Classics By Carlos

I Love Money

But… Isn’t the love of money the root of all evil?

Sorry folks, I beg to disagree. I just disproved it.

I love money. There is no denying it. Contrary to what has been embedded in most people’s subconscious, money (or the love of it) is not the root of all evil. It’s the lack of money that is the culprit.

Imagine Haiti without money pouring into the island after the disastrous earthquake. It would be a terrible world indeed.

I Love Time

I love time — lots and lots of it. I’m talking about free time.

Free time allows me to stroll around any place I want while the rest of the my friends are sitting on their office chair waiting for 5:00 PM to tick so they could punch the time card and so that they could stroll around like I do after a long day’s work.

Free time allows me to watch my kid growing right before my eyes. Unlike a remote control dad, this activity is so important to me that I am willing to give up all the business deals in the world just to have time playing with my little monkey.

Time and Money Dilemma

But time and money are not always best of friends like man and dog.

Let me explain it this way.

How do you make money?

For most of us, we make money by exchanging our time and skills for it. In other words, trading time for money.

A programmer makes money by coding, analyzing business processes, and following instructions from the development manager. An accountant makes money by scrutinizing financial information and making intelligible conclusions about it for business decision making. One of the ways a lawyer makes money is by playing the devil’s advocate, finding faults, and dissecting the Law to protect the client from potential punishment.

In all of the examples above, a person is trading time for money. For most people, this is the default business model, so to speak, they follow to earn money. In many cases this is fine – you get paid for what you work for.

And, ideally, this leads to…

• More work means more money
• More projects mean more money
• More clients mean more money

More money means more happiness, right?

Wrong!

Here’s why…

• More work means more money, but less time spent on other activities like:
  • a cup of good coffee with a friend
  • a good physical exercise
  • relaxation and meditation to remove the stress out
  • creative thinking
  • just plain do nothing
• More projects mean more money, but there is a limit on the number of projects you can handle.
• More clients mean more money, but clients are people — and people can mean problems. You can only entertain a few of them before your sanity explodes.

Of course, the less time you spend working means less money in the bank account.

This is the consequence of trading time for money. Since time is limited (a mere 24 hours in a day), it is not always a good idea to exchange your time for money. Exchanging time for money is bad for you. And it limits your happiness up to a certain point.

Time-Money Solution

Is there a way around this problem?

Of course there is.

First, you need to understand that time is more important than money. As a matter of fact, time is more valuable than money.

Money can be made from ZERO, but lost time can never be recovered.

In the next article, I’ll show you some of ways money can be made without trading time for it.

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When starting a new online venture, a beginning entrepreneur would probably do three things first:

1. Buy A Domain Name
2. Get a Web Designer and craft the collest web design on earth
3. Create five pages or so containing an overview of his products and services, his business, mission and vision, some photos here and there, etc.

After a few days, he could be laughing already confident in his ability in getting a cheap web designer after dumping the high-profile professional aside.

A week or two later, he begins to invite his friends to take a look at his latest business innovation. He would even tell his friends to tell their friends about the website — an experiment on word-of-mouth marketing. But will they do it? Heck, no!

Months past, he is wondering already why his website has only three constant visitors daily: he, his wife and his web designer (who would probably be still doing a few tweaks here and there).

Sounds familiar?

Small businesses still don’t get it. Like other professionals in any field, not all web designers or web developers are equal. If they are, they would all be probably long-haired by now.

When it comes to having a website, small businesses still don’t get it. A website is not just an online business card or electronic company brochure that you only update once in a decade.

A website is (or should be):

• A money-making machine minus the friction of the moving parts real machines have.
• A salesman who never sleeps and best of all never complains about it.
• A PR Officer that invites the visitors and sells them the benefits of doing business with you.
• An electronic catalog that visitors can use to find the products that interest them – not you.

The list could go on, but you get the picture. If you want to get the best of what your website can do for your business, there are basic things that you need to grasp so you can be on the right track.

You can do it right the time if you carefully follow the 5 Steps to Website Success below.

Five Steps To Success For Any New Website

1. Get A Domain Name That Sells

At the minimum, your domain should reflect what you are offering to your clients. It must be easy to remember and even easier to type on the keyboard. If you are a professional and your name is quite popular, get domain name that is based on your first and last names. If you are a company, your domain name should be based on the brand that your company is known for or a brand that you want to promote on the market.

2. Perform A Keyword Research and Analysis

Many small businesses have no idea about this.

When a web user wants to get information on something, he relies, almost always, on the search results generated by the search engines after typing some words and phrases on the search box.

There are millions of searches performed every single minute. It’s mind-boggling to know each one of them. But you don’t have to. You are only after the keywords that are related to your services or the products you are offering.

Think about those phrases. Do you have them on your pages? How about your competitors, are they doing a good job on placing the right keywords on their pages?

In essence, that is what keyword research and analysis is all about. It’s getting a snapshot of what the visitors are searching for when they needed information; hopefully, your information.

There are tools on how to perform this very important task. Don’t ever launch another website without having an idea of the keywords relevant to your business.

3. Prepare Your Killer Content

Content is the king. A good content is educational and information-rich. They should be related to your business or products and services. The content must be in an easy-to-read text format. Use graphics sparingly and only when they help convey the point of you text. Video and Audio may be good, but remember search engines can’t index the information contained in your video and audio streams.

One more thing on content: Never promote your website if it lacks the basic content that the visitors would expect. Putting the sign that says, “This website is under construction,” is a fastest way of telling your visitors, “Don’t come back here anymore.”

4. Get A Top-notch Web Design

One of the biggest mistakes small businesses make when deciding to get a Web developer is to award the contract to the lowest-bidding web designer who knocks on their door. Don’t do it. Cheap, even free, can be even more expensive than you originally imagined. You should understand that anything worth having always comes with a price and if you are dead serious about getting it, you should be ready to pay the price. Are you ready to pay the price in exchange for the things that you wanted the most?

Another mistake is to get the one with the cutest web design. Cute maybe nice, but it doesn’t always translate into positive cash flow or business savings. Worst, the graphic design could turn out to be just an expression of the designer’s artistic talent, which is totally unrelated (even hurtful) to your marketing campaign.

Tip: A lot of Web Designers out there are frustrated artists and painters experimenting their way into the digital media. Sure, they can come up with really creative and out-of-this-world designs. But would you rather run an online digital art gallery or a business website? It’s your call.

5. Promote the Website

I can’t emphasize this highly enough. Promote your website or it will die a natural death. Web Promotion is everything.

There are many ways of doing it: forums, email campaigns, newsletters, RSS, etc. The advent of social networking sites makes web promotion a snap.

If all you wanted to have is just a website, it’s ok not to promote it. But if you want the benefits of owning a popular website, positive user feedback, money from traffic, then web promotion should be a consistent activity of your business.

If you are an owner of a small business, this article is for you.

It’s driving me nuts. A lot of small businesses are still clueless about the benefits of doing it online. And for the few that jumped into the techie bandwagon, many are doing it wrong. As a result, they end up spending money on it instead of having the technology bring them the money. Technology then becomes a liability for them instead of an asset; sucking money out instead of pouring it into their business.

Take owning a website for instance.

The following as very common symptoms of small business website failures:

1. The website is owner-centered instead of user-centered. If this is you, don’t be surprised why your website has only three frequent visitors: you, yourself and you alone.

2. A fancy graphics design that demonstrates the graphical talent of the web designer more than his ability to promote it. Ever wondered why your website doesn’t appear on Google? Tip: Don’t ask your web designer.

3. Poor content including: ineffective copy, grammatical errors (of which I admit I am guilty of), articles made only to boasts the company’s already inflated ego and disorganized navigation. You may not be guilty of it all, but at least you get the point.

Remembering Mario

Mario was the visitor who came to ask how much I would charge for making a simple website. For the life of him, he can’t believe I actually charged a whopping $650 that consists of the following: Web Design, Setting up Ecommerce Account, and Search engine optimization.

Was I overcharging?

Based on Mario’s emails, yes I did. But that’s his opinion. Despite the fact that I pointed him to the websites I made where I charge even three times that amount, he’s still unconvinced. You can read the whole email exchanges here.

My fault, I guess, is that I didn’t elaborate to him further enough on what he would get from those things I offered. I was not able to convince him that by using me (my skills and experience), he would recover his investment in no time and if his products are good enough that there large enough market ready to bite it to nourish their respective businesses. He could have been laughing all the way to the bank now and surf as much as he wants, all because I made him a cute, cash-generating and simply crazy website.

His fault, I guess, is he thought every web developer is like everybody else. He therefore had the website developed by his son. And oh, he asked his son’s friend to do it for him FREE of charge, because his son was busy with his master’s.

Of course it made me smile in silence. I actually wished him luck in his new business website.

Break… Some Words Of Wisdom

Enough for this blame game now. An old man once told me a long time ago that “the only person to be blamed for in any failed business deal is the guy who stares back at you when you face the mirror.” Right, that’s me.

I have so much to thank Mario. Because of that email, I was able to write a two-part article on pricing: Price 101, Part 1 followed by Pricing 101, Part 2.

The Disappointed Entrepreneur

I can hardly believe it. Mario came knocking at my door once again (read: my website) after six long months to ask if I can help him with the website his son started but for some reasons could not continue any longer. And note he did not get his son’s friend to do it. It seems like nothing is FREE anymore nowadays. He thought he has no other choice, but to have his son develop him the website. Go, go, go, kid!

But what a crap! I could almost laugh when I saw the damage done by the kid. It was not a website that you can be proud of — from a business standpoint, that is. The domain looked like some cute-little fingers just typed in the keys in random and then another one decided it would be nice to have it registered as domain name. And viola, a domain name!

Not only that, the very reason why he shot me an email was that the shopping cart software failed during checkout. The email sort of say, “Carlos, can you help me with this emergency blah, blah, blah.” Unfortunately, I’m not the type of programmer who enjoys fixing the mess that others have created in the first place. And if I did, I would ask for a premium in doing so.

Enter: Carlos, The Consultant

Of course, the Web Consultant that I am suggested some solutions that he could take. My free suggestions included the following:

1. Getting a new Domain Name
2. Doing a Keyword Research and Analysis
3. Preparing the contents
4. Do the Web Design or Get Someone who can do it (should be some other guy and not me, I’m not available no more.)
5. Promote the website

These are the areas where a many online entrepreneurs failed miserably. Like Mario, they started taking the wrong path and wonder why they are not going anywhere.

In Part 2 of this article we will explore each one of these. So hang on please.

Pricing is the most important marketing decision that you could ever make. The price of your product or service almost always dictates the income of your business.

One of the deadliest mistakes a new freelancer makes is to price his services too low just to get the business. I also made the same mistake when I started. Luckily, I was quick to wake up to the realities of the importance of profit. I could almost hear myself swear I would never, ever accept a deal where I am a loser by default. Thus, I was able to craft a new mantra: “Profit or no deal.”

(Please take note that I am talking here about pricing a service. If you are selling a product, there is indeed some wisdom in pricing low but that will not be discussed in this article. Hopefully, I will cover that when I get more requests in the future.)

Pricing 101 : In Search For The Perfect Price

Pricing a service consists of many factors making it almost impossible to strike a perfect price. The following is a short list of those factors – plus a short explanation, mind you.

1. Market demand. Unless your clients are living in a cave, it is safe to assume they have an idea about the market price of your service. Having a crash course on Good old Economics is helpful in this regard.

Take a look at your competition, how much are they charging? Should you price lower, just equal or a little bit higher than the rest? Up to you, actually.

Is there an over-abundance of professionals in your field offering the same services as you are? Or, you are one of the endangered species walking around the planet offering such services? Is the market in dire need of what you have to offer? That’s the law of supply and demand at play.

2. Professional Expertise and Experience. Provided that your client is aware of it, your expertise and experience can greatly contribute to the price of the services that you can offer. It’s something that you can take advantage of.

Are you considered a well-trained guru while the puppies in your community are just not “there” yet to compete with you? You’re a lucky dog, you can command a premium price than the rest of the puppies running around the field.

3. Perceived Value Of The Service. How much is a 500 mL bottle of drinking water? The last time I bought one, I was on my way to a prospect’s office and the price tag was PhP 20.00. I’m sure some of you would disagree. At the very least, it depends on the brand, the place, and most importantly the buyer’s perception of the benefits the product brings. If you are selling me the same volume of water at the top of Mount Apo for PhP 2,000.00 a bottle, I wouldn’t hesitate buying it if I am deprived of water for 48 hours straight! I would even thank you for your generosity.

The same can be said of services. The client who realized the great benefits of your services will move heaven and hell if you are the one who can give it to him.

Unsolicited Advice On Pricing A Service

You should price your service in such a way that you eventually make the most profit! If you really want to be a real entrepreneur, you better be on good terms with the word “profit.” Otherwise, just do yourself a favor by getting out of your way and do something else more meaningful… like taking up Law and offering pro bono.

Profit, in simple terms, is just Income minus Expense. You already know what Income means so that leaves me to explain a bit about the word Expense. Well, that’s not really a challenge. Just give a few dollars and I will show you what Expense means.

Profit allows you to stay in business.

Why do you want to stay in business?

Well, why are you doing it in the first place?