Many things you had to keep or save on your desktop to be able to acess them some other time. You also must not forget to carry that computer with you to be able to make that presentation, check that website you saved or show family and friends your vacation pictures.
Thanks to new online services, now you can virtually always remember to carry the desktop with you.
Startups like Del.icio.us help you access your bookmarked web pages from anywhere. you dont really have to carry your computer or a notepad around.
Slideshare hosts your slideshows, and you can easily give your colleagues or clients the link to your presentation.
Flickr holds your pictures for you. You only need a Yahoo account to start using Flickr.
Rapidshare hosts all your files to free up some space from that old desktop of yours, or just to make your uploaded files available wherever you are and there is access to the Internet.
This update of Today's Startups forcussed on web applications that will host your files, bookmarks and so on remotely.
This concept and the latter are all driven by Cloud Computing.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Friday, March 27, 2009
Today's Startups Type 1: Everything for dummies.
This is a series of articles about todays Internet startup ideas, the problem they solve and I hope it will inspire you to do something. Let's begin!
Today, many web startups are all about making one a pro in something only geeks used to know how to do 3 years back.
Startups come up with online apps to make ordinary people like you and me build very professional things. Remember those things you needed to by tons of softwares to be able to do with your computer, sometimes you needed weeks of tutorial to be able to do them, and even you may finally give up and decide to hire a professional or a nerd to do it for you.
A few years back, you needed to learn to code or hire a programmer to be able to have a cool professionally designed site. Not anymore, the African startup Synthasite (It recently closed a $20mm series B funding), Google pages and a couple of more online services are here to rescue you, most of them are free to use.
Just a couple of years back, you needed to learn to use adobe photoshop, Ulead photo express or anyother good picture editing software to be able to do whatever you wanted with your pictures. Then came along picasa, anyone could just upload a picture and edit it online using very simple tools.
Video editing and animation used to be some work you had to pay someone big bucks to do. Well, incase you have an idea for any animation, see Aniboom.
Today, many web startups are all about making one a pro in something only geeks used to know how to do 3 years back.
Startups come up with online apps to make ordinary people like you and me build very professional things. Remember those things you needed to by tons of softwares to be able to do with your computer, sometimes you needed weeks of tutorial to be able to do them, and even you may finally give up and decide to hire a professional or a nerd to do it for you.
A few years back, you needed to learn to code or hire a programmer to be able to have a cool professionally designed site. Not anymore, the African startup Synthasite (It recently closed a $20mm series B funding), Google pages and a couple of more online services are here to rescue you, most of them are free to use.
Just a couple of years back, you needed to learn to use adobe photoshop, Ulead photo express or anyother good picture editing software to be able to do whatever you wanted with your pictures. Then came along picasa, anyone could just upload a picture and edit it online using very simple tools.
Video editing and animation used to be some work you had to pay someone big bucks to do. Well, incase you have an idea for any animation, see Aniboom.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
The 2 Internet business types
Right from my first year trying to market or buil a business online, I noticed to types of approaches to Internet business by cyberpreneurs.
1. The idea approach, and 2. the get paid approach.
Some analysis
1), The Idea approach
This is harder to realize as it involves brainstorming on an idea (a product or service) building and branding a business based on the idea and also monetization.
This kind of approach pays bigger dividends to the cyberpreneur and it may take a long time before it pays anything.
2), The Get paid approach
This is more like the web hustler approach.
Anything that will bring in pay quickly.
This includes forex and commodity trading, squeze pages, adsense sites, selling services, blogging (most people are passionate about blogging and don't do it for the money), sales pages, affiliate sites and many many more.
1. The idea approach, and 2. the get paid approach.
Some analysis
1), The Idea approach
This is harder to realize as it involves brainstorming on an idea (a product or service) building and branding a business based on the idea and also monetization.
This kind of approach pays bigger dividends to the cyberpreneur and it may take a long time before it pays anything.
2), The Get paid approach
This is more like the web hustler approach.
Anything that will bring in pay quickly.
This includes forex and commodity trading, squeze pages, adsense sites, selling services, blogging (most people are passionate about blogging and don't do it for the money), sales pages, affiliate sites and many many more.
Monday, March 23, 2009
I'm back!
I know I havent blogged for a while. I was consumed with work for my new startup during the past weeks.
We have entered turbo mode ;-) and we are trying to make some good progress before middle of this year. We are presently upgrading the site and hoping to enter into private testing soon.
We have entered turbo mode ;-) and we are trying to make some good progress before middle of this year. We are presently upgrading the site and hoping to enter into private testing soon.
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Guide on Building A Successful Online Business
My first Internet business idea was to share african music and other entertainment with Africans around the world. I thought all I had to do was learn web design and I would build a successful web business. I never thought it would take years of research and testing.
Forget all the hype about new tools, online secrets and so on. I believe all you need to build a successful business online is some sort of understanding. By this, I mean understanding the online market, what works and what doesn’t, combined with hard work and perseverance, you will automatically guarantee your success online. It's simple!
So how do you understand the market and know what works and what doesn’t work? And save all the time you would have wasted following one new marketing secret after the other.
There are two ways you can learn this, the first you go through almost every online lesson through trial and error by yourself, or the second, you learn from someone that has been in and out of the struggle so you save yourself a great deal of time. Please dont get me wrong here. I am not trying to sell you something, nor am I trying to make myself your mentor, I also dont mean you should start following every online guru. That is also another formula for failure.
What I am trying to do is have you relax for a bit, and then have you analyse a few successes online, not the success stories you hear, but the actual story behind the success story. Look at how someone that was once like you achieved success, and I am sure behind that you will see a staright to the point approach combined with persistence.
My time, I chose the first option (trial and error), not because I thought it was the better option, but because it was the only choice I had.
After a lot of hard work, I managed to put up a site on a free server, and that was when I began to learn some Internet marketing lessons.
I didn’t have any idea on how to get people to my site, I was completely new to the Internet and I already had a website. So I found a start page exchange program and I joined it hoping I would be able to get a lot of people to my site, make some sales and in the end realize my new found online dream.
It was never as easy as I thought. Web design became more complicated than I ever expected and I didn't have enough money to hire someone to do it. Getting website visitors became a very hard and time-consuming and making a single sale seemed impossible. Only one thing didn’t disappoint me, myself. I didn’t give up.
I kept trying, learning and getting better. Whenever I fail, I make a list of reasons why I failed and made sure I avoided them the next time I try something out again.
After the failure of my first attempt, the main reason that came at the top of my “reasons why I failed list” was the fact that my site was hosted on a free server. Such sites look very unprofessional, and distract the visitor with too many ads. Who would trust a web business that cannot invest a few dollars for hosting their site?
When surfers want to buy something online, they tend to go to an established online company, so if your site is hosted on a free server like www.yoursite.freehost.com, people wont buy from you. They get annoyed or carried away by too much ads on the site, unless if you are using a free non-ad supported platform like blogspot or wordpress.
So one of the first corrections I made was to invest about $20 for a web hosting account and a domain name, so that I would have my own address for visitors to remember and come back anytime and I would be able to post only what I want on the site, which gives a more established image of the web site and a focussed environment so that my prospects can focus on what I have to say and don’t get distracted by flashing banner ads.
I was still not making sales even though I now have my own hosting account and a domain name for my online business. I knew I had to make another list of possible causes. I needed to ask myself what I thought was going wrong and how to solve it.
I was not getting much traffic to the site, just around 300 visitors and the big problem is the source of my site visitors. I had not been indexed by any search engine, so I was using a startpage exchange program for my traffic which were popular with newbies and marketers then (2002). I soon realized that was part of my problem. I was not targeting any market, I was driving traffic to my site without asking myself if they want my product or not.
My site was a niche web site, but I was not targeting that niche market. The people that actually went to my site were participants of the traffic exchange program I was using. They were all website owners or affiliates, they are not the perfect customers for my site, a music site. An internet marketing and website promotion site would do better in that program because most of the participants were interested in Web business promotion and marketing or just making money online.
When I realized that, I knew I had to change my strategy and target only those that I think would be more interested. So I turned to the search engines to drive more targeted traffic to my site.
After 2 months I got listed in Yahoo and immediately saw an increase of up to 200, then 400 site visitors a month, and a month later I got listed in Google and many other search engines like Alta vista, Hotbot, Askjeeves, Alltheweb, Overture and many more.
My traffic increased steadily. And then I got listed in the ODP (dmoz.com). I started getting hundreds of sign ups and everything got so big that I couldn’t even handle it. And that was just the beginning.
I am planning on writing my complete story so anyone interested would learn a lot from what I have been through. I welcome all comments, also if you have a story of your own you want to share, drop us a comment and we will publish your story as a complete post.
Forget all the hype about new tools, online secrets and so on. I believe all you need to build a successful business online is some sort of understanding. By this, I mean understanding the online market, what works and what doesn’t, combined with hard work and perseverance, you will automatically guarantee your success online. It's simple!
So how do you understand the market and know what works and what doesn’t work? And save all the time you would have wasted following one new marketing secret after the other.
There are two ways you can learn this, the first you go through almost every online lesson through trial and error by yourself, or the second, you learn from someone that has been in and out of the struggle so you save yourself a great deal of time. Please dont get me wrong here. I am not trying to sell you something, nor am I trying to make myself your mentor, I also dont mean you should start following every online guru. That is also another formula for failure.
What I am trying to do is have you relax for a bit, and then have you analyse a few successes online, not the success stories you hear, but the actual story behind the success story. Look at how someone that was once like you achieved success, and I am sure behind that you will see a staright to the point approach combined with persistence.
My time, I chose the first option (trial and error), not because I thought it was the better option, but because it was the only choice I had.
After a lot of hard work, I managed to put up a site on a free server, and that was when I began to learn some Internet marketing lessons.
I didn’t have any idea on how to get people to my site, I was completely new to the Internet and I already had a website. So I found a start page exchange program and I joined it hoping I would be able to get a lot of people to my site, make some sales and in the end realize my new found online dream.
It was never as easy as I thought. Web design became more complicated than I ever expected and I didn't have enough money to hire someone to do it. Getting website visitors became a very hard and time-consuming and making a single sale seemed impossible. Only one thing didn’t disappoint me, myself. I didn’t give up.
I kept trying, learning and getting better. Whenever I fail, I make a list of reasons why I failed and made sure I avoided them the next time I try something out again.
After the failure of my first attempt, the main reason that came at the top of my “reasons why I failed list” was the fact that my site was hosted on a free server. Such sites look very unprofessional, and distract the visitor with too many ads. Who would trust a web business that cannot invest a few dollars for hosting their site?
When surfers want to buy something online, they tend to go to an established online company, so if your site is hosted on a free server like www.yoursite.freehost.com, people wont buy from you. They get annoyed or carried away by too much ads on the site, unless if you are using a free non-ad supported platform like blogspot or wordpress.
So one of the first corrections I made was to invest about $20 for a web hosting account and a domain name, so that I would have my own address for visitors to remember and come back anytime and I would be able to post only what I want on the site, which gives a more established image of the web site and a focussed environment so that my prospects can focus on what I have to say and don’t get distracted by flashing banner ads.
I was still not making sales even though I now have my own hosting account and a domain name for my online business. I knew I had to make another list of possible causes. I needed to ask myself what I thought was going wrong and how to solve it.
I was not getting much traffic to the site, just around 300 visitors and the big problem is the source of my site visitors. I had not been indexed by any search engine, so I was using a startpage exchange program for my traffic which were popular with newbies and marketers then (2002). I soon realized that was part of my problem. I was not targeting any market, I was driving traffic to my site without asking myself if they want my product or not.
My site was a niche web site, but I was not targeting that niche market. The people that actually went to my site were participants of the traffic exchange program I was using. They were all website owners or affiliates, they are not the perfect customers for my site, a music site. An internet marketing and website promotion site would do better in that program because most of the participants were interested in Web business promotion and marketing or just making money online.
When I realized that, I knew I had to change my strategy and target only those that I think would be more interested. So I turned to the search engines to drive more targeted traffic to my site.
After 2 months I got listed in Yahoo and immediately saw an increase of up to 200, then 400 site visitors a month, and a month later I got listed in Google and many other search engines like Alta vista, Hotbot, Askjeeves, Alltheweb, Overture and many more.
My traffic increased steadily. And then I got listed in the ODP (dmoz.com). I started getting hundreds of sign ups and everything got so big that I couldn’t even handle it. And that was just the beginning.
I am planning on writing my complete story so anyone interested would learn a lot from what I have been through. I welcome all comments, also if you have a story of your own you want to share, drop us a comment and we will publish your story as a complete post.
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