To be Entrepreneurial and Enterprising

I had written a small post on what I thought was the spirit of enterprise. To me it was and perhaps still is about being on the move always and be in a phase of ‘done’ always.

A good 7 months done almost and I am revisiting the thought.

Today is Blog Action Day, a wonderful initiative that started last year and will come every year with a new issue and a new opportunity to get it done away with. This year the issue is poverty and like me thousands of other blogs will speak about it in the hope of making a difference.

So why I am I revisiting my definition of the spirit of enterprise if it is poverty that we have to speak of?

The reason being the strong connect that entrepreneurship and being enterprising has with getting rid of poverty. For to my mind there is no better tool or effort other than being entrepreneurial to eradicate poverty. And it is this that takes the scope of enterprise beyond the realms of what I described before.

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My uncle started his business after a stroke of luck landed him a truckload of money and a car. So yes I do think you need to have luck by your side as a businessman. And good luck at that, no point wishing for bad luck anyway..it simply isn’t lucky (how ironic).

So how do you get ‘good’ lucky with your business?

Now living in India comes with its traditional privileges. So we have tonnes of astrologers and Feng Shui guys who claim with a money back guarantee to get us entrepreneurs success beyond our imagination. In fact I searched on the web and found that there are quite a lot of business astrologers. I actually think they are good businessmen themselves to pull this one off with aplomb. Anyway, obviusly their solution is so much more on chance than luck itself that we can’t really bank on it. It really is far simpler than anything you would imagine if you ask me (even if you don’t ask me it remains just as simple really, but it doesn’t sound effective)

The simplest way to get lucky in business (or even life in general) is to turn up every time every where.

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When I was with my previous host, I could never get technorati to pick or ping my blog..

Here goes another attempt. Sorry to bother you folks with this.

<a href=”http://technorati.com/claim/tvyt9tsxqc” rel=”me”>Technorati Profile</a>

Nature I feel is the best resource for the enterprising. It teaches us a lot really.

We can’t just eat deserts or that big fat burger all the time, even we grow sick of eating too much of them even though I admit it is very tempting. It ruins our system anyway if we stuff ourselves. That’s nature.

The same is the case with money. As entrepreneurs we need to love money, because that’s what runs our system. However, we can’t be obsessed by it, rather we should not be. It takes away the focus from business if we do. Being entrepreneurial is about adding value with what we do, that’s what makes entrepreneurs what they are.
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It is sad to see a 140 year old business go bankrupt.. just like that. The plush offices, the history and tradition, the brand. Everything gone and have put over 20,000 people in a spot of bother, a big spot of bother.

I am not much of an investment banker, nor do I understand today’s financial markets all that much. I have a very primitive way of looking at investing and that is to invest in businesses and not shares.

Every company with its heart right starts off with an opportunity it grabs. It grows, and as it grows it needs more funds, it needs more love.. so it goes public. And after a certain while it doesn’t have its soul in the right place.

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I figured what good would it do if I give a lousy explanation about why I haven’t posted in 2 weeks, doesn’t change the fact that I haven’t, so I won’t. Saying this just so you know that it is not that I don’t care, I do.

Now that that has been said, I want to talk about failing and failures.

Over the years I have made many mistakes.

The other day I wrote a really long mail to a friend of mine too about my latest misadventure. I spoke about how I failed in something I thought I won’t and how my belief in certain abilities of mine has taken a dent. I really want to say it out here too, but this perhaps is not the right time..travails of having a career on the web.

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This is not really a follow up (pun not intended) to my post on how to make the most of your day job while running your business. However, the idea certainly is an off shoot of it.

Initiative and follow up - these two words essentially sum up what I have learned from my days as an employee, which has helped me become a better man in terms of achieving things.

In my relatively short career, I have had two jobs and held four different positions in them. As a young man fresh out of college, I wasn’t someone who had a bunch of ideas to bring in. On the contrary, I was a lazy bum who was scared to try anything new other than what was told to me. To be honest I was blown by the immensity of being in a workplace where your actions were accountable.
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If you have, then head over to Michael Martine’s blog at remarkablogger.com.

He is running Blog Traffic Jump Start Project for the second time. Considering I am sort of renewing my relationship with most of you guys here, I added my name to and I think you should as well. Forget the traffic, or the readership you will get. It is the perfect place to find more people who are on the same page as you, and it would be wonderful to grow with them. I know what it feels like to grow with someone else, have done it before.

Go to this post. Comment. Subscribe. Can’t get easier than this. Oh yes wait, care a moment to visit the other blogs too, karma will catch up otherwise.

And to my friend’s who are coming through Michael’s blog, I am very pleased to see you guys here, I will come visiting yours over the weekend if you let me know who you are. Considering all of you are bloggers, you might like these posts here. Have fun.

I guess it is fairly common these days for many people to begin their business while still having a job someplace else. I am one of them.

Now it is sort of stuff, if you have to juggle between responsibilities and usually results in absent minded mistakes and higher than usual levels of stress. A couple of such mistakes proved costly for me and I had to find a way to avoid this.
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I was browsing through my finance books, when I came up on an interesting question, “Analyse effectiveness of ROI as a financial tool.” The analysis led to interesting results for me, so I thought I’d discuss it here at unneglectable.

For years, ROI or Return on Investment, has been pro actively used to measure financial effectiveness of any business project, even online advertising campaigns. A very popular financial tool, ROI also has a very logical approach which makes it seem the perfect tool to use while making investment decisions.

ROI’s premise is simple, this is the money invested, and this is the return; if the return is worth the time and effort the project is feasible. Any professional in today’s world, whether you are a marketer or a financial analyst, or even a blogger for that matter has to deal with ROI, and it becomes important therefore to understand ROI and its implications to make your judgments and decisions better.

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I won’t faff around much and get straight to the point. When you start a new business, you are sure to make mistakes, while most of them are something you will cherish, there are those which make you feel dumb. Now most entrepreneurs have faced these, and they are as common as common cold. So don’t be stupid and avoid these mistakes. There is no glory in repeating them.

The Team

Don’t hire people who can’t lead. And don’t go on a hiring spree every time you see potential for a new business account.

The Place

Unless you have an assured flow of money (revenue or funds) for the 2 years aheaddon’t invest anything for an office. There are options like a business centers, which can take care of your infrastructure, while not biting a big hole in to your pocket.
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Quite some while back, while I was active on this blog, I had written about the greatest tool an entrepreneur needs. To my mind it is vision.

However, everyone has their Achilles’ heel as well. So what’s the one for an entrepreneur? What’s that one thing that bring down every plan and strategy and lay them down to waste?

What kills an entrepreneur?

Alright, I need not stretch the questions long, for the answer has been screamed out in the title itself. Procrastination.
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You look at fancy offices.
You think some dimwit is earning so much out of a business then so can you.
You like the tag of CEO, Founder, Director that entrepreneurs dress themselves up with.
You have dozens of ideas that pop up every now and then..and you have heard that’s what entrepreneurs have.

Then most probably you are just enamored by the concept of entrepreneurship rather than being enterprising yourself.
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There will be times in your entrepreneurial journey when you have to pitch your company to people with money, so that they may load you with some. Now it is another matter that the only time some of the biggest entrepreneurs did this was when they went public. I am molded in the bootstrap philosophy and don’t quite appreciate external funding the way it should be. Nevertheless, I do realize the need that some entrepreneurs have for getting a VC into their plans, money after all is a valuable resource.. life blood for a business.

So there will be times when you have pitch to a funding guy. However, pitch as a word has a sales connotation, and of course many businessmen consider a VC pitch as a sales pitch. The need to sell everything about their business. The fact is it is not. The venture capitalists are probably sold on your business already if they have invited you to a pitch.
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Partnerships are a great way to start a business. A bunch of friends, one great idea and we have four owner sitting and dreaming of taking over the world. Nothing wrong at all.

However, partnerships and money, they don’t really catch like a house on fire do they, you know it very well, of course. So you take care of everything first up. You pen down the rules, take oath under the revered presence of your accountant and lawyers and come up with the perfect share for all. You talk to the best and arrive at conclusions on how the perfect partnership will work.
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There cannot be a better political case study in modern times than that of the Second World War. For most of it wasn’t fought on sheer military might than military and political strategy wars.

Now if you run a blog or a network of niche websites or something bigger, the World War can teach you lessons on how to make it successful. We all have seen that on the Internet it is not always about content.

At some point of time you all might have gone through a phase when no one seems to listen while you work your ass off on something that you know is mighty useful! Just like the number of soldiers and guns weren’t enough to win the war.

Sit, take a coffee and read through.
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Did you know that a human face has more appeal than colored text?

Nevermind if you did not, for there are many other reasons why using images in your website adds to its success.

The Aesthetic Appeal

There is only so much CSS can do. It needs a helping hand from good quality images to make a kickass design. Together they thrive. (Reminds my lazy self to practice what I preach)

A neat inspiring design works a tad bit better than just a fast loading one. On the web everything is perception, and rocking images add their bit to the perception. Now if only someone told me what image to use for this post!

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A quick post to those subscribers who have a blog. Daniel from Dailyblogtips has mooted the idea of having an RSS Awareness Day on May 1st. Despite it’s manifold benefits RSS still hasn’t gone mainstream. I had recently been thinking of writing the various business uses of RSS on the web, inspired by the growing Alltop project of Guy Kawasaki. And so this initiative struck a chord with me immediately.

The idea is obvious to anyone who cared to read. You have to make people aware of RSS and the benefits of using RSS readers and syndicated content. Blog about it.

I will let Daniel explain the concept to you in full detail here.

Remember the day,
The 1st of May.

PS: Forgot to Add - You get to win a lot of goodies for participating and spreading the word.. *incentives*

I guess it comes from the fact that we are all looking at ways to simplify things. Make the uncertain - certain.. that the most popular posts on this blog are all numbered lists.

Brian Clark had written a remarkable article long back on why numbered lists work on this blog. At that time I thought this was purely to attract social media sites. However, over a period of time I have realized that all of us inherently want things to be numbered and listed.

And today while installing a random post plugin I noticed how 3 out of the top 5 popular posts are list posts. There used to be more before, but those dropped after I changed the displayed number of posts to five some while back and they got lost in archived oblivions.

Anyway, this post is more like a proof on the validity of Copyblogger’s claim (as if anyone doubted that really). Even on a relatively new blog like unneglectable it is the list that wins hands down.

Here are a few of the numbered list posts that made their presence felt on the best blog for building an Internet business for your reference.
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