I tend to look at starting a new job as a brand new opportunity to take it to the next level – to make a name for myself, and show my new boss how it’s done.

A new job is a new opportunity – a time to put into action all of your experience, and to improve the place that you now work.

When starting a new job, you should act – and present yourself – as a consultant. Basically, you are selling your services to the position that you now hold – they need you for your experience and knowledge, and you need them for – basically – a paycheck (and a workplace to call home, of course).

What is involved with being a consultant? A few of the major points are:

• Be professional in how you act
• Be formal with your presentation of knowledge
• Keep track of everything in writing or a daily log
• Keep communication open, correspond daily (via email)
• Keep the flow of new ideas running
• Take initiative on new ideas, after getting approval

And remember – you are getting paid for the work you do, so do the work you are getting paid for.

So does everyone have their motivation on for the new year?  Come on!  It’s a new year! 2011! Where are the resolutions!

Yeah, I didn’t make them either.  I have realized that I make many of the same ones year after year.

BUT…

If you have that dream… desire… discontent with your career or job (or lack of one) – all I can suggest is that you try.  Give it a shot.

Although – as Yoda said “Do or Do Not.  There is no Try.”

That is very true.  But I believe that to start off, you have to consider it a try. I mean, why not? Throw your hat over the fence. Then you have to go and get it, and try doing what you’ve always thought and dreamed about.

I have a friend – a brilliant artist – who decided to try selling some of her artwork (see it here). Why not? It is great art. Friends love it. So she posted a web site / blog about it. Minimum cost and effort.  Easy enough – why not?  Might as well try.  Won’t hurt anything. She started selling art through an online store, cafepress.  Again, easy to try, low risk.

Now for the new-year exciting part. She is going to throw her hat.  It’s time to DO.  Renting out space in an art gallery.  More risk – sure – but much more gains!

Entrepreneurs, in general, do not see failure as a possible outcome.  Of course we know there will be problems and hurdles.  We know it is going to be tough, many hours working and marketing, headaches, sleepless nights – but we have no doubt that we can make it work.

NO DOUBT.

Do or Do Not.  There is no Try.

And best of luck to my friend Shelley – we are all behind you 100%!

Resources

The DOT is undertaking a major project at the front entrance of the neighborhood I live in.  They have decided to cut off a hill in the road, essentially making the road flat.  This involves lowering the road by about eight feet, and lowering the entrance to the neighborhood to match.

Happens all the time.  But what strikes me as amazing is the process that goes on behind the scenes.  If you think about it, the project is pretty involved.  It takes planning, money, people, tools, permits, and organization.

But it shows that just about anything can be done if you have the right resources and a dream.

What had to happen to make this project a reality:

• One person had a problem, a vision, or a dream of what they want to do
• That person put together a plan, probably a basic document of what they wanted to see happen, what the goals were, and the reason behind it.
• That person gained support for their vision
• That person found and received the funding for their dream.
• A team was put together to come up with a plan.
• Resources were put together – contractors, machinery, permits, and meetings
• All the people – each specialists in their field or company – shared that common goal and vision, and had their tasks in the project.
• The project gets underway, and eventually is complete.

So, what seems like a daunting task to reshape the lay of the land to make the road safer, actually becomes quite technical, if you will.  When you break it down into steps, and get the resources you need, it’s not really that hard.

But – it has to start with one person and a vision or a dream. It has to start with you, and your goals.  Without that leader, the project, dream, business – whatever you are going for – will not happen.

For me, I was pretty amazed at the team I had put together for my startup company.  I personally talked to each person I hired.   What surprised me the most is that they all caught hold of my dream and vision – they were excited about it too!  They took the dream as their own, and they each did their part to make it a reality.

When you are that excited about your goals, and you can gain support and excitement from other people – you are well on your path to make your dream a reality.

Have you been in similar situations telling people or listening to other peoples visions?  Post a comment and let the world know.

As I read through my last post, I’m wondering if I’ve given you a hammer, a few nails, but no plan.  Why don’t we step back a bit and do some homework on the business plan…fail to plan and you plan to fail…yada yada…

Determine your core pages and your core focus.

If you already have a site and a business, it wouldn’t hurt to pretend that you are starting over with a fresh look; don’t lament over the cost, rather look to the future of your business.  You might find that time spent on SEO work now will provide nice returns.

Home Page, About Us, Contact Us and a Product/Services page – just the basics are our focus now.  We will talk about page layout in a later blog.

Homework:

List the following to come up with your core focus:

1. What do you provide; affordable comfortable chairs for the ergonomically challenged for office use
2. Where do you offer this? Are you restricted geographically in your offer? Where do you provide this service?  US, Canada, UK
3. How would your customer benefit?  Relieve back stress and pain
4. Who is your customer?  30+ male/female in an office job, where sitting is a big portion of their day (like me!)
5. When can you deliver this product?  Delivered in 2-3 weeks depending on your location;  Georgia, US residents can pick it up or have it within a week.
6. Why should they buy from you?  Our chairs have been tested in our facility for durability and by independent Drs of Ergonomics.  Tours available.
7. How does it provide safety, comfort, reliability and cost effectiveness?  Our chairs
8. Something fun…comes in lots of color flavors: Lemon Lust, Avacado Amore, Pink Persuasion, etc.

You could even expand upon these.  #4 Who is your customer…  factory worker on their feet all day – computer nerd on the pc all day – financial advisor working from home on the phone a lot – etc etc.  If you’ve worked out a business plan – because we ALL do that when we start a company….right?!

Remember who, what, where, when, why, how…and throw in your twist (colors) or your competitive advantage.  I would like to buy one of these, wouldn’t you?

When you work out, what do all instructors say to work on?  Your CORE strength, around this everything else will evolve or revolve.

From your core you will extrapolate your keyword phrases:  comfort chairs relieve stress, back friendly ergonomic chairs (does anyone love that word ergonomic?!)

All pages will have this core focus; but be careful how many times you use this phrase.  I’ll show you how to use these later for:

• meta tags
• content copy/text
• page naming
• link backs

Your website must be ‘dense’ – filled with – your core focus, but cross that line with too much and you’re just bragging a little too much and that looks bad for search engines.

Now, do your homework.  Let it stew for a while; share ideas with friends, have a wine, add some more (more wine, more friends, more phrases, whatever it takes…)  Don’t be concerned if it gets too lengthy.  We can whittle it down later.

Thanks to Jon for letting me post to his blog…I am much more responsible when I am held accountable to someone else.  So when Jon asked me to be a guest blogger, I jumped at the opportunity…ok, last month I jumped at the opportunity.  But I DID jump.

The purpose of this “guest blogging” by Tweeter: NotesFromKris. aka Kristina McInerny, is to impart my vast source of knowledge on website SEO.  It’s actually just a ploy on Jon’s part to get free advice for his own website.  It worked!

Let’s start small…

Let’s talk about images…

Search Engines (Google, Ask, MSN, Jeeves, etc) cannot “SEE” images; all they see is text.   For images on your website, you need to be concerned with the following:

• file names
• alt property
• title property

Your filename needs to have hyphens between key words, no spaces, norunons (ha!), and it must consist of KEYWORDS.  Keywords are a whole other discussion for advanced users.  For this discussion and all future blogs, we will use an anti-gravity chair as our example product/marketing/web-site focus.

An anti-gravity chair defies gravity.  It is built for those who sit on their butts alot.  It is comfy and ergonomic.  We’ll assume that your optimized keywords are the following:

• anti-gravity
• comfortable chair
• floor vibration
• custom chairs
• comfort sitting
• sore back
• ergonomic chair

(Questions I asked myself in coming up with these:  what problem are you trying to combat with this chair; what would people search for?)

So, before uploading your image, name it “comfortable-anti-gravity-custom-chair.jpg”.

IF you have control over your content and IF you know how to update your image properties, add the ‘ALT’ property to the “img” tag (or select image properties from your content management system; CMS).  If you don’t have access to your website and don’t know how to update the source code, why are you reading this?

ALT stands for alternate; additional text that describes the photo, originally added for the browsers that didn’t display images or back ‘in the day’ when internet connectivity was slower than honey on a cold Northern day.  Nowadays, internet is fast we don’t have to worry about turning off images.  The ALT property is ADA compliant for the visually impaired.

So.. your html tag will look like this:

<img src=”/images/comfortable-anti-gravity-custom-chair.jpg” alt=”Black Anti-Gravity Chair to support your back and provide ergonomic support”>

Search engines can dig deeper into indexing your site with this.

The TITLE property is what displays when you mouse over an image…I believe there are some differences among browsers about which one (ALT or TITLE) appears on mouse-over.  If the image is not available, ALT text will display, but if you don’t have a TITLE property, I believe that the ALT shows up upon mouse-over.

So.. your html tag will look like this:

<img src=”/images/comfortable-anti-gravity-custom-chair.jpg” alt=”Black Anti-Gravity Chair to support your back and provide ergonomic support” title=”Support a Healthy Back with the Anti-Gravity chair for ergonomic support.”>

Yes I like the word ergonomic.

Yes, your designer (assuming custom design) should be providing you with images that have seo-friendly file names.  Yes, you should be paying them to do this extra bit of work.  Yes, every little bit helps.  Yes, the html provided to you should be optimized.  Yes, you can do this later, but the earlier in the process you start this, the more likely:

1. you will actually DO it
2. it will be cheaper

Search Engine Optimization is a big puzzle.  You can usually make out what a puzzle is going to look like with most of the pieces, but the more the pieces, the more clear the puzzle picture for the search engines.

If history is our basis for learning, why do we repeat the past? Maybe we haven’t adapted fully to discern similarities between different medias (or is it mediums?).

Designing brick and mortar stores depended upon product quality and “if people are interested in what we have, they’ll buy”. (All quotes are from the titled book.)

It’s the ‘sell it and they will come’ mentality with no regard for spacing in the aisles, lighting for the mood, layout for visibility,etc. Websites should be the same way.

I’ve just started this book and am excited to share the findings with you here on this blog. Maybe this will encourage me to read until the end. And if you don’t have time to read an entire (almost) 200 page book, maybe you can learn something here. So far so good.

So, I just finished up my fourth week of unemployment, and am well underway of starting to work for myself.  Here is a little rundown of how most small businesses get underway, from the viewpoint of an entrepreneur.

• I teamed up with a partner, who is far more organized and thorough than I am.  He pretty much is in line with me, and takes up the parts where I am lacking.  I am more of a “lets just go try it and see what happens” kind of person, and my partner is more of a planner and do-it-by-the-book kind of person.  I hold back and do it right, since he is correct most of the time.  This involves getting a business license, registering a trade name, setting up a checking account, and doing some competitive research.

• Came up with a good business name for IT work – Core Network Solution.  We went through about 100 different names, asking people their opinions, checking available domain names, and looking into the county business records for availability.

• Registered our domain name, and set up our web site in joomla (a content management system.  http://www.corenetworksolution.com

• Made up some quick business cards that we can print, just to get going.

• Working on a marketing brochure to mail out (quick lesson – if people don’t know you are in business, they won’t know to call you! – so BRAG)

The next step is to get the work out that we are in business.

See? Starting a business is not that difficult, or costly.  I’ve put in about $20 to register a domain name and the first month of web hosting.  Can’t hurt to try, right?

Nothing ever happens if you just sit around and think about your dreams.

What are the steps you need to take to follow your dream?  Post a comment and let the world know.

In the beginning…

Sitting at a coffee shop on Monday morning, imagining to myself what it would be like at an “entrepreneurs anonymous” meeting:

(me) “Hello, my name is Jon Colier, and I’m an entrepreneur.”

(crowd) “Hi Jon”.

I’m a mechanical engineer by schooling, and entrepreneur at heart.  I’ve been designing custom machinery for 17 years – oh, how time flies.  I’ve had a dream of running my own company since I was 8 years old.  I actually did start my own custom machine design company, ran it for two years until I took on too much work and went bankrupt.

Best two years of my working life.

After that, I ran into a streak of depression, for losing my dream and failing.  Since then, I’ve realized that it was not failure, but a lesson learned.

After that – after having my entrepreneurial spirit crushed, and in need to support my family, I took an engineering job – a “normal” job.

I was laid off from my place of employment last Friday.  I, like many people, saw it coming months ago, even knew about when it would happen.  It was not really a surprise, but a relief.  It was not really where I wanted to be, nor was it what my heart wanted.  Don’t get me wrong – I put in 100%, and did a great job.  I just knew it was not for me.

So now I sit here, wondering what is next.

I pretty much know what is next, I just have to figure it out, if that makes any sense.  Over the next few days, weeks, months – I will share my path of where I am headed, and where my dreams take me.  I will post my thoughts and actions for you all to follow and hopefully learn from.

Maybe you can catch some hope or inspiration from my path toward entrepreneurship.

Are you or have you been in a similar situation?  Leave a comment and let me know.

Thumbs Down

That’s right – us entrepreneurs have skeletons in our closet.  Little secrets we dare not tell anyone, except to other entrepreneurs, and those thinking about getting into the self-employed scene.

The cars, the boats, the vacations, the glamor and fame – it all looks good, but there are the little secrets that can strip the excitement away from the appearance.

Here are some of the “dirty little secrets” that no one tell you – you can’t learn them in classes, in seminars, or reading books. It’s one of those things you learn “on the job”, as they say.

1. It’s your dream – it’s up to you to make it work.
2. When times are good, everyone wants to be your friend.
3. When times are bad, you are alone.
4. At the beginning, just starting out – you have to believe in yourself, because no one else will.
5. When things go downhill – you have to believe in yourself, because no one else will.
6. If a job takes you 8 hours, assume it will take someone else 24.  Seriously.
7. NO ONE will work as hard as you.  Accept it as fact.
8. In the end, all responsibility is on your shoulders.
9. Part of having employees is babysitting – sometimes more than you would like.
10. You will have sleepless nights wondering what you got yourself into.

Those are some good, basic, entrepreneur rules, however negative they might be.  It is what it is.  Don’t get me wrong – owning your own business is absolutely wonderful – the pros greatly outweigh the cons (well, most of the time).

Next post, I will concentrate on the upside of entrepreneurship.

What tough situations do you find yourself in working for yourself?  Comment and let me know.

Are you crazy?

The stress… the long hours… the lack of sleep… the lack of money… did I mention the stress?

Some of the great benefits of being an entrepreneur and owning your own business.

But seriously – come on!  If it’s so terrible, why do people do it?

Admit it – you secretly love it, even crave it.

There are hundreds of books and online tests that attempt to tell you:

• Are you an entrepreneur?
• Do you have what it takes?
• Are you a born leader?
• What is your career path?

I believe that the people who take those tests and read those books already know what the answer is – they would not be researching it if they weren’t already interested in and craving entrepreneurship.  We just all want confirmation of our seemingly crazy and misguided need to work for ourselves, and build a business that is bigger than us.

What IS an entrepreneur?

• If you have a concept for something, and believe in that concept so strongly that it’s all you think about night and day – you have it.

• If you go after your dream, even though everyone tells you you are doing the wrong thing and going down the wrong path – you have it.

• If you risk all of your money to go after your dream, knowing that it will succeed without a doubt – you have it.

• If your concept fails, and you immediately start thinking of your next big idea – you have it.

Basically, being an entrepreneur means taking the courses of action to make your dream a reality.  To not be afraid of making mistakes, or even to fail.  To ignore the negative people, and seek out the positive.  To be so excited about your dream that other people want to join you and help.

It’s not easy – any business owner will gladly tell you that.  They will probably even try to talk you out of working for yourself – only an insane fanatic would choose to be an entrepreneur.

But we do choose to, because we need to.  It’s a feeling that is always there with us, and has been since we were kids.  It gnaws at us night and day, and we suffer with it until we embrace it, and start the long and exciting journey of learning, building, and growing our dream.

Yes, being an entrepreneur IS crazy.  But we would not have life any other way.