biz-blogger.net

After a few afternoons of baking I realised that I actually had quite a passion for it and after getting my friends and family to taste and test my efforts it became clear that I wasn’t half bad at it either, everyone was definitely giving my baking the thumbs up, one of friends actually suggested that I sell them. So I decided to start looking at what I would need to do to set myself up with a cake business. My first decision really was deciding what the business was actually going to be and which market I was going to try and target??

I think everyone deep down has a bit of entrepeneur in them, it’s just a case of whether you want to bring it out and use it. I, like a lot of people have really stuck with jobs I know best, never really seeing myself as a business woman, I don’t know why, I think I just didn’t see it as an option. Then recently, I had some spare time on my hands and decided to do a load of baking. I didn’t intend for it to be anything but an afternoon of fun and a lot of cake eating but I surprised myself.

Lots of people at one time or another look to set up there own business normally based on there favorite past times or there current set of skill that they can do to a really high level. One thing my misses is particularly good at is baking and she makes a fantastic Victoria sponge and a amazing set of various chocolate fudge or general chocolate brownies.

She has tried and tested these on not only my self but my colleagues friends and family and everyone is overly impressed so what is the next step to making money out of her talent and how does she turn her talent into cold hard cash?

What are the next steps? Marketing?

Googles business for the third quarter of the year is up once again, what will stop this giant ion the business world taking over TV advertising and word of mouth as the money that google makes every year is catching up with some of the richest people in the world and I’m sure in the next ten years it will definitely take over as the most profitable company in the word. Yahoo and Bing are trying to play catch up for the left over cash but its a big hill to climb.

Which search engine do you use?

I’m a googler.

Many business are using face book to drive traffic and sale to their site. But many business are also having problems with staff using face book while they should be working. Dragon Theo Paphitis recently wrote an article about why he was banning the social networking site at his work.

On the contrary James Caan another Dragon has looked to embrace the site in his role as the chairman of an SEO company in the south. Either way you need to decide to ban or not to ban. Many staff will react badly to the news. The best option is to allow people on but only at break time and dinner time.

If your still feeling the pinch and you want to continue to promote your website it doesn’t need to cost you a penny and that’s even if you don’t have any technical knowledge.

Unless you have a CMS or a blog on your site updating and adding further pages or content to your site requires a programmer or a designer. If you can’t afford one then you can promote your site from other sites. For example set up a twitter account, or a face book account and start to add content there. Providing you use the same branding as your main site and link back to your site your customers will understand that it’s part of your site.

Jaguar Land Rover will be closing one it’s plants in the West Midlands by the middle of next decade. The company wants to shut one of the two plants in the midlands Castle Bromwich plant in Birmingham or a factory in nearby Solihull.

The counter balance 800 new jobs will be created in Merseyside at the Halewood plant which secured the deal to produce the new Range Rover. The Company is owned by Indian firm Tata. There is no news on which plant will be shut. Most people have seen that the move although bad counld be worse with both plants shutting down.

“This is a plan that recognises the impact the economic collapse has had on our business, and at the same time the opportunities that lie ahead for these two great brands,” said chief executive David Smith.

It look like the UK is currently coming out of the recession, slowly but surly business are starting to pick up orders are coming in which is great to see.

It’s important that businesses don’t then decide to take their “foot off the pedal”. We noticed that companies that decided to cut back on marketing during the resession would have a bad time the same is now correct with the recovery period. It’s important to keep on spending money and time on promotion of your product.

It could be the case that you come out of this period stronger and making more money then ever.

When I came up with the idea of creating a series of posts based around earning online from nothing, the first thing that came to mind was providing a service.  In business, those that have the ability to provide relevant and sought after services will always have business, and for those that can do it well there will always be food on the table.  In an offline context, we’re talking about plumbers, bricklayers, painters, accountants, lawyers – those service provider without whom we would struggle in specific skilled areas.  Online, we’re looking at the web designers, copywriters/content writers, SEOs.  Providing those kinds of services can be a great way to get started, and if you’re going from scratch, freelancer sites like RentACoder.com can provide the work you’re looking for.

But this presents two problems – primarily, that on RAC you are competing with other freelancers on a ‘lowest price’ basis, where quality doesn’t often guarantee you’ll get the job.  The second problem that this presents is that you have to fight for work, and lose a hefty percentage to the site from which you won the work.

A more advanced business model, then, for those looking to provide services eliminates you personally from the picture.  What have you got over the freelancers working extremely hard on their respective sites?  You have the ability to devote time and energy into winning work and managing a business, (which I can assure you beats writing articles).

Many great businesses have been built on the oursourcing model – offer your services through branded, professional channels and outsource the work to a network of freelance staff, taking a percentage on the top.  The beauty here is that you can provide just about any skill through the form of another, whilst still marking up the price.  The customer is happy, because he deals with a professional interface and receives exactly what he is looking for regardless of technical requirements.  The freelancer is happy because you provide a regular stream of work and payment – your job is to act as the middle man and co-ordinate communications and cash flow amongst both sides of the transaction.

This kind of business can be started from scratch with no resources.  All you need is a RAC account, and the ability to find work for yourself.  If you focus on winning and closing contracts online, through building on social networks and forums, you will soon realise healthy profits on what is a high margin, project management role.

One of my favourite exercises in branding and working with brand strategy is a kind of reality vs. desire task involving thinking on a critical level about your brand identity now and where you want it to be later down the line.

As an online business owner it can sometimes be easy to blur the distinctions between what your brand actually stands for in the eyes of your customers and what you would like it to stand for.

Grab a pen and paper and begin to jot down what your brand stands for. Are you an innovator like Apple? Are you low-cost, value like Walmart? Are you quality driven like Mercedes Benz? Of course it is seldom this clear cut and there are many shades of grey between each known classification of brand. Write down what your brand represents, and what you want conveyed as your brand message. When you’ve done that, the same thing can be done for your competition. In branding, it’s important to find a point of distinction amongst the competition – if you’re all competing for the quality market, who is servicing the value market?

You should be able to come up with a list of values that your company portrays, along with the same for your direct competition. Do you notice any trend? Is every brand gunning after the same ideal? This kind of exercise allows you to spot gaps in the market, where appropriate, to enable you to channel your marketing efforts more productively.

The next step of the exercise is to think about your product or service strengths. Again, a similar list like the previous should suffice. The point here is to bring up some common ground, which when combined with analysis of the wider market should allow you to find the right direction for your brand.

From there it’s a case of implementation, through consistency and building familiarity. It’s all as simple as that, really…