… In which we discover how we can harness the fearsome power of the World Wide Web for our own profit and advancement.

THE WORLD IS YOUR VIRTUAL OYSTER

The elephant in the room and the thing that has transformed my enterprise for good and ill is that good old World Wide Web. It means that everyone can have a global presence and it also means that traditional employment is even more pointless.

To repeat the point made earlier, if your job can be done at the other end of a wire, it is probably under threat. On the other hand, if you are self-employed, you may well be able to do your job at the other end of a wire. If you analyze aerial photography for forensic examination, you can have clients from Kathmandu to Bogota. If you teach a foreign language you can do it over the Skype network to anywhere in the world. So it still escapes me why employers should want to lock hundreds of bored, listless people up at great expense in a large concrete and glass structure just to keep an eye on them. Even more weirdly, why would you let yourself be locked up there just for some non-existent job security?

It could be suggested that it is our obsession with process, the traditional manager’s fixation – not with ‘what have you achieved?’ but with the ‘how did you achieve this?’. If you are an ex-manager and can let go of this illness of overmanaging the process, you can, with the help of global connectivity, become a world wide multibillion dollar mega corporation from your back bedroom.

To take this idea to its most ludicrous conclusion you could commission a number of freelance vehicle designers to design a range of family-sized cars, you could email the designs to manufacturers in the Far East, appoint independent garages as distributors and bingo, you are a volume car manufacturer from the third bedroom of ‘Bide-a-wee’, 47 Dingle Avenue, Anytown.

A Lot of Fish in this Sea

The danger of the internet is that it is like a great big magnifying glass. It can magnify our opportunities but it can also focus on any element of crappiness and magnify that just as easily. First and foremost, here is a bold statement: YOU DO NEED A WEBSITE.

I have a very dear friend who is a brilliant technician in a certain field – in truth, he is probably the best in the world but, despite constant nagging, he just will not have a website. There is no doubt whatsoever that his work is in constant decline to the point that he is finding money short, and he says in a wonderfully mournful way, “How can I spend money on a website when I need to eat?” My reply? “No website, no eat!”

My own website, which I am never totally settled with, brings in work from all over the world. To my friend the technician, it’s like looking into a bucket devoid of fish when there is an ocean full of them behind him that he could drop his line into. If your enterprise is a traditional one, say, house painting, child care, gardening or catering, not having a website is like not having a postal address or a telephone number.

Net the Opportunities

At the other end of the spectrum there are web-based enterprises that only exist in cyberspace and then there are the enterprises, like my own, that become a success because they are transitional. In other words, they were started traditionally but have discovered new opportunities on the internet.

An accountant, laid off from a large corporation, started, as one would, to work as an independent accountant for small firms. For some reason his website hit the mark and scores of small firms from all over the place started to contact him. What now? Expansion? Employees? Apart from good presentation, efficiency, and general pleasantries, his key attraction was cost effectiveness (oh, OK, he was cheap!). Any expansion could compromise this so he discovered that the miracle of the internet meant he could get the grunt work of the audit done by very skilful people in Bangalore, India. While my car manufacturer fantasy is a joke, this guy’s international accountancy practice isn’t.

WHAT CAN THE WEB DO FOR US?

To get this techno-adventure under way, we need to decide what it is we want the web to do for us. As a marketing tool, it produces more opportunities, but remember, they are just opportunities. But the web can actually sell and bring in money, so is it a shop we are building here? It is also our showcase for the world to have a look at us and what we do. The potential customers can speak to other customers who love us, they can sample our work, see us in action, and they can contact us.

I am absolutely paranoid about my website. Is it any good; where does the professionalism of its construction rank me with the other sites you have visited? When you build a site with your biography, pictures, video clips and testimonials, you are literally exposing yourself or your products to scrutiny and comparison. The cheapest way into this is to design and build your own site – a number of the hosting companies and internet providers offer free or cheap website design. I don’t know what advice to offer because you may be very talented at web design, I just know that I am not. It is like saying that because you can hold a coloured pencil, you are capable of designing your logos, adverts and publicity material. In my case, I feel it necessary to hire in some professional help. I have a truly brilliant genius who I refer to as my techno-troll, but just because he is a genius doesn’t mean that he and I don’t have very heated and controversial arguments about the purpose of a website.

OPTIMIZE DON’T COMPROMISE

If you talk to a skilful website builder there are certain obsessions that they have, and from my observations one of those is website optimization. If you already have a website I bet you have been hassled by companies offering to optimize your site. There are websites where you can measure the ranking in global terms of your site. The technicalities of this are hugely complex and involve loads of techno-troll speak about Bots and spiders. I have no technical know-how about this whatsoever, so let me explain my understanding of this and how it will impact on us.

Search engines such as Google look for things on the internet when we ask them to. We, the consumers, are Google’s real customers and it does its best to find what we are looking for. If we type in ‘window cleaner’ it will try and find one for us. If our enterprise should happen to be window cleaning we, of course, would like to be found. The search engine has a look at the World Wide Web and sees millions of window cleaners. The problem is that when the search results appear, the consumer only really picks from the first one or two pages of choices. The search engine has all sorts of weird and esoteric ways of favouring one site over another – at one time, it was key words like ‘cheapest’, ‘Elvis Presley’, or ‘pole dancing’. The trick was to type them over and over again, black on black, so the viewer couldn’t see them, but the search engine could. Of course, Google rumbled that stunt and started disqualifying some sites.

Popularity then became important; the answer was to get Far Eastern call centres to hit and hit and hit on your site. Then links to prestige sites like Fox News or the BBC were important. As Google got tougher, the techno-trolls got more slippery. To the trolls, the measure of success was the amount of traffic (or visitors to the site).

Nearly Famous

My personal techno-troll is absolutely brilliant at this; he capers about calling out that I have a diddly pom or doo-hickey rating of eight hundred thousand! “Is that good?” I ask. “Oh yes,” he cries, “last year you were four million.” This means that on one scale or another I am, in the business world, the eight hundred thousandth most famous person. To me, when you consider all the stars and galaxies, to be eight hundred thousandth on this little spinning ball of mud seems a little insignificant but my troll assures me that it’s brilliant!

Now, this is the important bit: I don’t seem to feel any richer. The scoring is based on the number of visitors to the site. To this end we tried to construct a site that was entertaining, amusing and informative. The result has been what I call “masturbating teenagers” My trolls get really angry with me when I start that but my explanation is that while the site may attract millions of cheery visitors, how do I get any money out of them?

All the Fun of the Fair

Another downside of this is that if people have enjoyed your site you can end up in the funfair trap.

There is a business model that offers a funfair or a carnival as the perfect business structure. Why do you visit a funfair? Because you have been before and know that it’s fun. What disappoints you when you get there? When everything’s the same and there are no new rides, or when everything is different and your favourite ride is not there. So they have to be as expected, but always have something new and exciting to see. Oh, and they have to suit all tastes with kiddy rides in the day and white-knuckle at midnight. If I am busy, tired or unconscious for a while and neglect my blog or video clips, I get a storm of emails complaining – or worse, a decline in visitor numbers.

WEIRD AND WONDERFUL

Let’s, for our little trip together, forget the technical stuff and see where the web helps us on our journey. First, why do people visit websites? For me, I visit for things that are cheap, weird or specific. For ‘cheap’, for example, my typical specific Google will be ‘flights to Hong Kong’ – the results will help me to pick the cheapest of the least dangerous airlines; I will be offered compromises of airport, timing and price; I make my choice and buy. In the ‘weird’ category I look for unusual steam engines for sale or collectable pinball machines, and for the ‘specific’, I mighty type in a person’s name or a particular part number.

My name is Geoff Burch and, strangely enough, the name of my website is Geoff Burch. Guess what, if you want to find me you should type in ‘Geoff Burch’. Forgetting any Bots and spiders, the result happens to come back with websites with Geoff Burch in their title.

If you run the ‘Cheering Lizard’ reptile shop, then if some­one types in ‘cheering lizard’ they will find you. Where things become hard work is when someone types in ‘Business author self-employment’ – I don’t think I would be found. Or if you type, ‘I want a gecko’, the ‘Cheering Lizard’ might not appear. You would have to work really hard to get those more oblique requests to find you and one has to judge whether that is worthwhile. In other words, consider coming at this backwards. If people know who you are they will Google you by specific name and find you. Remember, I am doing well as eight hundred thousandth; it is just that I wonder whether people who have a bundle of cash in their hand will fight through the other seven hundred and ninety nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety nine to get to me!

A Load of Balls

When the visitors do get to you, what offer are you going to make to them and how easy is it to work your site? The other question is: are you going to have a web-based enterprise?

Let me run a simple thought by you. Let’s imagine that I would like to sell golf balls. I cannot think of a better web-based business. I have a source of brand name golf balls at ridiculously low prices. After a great deal of thought, I have decided to call this site ‘Cheap Golf Balls’. The reason is that the parsimonious golfer will type into Google, ‘cheap golf balls’ and if you do sell cheap golf balls you are in business … well, as long as they are around the cheapest golf balls in the world. The site will be easy, too; no music, no dancing girls, no hilarious cartoons or chatty blogs, there will be a picture of a golf ball or a box of golf balls, a list of prices and a ‘buy now’ button. If you don’t like people or want to live dressed only in skin-tight latex you can sit in a shed somewhere dispatching millions of golf balls and becoming rich. Here endeth the business plan.

Let’s Be Twee

If you have got to here by reading this book so far, you will have noticed that I hate and deride twee names. That also got tipped on its head by the internet.

As you know, I suggest that if your name is Susan West and you ice cakes, you would be well advised to call the enterprise ‘Susan West Design’ and not something like ‘Ends in Tiers’. The search engines would struggle with either of those but if it was called the ‘Iced Cake Company’ you may well get found. So, possibly a twee name is a good idea if it describes exactly what your enterprise is about, i.e. The Window Cleaning Company, Cheap Golf Balls, Wedding Gifts, or Rent-a-Car. I know they’re not exactly twee but I hope you can see what I mean.

WORDS ARE CHEAP

It is also worth contemplating here what we could sell on the internet. If one of the things the consumer looks for is value for money, whilst it may be difficult to find golf balls that are cheap enough for us to make a margin, not to put too fine a point on it, the contents of our head are very cheap indeed.

If we know a jolly amusing little song and can sing it reasonably well, people may well pay us a dollar to download it to their MP3 players – cost of production, nil, cost of storage (in your head), nil, received, one dollar, profit, one dollar. While Machiavelli said, “Knowledge is power”, Geoff Burch says, “Knowledge is cheap” (but, of course, can be very valuable). By that I mean, to us, the suppliers of the knowledge, it’s cheap, but to our customers it can be extremely valuable and worth paying for. For example, if you grew up and live in a Spanish-speaking country, that is a no-cost consequence of birth, but because I would like to improve my Spanish I would pay good money to have Skype conversations with you. If you train, and then hold webinars or offer subscription downloads, whether that is easy to sell or not is beside the point, the thing is that the manufacturing cost is zero.

Don’t Take My Word for It

This leads us to a dodgy, or possibly illegal, area so the usual caveats, reservations and warnings apply here. Another cheap thing to sell is something you haven’t got. I picked a hint of this up from Timothy Ferriss’s The Four Hour Work Week (a recommended read on the whole cyber-business thing). The point is that self-employed people who set up a new enterprise tend to throw themselves into it with fearsome gusto, only to crash and burn in spectacular style. They believe they have a great idea and then they bet the farm on it. To take that analogy a little further, when the tornado has passed, they are left with one small goat, a pile of wreckage and a heap of debt, but let us consider the cyber world for a moment.

In the real world you may decide to open a shop, ‘The Hilarious Knitted Vegetable Cover Emporium’. What a cracking idea, you chuckle, in front of your log fire, sipping an amusing little claret while congratulating yourself on the elegance of your plan. The problem is that you will have to lease a shop.

Back to the Cyber Shop. You will have to fill your shop with stock and wait. What do people do when they walk into shops? They pick things up, they look at them, they check the price, you may engage them in conversation, they may or may not buy, and they amble out again.

Can we examine the risks? First, of course, there is the chance that no one buys anything; next, there may not be enough people buying anything – perhaps because of the location there are not enough people or the wrong sort of people are visiting. If your hilarious vegetable covers don’t sell, you are done – another 24 years and 6 months of rent to pay, four tons of unsold vegetable covers, and a whole pile of worry.

In the cyber world all of these troubles just melt away. I have a place on my site that my techno-troll is very, very excited about. It is a bit he called my shop. You can visit my shop and buy things, mostly books, but there are DVDs, eBooks, tee-shirts, and even me (you can buy ‘me’ for your conference). The reason he is excited is because he designed it and thinks it is a very good shop as it is bulging with clever technical wizardry. My feeling is that, although it does well, it maybe doesn’t work quite as well as the old shop.

The fact is, this whole thing is an illusion. It is not a shop, it is a picture of a shop. When you pick up a book and flick through a few pages, you are pressing a button to look at pictures of a few pages of a book that may, or may not, exist. Perhaps there are no books there at all, maybe I have never written a book in my life – and I never will unless enough people order one. Hang on, you are reading this, but this may be a sample page and if you are enjoying it I might write the rest. Can you see where I am coming from?

The Case of the Woolly Carrot

You can test run websites and online shops: instead of having crap business ideas that cost you every penny you possess, you can now have virtual crap business ideas that don’t cost a penny. ‘The Hilarious Knitted Vegetable Cover Emporium’ can be launched in cyberspace to see how it goes. The advantages are that you don’t really need any stock to get started, the whole world is your footfall (however stupid the idea, in this entire world somebody may well be stupid enough to want a knitted vegetable cover or wish to teach their dog to weld), and you can keep trying different things. You could create many websites, ‘Woolly Veg R Us’, ‘Cover Your Legume’, ‘Knit before Boiling’, or go for the niches with ‘Hide Your Carrot’, ‘Insulate Your Aubergine’. The tiniest changes make a difference.

I came across someone who wanted to sell beautiful handmade shoes on the internet, but to do that would have required an enormous investment in lasts, leather and a knowledge of the most popular sizes. So what he did was to offer the shoes for sale before he had any stock of them at all. I’m not sure how legal or moral that activity was but what did happen was that he received a large number of orders for a very specific range of sizes and colours that showed him the way forward. Of course he refunded the money, but what it did tell him was that the business was viable, only certain colours were popular, and that the demand fell into a very narrow range of sizes. When the site was launched for real he knew he was going to make sales, he knew which stock was going to be popular, and had a list of people who had already stated their interest in his potential product.

If we set up something like that and the response to our offer is disappointing, we should email back and say that we regret that the offer was sold out and unfortunately we can get no further stock – all money fully refunded, of course. If the response is good, the reply would be, “We have been overwhelmed by the response to this offer and are now out of stock. Would you like a full refund or are you able to wait 28 days for our new stock to arrive?”

As a professional speaker, I get a lot of my work from speaking agencies which come and go, but one in particular gave us a lot of work. Whenever I searched for my name there were a number of speaking agencies in different fields of expertise that featured me, but I didn’t recall ever doing business with them. As I am sure you have already guessed, they were all the same guy who was not so much an agent as a cyber-expert who knew how to manipulate the search engines. The thing for us to consider is that the one thing that made him different from vegetable covers or welding dogs was that he could stock or obtain known products – namely me! Type in stuff you want – Geoff Burch; Sony TV; VW spares – those are things widely looked for by name. You just have to convince the search engines that you are the best, the cheapest, the most used, or the handiest person to do that.

HANDYMAN

Of course there will be recognized services that will be searched for: Thai massage, plumbers or car hire. Even if you can’t manipulate search engines and you offer a service, you had better have a smart, professional website. You will be found and some search criteria are geographical, so me typing ‘plumber’ may well result in me getting the nearest one to me. That could be you!

Then people search for knowledge bases: ‘Can I sell more?’, ‘Fix a Chevrolet gearbox’ or, one in my own case was, ‘how can I weld aluminium with a mig welder?’ (Don’t ask.) On that one we got a great free film clip which was brilliant. We could have been charged for that but the maker of the clip instead used it to promote their great welding kit, which takes us neatly on to social media.

SHIPS THAT PASS IN THE NIGHT

A brilliant feature of the internet is how it broadens our horizons. You will remember in the story of the burglar how he benefited from forming loose alliances for specific jobs. For the self-employed, these sorts of opportunities are magnified by the internet and we can form alliances and contacts with people all over the world. I received an email a while back from someone in Singapore who wanted me to collaborate with them on a book they were written. We had no conversations or contact other than by email and yet we successfully completed the task which resulted in a book that had been specially written for the Far Eastern market. It also gives us the opportunity, as self-employed people, to outsource some of our tasks. Where previously we may have needed the services of a very expensive professional such as a tele-marketer, lawyer or designer, if we search the globe we can find these services at a fraction of the price we would pay locally.

Another thing we can do is to find support and reward by collaborating with our fellow professionals and by using professional contact sites such as LinkedIn where we can be in contact with other professionals who can share and introduce us to valuable work. Whilst writing this, I have realized how much of my contact is done through email and how many of my customers come to me through the internet, and because of that how my horizons have been expanded. I have travelled around the world from Kuala Lumpur to central Mexico and the only reason is because people have found me on the internet. A few years ago, those opportunities would not have been open to me. The world literally is your oyster.

ALL OF A TWITTER

First question, why? My publishers and publicists are very keen to get me involved in Facebook, Twitter, blogging and YouTube, but in my opinion we could be back into masturbating teenager territory. I would love to promote successful ‘self made me’s’, but would having 20,000 followers on Twitter do that? I do put practical tips on YouTube and I do blog when I have the time. The difficulty is that if you become popular and stop, it really upsets people. What I am saying is, use these things as tools but be aware of your target audience, your target customer, commitment, and the image you would like to create. It is very difficult to uncreate an image out there. The pay-off is that, if you create a name, you will be searched for by name. If you can knit a vegetable cover while wing walking or assaulting a celebrity in an amusing way, it will be a YouTube hit and many people will search the internet for you. When friends visit each other, someone will casually pick up a Fairisle clad parsnip and say, “Ah, one of these things! Have you seen the clip on YouTube?”

MEET YOURSELF COMING BACK

A tip I give to all self-employed people is to visit yourself. If you have a shop, stand the other side of the street and look at it as a customer would; phone your office and try to do business with yourself. The key … and a real clincher, is, are you easy to do business with? This is never truer than in cyberspace. Visit your own site – is it easy to find, does it look great, professional and slick? When a specific order is placed, is the product easy to find, size and price? Is it easy to pay? (We use PayPal as it proved easier than the hoo hah the credit card companies put you through).

Just the same mistakes are made on the internet as they are in real life; the business expert who thinks it’s cool and on the ball to wear a Winnie the Pooh tie is dead in the water. The website that blares out with jolly music and a rib-tickling animation is just as dead. Think about this … a lot of people who have the misfortune of still being employed in a ‘proper’ job will spend most of their time sneaking around the internet looking for stuff, so a fanfare of loud music and a brightly coloured flickering screen is the last thing they want when the boss is about.

Reducing the Risks

The web is like a huge magnifying glass and it magnifies everything that we do. It can amplify the number of customers we can connect with, it can amplify the quantity of contacts we can make, but the downside of this is that it can also amplify our crappiness and amplify the perceived risk that our customers take by doing business with us.

Can you remember the formula that our customers use when looking for us? They want maximum benefit and minimum risk. With all of the scams, fiddles and rip-offs that exist in cyberspace, people are even more cautious when doing business on the internet and if you want your enterprise to succeed we have to find sure-fire ways of reassuring our potential customers.

Consider your own buying habits on the internet when choosing, say, a holiday. What’s the first thing that you look for? For many people, it is independent reviews, so every time you do a good job make sure you get a good testimonial and ensure that it’s one of the first things your potential customers see on your website. If you are getting a 100% customer satisfaction, tell the world, it helps to reassure. Offer plenty of guarantees – although this is a risky thought don’t just offer money back but offer more than money back, i.e., “If you are not delighted with our golf balls, we will refund double your initial outlay.”

A thing that we did before PayPal came along was that we sent ordered books out with no payment and allowed the customer to pay when they arrived. Strangely enough, I don’t think we ever got let down – except by a large international corporation, would you believe! If people feel they are being trusted, they feel a sense of commitment.

When it comes to payment you can use a system like PayPal or any other secure payment system, so that the customer knows their money is safe until they are delighted with whatever they receive.

The final big reassurance, which is something that is unique to the self-employed individual, can be the human touch. If there is a strange query or if things go wrong, be prepared to be on the end of a telephone or send a personal email that shows in this big spooky cyberworld there is a kind, thoughtful human being involved who can sort things out personally.

To sum up, the internet is a great place to test business ideas. The world can be your customer, niches become less niche – i.e. when millions are viewing you. Everyone has to have a professional website – it’s the world’s window on you.