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August 31, 2009

Follow the Money

Networking for a small business owner (or an aspiring entrepreneur) is always helpful, but networking during times of economic turmoil is essential.

As a single-owner proprietorship, you can set up a simple advisory board locally that includes a wide spectrum of professional expertise that you can draw on for advice. Such board members often are attorneys, certified public accountants, civic club leaders, owners or managers of businesses similar to yours or whom you do business with, and retired executives.

They could be three to five individuals who are knowledgeable about the environment in which you do business and are able to connect you with the information you need to make good decisions.

The purpose of such an advisory board is to offer you objectivity. It should be people who are truthful with you and who will keep your disclosures confidential.

Most advisory boards discuss specific business problems you have and brainstorm about possible solutions -- and help you take the next step in your development after you have been operating as a small business for awhile.

But, why not employ the advisory board concept to explore your market niche before you make a commitment to a business model?

You could charge the members of your temporary advisory board with this mission: help you define and identify a market niche of customers for your product or service who have discretionary money to spend or who are not affected by economic downturns.

In other words, they could help you "follow the money" by targeting potential customers who need your product or service and have the ability (and willingness) to pay you for what you offer.

The information you gain will help you develop your business plan for a profitable business.

And you can do all this online through social networking sites. For example, you could set up your own private LinkedIn group, Facebook fan page, Twitter chat etc. just for your temporary advisory board.

Here are five business guidelines and concrete examples your online group of advisors could help you evaluate in terms of potential profitability.

  1. Orientation and Mobility

    Guideline: Contact potential customers before they contact you about what the problems are. Can you help them in some way? You can gain a longtime relationship with a customer by approaching them proactively with the view of being there to help them through their own hard times.

    Example: Have you been collecting tips about how to enjoy leisure travel when you have a visual impairment? You could write an eBook about them and offer it for sale through a web site targeting baby boomers who are financially ready to retire and travel but suddenly find themselves dealing with orientation and mobility issues. Would they be willing to pay for your eBook?

  2. Educational Services

    Guideline: Avoid market niches which already receive your services for free.

    Example: Be aware that college students with disabilities often can get free career counseling through Student Disability Services on campus. So, if you’re a career coach, why would you target that market as an entrepreneur? Or, is there a specific need within the career management sector that is not being met by on-campus services – a void you could fill as an independent contractor?

  3. Public Financing

    Guideline: Follow local, state and federal priorities in public financing.

    Example: Study government spending in your sector. If you’re serving a sector of the economy which is receiving stimulus money (such as education, infrastructure, energy etc.), how would you be able to tap into that emerging market buoyed by public money or receive grant money to service that market?

  4. Assistive Technology

    Guideline: Study trends in demographics which will have an impact on your product or service.

    Example: Think of people who are in their peak earning years and beyond who are acquiring visual impairments. What do they need and want? Do they need or want to work beyond their normal retirement age but have little knowledge of the assistive technology that is now available. Would they pay for accommodation help from a private individual who has experience in mainstream employment and assistive technology?

  5. Corporate Alliances

    Guideline: Study successful online entrepreneurs and what strategies they’ve used to reach their targeted market niche.

    Example: Explore affiliate relationships, partnerships or alliances with your vendors or with products or services closely aligned with your own. Which alliance reaches the most profitable spectrum of potential customers?


By the way, people with disabilities who want to start a business can find assistance and support from a number of different local agencies.

Check this fact sheet for some of the many business resources that are available across the U.S. that can help you become self-employed or start a small business.

What other ideas do you have for using online networking to help you develop a profitable small business?

Posted by Liz Seger at 01:08 PM | Comments (0)

August 25, 2009

How to Find Your Unique Market

Today's online social media are great tools for both talking and listening.

But, before you begin talking, try listening.

Listen and do market research. This is critical if you want to start a small business at home and use social networking as a relationship-based marketing tool.

Relationship-based marketing is all about gaining followers online and gaining the trust of those followers. After you have established your credibility with those followers (they trust you), they become potential leads and potential clients/customers.

You can then show them that you have something of value to offer (which they are willing to pay for) -- such as coaching, music, photography, sign language interpretation, voiceovers etc.

But, first you need to listen to your prospects and track what your competitors are doing.

Use social networking to identify new needs for your product or service within a redefined niche. You need a special spin for what you offer so it stands out against your competition.

Note that your product or service can be your own. Or you can market and sell other people's products and services through partnerships or affiliate programs.

If you want to sell other people's products or services, you still need to listen and observe what is happening within social networks so you capture the right set of followers for what your affiliates are offering. You need to direct those followers to a landing place on a blog or a web site where you can offer them further information that they need for free in exchange for their contact information.

So, whichever path you take, you need to identify what individuals really need within a niche audience that others haven't already fully tapped.

Here are three ways to use social media to do that.

First, use Twitter to seek out potential prospects in your targeted field. You can also look at your competitors and see who is following them.

Let's say you want to market your voiceover talent.
You can go to http://search.Twitter.com and type in:

You'll be able to see ongoing Twitter conversations about voiceovers. You can then join the conversation, contact people directly, and ask questions (all with your marker research needs in mind).

Second, join a group on LinkedIn which most closely matches the niche customers you have in mind, and then listen and join the discussions and ask key questions which will help you identify what this niche really needs in terms of your product or service.

Third, use social bookmarking to further refine your market research.

Digg , StumbleUpon , Reddit, and Delicious are very popular sites for what is known as social bookmarking.

The great thing about social bookmarking is that you can get started with it even if you do not have your own content to share with others.

Through social bookmarking, you can discover useful information about a customer base for a certain tag.

A tag is just a keyword or term assigned to a piece of information. For example, "voiceover" is a tag, "sign language" is a tag etc.

By searching for all of the Web content tagged with your specialty or niche, you can begin to size up your competition and see what strikes a nerve with the community.

In what ways can you use online social networking to help you refine your own market niche?

Posted by Liz Seger at 06:11 PM | Comments (3)

August 19, 2009

Your Competitors Could Be Your Opportunity

There are signs that an increasing number of people who have been forced out of their jobs are starting their own businesses, according to the July 30, 2009, Computerworld.

"A quarterly survey of 3,000 job seekers conducted by Chicago-based outplacement firm of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc., released July 30, shows a near doubling in the year-to-year growth of job seekers turning to self-employment," Computerworld’s Patrick Thibodeau points out.

More people turning to self-employment as an alternative to competing for scarce jobs has both positive and negative implications for those of us with visual impairments.

On the one hand, it could mean we’ll face stiffer competition from our fellow entrepreneurs.

That stiffer competition, I suspect, will come particularly from recent college graduates, returning veterans and baby boomers who decide to forego the job market and go into business for themselves.

But, consider the upside of this development. Imagine the goods, services and coaching these new small business owners will need to succeed as the economy recovers.

If you have a service or product or information or training to offer a niche within anyone of these groups, how can you make sure you’re there to serve them now – and when the economy recovers?

During the next several weeks, the discussions in eSight NetWork News and the eSight Networking Forum will show you how you can use online social networking to help you refine your focus, be realistic about your expectations and extend your reach as a small business owner to potential customers and partners so you can take advantage of this opportunity.

It’ll result in a new series of eSight articles and discussions we call "New Guidelines for Starting Your Small Business" – an extension of our previous seven weeks of dialogue about how effectively use social networking in searching for a job.

We’ll show you what has changed in the process of developing a small business – and how you can gain an edge on others within your particular niche in gaining the customers you need to make your business prosper.

At this stage of your development, what help do you need most in setting up your own small business?

Posted by Liz Seger at 11:00 AM | Comments (9)

August 10, 2009

Keeping Your Contacts Enrolled

Over time, thoughts and ideas will occur to the people within your social network about how they can help you with your job search.

You want to make sure you are at the top of their minds (that they have automatically become "enrolled" in your support group as you search for your job) so they'll feed helpful information to you and you'll have an opportunity to help them in return.

How do you get individuals "enrolled" in your job marketing campaign? Express appreciation for the help you receive and help them in return.

Think of your online network as your job club, your mastermind group, or your support group - consisting of individuals who want to help and be helped.

If you experience a benefit from a referral, let those in your network who helped you get that referral know how valuable it was for your job marketing effort.

By showing genuine appreciation for the help you receive through your network, you'll also be demonstrating -- in a dramatic way and in a real situation -- your ability to establish effective interpersonal relationships, implement a creative marketing campaign, and conduct an extensive business research project.

In doing so, you're showcasing your skills in strategic planning, personal sales, business writing and project management for recruiters and hiring managers.

Specifically, here are 10 ideas I've collected for helping members of your network become active participants in your job search:

  1. Check in with your online network each day to tell what progress you've made, what set backs you've had, what you're feeling and how you view you're current situation as a job seeker.

  2. Set up your contact management system so you are automatically flagged each day which contact people specifically need a follow-up communication from you now -- and then do it.

  3. Reactivate those contacts you have identified as "sympathetic" to your situation but who have not corresponded with you during the last few weeks.

  4. Listen to the dialogue within your network to find what individuals within your community need.

  5. Collect information that you believe is helpful for specific contacts and share it with them on a routine basis.

  6. Volunteer to introduce people you know to others (and make recommendations within your social networks) because you believe they would enjoy -- and help -- each other.

  7. Provide useful, new information each day that addresses the broad needs of your network -- either through a blog, Tweets or on your Facebook wall or LinkedIn group.

  8. Use StumbleUpon to highlight articles or web sites others have created that speak to your needs and the needs of your network.

  9. Ask thought-provoking questions within your social networks that are related to your field of interest -- and which get the attention of members within those networks.

  10. Use www.ping.fm to dynamically update multiple sites -- such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Delicious and others - with your status updates. As a result, you'll always be on the dashboard of others within your various social media.

    You can keep you contacts enrolled in your job search by routinely doing one, two or three of these networking activities in just 30 minutes a day -- perhaps 15 minutes in the morning and 15 minutes in the evening.

    It's not much different than keeping the contacts enrolled that you gain through in-person informational interviewing. To find how that works, go to "Keeping Your Contacts Enrolled"

    How do you keep your network interested in your job search efforts?

    Posted by Liz Seger at 06:25 PM | Comments (0)

    August 05, 2009

    Seven Tips for Managing Your Social Network Information

    Seven Tips for Managing Your Social Network Information

    Manage the information you gain through networking. That involves not only recording the information you gained and comparing it to what you wanted to obtain. It also means personally evaluating your contact's response to your current dialogue.

    Both pieces of information for each of your contacts are important. Why? You're on a job search. You want to actively use the referrals you've collected to reach out to specialists in your chosen field who can give you specific information about the steps you need to take in charting your career path.

    It's information you cannot obtain at the library or in Internet documents. It's information bringing you closer to the job and company that's best for you. You get it by visiting with people. That's the power of networking.

    And your hiring contact may be two, three or four levels deep within your network (so-and-so knows so-and so who knows Mike who has a job open).

    So, networking is real work. That's why streamlining the updates you send to your network and effectively managing the contact information you gain as a result of those updates is so important. Streamlining can save you time.

    Here are seven streamlining tips I've picked up during the last few months.

    First, use the same ID and password for all social networks you join (and keep a record of both), but open a separate, free e-mail account for each network you join (perhaps using a key word that applies to your job search in each address).

    Second, the key to managing e-mail within each account is to keep only a few (under 30) e-mails in your inbox at any given time.

    Third, read each e-mail only once. The first time you read an e-mail, try to delete it, respond to it, and/or move it to a folder.

    Fourth, to minimize the number of inbox e-mails, sort e-mails into folders for different matters. Streamline this process by establishing "rules" in Outlook or LotusNotes that automatically deposit e-mails from specified individuals or groups into the right folder.

    Fifth, be sure to use an application you find accessible to automatically cross post your newest blog entry or Twitter comment or LinkedIn comment in other social networks -- all at the same time with the click of one single button.

    Check hellotxt or Ping.fm . There are others as well, and you can read about few of them in "Six Ways to Update Your Status".

    Sixth, find a system that works best for you to organize your information by contact person, by company, by industry etc.

    Whatever system you use, you should be able to record and retrieve information about each contact person easily and quickly. Such a system needs to include slots for these details:

    Contact information:

    • Contact name
    • Contact title
    • Contact company
    • Network address
    • Where you first received the contact's name
    • Questions you asked or topics you discussed
    • Contact's area of expertise
    • Record of message exchanges

    Contact's response to you:
    • Motivated?
    • Involved?
    • Interested?
    • Sympathetic?
    • Confused?

    Specific information you obtained:
    • Details about your targeted job
    • Feedback and advice about your career marketing campaign

    Information for each referral you obtained as a result of the contact:
    • First and last name
    • Title
    • Company
    • Network Address
    • Telephone
    • E-mail address
    • Area of expertise
    • Name of person who gave you this referral

    Follow-through actions for direct contacts:
    • Telephone call needed to obtain referral information?
    • Thank you message sent? When?
    • Schedule for next message?

    Seventh, organize your contact information so you can easily identify which contacts are

    • motivated and
    • involved.

      Those are the people who can have the most impact on your job search. Use their suggestions. Follow up on their referrals -- and use their names.

      For a glimpse into how managing information in a social network is similar to keeping track of contact and referral information generated by in-person information interviews, go to "Managing Contact Information."

      James J. Elekes, M.Ed, MPA, CPM has provided us with an example of how to organize (and track) contact information in today's online world. Here's what he wrote in this forum last week:

      "Having established (my) consultancy in April 2005, I now have approximately 100 strategic contacts in several industries (I) routinely contact (with) updates on a variety of topics.

      "For each individual, (I) maintain a "Profile Card," synchronized between PDA and PC, which includes Contact Name, Job Title, Organization, Professional/Personal E-Mail, Telephone Numbers and Best Time to Call; Contact's Spouse Name; Contact and Spouse Birthday; Wedding Anniversary (if applicable); Children, their ages and quick fact about their activities (school, extracurricular etc.) and any significant notes from previous e-mail or telephone conversations.

      "To facilitate management of this "Contact List," (I have it) on an Excel spreadsheet. In this way, when making contact, the last date contacted, (and) topic of last conversation can be readily accessed, using information as the starting point for updates.

      "Aforementioned personalized information adds a personal touch to the conversation/communication, demonstrating focus on the individual and what's of meaning in his/her life.

      "An Excel spreadsheet is also useful as I can log the date of the last contact, insuring no one drops-off the list and a schedule is maintained.

      "It takes personal discipline to maintain an Excel spreadsheet, but the benefits are the ultimate reward."

      What tip do you have for keeping track of job search information you generate through social networks?


      Posted by Liz Seger at 09:44 AM | Comments (3)