Working for yourself means you do not know and should never count on when you are going to be paid. Clients will give you the run around, checks may bounce, disagreements on an invoice, you never know what may prolong getting paid for a job. However this can be great because it can force you to learn how to become frugal and pay everything on a cash only basis. Cash is King.

It also means you do not have all those nice benefits like health and dental conveniently taken out of your non-existent biweekly paycheck in small sums.

There are of course other cons working from home, but the pros most definitely outweight the cons. For instance, its 4:21p, 84F, and sunny, I’m going to take a little break and go take the motorcycle out…

So with that said, if you have a twitter account and a blog, why don’t you just integrate them? This way everytime you post on your blog, it posts a new tweet, and everytime you post a new tweet, it shows up in your blog.

After hearing about several wordpress plugins that do this I immediately started digging for the best. I eventually came across Tweetsuite which I now highly recommend. It does not require any coding whatsoever, you just install it like any other plugin. It provides many other features in addition to integrating your blog posts and it is definitely worth your time looking at.

Check it out here: http://danzarrella.com/beyond-tweetbacks-introducing-tweetsuite.html

If you plan on starting a business you better be prepared to display all of the above, or don’t plan on staying in business very long. Perseverance is one of the main reasons I am still, and just about any other business, is still around. When MN3 started out it was just myself picking up small clients while working for big name retailers. The next thing that happened was either through what some would say luck, or what I would say, was through pure persistency in my pursuit to build my business. I eventually made some great hits and has ever sinced created an ever growing snowball. It’s just like sales calls. If you go through a small list of people you are going to build a small amount of business, if any at all. If you make a huge list and give up halfway through it because no one is buying, then you’ve also failed. Who knows, that last guy on the list could be your big sale that rolls into many more.

Keep a very clear vision of where you want to be in the next five to ten years. Tape pictures of your future Ferrari and beach house to the refrigerator. Do something to make those goals permantely embedded into your everyday thought process and you will get there. Oh yeah, don’t forget to have some fun along the way.

American Psychological Association (APA):

Here’s the new blog, woo, exciting. Had to get rid of that grass background, bleh.

I have been developing my network of customers, middle men, and mentors for only a year now. So you may say what the heck does this guy know about long term relationships? Well I can say I know enough to say that they are extremely important in business, and I knew this from the beginning.

My first big lead was a guy named Brian who owned a steel contracting company. I met him while working at an Apple store. Fortunately for me this apple store was located in an upscale city near Chicago, Illinois where many business owners resided. It was time to capitalize on that. Yes, I was double dipping while working for Apple, I would sell business owners their Macs and Printers and then BRIEFLY ask if they’re looking for any graphic or website work. Some would say that is extremely unethical, I say it was extremely slick. Anyway, I was a week too late with Brian on doing things for his website as his business partner already had another company working for them. He did mention there was other work he had, which didn’t turn out to be much.

Fast forward a year. I talk to Brian at least three times a week and meet up with him for a beer at the local Apple Bees a couple times a month. What the heck does a web designer and a steel contractor have in common? We both own businesses and know many people that also do. Brian hooked us up with our biggest client thus far, Dave Trautwein of Professional Baseball Instruction, another big client shortly, and turned me onto email marketing where I have definitely seen some cash. He doesn’t ask for a thing in return except that when we meet up I help him with his site and any tech related problems, sweet deal huh?

Moral of the story, spend the extra effort and time talking with people, don’t nickel and dime, don’t be an ass, and the cash will find its way to you.

Depending on what you want to accomplish, find a single or multiple niche searches and hit it hard.

It would be HIGHLY profitable for me to be on the first page of Google every time someone searched “web design” being that I own a web design company. However, it is sort of unrealistic to achieve that in a very short period of time. So why not narrow it down? In my case I made most of our website geared toward getting ranked higher for the search “Schaumburg web design”. In addition to this I made specific pages that had nothing to do with Schaumburg but to other cities and subjects. For example I made a page for cities that are known for housing business owners and a page for small business in general.

Each of these pages have the same idea as our standard home page, basically an introduction of the company, but have unique content that are relevant to the niche search I was targeting. In the end, you are not only developing pages/content to take over specific niche searches but at the same time they all tie into the broader search, in this case, “web design”.  Simple really, right?

Relevant Back Linking.

I have read that this is 90% of the battle of page ranking. If someone puts a link to your website on theirs, they must have some sort of trust to do so. If this someone’s website is bringing in thousands of visitors a day and is a highly respected site, well you’ve just hit the gold mine. Not only will you see traffic through theirs(maybe not your target audience however) but search engines recognize this trust between the sites. A couple things to mention about linking is that it will benefit you more when the site pointing to you is relevant to what your website is about. In my case I submitted our company site to web designer directories which not only brings in the target audience I’m looking for but also creates a link to my site from one that is highly relevant.

There are things that can definitely hurt your page rank and even become what is called black listed. Then there’s even SEO espionage…scary. I will get into these things later this week and supply links to great resources.

This is one of the many things entrepreneurs live for.

Realism then sets in.  For this lead to mean anything they need to be converted into a paying client.  Before that can even happen they need to be qualified as a potential customer. You don’t want to waste your precious time, do you? One easy way to qualify a lead is to setup a meeting. Even if they are asking you for something, a price, a full quote, a proposal, you need to ask them for something. That something is their time to engage with you face to face. This helps prove if this lead is worth looking into and builds a better relationship with them.

www.mn3marketing.com

Anyway, I’ve decided on my first real side project. It involves spending time with my devious (had to say it) little sister. Myspace has engulfed her past time to my parent’s dismay. I discovered last week that my she has an amazing talent for computer graphics for her age, 13. I briefly showed her how to apply and show off her skills by making her Myspace background one of the images she had created. Something so simple to us developers and web designers as linking in an external image made her completely ecstatic. It was very nostalgic, a great reminder of where I started.

This project is simple and is not by any means unique. I’ll be constructing a website where my sister can upload her myspace backgrounds to share with the world, for free. Yeah, great idea huh, so where do I benefit? The value of hands on experience is far greater than that of a book or a teacher’s lecture.

This website will be an experiment for digital marketing techniques, ranging from SEO, SEM, to linking strategies. This will teach my company and I an uncomparable amount of knowledge. Assuming that I can successfully increase traffic to the website at a very above average rate, it will be used in future sales processes. Raw numbers and graphs don’t lie and the closely measured results will be a very powerful sales tool for future prospects.