Mindset Of An Entrepreneur
I remember in 2001 when I first read a book about entrepreneurship, it changed my mindset and became the turning point in my life. Once I started to embrace new ideas and have an open mind to business opportunities, I started attracting more of it. It was a phenomenal change for me and I started to notice the different mindsets of people around me.
What Is The mindset Of An Entrepreneur?
An Entrepreneur sees the world differently and applies different principles to the environment they are in. They are a great strategist and a master at leveraging their skills and time to grow their business through people, money and technology. There are two different approaches that I see, the employee mindset and the business owner mindset.
Employee Mindset
Previously when I was working in a real estate agency as an employee my day was set and I had to be at work between the hours of 8am to 5pm. I was given work to complete by my boss and told when to have lunch. Basically I was told what to do during my time at work and getting paid for it. Unfortunately a majority of the population has been trained this way and it stems from the days of schooling. We were taught and given homework at school, which meant if we didn’t complete it we would get some sort of punishment or if we did complete it, we would get graded with a number. This way we were trained to complete a task because we were told to, not because we thought how will this benefit others or make a difference to the world and my life? The employee mindset is what I call “lazy” thinking because we are spoon fed what to do and how to do it. We get paid for just getting up and going to work.
Business Owner Mindset
As a business owner I take complete ownership of what I do everyday within my business. It doesn’t necessarily mean that I do everything in the business. What it means is that as a business owner I see the world’s opportunities differently.
An Employee Mindset Vs. A Business Owner Mindset
An employee’s mentality is to follow commands.
Getting Started In Your New Internet Business
I always think it’s fun and exciting to start a new Internet business. I know for me that I would do something that I’m interested and passionate about. Otherwise the new venture doesn’t last for long. As it’s just as important to have passion, motivation and interest, there are a few areas that help me succeed in business.
Promoting Your Internet Business
I would call this the “show me the money” part of the business. Without money or income, there is no business. Therefore it’s important to promote your business and turn your promotional activities into sales. At every opportunity, try to promote your business through passive means: e.g. through your stationary, letterheads, emails, brochures and any other promotional material you may use. Even if it’s just an article you write for a directory, remember to put your website address at the bottom of it. In the past, I made stickers of my logo that I could easily stick on my products. Also I made sure that every email I sent out to a customer had a company logo in it. This all helps with creating the brand for the business.
It’s crucial to develop a marketing plan that will not only sell your products, but also your brand. Here are some other articles I recommend to read to help you promote your Internet business:
- Spreading The Word: Turbocharge Your Traffic
- Converting Traffic Into Sales Part 1: Generating Leads
- Converting Traffic Into Sales Part 2: Profiting From The Back-End
- 12 Sales Effective Marketing Tips
Operating Your Business
This is the “lifeblood” of the business and I’m amazed at the amount of businesses that still operate without having good systems in place. An electrician I use from time to time asked me how I maintain my book work and said he doesn’t know how to do it. I was shocked because I’d known him to be trading for over 2 years and he probably doesn’t know how much money is being made in his business or let alone lost. What I am saying is to not be like my Electrician friend and make sure you buy an accounting software to track all your accounts and paperwork. I would suggest hiring a book keeper because it will save you the hassle and time of doing it all yourself. Some good software packages out there that are under $500 like MYOB Accounting and QuickBooks will be more than sufficient when you start out.
Another area that most people forget or get caught out on are getting the appropriate insurances for your business. The most common are public liability insurance, fire, burglary, vehicle and workers compensation insurance. All these can be easily found via a quick search on Google. I would recommend ensuring both public liability and fire insurances are in place before even running your business.
Keeping Pace And Staying Up To Date
This may sound all too overwhelming when you have to promote, operate your business and keep up to date with your industry. Believe me it’s not as hard as it sounds. Take the first step and join a trade association or your local Chamber of Commerce. You will find it both informative and beneficial to your business. To know what is happening in your area and within your industry can help you make better decisions for promoting your product or service. Whether it may be time to change a product line or add more services to your business, you will be keeping up with the industry and making sure you are not missing out on opportunities. Also it’s a great way to network and promote within your trade associations and Chamber of Commerce. Simply write an article to contribute and it can be used as great public relations (P.R) for your business.
Also I emphasise to have a well prepared business plan created before starting your business, because this will be your starting point. A business plan is useful for so many areas for your business from sourcing finance to implementing a growth strategy for the next 5 years. Once it’s written down, it will become a living breathing document that you can update and review over time. I’ve just finished preparing my business plan for this business which took nearly 3 weeks to complete but I can tell you that it is well worth the time and effort to do. Learn how to put your own business plan together and I can guarantee you that you’ll get finance and negotiate business deals much easier.
The Future Of Your Internet Business
Starting your Internet Business is rewarding and if you look into those areas I have mentioned, then you will have a good foundation to running a successful Internet Business. Take action today and know that you deserve to live your dream.
Tyrone Shum
Internet Business Coach
Work For Money, Or Mind Your Own Business?
There are so many money making opportunities in the world today. By far, trading your time for money is probably the worst money making opportunity I see because if you don’t work, you don’t get paid! In fact, I have not held a job for more than a year and a half as I can’t see why I should earn dollars for the hour. Since quitting full time work, I’ve run numerous businesses and I believe that is how the rich get richer. Some comparisons to why minding your own business is better than working for money:
Reason #1: You get taxed the most as an employee
Once you start earning above a certain income bracket as an employee, the government starts to tax you around 48.5% of your income and I would start asking is this worth it? So if you like to trade the average 50 hours a week to earn $100,000 a year from your job and have a nice chunk paid to the government, then I would say keep your job. But if you are smart and start your own business, doing the same hours and earning the same income in your company, then you will be able to keep more of your money. Even if you earned $100,000 through your company, you are only taxed at a flat rate of 30% after expenses are paid.
Reason #2: Security versus Stability
In my opinion a job nowadays doesn’t necessarily have security, because your employer can make you redundant anytime the business goes through hardship. An example in more recent times can be seen when Australia’s ANZ Bank cut almost 3,000 jobs or nearly 10% of it’s work force. Unfortunately once you are made redundant, your job security is lost and the weekly income is gone, a tough call for stability? In comparison if you had a business that you setup and structured well, you could be living off a stable source of passive income just like many successful Internet Marketers who are earning in excess of $200,000 a year from their businesses.
Reason #3: Fewer Tax Benefits
As an employee not only do you get taxed the most, but you also get fewer tax benefits. As a company you can write off almost everything that you do for the business and claim it with pre-taxed dollars. On the flip side, as an employee you have to pay for your lunches, conferences, buy clothes, buy fuel for your car with after-tax dollars and only do you get to claim these deductions back at the end of the financial year. Doesn’t that seem unfair?
Use Your Time Wisely
Everyday you are limited to 24 hours just like everyone else and no matter how much you earn as an employee your income is caped. Once you stop trading your time for money, your income stops immediately. Even if you are a high paid IT consultant that bills out $1000 an hour you still have a cap, and you are still trading hours for dollars.
There will come a time when you can no longer work either because you become sick, have an accident or are forced to retire. What happens then depends on the decisions you made earlier in life. If you planned well, you’ll have enough to live on without trading hours for dollars. However, statistics shows that the majority doesn’t plan well and will be force to take some kind of social handout – either by the government or family.
If you are currently working for money and not minding your own business, I urge you to take a serious look at your situation. You will see that governments tax more on employees than on companies and it can mean that my company only pays a flat rate of 30% tax on it’s profits and an employee has to pay almost 50% on their wages upfront. There are substantial benefits in minding your own business and I urge you to explore how it can help you become wealthly and have more freedom for yourself.
Tyrone Shum
Business Owner
7 Ways To Get Your New Website Listed In Search Engines
Since your new website is your marketing tool for your business it’s going to be crucial to be listed on search engines. In the past when I have setup new websites I have used 8 methods to get them listed on search engines fast and as high as possible. Though, we first need to understand how Search Engines work and how we can maximise our efforts to rank up high.
How Do Search Engines Work?
Search Engines have two elements that make them work.
1. The Index
Simply, the index of a search engine is a giant catalogue containing a copy of every web page and file that the spider finds. If a web page changes, this catalogue is updated with the new information. To give you an idea of the size of these indexes, Google has over 8 billion pages.
It sometimes takes a while for new pages or changes that the spider finds to be added to its index. Thus, a web page may have been “spidered” but not yet “indexed.” Until a page is indexed – added to the index – spidered pages will not be available to those searching with the search engine.
2. The Search Engine Spider
This is also called a web crawler or robot. A search engine spider is an automated program that reads web pages and follows any links to other pages within the site. This is often referred to as a site being “spidered” or “crawled”. There are three very active spiders on the Net. Their names are Googlebot (Google), Slurp (Yahoo!) and MSNBot (MSN Search).
Spiders start their journeys with a list of page URLs that have previously been added to their index (database). As it visits these pages, crawling the code and copy, it adds new pages (links) that it finds on the page to its index.
The spider returns to the sites in its index on a regular basis, scanning for any changes. How often the spider returns is up to the search engines to decide. Webmasters do have some control in how often a spider visits their site by making use of a robot.txt file. Search engines first look for this file before crawling a page further.
The Search Engine
Most people have heard of Google, Yahoo and MSN. As these are the dominate search engine providers on the Internet today most websites look at being listed on their indexes. Therefore it is crucial for a new website to let “The search engine spiders” know they exist. Here are the 8 ways to get your new website listed:
1. Search Engine Optimization
I highly recommend setting this as your first priority to do. The reason is, once you get listed onto a search engine – particularly Google, you will find increasing amounts of traffic to your new website.
Since search engine optimization is a very large area for discussion I have created another post about search engine optimization.
2. Google Sitemaps
Simply by creating a sitemap that tells Google to crawl your website will enhance the chances of listing higher in Google searches. Google has written a very comprehensive manual to show savvy webmasters how to communicate with Google through their Webmaster sitemap submission system
Something interesting I discovered with my own website: if you know how to create Cron Jobs and have it automatically run it on a daily basis to tell a search engine to crawl your site, you will have a greater chance at getting to the top of a search.
3. Manual Submission
Once you have optimized your site using keywords related to your website, the next stage is to submit your site to the various search engines. I don’t believe it’s necessary to submit your website to all the search engines on the Internet, but I do recommend submitting to the top three: Google Add URL, Yahoo and MSN. Each of these search engines provide a submission page to let you submit their websites.
One last tip about manual submission, I wouldn’t recommend anyone pay a company to submit your website. Personally I think they are a waste of money because there are no proven results that they work and get your website ranked higher.
4. Submit Your Site To Directories
Another good place to start is with web directories. The two biggest by far are Yahoo Directory and the Open Directory.
There are plenty of other directories you should consider as well. To find them run a search for ‘web directory’ on your favourite search engine. The directories that come up highest in the search rankings will probably generate the most traffic. You can also check these directories of directories:
5. Comment In Blogs, Forums, Bulletin Boards And Newsgroups
A great way to get your website listed on the search engine is to provide comments on other sites with your website at the end of your comment. NOTE: The idea is to provide something of value to another site, not just putting your website there as that is considered SPAM.
6. Linking To Other Sites And Ask For A Link In Return.
There are three ways you can find websites that might want to link to you.
- Go to your favourite search engine and type in some words related to what your website is about.
- Sift through the websites in directories such as Yahoo Directory or the Open Directory
- Find out who’s currently linking to both you and your competitors, check who’s linking to them, and who’s linking to them, and so on (To see a list of the inbound links to a website go to Google and type in link:http://www.URL.com) – replace URL with your own website name.
Now that you’ve found these websites, ask them to link to you. A quick phone call or e-mail will help. And remember, always mention that linking to your website will benefit their site users and therefore their website. You could also offer a link exchange, where by you both link to each other. If you’re going to do this, it’s wise to link to their website first, before getting in contact.
7. Press Release Distribution
This is one of the most cost effective way to distribute your website in the marketplace. PRWeb.com is a great place to promote your website.
Tyrone Shum
SEO Tipster
2009 New Year Starts With A Bang!
Most people start a brand new year with a resolution to what they want to accomplish for that year. For me it’s a new year, with a new lifestyle and a new business venture. Over the last 12 months I’ve been consolidating all the different ventures I have dabbled in and streamlined the systems so that I could take myself away from running businesses and spend more time working on them instead.
For 2009, my goals are:
- To teach others how I have successfully run Internet Businesses.
- To work only 4 days a week and take one day off to purse my hobbies.
- To monetise InternetBusinessPath.com so it will generate $200,000 per year from multiple revenues.
- To offer valuable content about Internet Business, Entrepreneurship and Making Money Online to my customers and readers.
- Increase the readership of this website to 10,000 subscribers by the end of 2009.
In 2009, I will look forward to working with like-minded people who want to also succeed at creating a profitable Internet Businesses.
