Business Starter Series – Introduction
While I haven’t had much going on in the blogging department of late, I have had a lot going on in the research and development department and you would have read about that in my article on Keepin’ it Tidy.
I’ve come across a lot of blogs on design and business promotion on a budget during recent times. It’s quite ironic because I’m currently in the situation of wondering how to promote myself to gain more clients. I already have several clients and pull in maybe one a month. While more business is always nice, I just don’t have the slightest about how to promote myself. I have plenty of ideas of how to promote other peoples businesses, but never mine.
I’m a designer; I have been for some 8-9 years now and I’m just that – a designer. I don’t know how to code web pages strictly, but I can do enough to get a website out for someone on a budget that works. Like I said, I’m a designer so I only care how it looks at the end and if it looks like it should then I’ve done my job. But I’m no web designer – my forte lies in print and pre-press and that’s where I’d like to stay. Leave the ‘candy-apple’ graphics to the kids with Photoshop and nothing better to do. Because honestly, they make some of the most terrible designs I’ve ever seen and you only need to see some PHP-nuke templates to understand what I’m talking about.
More to the point, I read both articles on Freelanceswitch.com about how to promote your graphic design business part one and part two, and also the 10 essential free or cheap ways to market your freelance work. This is where I’m going to go in more depth on some of their material
Also a lot of people find it easy to give advice on how to promote your business, but not in enough depth. Exactly what should we put on a business card? Thats something I’m going to try and help you with, and more.
I’m progressively working on a series of articles that I’ll release over the next few months covering some topics mentioned in FreelanceSwitch to help start up a business. If you’re like me and you want to make a little bit of cash on the side and hope in pushing your business to one day be a full time proposition, then stick around and I’ll give you something to read and consider before you start up your own business.To see whats coming up, I’ll be writing on the following.
- Brainstorming
What exactly do you want to do as a business? Finding a good business name, doing some lengthy research and deploying that research to get the ball rolling.
- Promotions
Business cards, websites, marketing proposals, fliers. It’s all there, can be done cheaply and effectively.
- Client Focus
Focusing on what your client wants, and what you can give them to find the right balance.
- Target Audience
Find your target audience, who are going to be your clients, and who is going to be their clients.
- Communication
Communicating with your prospective clients, and helping them communicate with theirs.
- Profitable Niche
Narrowing down that target audience to find a niche market you can find profitable from.
- Client Satisfaction
Bending over backwards until your client is happy.
Keepin’ it tidy
After offering to be a moderator on the forums at Zenhabits, Leo (and I) noticed that there are a lot of spam bots that hit hard on phpbb2 forums. I also noticed this on my own website with a forum A Geeks Life (which doesn’t do much really). But I searched for so many ways to stop spam bots, banning email addresses, forum modifications to stop them from signing up, preventing bots from seeing user lists. The list just goes on and it’s irritating. Seeing them come flooding into Leo’s site was definately what got my ass into gear and to look at what I was going to do about it.
I first had this idea, and that’s what I’m developing at the moment in my spare time, and I thought it would be a damn site useful for people like Leo from Zenhabits for when they set up their own websites that they can counter this kind of spam and make their website easier to manage. Basically a place for resources.
Bring forth the ‘Tidy Collaboration Project’. I’ve had the domain lying around for a while and thought I’d use it. So to give you an idea, I like to work on the saying from a good friend of mine which has become somewhat of a life philosophy, “keepin’ it tidy”. ‘Tidy Collaboration Project’ isn’t its official name, it’s only what I’m calling it while I work on it. I’ll have something when I launch it that will knock your socks off 
That’s exactly what I’m going to try and to, help people control and develop their site no matter how their experience is with the web. They may be just a blogger who is new to the game, or someone who’s been around for years looking for something that can help them get their site going and some traffic.
But there’s a catch, it will be user powered. Let’s take the PHPbb spam bot saga again, you can actually save out a file of banned addresses from your forums. So what I’d like to do is use that as a base for people who have banned addresses to submit them to my site and we build one huge database that people can download and load into their own database and stop the spam quicker. Also a mix of tutorials for beginners and the like.
The site has also been a steep learning curve for myself, I haven’t dabbled much in database work. But this one I’m trying to base it around phpbb but I’m not having any luck as it’s a pain of a system to use with multiple style sheets and conflicting with other style sheets on the site. Major, major headaches!
Anyway, that’s what I’m up to in my spare time and hopefully I’ll have it launched in the next month or two. I’ll have some more details on this and probably looking for some staff (read – volunteers) to run it and contribute to the community, promote it and what not.
Quick update
Well apparently some people do read my blog and want to know more, even if it is a miniscule few that do read it.
I haven’t made a post in a while but I’ve been asked when more will come up, so this is to let the people know that I do have a few articles I’m in the midst of and will be posting them up shortly. Although I may have to break them up into a series of articles as the current one is quite long. I’ve been undertaking a lot of development work with phpbb the last few weeks and I’ve nearly fried my mind work on it. But I believe that it is going to be useful not only to me, but to many bloggers and site hobbyists around the world, and also for those beginning on their websites for the first time.
So stay tuned and keep it tidy, I’ll have a few things up by the end of the week, and just to hint I have a new project on the way which I’m hoping will become useful.
Keep it tidy
