Tag: business

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clients

Blogging For Small Business

Many resources recommend having a blog and creating content in order to position yourself as an expert in the field. Blog attracts attention to the product you are selling giving it a contextual boost from the content you are writing. In most cases, people who know the most about the product or service are those who run the business. They are so busy creating the product or service, dealing with clients and suppliers or whatnot that they simply don’t have time to create quality content.

Sure, you can hire a blogger, ghost writer or just an English-major intern to write stuff for you. Problem is – he doesn’t know the product. He doesn’t have the feeling for the product, like the owner has. There is no passion, no interest (except for being paid) and no understanding of how to present your product to the readers. Those readers, who later may become customers. It’s all about presentation, after all. So blogging becomes new sales tool that the owner doesn’t have time (or some times skills) to use.

What we recently started doing is we offer our clients to keep their blogs for them. We know the product, since we worked on presenting it for so much time. We know the target audience, since we’ve been talking to them since the launch of client’s web site. And we have interest in promoting clients’ businesses, since it means more business for us.

Everybody wins. Except for the guy who’s hands are full already.

Categories
business

Debt Of The Entrepreneur

Unless you were born into money, one way or another you get into debt. For most of the people it’s manageable debt – revolving accounts (also known as credit cards), small and big loans (also known as car financing and mortgage). But the whole bunch of people are suffering from unmanageable debt (the one that leads to bankruptcy). For some people the thought of debt is so heavy they don’t even do anything about it. Others become refugee entrepreneurs, escaping from debt into running their own business.

Debt Negotiation, debt consolidation and debt help are considered lesser evil. They don’t usually pay your debt for you, but they refer you to services that may help. How it works for them is that they either buy your debt from your creditors for less then amount you owe thus making a profit. Alternatively, they negotiate easier repayment terms under the assumption that bank has high chance of not seeing their money anyway.

Any debt is like a swamp – you better off not get into it, but if you got yourself in there – get out as fast as you can.

Categories
business

Learn To Fly

For as long as I have been working in IT industry, there were two types of people – those who knew how to do the job and those who had proper certificates. At one of the jobs I held there was this Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer guy, who passed all exams. I remember that someone on our team was teaching him how to troubleshoot a networked printer in real life. I taught him how to hook hard drive to the cable to the motherboard and how to install drivers for network cards. Someone else explained how to set up Novell network on Windows NT workstation. We had fun.

This was awhile ago and since then employers have learned to distinguish certified knowledge and real-world knowledge. Recently, I spoke with a friend of mine, software developer and team leader. He stated that they do take into account if the candidate has Microsoft Certification (they are all-around Microsoft shop), and what kind of certification it is. It matters to them because most of those candidates are self-learners and having certification assures that they at least know the basics of technology. It saves time on the interview since candidates are being asked complicated, full-blown interview questions, not wasting time defining what “abstract class” is and how to build an inner join select in SQL.

I guess there is some progress to the IT management as well, not just technology itself.