Amazing
Business
Ideas!

To be fair I am not sure if this idea is a business idea or a masters project for a university student - but rather leave it in my head….

As someone who purchased print advertising in national magazines in the past to promote a previous business interest, I have always wondered if the place I was getting was the best for me. You clearly shouldn’t listen to the sales reps at the magazine as they will say anything to fill that last space in the magazine before they go to print. So how do you choose? Getting the wrong position can cost you dearly, resulting in little or worse no return on investment. In my opinion, if there is no point in doing it, don’t spend the money. If you’re intend in spending the money, use what you would have spent on taking your staff out for a meal or few beers - it’s probably a better return.

My idea therefore would be to do research with one of those funky eye tracking things, that tracks where you’re eye goes when scanning a page. Something similar was done a few years ago on where people look in the google search results. You would see with enough people hot spots in magazines that were key places to put advertisements.

From this research some rules could be drawn up to allow the best placement in a publication to be achieved for the best return on your investment. Not good for the magazines, but good for the advertisers.

To make money from this, you could do a whole host of things including:

• Write a book about it.
• Run seminars.
• License the information to advertising agencies that book space for clients.
• Sell the information to magazines to allow them to charge real premiums on the best spaces.
• Consultancy work.

Once you’ve got magazines and newspapers sorted, you could do the same for web sites. There are probably only a dozen master layout styles out there. Profile them, do the head-cam thing and again make up rules on where you wish to put adverts or buy them.

Looking at the web would be interesting as if you were doing a content site (forum, blog, community etc), you’d know the best locations to put your google Adwords.

Some great articles on eye tracking:

http://www.useit.com/eyetracking/
http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting

A lot (and I mean a lot) of people are trying to make money by blogging, myself included with several niche blogs and some really, really general ones! Some make a reasonable amount of cash everyday, some have good days and bad days, and some never see a single visitor!

Announcing yourself to the world and getting links to your site from other prominent bloggers to build your reputation is both time consuming and requires a certain degree of patience (something not everyone has!).

However, a recent trend by several blogs I’ve visited has been to launch a competition, a “comment on this blog post and link to it and be drawn at random from the people entered”, if the prize is good enough it’s a sure fire way of creating a bit of buzz around your site and getting it discussed far and wide across the blogosphere.

This post is exactly that, an entry into the competition over at BusinessBlogger.net to win $500, second prize is a graphics card (a bit random, but I’m sure it’s a worthy prize to some).

Alright, why are they doing this? They’ve just launched Business+Directory, a business directory and have a special offer in that for the entire month of February they’ll be doing free reviews - they need a bit of publicity and this is it! As they normally charge $49 for a request to be included in the directory (whether you get accepted or not - this is quite a good deal!).

The competition requires a minimum of 50 entrants to ensure that the $500 is paid out, so if you’re reading this and thinking $500/£250 would come in quite handy around now, then what are you waiting for - get entered!

If you’re thinking of launching a site in the near future, why not think about a competition to publicise it?

Having had a discussion with someone recently about trademarks it reminded me of a business idea I had had a couple of years ago. At the time it was unfortunate that I came about thinking of this as I had just had to pay a not inconsequential fee to a large company’s lawyers for infringing their trademark.

I won’t go in to the details, but one of my web sites that was an e-commerce site mentioned one of their trademarks in the keywords of the meta tags and the product description of a very similar product to theirs. At the time I didn’t know it was a trademark so was most surprised to have a heavy-handed letter from some big-shot firm of lawyers.

Anyway, the idea I had was that you could subscribe to a service that had access to the database of patents and then crawled your web site periodically searching for trademarks and highlighting this to the web site owner when it found any. Then the site owner can choose to remove or leave them (as the trademark might be for a different class of products).

To monetise this you would simply charge a subscription for the search based on the number of pages and how often you wanted the search to happen. You could also team up with a lawyer and pass leads on to them for people wanting advice and get a kick-back.

To promote this, you could easily get lots of PR in the business and legal press about it. In fact you could offer a reseller package to lawyers for them to sell to their customers. Also you can get people to try it by either searching a single page or doing the full search one time, but only showing the summary of the results.

Nice little earner that once configured with the technology in place would run itself.

About six weeks ago, Keiron rang me up all excited little a child who had heard that he as getting a bike for Christmas. He had seen a Google Tech Talk on how to make your life easy when it came to managing email. Now I get like the next man bucket loads of emails and anything that would make my life easier would be a godsend.

I went off and viewed said video (approx 45 minutes worth) and I had to join Keiron in his excitement as it seemed like my every prayer had been answered at once. I would highly recommend anyone who’s reading this to go off and watch this video and be amazed.

The chap who was doing this Tech Talk is the guy behind the 43folders.com blog and specifically he has written a whole section entitled Inbox Zero. The basic concept here is that you are not a slave to your email client and that you need to relearn how to use it as a tool than it directing you how you work. It makes a lot of sense and I have put it in to practice and can state this does work 100%. The video discusses at a high level the topic and I then spend 30 minutes or so jumping around his Inbox Zero blog to get a bit more detail.

There is a pleasant satisfaction with leaving the office for the day with no emails in your inbox and the calm reflection you are on top of what is there in your other folders. If you’ve been feeling stressed recently, save the money on a shrink and spend some time on this.

Getting things done

While poking around in mate’s blog, I discovered that the general principles he is talking about are based on some work by David Allen. If you’ve already gone off and looked at it web site, come with me on this as he’s not yet another loud mouthed American who has dreamed up some corporate bullshit methodology to make your life allegedly easier and him lots of money. Yes he is American (I’ve nothing against American’s but us Brits are always a little sceptical about the yanks) and he has come up with a methodology and I’m sure he earns nicely from it, but this one in my opinion is not bullshit.

Owing to the major success I had on following the principles of Inbox Zero, I took the plunge and purchased one of his books, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-free Productivity. It is an approx A5 260 page light weight book that in my opinion is a very easy read. The text is pretty chatty in the writing style, but this probably accounts for how easy it was for me to fly through it.

Having done time management courses in the past and read articles and bits of books on the topic before, I found them either stupidly boring or not worth the paper they were written on. However this couldn’t be further from the truth for Getting Things Done. Maybe it was because I had bought in to the general idea from watching the Google Tech Talk I don’t know, but I am now a convert.

The general principle is that you need lists of actions and outcomes. Pretty common sense, but the way that David teaches you how to manage these and the process of using them makes life easy. I am particularly a fan of “emptying your head” as he describes it which makes you go through a process of clearing all those to-do, should-have-done items out of your head and recording them in this new system, be that on a note pad, program on your PC or whatever you find the best for you. Having done this, it is amazing how easy it is to sit and relax, not because you’ve done everything (although you can achieve more using this system), but knowing what you have not done.

Your brain no longer reminds you while you’re in the car that you’ve not emailed your Cousin to invite him to your BBQ this weekend. Yes you do remember or think of things that need to get done while you’re in the car or at the supermarket buying food, but I have dealt with this using a little Phillips VoiceTracer digital Dictaphone.

It also highlights how you should clear your “in trays” (I use inverted commas because your voicemail, physical in tray, email etc are all in trays for the concept to work) and then work out what to do next. What is the next action, is the key question.

The book goes on to talk about working out what to do next, which oddly when you first see it, does not put priority of a task at the top of the list of things to consider. Odd as that may sound, when you see how you should do it and then follow that through it makes you realise how wrongly you had been doing it previously.

Using it in practice

I have to be honest only been using it a little while, however it works. It’s a simple process to follow and without trying achieved tons of things that have been lying around for ages. I’ve cleared the decks, tidied the desk at work and made by home office spotless. Everything is where is should be and I know what there is to do and when it needs to be done.

As Keiron will testify I am not one to recommend something strongly lightly, but this is one concept I would whole heartily suggest everyone goes and learns about. Not only will you get lots of stuff done, you’ll be more relaxed in doing so.

Keiron however has failed on the first hurdle. He bought the book on my recommendation when I was still only 2/3s through it, took it on holiday with him and he didn’t even tough it! Tut tut, if you don’t read it you’ll ever see the wonders of how the other half live.

Highly Recommended Buy

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-free Productivity

Updated 31st March 2008: I found this Google Tech Talk by David Allen himself.

Part of my empire is that I am a Director in a web hosting, e-commerce consultancy business. Our clients are small businesses who need an internet presence with a reasonable amount of hand holding. Periodically we get asked about push email for their PDAs.

There are several ways technically to achieve this:

• Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 (or newer)
• Blackberry
• IMAP IDLE

None of these currently our email infrastructure caters for. After getting asked for about the hundred time by one customer I spent a little time looking in to it.

Exchange is a pain and stupidly expensive, considering this client would not be prepared to spend £10-15/month per email account. This instantly knocks out Blackberry also as it’s a similar cost and as you need to buy this through a mobile network, makes it impossible for us to mark it up of any value. So the cheapest option would be IMAP IDLE, but we’ve discounted that as we’re more than happy with our current email server.

This means we were in a bit of a sticky wicket. Around the same time I came across an email management methodology called Inbox Zero (I’ve discussed this here). For the purpose of this post, it really made me think about the idea of push email and if this wasn’t just some stupid fad being pushed by Microsoft to sell more Exchange licenses and Pocket PC enabled PDAs.

So let’s look at Push Email first. If you’ve got this far I’ll assume you know that this is a service where the network pushes automatically new emails to your PDA without any user interaction. This means no matter what place or time of day you’re connected to your corporate email.

The advantages of the user is that they have near immediate notification of new email and better efficiency on the server from being polled.

I’m a little sceptical about the latter one and my users don’t give a fig if I have a single email server or a server farm handling their emails as long as it works so I’ll not discuss this here.

Immediate Notification of Emails

Great, you’re on the train and an important email comes through from a prospective client. Great, reply to them and get the deal - superb customer service and a bigger bonus. We’ll that’s a great sales pitch, but in reality how often is that going to happen to the 99.9% of users here? Never I reckon.

I can see some benefit for one of our customers who has engineers on the road out installing air conditioning systems. He wants to get next jobs etc to them asap. Their PDAs would quietly be getting this information, while they are servicing Mrs Bloggs Acme Airmatic 2000!

However as much as that sounds logical, if they have their spanner in their hand, will they see or do you want them to be interrupted in their job with info on their next one? Not me if I was their boss and more importantly if I was Mrs Bloggs, I’d be royally annoyed that I was paying someone by the hour to fiddle with their PDA thingy-whatsit.

So why not just do a send and receive then they finish the job? Or an arguement that is valid for what ever situation you’re in, just set your email client to poll ever couple of minutes.

Having a Life (or should than be get one?)

There are two sides to this, if you are an employer if you can get your staff to pick up emails at home on their own time and to be at your beck and control all the better. However frankly, when I’m at home and not in work mode, I’m just not interested that some daft American wants some stupid slides done today because he forgot to ask last week while I’m eating my dinner with my family.

Of all the people who have Blackberrys, Motorola Qs et al, they are glued to the bloody things 24 hours a day. What is more they seem to have been brain washed in to think it’s in their own interest to be like this. “Oh it saves me stress in the morning reading my emails.”, “It keeps the boss sweet, will help my promotion.” and other such diatribe of rubbish. Yes your employer has loved you so much to give you a new toy, that’s entirely in their own interest. Wake up and smell the coffee.

Interrupts

The biggest reason why I would never want or currently prepared to offer such a service is that the interruptions from email are many and regular. You could easily spend all day servicing your inbox without achieving anything worth a damn. Wife’s tale or not, but every interruption costs you 15 minutes of your life to get back in the zone and continue. So why would you want more when you’re not in the office. Not being in the office is great, you can get so much stuff done.

Part of the idea behind the Inbox Zero approach is that you should not be driven by your inbox, but that you go back to email being a tool. You are not a drone to Outlook, break away be free and get some real work done.

Costs

To implement this based on Exchange system you would need:

• New server hardware and associated support contracts etc
• Exchange 2003 licenses
• PDAs
• Costly wireless data charges from your mobile network
• Productivity drop of staff with such a device from being interrupted every X minutes.

Conclusion

In summary I can not see any reason both from a business perspective or technical one to warrant the time and more importantly substantial cost of implementing such functionality. In fact for our customers I suspect that it would cost them in wasted time and massive wireless data charges. If they are they desperate for it, or something similar use the regular Send/Receive mechanism in their PDA email client.

It’s a gimmic, a fad and as waste of money - don’t do it.

A lot of towns across the country have huge new build areas going up. Why not start a local community magazine, paid for by advertisers trying to reach these new customers. Be the first to them and even if there is another magazine looking to expand you’ll do okay. Biggest pain will be getting them delivered. Not a problem if you’ve got teenage kids.

Having recently been involved with a corporate team building event in the community, it did get me thinking about the idea and how you could make money from it (as often happens).

After a while of having sat on the floor painting a skirting board for some hours (not the most imaginative project), it came to me. I proposed to myself and later Keiron when I mentioned it to him, that you could make money facilitating these events.

The basic premise is, companies both large and small are always looking for great ways to make their staff work better together. From the corporate weekend away in the Lake District, to the plumbers who end up down the pub on a Friday lunch time. Either way, the objective is the same.

So working to the assumption that everyone is organises this sees the benefit but ends up with dull events (painting a community centre…!) they would jump at the idea to buy in an organisation that would project manage these events for them.

If you were to run such an organisation you would need to match-make businesses looking to spend some time doing work in the community, with community projects suitable for this activity. Then to add value for the businesses, you could handle all the dreaded Health and Safety requirements, buy supplies, arrange transport, issue press releases and all such good things.

By taking the hassles of organising these events out of their hands, they are more likely to do them. You could then charge a fee per person, with a minimum charge. To cover your bases, have the projects available on a web site that they need to pay a subscription charge to be a member of.

So to do this you would need:

• A list of community projects, which you’d need to categorise based on number of people required, tools, risk etc.
• Understanding of Health and Safety legislation.
• Ability to event plan.
• Handle basic PR for smaller organisations.
• Sell the concept to businesses to buy it.

Going forward you could also look to expand the business, potentially through a franchised scheme across the country.

To make life easy you’d need a web site with the projects on that would do some of the leg work of match-making. It could then allow larger businesses to allow it’s staff to sign up to different projects. Again adding more value.

Adding value, you could offer services such as:

• Have t-shirts with company logo emblazoned printed.
• Come in to the business premises to get staff to sign up.
• Find a community project that fitted their needs if you did not have one on the books.
• Provide training for machine use if needed.
• Arrange for photos to be taken etc.

There would be lots of ways of up-selling from the basic match-making service.

I think this would have some legs, although you would need some up-front leg work to get your database of projects filled then then kept up to date.

I have over the last six weeks had the “pleasure” of travelling twice on business on behalf of a large corporate I have been doing some work. It came to on the third day of the first trip after getting yet more piss poor service at yet another restaurant that should know better of a new business idea.

Mystery Shopper Reviews

Every large brand and even some smaller ones conduct mystery shopping checks on their staff and different locations to verify that all is well. So I thought, how about a independent mystery shopper? There could very well be two elements to this.

Firstly, you, your wife and friends can write reviews when ever you deal with a company. This will be a great way for content to build on your web site thus giving you credibility. Ideally if you happen to travel for business or go on lots of short leisure breaks then this gives a wider spectrum of reviews.

Writing the review in itself will not get you any money but gives your site content. But you can still make money out of this. Once your review is written, write to the manager of the business with a copy of your review and say that it will be going online in 14 days time. If they would like add a comment before it’s posted they should get back to you within that time frame (although it could be retrospectively added). Now if your review is negative, you could say that their comment could include how they will fix it. Now the money making bit - offer to revisit in the future, say within three months, for £99 plus travel and expenses to see if they have fixed the issues. If they do this, your review will be marked that the owners are taking this issue seriously and you will be updating the review later.

You could also offer to provide for a nominal charge window stickers and posters saying “We’re reviewed at mysteryshopper.domain” which companies that get a glowing review might like.

If you happen to be a little bit cheeky now, you could while still at said organisation ask for the manager and give them your business card and explain what you didn’t like about the service. You might find they’ll give you a discount or let you have something for nothing.

Secondly once you have a good series of reviews online, you can start offering your services to companies. You could easily ask £299 + expenses for a mystery shop and basic report. The smaller companies might find this useful. How you advertise this service is up to you.

You can obviously also earn from your site with ads and the normal nonsense if you want. You could also allow people to pay for older, or the newest reviews, or to be notified when new ones are added in their area. It only needs to be a few pound per year so that they’ll spend without thinking, but it all adds up.

This has been around for a long while, but is what generated the idea for this category (whilst in the pub) so I thought I’d include it first, back in October 2005 Google introduced Section Targeting, here’s the Adsense Help Center page for Section Targeting.

The HTML tags to emphasize a page section take the following format:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>
<!– google_ad_section_end –>

You can also designate sections you’d like to have ignored by adding a (weight=ignore) to the starting tag:

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>

This allows you to specify which parts of the page your ads are targeted to, it’s great for excluding menu’s and footers to make sure that your ads are targeted purely to the content of the page.

Over a few quiet pints with Glenn (just prior to going to see Michelle Dewberry talk last week, and several pints after!) we were discussing blogs, monetisation of them and just general business ideas.

It seems we have a few hints/tips and other general bits and bobs of random knowledge that each other probably doesn’t know about and may help you! So I’ve created a new category for these tips and we’ll start adding to them every so often - don’t expect long posts and deep explanations - treat them kind of like post-it-notes!