Small Business Essentials » Opinion

A True "Lifestyle Business"

nhgnikole — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 19:24:27 +0000

I started this post on February 19th. That’s right—nearly a month ago. The irony in that is that the very things I was talking about, such as focusing on your life plan and having a lifestyle business, happened to me. My daughter, the light of my life, got a serious respiratory illness and I had to stop working for a week to take care of her. Then, my husband had knee surgery, and I had to care for him. To top it all off, well, let’s just say we got a little surprise that will be showing up around Halloween sometime, and I’m finding myself so tired and nauseated that working has been difficult for a few weeks. The importance of these events is that I didn’t quit my "regular job" to work from home (and to be with my family more) just to make the people in my life take a back seat to work. What I did was create a true "lifestyle business", employment that would be flexible enough to be second to those that really matter in my life.

A while back, I had a bit of a rant regarding the idea of the Location-Independent Professional, the person with no ties who could work anywhere in the world without responsibilities. The concept of the "responsibilities of the entrepreneur" took on a whole new meaning for me in this past month, with my business being on reduced work and this blog being pretty much shut down. What these 2 things, the "Location-Independent Professional" and me shutting down this blog, have in common is that they both are entrepreneurship based on a strong Life Plan.

The Life Plan

There are many thing that will come up in entrepreneurship that have a potential for changing your direction: you may be offered a position with another company, the economy might change, or you may be presented with new opportunities. This is why creating a life plan as your first action as an entrepreneur is vital. When a new opportunity comes up, I can look back at my life plan and decide if this new direction fits with my life plan, first and foremost.

I found that the hardest part of creating a life plan was the soul-searching involved in deciding what it is in my life that makes me truly happy. For example, everyone would like more money—but does more money actually make you happy? Speaking at a conference also sounds nice in print, but it would be nerve-wracking not only to speak in front of a large group, but to have to leave my daughter and get on a plane. So the important part is to look inside yourself and decide what truly makes you happy in life, and then put that into words to create your life plan.

Your Life Plan in Action

I didn’t really believe in the power of having a life plan until my first test of it came. Once you have created your life plan, how do you use it? Well, you can use it in several ways:

Use it to create your Business Plan
Does your life plan include a lot of time spent outdoors? Then don’t create a business that requires many hours spent in an office, or find ways to delegate those tasks which would bring you inside. Does your life plan include picking up your kids from school every day? Then use it to shift your business hours in your business plan.
Use it to weigh opportunities.
I was offered a job at nearly twice my salary a while back, but it would have required me to spend several hours a day commuting and about 60-70 hours a week in the office. As my life plan includes family issues (including stopping work at 1 pm to play with my daughter) and environmental issues (like conserving gas by not driving), I was able to reaffirm my goals and pass up the job despite the temptations of the salary.
Use it to set long-term goals.
Some budding entrepreneurs find themselves stuck in their current job for financial or other reasons. Having a life plan helps you to keep focus as you set intermediate goals to help you achieve the life you eventually want without getting discouraged by your current situation.

People Matter

I was reminded of all this today when I was reading Rob May’s changes in business thinking, where number 1 was "Relationships, relationships, relationships". While he was talking about business relationships, it is the people in your life that really make life worthwhile. I have had a lot of great projects since 2005 when I went into business for myself, but the money I made pales in comparison to watching my daughter grow from a tiny egg to the smart, capable 2-year-old that she is today. Twenty years from now, taking the time to be with her instead of working a 70-hour week will still be the best thing I ever did in my life. I am glad that, despite the opportunities I was given to do other things in life, I stuck with my life plan and didn’t miss out on moments like these:

(laughing in bed, in the dark, march 2008)

Additional Resources

Creating a Life Plan from StartupNation
The Life Plan Worksheet from Inc.com
Personal Goal Setting from MindTools

Reader Questions

Do you have a life plan? What does it include? Has it helped you?

Editor’s Note

Sorry for my "extended vacation" from this blog. Hopefully I’ll be around more now, but I can’t promise anything!

Is Money the Root of All Evil? (Writing with Purpose)

nhgnikole — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 09:21:11 +0000

I have been writing in this blog for just about a year, and I have been through a number of changes:

The blog was once on a subdomain of my company, and now has its own domain.
I started at infrequent posts, then went to 2-3 posts a week, and now am at 5-6 posts per week.
The topics have changed as my voice has developed and my experience has grown.

I have thought a long time about what the purpose of my writing really is. It does not build my client list, so it’s not for promoting my business. (Although, in all fairness, I rarely promote myself on this site.) It hasn’t produced income for me. It hasn’t opened up new job opportunities. It has introduced me to a lot of really wonderful people that I have been glad to message back and forth with. It has helped me sort thoughts in my head and put them into words in a more focused way. Being responsible for posts on a regular schedule and extras such as the Carnival of the Capitalists has made my writing production more disciplined. So I guess you could say that blogging has been more of a writing exercise or a hobby for me for the past year, rather than an actual job.

This is where I got to the point of advertising. I have been debating advertising for a long time, and the debate had taken a new intensity since rebranding the site on its own. While having additional income for my efforts would be nice, there are many cons to putting ads on my site.

Advertising is a Distraction

Unlike linking to more content which would provide value to my readers, advertisements just take them to a place where they will be sold something. I suppose if these things are of value to them (what small business owner doesn’t need supplies or a computer or search engine services?), then that is not too bad.

Blogging is about Trust

For me, placing ads on my site would require very strict control over the content. I couldn’t use a program like AdSense because with small business content, those scammy work at home ads were bound to pop up. The only way I would feel comfortable hosting advertisers is if I had a strict system for selecting exactly which ads and offers would appear on my site. I would then not have to worry about the trust I have built being destroyed by unscrupulous advertisers. I would not accept things like link-buying or paid content, because without transparency I feel like that erodes trust.

Aesthetics are Important

If I didn’t care what my site looked like, I wouldn’t have paid an artist to design it or hand-code all the templates myself. I see so many blogs out there where advertising has just taken over, and it makes me not want to come back to that site. It is easy to do ads the wrong way, and have your site take a turn for the worse. Recently, on BusinessPundit (not to pick on Rob May, because he has no control over the advertising on that site), there were some talking ads that completely altered the experience of the site, and popups that showed up some time after that. I would want to keep my site as distraction-free as possible to make it a unique viewing experience.

Money Shouldn’t Drive Content

If you read a lot of the stuff put out by those internet marketers, they develop their content based on what will sell. They write posts based on Google popularity, SEO keywording, and other false ways of beefing up traffic. I’d never want to be in that situation, to be writing about what is popular just for the sake of increased advertising traffic. By writing for myself, I get to stay true and honest—to write for writing’s sake.

Evaluating my Peers

There are a lot of people that I respect and content that I value that does have ads, like Anita Campbell at Small Business Trends, Rob May at BusinessPundit, Guy Kawasaki at How to Change the World, and Darren Rowse at Problogger (the advertising juggernaut that teaches other writers to advertise!). There are also others that don’t, like Charles H Green at Trust Matters, Chris Anderson at The Long Tail and, well, Rob May at Coconut Headsets. (It is interesting to note that when he started writing for different reasons than he does at Business Pundit, and while he is writing for himself, the ads became less important.) Looking at their sites helps me decide what I do and don’t like, but it doesn’t help me with outside influence on my decision here.

Being True to Myself

I start out this year 2008 with a mission to never settle for less than 100% quality in everything I do here on Small Business Essentials. I continued this commitment by adding the links feed, extending my site to other platforms like Facebook and Twitter, participating in the business blogosphere, and creating (what I consider) to be original, valuable content. Somehow, the thought of monetizing this site through third part advertising diminishes that in some way. This may be only an internal perception, however—perhaps my own issues with money cloud my judgement of what is real in this case.

Limiting my Options

If I choose to not monetize the site, it makes me more actively seek out other ventures that would be income-producing. In this way, it is enticing to keep this blog as my writing playground and to use other means to expand revenue. (That revenue, then, would go back into funding this little hobby blog of mine.)

The Future of Small Business Essentials

I have decided to try a few hand-selected advertising items for the time being to try it out while I consider if this is really what do to. After about a day of thought on this subject, and as of right now, I am leaning towards removing them again and just continuing to write as I always have. I will give it a few weeks to make this decision though, and if the ads are permanent, I may have to do another site redesign to make them fit better with the site.

Thoughts?

I’d love to hear feedback on the ads as they are now, your blog/monetization strategy, the purpose of writing, or anything else for that matter.

Gas Stations Don’t Need Blogs

nhgnikole — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 08:51:10 +0000

I read a post today on how a corner gas station owner could benefit from having a blog.

Challenge: Can You Stump Business and Blogging?

I know you’re going to read it and then tell me it was not about gas stations needing blogs, but about the benefits of blogging for any and every business. My argument is that this post is absurd and misleading in its self-serving logic. (Of course a site that generates ad revenue based on content for business blogging would say every business needs a blog!) I know the piece was meant to be fun and attract traffic, but this was just over the top. I would also not take such offense if I didn’t see this same sentiment echoed by 95% of the web developers and marketing professionals out there. To combat this problem, and to help the non-tech people just looking for advice on marketing their business and their website, I offer this:

Every business does not need a blog!

As I have written before, there are many reasons why some people should not have a blog. To elaborate on this with the gas station owner:

Writing skills are important.

Many gas station owners, especially in this area, either don’t speak English, speak English as a second language, or lack the writing skills of a professional writer. Running a gas station requires good management skills, but not necessarily good written and oral skills. If you do not speak English fluently or do not write well, your blog is not going to be a strong marketing piece for your company.

Blogging is not cost-effective in this niche.

Which of these takes less time and costs a gas station owner less:

Setting up and maintaining a blog, or
Putting out a sign on the corner with prices and specials?

I’m going to make an educated guess in saying the sign is also more effective as well.

This niche has already been done.

Do you think the local gas station will have more internet marketing power than Yahoo! Answers, AAA, or About.com? There is just no way my local gas station is going to surpass the power of a search engine or a social media site.

Conversions and traffic are not guaranteed.

After composing his posts, the gas station owner would then have to spend time building traffic to his site … so now he is spending time marketing both his blog online and his company offline. All of this effort does not mean any of his stumbling-in readers will convert to regulars to build trust, nor does it mean his blog readers will convert to sales at the pump. In fact, I’d guess that the conversion rate from first-timers to regulars, and from readers to gas-purchasers, is pretty low in this scenario.

Gas stations are local businesses.

Very few people will drive more than a mile or 2 out of their way to fill up their gas tank, and it usually has to be quite a deal to be worth it. Having a blog will not attract customers to your station from 3 cities over. What are the odds that people living in your immediate area will find your blog through Google, become a regular reader, and then start using your station instead of their regular one?

Gas stations don’t require experts.

It’s gas, not rocket science—the station provides it and you put it in your car. Many people don’t even know who works there or owns the station because they just pay at the pump and drive off.

The proposed questions can be found on Yahoo! Answers.

Most single-topic quick-answer types of sites don’t have long-term readers or regulars.

Running a gas station is time-consuming.

When the owner is not running his business, do you think he’d rather be home blogging or spending time with his family? My husband works long hours, and I know that thinking about work is the last thing he wants to do when he gets home.

Your Opinion?

What do you think? Do gas stations need blogs? Can every business benefit from having a blog?

Update

The discussion has been continued over at Business and Blogging and the StartupNation Community. Follow the links for direct access.

The Joy of StumbleUpon

nhgnikole — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 01:00:21 +0000

I have been getting a lot of traffic in the past few weeks from StumbleUpon. I was discussing this with a colleague of mine, and he asked me how I attract traffic from StumbleUpon. The answer is: I don’t. I do my best to write good content, and the links will follow.

It’s not about writing for search engines or links or anything else. You write for people.

If you’d like to learn more about what I mean by that, check out the recently released podcast I did on using content and code to market your website. You can also read the discussion that came out of it.

It’s Family Friday

nhgnikole — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 01:58:39 +0000

I’m writing this post on my "break". You see, my daughter has been sick for a couple of days—and anyone with a 2-year-old can tell you that a toddler barfing all night is enough to knock a few years off your life span. Instead of actually resting, I thought I’d take a moment on my break from her needs to discuss the balance between work and family with my readers.

The ability to reschedule work when my child needs me is one of the best things about working from home. I made the decision to work from home before I got pregnant because I wanted to have the flexibility of being there for my baby when she needs me. This perk has downsides, however, which are frequent problems for many work-at-home parents. Your family calls asking for favors, your spouse expects you to be able to do the shopping during the day, your friends think you can do playdates and long lunches, and your kids ask you to volunteer for every field trip and class project.

The key to success is to be able to establish boundaries and say "NO". To illustrate this, here are some of the myths about being a parent who works from home, and how to handle each of them:

Working from home means no child care expenses.
This is only true for a short period of time when you have one child, or when your child enters school full time if you work part time. When my daughter was younger than a year, I could reduce hours and get away with working while she was asleep, with occasional phone calls while we were on a walk. As she grew older, napped less, and got into more trouble, this became impossible. I started hiring in-home nannies when my daughter was about 18 months old, and then moved on to sending her to childcare part-time. While it is tempting to watch your child and work at the same time, they both deserve your full attention. So focus on work when it is time to work by finding other things for your child to do, and when your child comes home for the day, you can give 100% of your attention to him/her.
Working from home means that you are available.
I had to stop taking most personal calls during the day, because my family did just not get it. I could not be paying for childcare and doing their favors at the same time. Just as you would not take an excessive amount of personal calls during the day if you were working somewhere else, limit your personal calls while you are working from home.
Since you’re not doing anything …
I don’t know why working from home means you have the time to volunteer for every school function or club outing. If it’s important to you and you can work around it, by all means do so. Otherwise, learn to say no, because your clients are counting on you just as much as the school’s bake sale is.
You can be it all: Suzy Homemaker, Super Mom, Career Woman.
Speaking of bake sales, it’s okay to let yourself off the hook and show up with store-bought cookies, or to admit that you don’t have time to clean the whole house with a looming deadline. You wouldn’t take off the day to help your son with the project he procrastinated on if you worked outside the home, so why do it for him just because you work from home? You don’t have to be everything to everyone—just set reasonable expectations for yourself and stick to those.
You can multitask home and work life.
It’s better to separate the two and be fully present in each at the appropriate times. Set aside a space and time for you to do your work, do it during that time, and then walk away and be full present with your family. I do understand that some juggling will occur, but try to not make it a regular habit.

Additional Resources

Balancing Work and Family as a Home-Based Entrepreneur
Family Issues Facts, Balancing Work and Family
6 Tips for Balancing Entrepreneurship and Family
Balancing Work and Family from About.com Career Planning
An examination of the role of emotional intelligence in work and family conflict (a research report)
40 Mom-Tested Tips for Balancing Work and Family from iVillage
Balancing Act at BlueSuitMom

Reader Question

How do you find a balance between work and home life? Do you have any tips to share?

I’m a Location Independent Professional!

nhgnikole — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 18:38:29 +0000

Disclaimer: I’m not picking on the people who really do live like that. Really, I’m not—if it works for you, then great.

I saw a blog entry today on Problogger from someone saying she is a "location independent professional". After immediately thinking that sounded a whole lot like a "hook of a brand-like name" (straight from the Wally Bock laugh from earlier this week), I was intrigued enough to click on the link. So what is a location independent professional? Basically someone who can do their job from anywhere in the world as long as they have their laptop and an internet connection.

So what’s the problem?

The problem with this wonderful fantasy is that reality eventually sets in. Yes, technically, I am a "location independent professional" myself, as I have worked from many locations here in the Bay Area as well as while visiting another state. All I need is a high-speed connection, my laptop, and my business phones which are cellular anyway. But working while traveling is not the best idea for maximizing productivity because success often lies in the routine. This is especially true with writing, where setting aside time every day to write is a very important exercise to keep you motivated and working. Although I don’t always practice this myself (I do try!), I really think that you need a mental space to program your brain to work. Even if you work from home, the routine you go through to get yourself working for the day tells your brain "OK, it’s time to work now!", and I’d imagine productivity would suffer if you were constantly in a new time zone with a new routine. (Yes, maybe some people would thrive on such a system, but I believe they are the exception, and not the rule.)

Work/life Balance

Along with that routine of shifting gears, you do need some sort of barrier between your professional and personal lives. I know that many entrepreneurs think that such barriers don’t exist, because they often juggle so many things simultaneously. This, however, is a great way to burn yourself out. True success is not in the sprint, but in the marathon, and in order to make it for the long haul you need to have some separation in those parts of yourself. Your mind will never learn to be in the present of what you are doing if you continually run it full speed in both parts of your self.

What about family and responsibilities?

As a good laugh, this was my favorite part of the promise of working from a beach in Maui: Did you just leave your spouse and children at home to work there for a few months? Sure, that lifestyle is great when you are young and single, but eventually you get lonely and want to settle down. At this point in my life, I have a husband with a non "location independent professional" type job, and a toddler with a routine and a friend’s house she plays at every day. Moving around is not only disruptive to your work schedule—it is disruptive to your whole family. This is why this working on the beach fantasy comes to an end when reality hits!

And the long lead-in award goes to …

I am mentioning this at all because this is a typical promise for work-at-home business opportunities: "Live the lifestyle of your dreams!" "Own houses and sports cars!" "Work 2 hours a day and make enough money to retire at 40!" In the real world, work at home professionals are people just like myself—moms who want to have more time with their kids, dads tired of commuting every day, grandparents who want supplemental income after they retire. This is why a business partner and I are launching a site in 2008 that gives people the real deal on working from home and how to evaluate work at home opportunities. I feel good about getting this site launched every time I see some of these silly work-for-yourself claims, because real people need realistic expectations of what they are getting themselves into before they invest their time or money. So stay tuned, because you’ll be hearing more about this site up until it’s launch day.

Another Kind of "Dip"

nhgnikole — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 15:27:03 +0000

There has been a lot of talk lately about Seth Godin’s new book, The Dip, and even some discussion on whether or not you can teach someone the business skills that allow them to know when to quit. But today I want to talk about a different kind of quitting—one that involves a change in your life plan. As it is with your business and career, knowing when to change your life plan is important to your long-term success.

When I came out of college, it was the beginning of the dot-bomb time. One minute I was riding high with a great job, and the next I was hanging out with all of my other unemployed friends and watching cartoons from Laid Off Land. At one point, I had gone through four jobs in a single year due to layoffs. The significance, however, is not which jobs I held or what happened to those companies, but that I recognized the dip. When my days were measured in a countdown to when I assumed I’d be laid off again, it was time for a change in the life plan. This pattern would repeat itself several times in the years since I have been out of college, as my life has changed courses several times.

What is important about this little story is that I saw the lull coming and had to make the decision whether it was time to find something just like before, or it was time to move on to something else. When the dot-bomb got old, I went back to my degree and worked with animals. When I met my current husband and needed more of a job than just “getting by”, I went back to marketing. When I got tired of working in an office, I found a fun but well-paying job where I had a lot of fresh air and independence. When it came time to settle down and get married, I chose to return to my marketing roots and launch a company that would allow me the flexibility to raise our insanely smart daughter. Gone are the days of 80-hour weeks where I would eat 3 meals a day at my desk, and where the bartenders at every pub within 10 miles of my current employment knew my name because that’s where I ate dinner at 9 pm every night. I’m someone’s mother now, someone’s wife, and a business owner with employees. While my current company has had a few dips of its own, I feel as though I can manage and overcome these because my current life plan is the right path for me.

I am thankful for the opportunities I was given to change my life plan when my path took a new turn. I can’t imagine the path my life would have taken had I stayed on the course I had been pursuing straight out of college. So it is important to not only recognize the dip in your business life and career—that moment when you should decide to either hammer through to get results or to quit and move on to another venture—but also the dips in your own life which you should embrace and evaluate as they come.

Just make sure that your life plan is a living, breathing guideline—and not a path set in stone.

Questions for our Readers

Do you have a life plan? If so, does it help or hinder you when a dip shows up in your life?

The Problem of Internet Marketing

nhgnikole — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 19:00:00 +0000

Internet marketing is a huge trend on the internet right now. It is important for small business owners to understand what it is in order to develop effective strategies for marketing themselves. It is equally important for marketing professionals to maintain a code of ethics and not follow this lead of falsehood in order to allow the system to correct itself naturally.

Consider this example:

The owners of MomAndPopStore.com create an e-commerce store that sells hooleywidgets, a special niche device. They design the store well and include rich content to draw in traffic. They submit their URLs to all the major search engines. They have an abundance of traffic. Anyone looking for hooleywidgets on Google sees MomAndPopStore.com as the firs listing, and can easily purchase exactly what they were looking for with a few clicks.

Eventually, someone catches on. The internet marketers go to Google and see that hooleywidgets have a high search volume but very low advertising competition. So they set up multiple single-page sites that are loaded with keywords but don’t actually have anything qualitative about them. These pages are also loaded with Google ads. Then then spend hours a day planting their links around the internet to artificially raise their Google ranking for their useless landing pages.

MomAndPopStore.com’s owners are now confused why they, as the only one selling hooleywidgets in the entire country, are now ranked 100th on Google. Their traffic is falling drastically. So they purchase an AdWords campaign to boost traffic and are now paying for every customer that finds their site. While their traffic is somewhat increasing, it is still not as strong as it was when they first started, and they are paying a lot more to attract it.

What is happening is that the internet marketers, with an endless amount of time to spend on these kinds of projects, are now taking money from MomAndPopStore.com by acting as an unauthorized middleman. Instead of searchers finding MomAndPopStore.com directly (and at no cost to MomAndPopStore.com) when they search for "hooleywidgets", they are finding these landing pages. Confused about how they got there, they see MomAndPopStore.com’s ad on the side of the page, click on it, and arrive at what they were actually looking for. Some searchers hit these landing pages and simply give up, thereby reducing MomAndPopStore.com’s overall traffic, paid or free.

These tools (Adwords campaigns, search engines, internet marketing) always start with great promise and then begin to fail as the system is exploited by those trying to make a living off that which they don’t understand. The point in this example is that, although we can manipulate the system if we work in large enough numbers, we should also consider the ethics of what we are doing and the impact we have on the society as a whole. I see stories like this one more and more every day, where companies with greater marketing budgets buy their way to the top falsely. (The recent Big Digg Rig is an excellent example of that.) Remember the days when the quality of your product and the friendliness of your customer service made you number 1, and not the amount of money you had to toss at advertising?