Working at Home on the Internet

Free Advertising Using Free Offers And Get A Great ROI

When should you charge for your services?

Frankly… ALWAYS (almost)

 You are in business to make money. Tons of people write tons of articles about ROI (Return on Investment). But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to get Cash for every transaction, service or bit of advice you give.

On the contrary, you can often times get a very favorable ROI by performing a service or offering a product Free of Charge. The return usually comes later in the form of referrals, free advertising and return customers.

A couple of examples that I can cite are

Offering Free Services in the form of a prize as part of a community effort. By participating in the community in this manner, you can expose all your services (products) to more people that could have a need for what you offer and may lead to more sales. You also get Free Advertising in the form of promotional efforts as part of the overall project.

Offer Something for Free as a lead-in to your main product. This can be an advertisement in itself. Once a potential client has shown an interest in what you offer, they could be enticed to dig further into your product line or may need other services you offer in the future.

Offer Free Advice to existing customers by answering questions they may have. Not really as part of the customer service for something you have already performed, that should be automatic. I’m talking about fairly routine questions that they may have problems with that may not be related directly to the purchase, but something you can answer relatively easily without researching the answer.

So, are these ways of getting paid for your services or products? Indirectly, YES. If you can build your exposure, credibility and ensure return customers without paying directly for advertising the Return on Investment can be well worth the effort.

Can you think of any other ways to get “paid” indirectly for your service? Do you think this is a good way to increase business prospects?

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March 26th, 2008 at 05:48am | Posted by Joe | Advertising, Management, Promotion | 6 reader remarks | Print This Post

WampServer-A Good Designer and Tweaker Tool

 As most of you already know, I do Computer Consulting for various Internet business applications as well as some problem solving for home business and individual use PC’s. A lot of what I do involves setting up Blogs, Websites, Forums, Shopping Carts and the like.

Going through my daily routine of reading feeds in my RSS feed reader, I came across something that grabbed my attention: Be Brave-Break Your Blog by Michael Martin who was guest posting on ProBlogger. The article itself was quite informative and gave different ways of testing Blogs before, during and after they are set up. If you have been around here for a little while, you know I know how to break a blog. I’m always tweaking and trying new things.

What intrigued me the most was the Last part of the post where he suggests installing WordPress on your computer using WampServer (Windows version). This is a program that allows installation of PHP, Apache and MySQL on your own computer. No need for using your Host to set up and test different templates, plugins and applications live on the web.

I have already downloaded and tested WampServer on my computer with WP and it seems to be working fine so far (just follow the instructions that Michael gives in his post, it’s easier than the “readme” that comes with the .zip file). I can see this being quite useful to developers and “tweakers” alike for such things as WordPress Blogs, Forums, or anything else that uses php, MySQl, or Apache to make things work.

I think this is a keeper. What do you think? Have you tried WampServer on Applications besides WordPress?

November 27th, 2007 at 05:03pm | Posted by Joe | Management, Organization, Tools | 2 reader remarks | Print This Post

Be Like McGuyver When Solving Problems in Business

If you tried to access this Blog or MCBS yesterday, you more than likely got a 404 error or something about not being able to display the page.

It seems that BlueHost was upgrading the PHP and MySQL on the server I am using. No notification before hand, no warning that my sites might be down, just "poof" gone for hours. No one, not even myself, could view any of my pages. I couldn’t even log in to any of the Blogs or BlueHost itself!

What can you do in a case where your server is down unexpectedly? Pre-posting wouldn’t have even worked because with no server there would be no way a post would go off.

There is no good way that I know of around it. But at least I have Windows Live Writer. I can write a post, format it the way I like, and set any tags and pictures with no problem. I can even see what it looks like while I’m doing it.

Sometimes in Business you have to prepare for the unexpected. Realize that there could be unforeseen problems with things that are beyond your control. And prepare as best you can. Use whatever tools you have at your disposal, even if it is Duct Tape and a Swiss Army Knife to keep things flowing.

Hopefully, my server will be up soon (I wrote this yesterday) and things will be back to normal.

Do you have a backup plan in case things go wrong? How do you handle posting when your server is down?

November 21st, 2007 at 06:35am | Posted by Joe | Management, Organization, Work at Home | 1 reader remark | Print This Post