted!

 

Awesome futuristic modern office desk

by Chris M on January 10, 2012 in Business, Style with 2 Comments

This awesome desk by Nüvist is too cool to not blog about. I don’t have many words, apart from “I want!”.

Check it:

slick-desk
rad-desk
modern-desk
modern-desk-2
future-desk
awesome-desk

Attention Bloggers: PAIA by 31st December 2011

by Chris M on December 20, 2011 in Blogging, Business with 7 Comments

Before I write this post I’d like to state that I’m not a lawyer nor an accountant, so what I write below is based on my research and my opinion thereof.

The Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA) states that anyone who trades in any way needs to register for PAIA. People who do not register by the 31st of December 2011 could be fined up to R15,000 and face prison time of 2 years.

If you have a blog and you accept payment for advertising, you are going to need to register – you will need to complete your PAIA forms and link to them from the bottom of your website.

I was sent the following form from Shelf Company Warehouse – click here – which I had to complete and they submitted it for me. At this point I’m not sure if anyone can do this or if it’s only for clients of the Shelf Company Warehouse, but worst case scenario, you could still use the template to complete your PAIA and submit it yourself.

If you do some research, you’ll see that this isn’t a joke and that everyone should be making a big move to getting registered – I don’t want to see a case where a local blogger is made an example of!

I’ll be adding my PAIA docs to iMod shortly :)

Dry-erase whiteboard walls for your office

by Chris M on November 28, 2011 in Business, Style with No comments

I always thought that an office with walls that you could write on would be a great idea. I love innovation and I love sitting in the middle of what’s happening so what better than sitting in and amongst all your ideas? I love the thought of glass separators between work stations which make text written on them visible when a switch is clicked, but that’s getting advanced, so let’s settle with this idea.

John Goscha is a young entrepreneur who quit his job to follow his dream of IdeaPaint, which turns your wall into a writing space.

Take a watch:

Here are some photographs:

white-wall-writable-paint
white-office-paint

I think it’s awesome I hope it goes global!

Social Media can backfire, just ask Durex SA

by Chris M on November 24, 2011 in Business, Networking with 9 Comments

Online Reputation Management (ORM) is a fairly new concept, but a concept that’s incredibly important. I think we’ve all seen a situation where something happens and suddenly every person on Twitter, Facebook and Google+ and every blogger climbs on board and writes about the situation, before you know it, something that might have normally brushed over has suddenly become a trending topic, one that might cripple a company. ORM comes into play to manage situations like this, and hopefully stop them.

I saw a situation today where Durex South Africa sent out a tweet, which ended up offending a few people and within minutes it escalated and everyone was talking about it and Durex SA was faced with a horrible situation that required immediate damage control. The whole thing started off when @DurexSA sent out a tweet saying, “Why did God give men penises? So they’d have at least one way to shut a woman up. #DurexJoke“. Sure, they were joking around, but if you think about it, this is going to offend something!

@FeministsSA quickly jumped onto this and tweeted back at Durex SA, who responded in what I would say is the worst way they could, here’s the response, “@FeministsSA We have posted many jokes, see our timeline… And they not violent against woman! Re-read it!!!!!” – bad, bad, bad move. FeministsSA clearly didn’t take the response well at all and went on to write a long blog post about it; But, it didn’t stop there, everyone on Twitter stood behind FeministsSA and so the ball began to roll. Tons and tons of tweets went out against Durex SA and finally after a few hours Durex SA stood up and apologized, “We’re really sorry for causing offence today, not intentional. We believe in the rights of woman and safe sex. Thanks for putting us right.” A few hours!

I feel bad for Durex SA because I do see it as an honest mistake on their behalf, but the way in which they dealt with it was really not great, an immediate response apologizing to FeninistsSA might have controlled this situation a great deal better. I don’t excuse Durex SA at all as I think the tweet was uncalled for, but as an honest mistake, if only they had someone who understood Online Reputation Management, they might have avoided this whole situation.

So, what’s the moral of the story, I guess it’s two-fold:

  1. Hire someone who knows what they’re doing to run your Twitter account – Twitter seems easy and most people will be too proud or cheap to pay someone to manage their Twitter account, but it’s not that simple and if you have a brand that wants a Twitter following, then you need someone who knows where the line is – remember, you have to move quickly and close to the line to draw in new followers, but if you cross that line, there’s big trouble.
  2. Think before you tweet – Twitter is so accessible, from your mobile phone, from your laptop and even from some cars! It’s easy to just blurt out a tweet without thinking, we’ve probably all done it, but why not be the person who doesn’t make the mistake and who thinks before tweeting, a lot of brand damage can be avoided.

If you have any tips of advice about managing social media accounts, please feel free to leave them in the comments.

What do Google, Facebook, Twitter employees get?

by Chris M on October 17, 2011 in Business, Industry News with No comments

I’ve read many posts over the years that discuss the perks of working at some of the leading technology corporations, but it’s not often that this information is compiled into a visual representation, in this case, an infographic. I thoroughly enjoyed looking through this infographic, but then felt a little jealous afterwards ;)

Just click the image below to enlarge it:

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