Prosper Newsletter: February 2007 > Small Business
You understand that the following information is educational in nature and is not intended to be legal, accounting, or tax advice. You are responsible for your own financial decisions and should consult your own legal, accounting, and tax advisors before making your financial decisions.
Joining the Team
As professional fundraisers, Joe and I have traveled the country working with hundreds of philanthropic individuals and organizations. Often, we'll hear comments like, "this is really easy if you know how," or "more people need to know what it means to be a philanthropist." Like many professionals, and many of you, we often thought, "We need to write a book about this." However, how do you find the time? We read several books, and contacted many individuals, and then we had a meeting with Proper, Inc. We then met our coach, and what happened next is going to change our lives.
Our coach listened to our grand plan and all our ideas. He talked us through what we really wanted to accomplish and what our dreams were. Finally, he organized our thoughts and put us on a path. He worked with our demanding travel schedules and odd hours. Often we would call in or email from various locations. Our coach was flexible, and always available for a quick email or short phone call. His weekly assignments were challenging, but kept us fired up, making a seemingly impossible job, not only possible, but gave us just enough glimpse of our end goal that we had the confidence that we could and would accomplish our goals. He taught us marketing principles and techniques that can only be learned from personal trials and experiences. It didn't end with our coach. Individuals from technical support helped us with website details. Marketing experts gave us advice about book publishing, e-books, and small details that have made a large difference. The design team helped create a book cover and a "brand" for our site. We felt like we were part of a complete team. Teams where all the members are genuinely interested in helping us succeed!
With the help of our coach and Prosper, our plan is nearing completion. We've created a website. Eventually, this site will be a site that provides families, and small organizations, with information on educational topics, fundraising, and educational products and tools. Set one was to establish the fundraising aspect and complete the book. We've accomplished step one and are excited about our future with our fabulous team. Prosper has taught us that dreams do come true, and the best way to accomplish them is with a coach! And the great team the coach bring along!
- Chris M.
Write Down Your Goals
Write your goals down. Writing a goal down is a very powerful exercise. Many New Year's resolution makers often find that the very act of writing a goal down improves both its articulation, but also its follow-through.
One reason why I suggest writing down a goal is so you can capture the essence of what you want to do with specifics. In many cases where a goal is an undefined task or nebulous objective, people tend to falter. Having some specific, measurable, definitive goal becomes easier to hold yourself accountable to and track.
Another reason why written goals are great is because they can be posted in conspicuous places. They can be reminders and motivators. Keep them posted. Keep them in a visible place. As you seek to make some new goals this year... remember, writing them down is a great first step.
Doing Research
Before beginning any venture it is important to understand the fundamentals associated with the endeavor you are undertaking. One of the most effective manners in which you can do this is to do research on the topic. The more familiar you become with the business you begin, the better your chances of success.
The idea of doing research spans all three areas of information marketing or info-marketing which are info-preneuring, online marketing, and business marketing. Research is so important to these three pillars that we'd like to discuss this more at length.
There are two basic types of research that you can do to find out about supply and demand. These are:
- Subjective - such as through an observational studies
- Objective - online research
In order to understand supply and demand, you must first find out how many people are looking for the product that you will be selling. One way that you can do this is to visit a site that lists the amount of searches for that product. One site you can visit to obtain this information is http://inventory.overture.com.
Overture is one of the largest and oldest pay-per-click search engines. Overture is one of the only search engines that provide us with this type of tool. This tool allows us to search for a particular keyword phrase. It will tell us how many searches were done for the previous month for that particular keyword phrase on Yahoo!
In order to get a better idea of total internet-wide searches for that phrase, we would probably take the number and times it by four. This is one of the quickest and most effective ways that we can diagnose demand for a particular keyword phrase.
Whether working on website that will provide an informational product or a website that sells tangible goods or services, you really need to get a better idea of that marketplace and the competition within that marketplace. So the first thing we need to do is figure out the demand for a particular area.
Keep in mind that just because someone is looking up and doing a search for a phrase doesn't necessarily mean that they are looking to go ahead and purchase the item. They may be looking up information, comparisons, product recall information, etc. Even so, you can get a general feel for the basic demand of a product based on the amount of times the phrase or item is being searched for.
You may be wondering what the best way to figure what the supply for a particular product is. One way of doing it is to take the exact keyword phrase used in figuring the demand and doing a search on Google with that keyword phrase. Google shows the number of websites offering this phrase in the upper right-hand corner. This number represents your competition.
Your goal is to become a big fish in a little pond. The way you can know the size of the pond is by looking at the number of websites competing for that same keyword phrase. In order to understand what you are looking for you need specific parameters to judge supply and demand.
