Archive: E-business
May 22nd, 2008
Today I have the privilege of interviewing the founder of the MyGenius community, John Raath. MyGenius has just reached ten thousand users in the last week and I thought it would be great to hear from its founder about what MyGenius means to him and where it came from. I myself am I member and have found it very useful as well as practical. So, with that said,on to the interview…
Q: Firstly, what was life like before MyGenius? What was your occupation?
A: I’ve been an entrepreneur for many years, both in SA and abroad and I always encouraged people – I just love to see people progress in their chosen paths. When I returned from the UK in 2004, I wanted to find a way to enable thousands of people to be inspired by their own genius and their own sense of what was possible. And of course, by being embedded in the MyGenius community, I feel inspired every day…encouraged by seeing such hugely talented individuals making real progress.
Q: How would you define MyGenius? Is it a “business social networking website”?
A: It’s a niche community for business owners. It operates both online as a social networking website, and offline – as members engage with one another, do deals, learn from one another and get clarity from one another about their unique business challenges.
Q: Where did the MyGenius concept come from? In other words, what inspired you to create the website?
A: In my heart I knew that as most people now work for themselves they are faced with two challenges – how do they find more clients and how do they get fresh thinking applied to the direction of their businesses. In both these cases, we need other people…we need fresh thinking, we need encouragement and we need people to open doors to new business and to new opportunities. I was inspired to create an open, authentic and really helpful platform where members would be able to create their own breakthroughs….
The current format is the result of input and shaping by partners and by the community itself….it’s been a huge learning process for all of us at MyGenius.
Q: What benefit do the users derive from using MyGenius?
A: They are inspired to vastly improve their businesses through collaborating with other members, by seeing new opportunities, by receiving new ideas about their businesses, by finding new clients and by belonging to a supportive community.
Q: Why did you choose the name MyGenius?
A: We can only make progress in our ventures when we understand our own true genius…our specific calling. We need to understand what we can do brilliantly well and learn how to find and engage with other individuals who are geniuses in their own right….it’s only when we connect and work and collaborate with other geniuses that we can create real magic. I’ve seen ordinary, small businesses become brilliant successes simply because the right people came together. And it all starts with knowing your unique Genius – hence the name.
Q: Was success immediate? If not, what kept you going?
A: Today we reached 10000 members. We expected to get there much earlier but I guess we needed to learn how to deliver real value before so many joined. We’ve invested heavily into this venture and it’s not been easy….but we always knew we were on the right track….so we never even thought of giving up.
Q: MyGenius is free to use, with various membership levels that the user reaches based on certain requirements, what was the thinking behind creating the membership levels?
A: The idea is for individuals to build their own networks and so part of the obligation is for members to recruit their own friends and associates. We are moving to a situation where members will pay…after allowing enough time for members to experience the power of MyGenius for free. We are convinced that a modest monthly fee will be a fraction of the value that members derive. It’s vital that MyGenius is commercially viable so that we can go on developing new, added value services. We’ve got an 18 month development pipeline and we can’t wait to get all these new ideas rolling.
Q: MyGenius has reached ten thousand users in a very short amount of time, what do you attribute this phenomenal growth to?
A: Business people need to connect, they need to vastly improve on what they’re doing. And times are getting tough for many people….so the only way to guarantee their futures is to build their networks, their prospects and their income. MyGenius delivers that and I suppose that’s why we’ve attracted 10000 people. By the way, we believe we will have a million members in 24 months’ time. In June, we’re launching DiscoverMyGenius.com, a free online toolkit to help individuals to discover their unique calling….that will get the MyGenius message out there to a vast market. And of course the bigger MyGenius gets the more value for every member because that means more clients, more opportunities and more scope to build one’s brand.
Q: You recently introduced Genius Ads, how does one go about placing an ad?
A: It’s the easiest thing in the world….you simply create an image, a header and a byline…and then we give you the stats relating to your ads…so a MyGenius member can control their own marketing campaign. It’s about empowering individuals to do their own thing – and it really works. By putting your own name behind your ad is really authentic business.
Q: What is your vision for MyGenius in the future?
A: It’s going to grow enormously. But our vision is that every member experiences real breakthroughs in their businesses for themselves. I come across people everyday seeing new possibilities for their businesses and I see them taking bold steps forward….we want everyone to experience that!
Well, I hope you found that interesting. Please feel free to post your comments below.
May 21st, 2008
A while back I wrote about how helpful outsourcing can be to growing your business and that it can save you a lot of money in the long run. It makes sense to let other people do the tasks that are not your primary concern or that you don’t have the necessary skills to do properly.
In that post I promised to check out oDesk and give my opinion. I haven’t used the site yet but I have taken a look at what they have to offer and can definitely say that it would be a worthwhile consideration if you are looking to outsource some of your business functions.
What I really like about oDesk is that you can place a job or project on the site for free! Which means that there is no risk of you paying and then not finding anyone decent to do the job. They do, however, charge a 10 % commision on the exchange between you and the provider.
Another thing that I quite like is that you have a choice between paying hourly for the work or paying a once off fee, agreed upon at the start, on completion of the project.
If you are thinking of doing some outsourcing, go check them out and let me know what you think!
May 19th, 2008
The first thing that I need to say is that making money is not everything. Not all of us start blogs or websites with the goal of making money as our priority. With that having been said, if you are planning to make money with your website or blog, do you know exactly how you are going to do it? In other words, do you have a plan in terms of what revenue models you are going to use? It’s also good to have an overall plan as i have mentioned before in an earlier post.
The purpose of this post is to try to help you decide how to best monetize your blog or any other website. There are a number of different revenue models available and it’s not all about advertising. Advertising is a without a doubt a great way to make money with your site but it’s not always the most efficient way.
Advertsing-Supported Revenue Model
This model is your basic advertising model in which your website will display an number of banner ads, text ads, google adwords etc. You, being the publisher will be able to decide what kind of ads are displayed, from whom, as well as the sizes of the ads. This type of revenue models is all about getting as many page views as possible so as to get as many clickthroughs on your ads as possible.
Advertising-Subscription Mixed Revenue Model
This model takes advertsing a step further in that you are now creating a second revenue stream through charging a subscription fee for a particular service or product that is received by the customer on a regular basis. As an exampe, many sites charge a monthly fee for access to certain private sections of the site. Now when you combine this with advertising on your site, you are using your site much more optimally.
Fee-for-Transaction Revenue Model
This model is great when your website provides a product or processes transactions on the user’s behalf. There is no need for any advertising to be placed on your website and very often it’s better not to have advertising because it sends a certain message to your customer. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t place ads on your site at all, it’s perfectly acceptable to have a few ads on your site. I’m simply saying that sometimes the impression given to the customer regarding the quality of your service or product, which you are charging for, can be influenced by having “unrelated” advertising all over your site.
Fee-for-Service Revenue Model
This is the final model that I am going to mention, but is by no means the final one available, you can successfully combine all these models and you can come up with new ones too. In this model you charge the customer based on the service that you provide, you could be a consultant or you could be a web designer, it doesn’t matter. Having a blog is a great way to promote yourself or your service and very often no advertising is required to successfully make a profit. However, there is nothing wrong with supplementing you revenue with an additional advertising revenue stream.
The last thing I would like to say is that what I have described above is merely a guideline to help you to be able to plan. I wouldn’t dream of suggesting that you should limit yourself to the above models, all I intended to do was to help you to become aware of the fact that there are many more ways of making money than simply placing banner ads on your website.
I hop that this information was helpful. Please feel free to give your comments or opinions, I love to hear from my readers!
May 16th, 2008
Companies take out insurance policies to protect themselves against fires, theft and acts of God. They make sure that their employees are well looked after and try to keep employee retention high. When you consider all the effort undertaken to protect these important assets of the company, then the question must be asked… “Why don’t companies look after their reputation?”
If you think your building or your employees are important to your business, then you are correct. A financial or natural disaster can really affect a company negatively, but it is very possible to recover from these, however, a reputational disaster is almost impossible to recover from. There is plenty of evidence to support this and many companies have been ruined due to bad reputation management. The purpose of this post is to help business owners to understand that money is not everything and that sometimes it is more important to make sure that the reputation of the company remains intact even if it means that you have to go above and beyond what is expected from the customer.
By making sure that your image and reputation are intact and that your company is actually investing in the improvement of its image you can make sure your company is on track to success. Yes, I did say investing… I said investing because it will require effort, time and sometimes money to build your reputation. A good reputation does not guarantee financial success but there is no reported incidence of a good reputation having a negative effect on a company.
You need to make sure that everything you do and say does not harm your reputation because a single bad move can ruin the image of your organization, built up over years and years. A fantastic innovation by an interent marketing company called Quirk is called BrandsEye which is sophisticated software which tracks your online reputation and how your brand is perceived on the internet. If you want to monitor your online reputation then I highly recommend checking out BrandsEye.
I hope that this information is useful to you and that you found it interesting. If you have any opinions or would like to comment, please feel free to do so.
May 14th, 2008
I have been using Google analytics for my websites for over two years and I have to say that it has been an extremely useful tool. It is enormously powerful in that you are able to view just about any statistic you can think of, regarding your site.
You may ask why you need to make use of a service like Google Analytics. Well, the simple answer is you don’t have to use it, but I would highly recommend using it if you are serious about being successful in your business venture. You can always achieve better results, in any business activity when you are able to receive feedback. Now, in a bricks and mortar environment, if you wanted feedback from clients you would need to send them a survey or give them a call, but for us in the online world this process can be vastly simplified through tracking your website.
If you are able to see how many people are viewing your website and for how long, as well as from what countries, you can serve your customers better. You can identify problems or weak spots on your website and then fix them. Imagine that you sell apples on your site and that you are tracking your visitors. You notice that many people reach the checkout page and then do not complete the sale. Obviously this is a problem because something is stopping them from completing the sale, you then need to look at improving or streaming your checkout page to make it easier for customers to buy your apples. Now, if you weren’t tracking your visitors and analyzing the data, you would never have know that there was a problem with the checkout page and you would have continued losing valuable business!
That small example above is the essence of the argument for using website tracking software. I recommend Google Analytics because it is extremely comprehensive and it is free, plus it can be integrated with a Google Adwords campaign. If you would like to recommend a different website or give a give your opinion, please feel free to leave a comment.
(Images from Google Analytics)
Current Projects
