Hearing Michael Dell

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This week, I was invited to an NVTC event in McLean, VA where Michael Dell was speaking. It was interesting to hear that in 1983, while he was a freshman, he noticed an opportunity to sell computers for less. He saw that when you bought a PC for $3,000, there was about $600 worth of parts in it. During college, he operated a business out of college dorm room had had people bring him their computers and he would put in some memory or a disk drive. By doing this inexpensively and giving customers exactly what they needed, he made close to $25,000 a month. Dell continued to sell directly to customers with his own company soon afterward and quickly made $6 million.

This background is fascinating given that Dell Computers is now on its way to becoming a $60 billion-dollar company. A few things struck me about Michael Dell. He, obviously, had a tremendous amount of dedication to his vision. Despite all of the economic fluctuations, major changes in technology, and a savvy yet ever-changing landscape of shoppers, he thrived due to his ability to adapt.

As more and more entrepreneurs create online businesses, It is good to keep in mind that if you understand your customer’s needs and remain committed to your company, you have a chance at being successful too.

Use of Time

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Tips for High Quality Time Management

Setting time aside for those important tasks is never an easy thing to do, especially if you are the procrastinator type.  However, there are many ways for you to turn around your procrastination traits and begin practicing effective Time Management and gaining Time Management skills.

Here are a few tips to improve your time management skills

Before you can dive in and implement new time management strategies into your daily routine, you need to understand a few basics.

You must be cognizant of your goals in both the short term and long term.  This awareness of what your goals are will help you prioritize your day to achieve the daily short term goals and well as make strong headway on reaching those long term goals.  These goals will also help to keep you motivated and make you less distracted away from your daily plans.

Be sure to develop a flexible and open schedule for your self to follow. Ti needs to be flexible and open enough so you can fit your goals within, yet leave some extra time in your schedule in case a distraction has to take you away from your daily activities for a few hours.

A Few times to use your time successfully

1. Have a look back at your old daily habits and see what you can do to improve them. — Once you realize what habits you have formed that are impacting your management of time, you have made the first step in beginning to change them. Old habits die hard, so once you have felt you have begun to overcome one of those habits, be sure to reward yourself.

2. Keep your short and long term goals in sight, literally. — It is easy to lose focus on something when you are not seeing it everyday. Put up reminders around your house or office, even if they are yellow sticky notes, to help you refocus on the task at hand. The more focused you are, the less likely you are to get distracted.

3. Write down a daily list of things to do, and prioritize them once the list is complete. — Keeping a daily to-do list is a great way to see how much and what you are accomplishing on a daily basis. This will also give you an indication of whether or not you are properly allocating to the tasks at hand. At the end of the day a list will help you to remember your goals for the day and give you a visual checklist of what has been completed.

4. Concentrate on one task item from your checklist at a time. — Some people are not natural multi-taskers, so be sure to focus on one of your task list items at a time. Once that is completed, you can move onto the next item. Good time management will afford you the time to work on just one thing rather than 10 at a time.

5. Keep what you are doing fun. –When you are working on a taks that you feel is fun of enjoyable it is much easier to keep moving forward to meet your goals. When you are not doing something you enjoy it can create a lot of stress, and this stress can impact your time management and the completion of both short and long term goals. When you are not stressed, you are more likely to accomplish tasks quicker.

Investing Time and Effort in Marketing Your Site

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It’s funny how many times I’ve received the question, “Is there a free program that will optimize my site?” Fortunately, most online business owners know that doing search engine optimization (SEO) is an ongoing effort in running a company on the Internet. In fact, making sure that search engines index your site and rank your business high is paramount to having an internet-based company. If you have any hopes to be successful on the world wide web, optimizing your site is a “must-do”.

The ultimate goal of SEO is to satisfy the needs of people who are entering a query into a search engine. If they find you, you stand a decent chance of obtaining traffic. Ideally, you should not only rank higher than your competition, but your site should be on the first page. If you are on page 43 million, for example, you may as well count your business as being invisible.

While there are no SEO secrets or easy tricks in order to gain high ranking, there are several things that you should keep in mind. First, make sure that you have solid content on your site so that your business is deemed to be an expert. Second, you should have a good idea what keywords that your site should have in order to allow searchers find you. Third, you should ensure that you have links from quality sites and, also, have outbound links. When you have these links , it affirms to the search engines that your site has relevancy. Finally, make sure that you budget time to market your site on an ongoing basis. As you learn more about SEO, you will discover that it is, not only, a reiterative process but also that search engines are consistently changing their algorithms. It, therefore, will be up to you to keep on top of this dynamic field as well as keeping ahead of your competition.

While there isn’t a free program that can do SEO for you, fortunately, you can learn more about how to do Internet Marketing from a plethora of books or you can even obtain information from the Internet. Ultimately, you should remember that having an online business requires the same discipline that running any type of business would. You will need to understand your audience, market to them and bring them onto your premise.

Sales and Marketing Today

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You’re not in business to be popular
Kirstie Alley, popular 1990’s actress

I thought about this quote and realized the irony of it given my role with Arca Solutions. I am responsible for educating our prospects and customer base on how they can increase search engine rankings and market their site. Specifically, I promote eDirectory and our Search Engine Optimization(SEO) service which are designed to make our customers’ sites popular. As most people know, the importance of high search engine rankings is key to getting the traffic that can turn into sales.

There has never been a more exciting time for people to run an online business whether they do this as a full time job or manage it on their spare time. Because the overhead is lower than having a brick and mortar shop, getting into the web space during down-economic times is a low risk thing to do. It still requires dedication and the use of all of the tactics that you would normally use to run an “offline” company. With all the software tools out there, however, a mere spark of an idea can turn into cash-flow reality in less than a year.

I look forward to writing about topics such as search engines, monetizing your site, increasing traffic and how to make your audience find you. After all, unlike Kirstie’s thinking, you ARE in business to be popular.

We are the Project Managers

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Hi Everyone;

My name is Jessica. Just 2 years ago I started at eDirectory as a project manager and I am now currently one of several project managers we have in the office. The project managers here come from a diverse background in business administration, information technology, finance, and other industries which allow us to put a unique perspective on any project that comes to eDirectory.

Our daily focus is on the development, production,  and success of eDirectory sites for our wide variety of unique customers. Each phase includes time spent discussing the needs of the project with the customer to relaying those needs to the development team and producing a strong final product.

We will be posting on a variety of subjects which we touch on, on a daily basis:
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  • Website Design
  • Website Profitability
  • Website Management
  • Time Management
  • Selling your site

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Postings will come out one to two times per week. Hope you check in frequently to see what is going on in the world of project management here at eDirectory.

Jessica and Project Management Team

The eDirectory Blog is Live!

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Friends,

A little over 5 years ago I rented a small office, hired 2 young developers and opened for business. The idea was simple – software and services for digital media. Back in 2003 the dot com bubble had burst, but the Internet was still growing rapidly, and then as today, grand opportunities seemed abundant despite the economic uncertainty.

Fast forward to 2009- our company has grown quite a bit. We closed last year with 51 full-time employees in our two offices, and a wide range of customers from publicly traded media companies, to decades old (but surprisingly modern) family owned publishers, to the T-shirt guy in his home-office getting the next “it” site off the ground. eDirectory, our flagship product, is now used to power more than a thousand online directories, guides and yellow page websites. As print industry revenue is collapsing, publishers must remember they are in the media business and the demand for content is increasing with all the new outlets, not decreasing. For all-digital startups, this rapid change in landscape marks a unique opportunity.

During our year end review there was a constant standout– we need to share our knowledge to make our customers more successful. With this in mind we cornered off a small space on eDirectory to launch the eDirectory blog.

We intend to post one or two times a week with success stories, monetization strategies, product announcements, and maybe the occasionally anecdote to keep it engaging- I’ll try to push the one about getting robbed in Rio past editorial.

Stay tuned, and please post your comments – we intend for this to be a forum for your success online.

James Chubb
CEO