Question #1

Question: How do I promote my business when I have limited amount of money ?
What ways have you advertised/promoted your business with minimal money. So far I have done the following :-

• Google Ads
• Face Book Ads
• Linked In Groups
• Face Book Groups
• Email Collegues/Friends

I am probably impatient as want people to know about my business now. Also I feel a bit embarassed about sending info on groups about my business.

Answer:

This is one of my favorite new business questions to answer and am planning on doing a full series of blog posts on building a brand and community. And obviously, I have a bit of work to do myself for this Q&A site, but wanted to make sure all the kinks are worked out before I go commando and push this whenbusiness.com to the bones.

Start thinking about your brand in a niche saturation context and what value your content/conversation can bring to the niche.

Obviously you've already started attacking some of the larger social networks, which is a great first step, but now you need to take a step back and do a little market research finding who maintains the heartbeat of the conversation and influence in your niche.

1. Find the top 25-50 bloggers in the niche and engage in meaningful (important!) conversation. Have something intelligent to say in replying to their blog posts. Your intelligence is your key to driving traffic back to your site. Have you ever read an intelligent reply in a blog post and followed their name back to their website? This is exactly the type of behavior you're wanting to encourage. You may not get google juice from backlinks to your site because of "nofollow" attributes on most blogs, but you'll get something more important, a visitor. Being one of the first to respond to large blogs, like techcrunch.com for example is a meaningful thing, and free to do. Technorati.com actually just re-launched and has a top 100 blogs, and which you can use to find those blogs that belong to your niche.
2. Aside from the mega social networks, there are literally hundreds of other social networks and message boards that you can newbies like you can leverage and is easier to have a voice because there is much less noise. Sites like Ning.com, have hundreds of networks for every niche imaginable. This is a perfect place to join and again engaging in conversation, and make a little noise at first, and more noise later as you gain a noticeable persona on the network. These social networks and forums, are really the key in establishing your brand.
3. Creating a blog and/or podcast, gives you the opportunity to continue engaging your audience with what you've learned about the current social conversation in your niche. This also gives you a direct voice in casting your opinion for your audience and then becoming an influencing presence within the niche yourself. When doing a blog, you can reply to another blog's post and leverage automatic pingbacks or trackbacks on meaningful topics. This is also an important way to establish relationships because these authority bloggers will now know who you are. They will see what you've written about their blog post. And you'll be listed on their authority blog site, waiting for their readers to find your title of the blog post interesting. If doing a podcast, ensure to do or use a transcription service. This is an extremely important way of getting a lot of free content written and works tremendously well with search engines (SEO). Don't worry too much about that audience at first, doing a podcast is difficult, for me anyway. Getting the equipment and production level right, is a difficult process. Just start out small, and if you need guidance on podcasting, i have a ton of resources. Have unique and meaningful titles, have a look at CopyBlogger.com for a series of tips, tricks and trends on what is working for blog copy.
4. Now that you have blogging and/or a podcast, make sure that you try to use aggregation services for your best material, digg.com, alltop.com, reddit.com, 9rules.com, etc.
5. Find available directories to put your business online. Places like technorati.com allow you post content yourself back to your site. Techcrunch.com has Crunchbase.com which is a directory of startup businesses. Then do all of the typical other directory sites, DMOZ.org, etc.
6. USE Posterous.com, and Tumblr.com even if your blog is on another platform, posterous allows you to quickly and easily create a synergistic brand concept, where now you're influencing the conversation on a whole bunch of platforms. Just by emailing a Posterous account they support many other social tools and networks, Twitter.com, Youtube.com, Facebook.com, Vimeo.com, Flickr.com, WordPress.com and Blogger.com blogs and more. You post once, and you post everywhere, social saturation, social saturation, social saturation.

7. This last one is my personal favorite, help people and the favor will be returned tenfold. Create tutorials or how-to's on your niche's subject matter helping people out, and they'll realize that you are a valuable resource to them. Then google tutorial aggregation sites for your niche. There are like 30 prominent players..

   Gonna say it again, Social Media Market Saturation!!! Hrmm, wonder if i can coin that term. Get out there, it's all FREE and yours for the taking. Say that out loud! It's FREE marketing, and you'll be smarter at the end of it all to boot!

Question #2

Question: Business Books for Beginners

I want to know some books on business for beginners?

Answer:

These are my favorite business books, and really have formed many of my viewpoints on business, marketing, and entrepreneurship.

1. The Art Of War, by Sun Tzu Know your enemy(competition), be as close to their heartbeat as possible. This is technically not a business book, but if you ever want to succeed in any competition, be it life, war, or in business, this is the book to turn to.

2. Crush It, How to cash in on your Passion, by Gary Veynurchuck I know it just came out, but it's a great book, and definitely worth it's weight in gold. Gary Vey*ner*chuck, of winelibrarytv.com fame, likens this new period of internet as the Printing Press incarnate, and that it will have a huge shift on global business that we are barely beginning to see come to fruition. He argues that anyone can use their passion monetize it in today's internet with a limited budget. The book has many new social methods in building a personal brand.

3. Purple Cow, Tranform your Business by being Remarkable by Seth Godin Seth is awesome, and his blog and books are a must read. Realize that your only as good as your product/service, and if it's not remarkable, then you will not succeed. You can find some of his talks online as well, his TED talk was great, and so was the one at Google.

4. Predictably Irrational, By Dan Ariely A must read for anyone selling a product/service and needing to figure out price points. When it comes to decision making, in general, people are easily manipulated, while the people maintain that they are always making the wiser decisions.

5. How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie An oldie, but a goodie. You'll be amazed at how easy it is to have people/clients on your side by just listening, genuinely caring, and being human.

6. Built to Last, by Jim Collins Business visionary Jim Collins has really passionate ideas about leadership in the enterprise.

7. The Entrepreneur's Guide to Business Law Just because I haven't finished this book doesn't mean it's not valuable. It serves as a fantastic laymen legal resource I pickup constantly.

8. Bootstraping your Business, Start and Grow a Successful Company with Almost No Money If you've followed my posts, I'm a fan of shoestring budgets, and this is huge reason why. Founder of RightNow, an entrepreneur built a world class business from Montana with virtually no money.

There, that should keep you busy! Good luck.

Question #3

Question #4

Question #5

Wisdom of Crowds

The premise of this site is based on a book called, The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. Some of you may have either come across it or just plainly heard that the if you get a diverse sizable enough crowd, you will be able to find the most correct answer in any given cognitive problem. It will typically be more thorough, and at a completeness level much higher than any expert. This idea has been around for a long time now, and is now the underpinnings to everything from statistical population sampling (polling), to restaurant and product reviews (yelp.com, epinions.com), to the ask the audience lifeline from the show "Who wants to be a Millionaire".

Crowd Smarts

This is taken from a Q&A with the author of the book that highlight the largest reasons that the wisdom of crowds should be used much more.

Under what circumstances is the crowd smarter?
There are four key qualities that make a crowd smart. It needs to be diverse, so that people are bringing different pieces of information to the table. It needs to be decentralized, so that no one at the top is dictating the crowd's answer. It needs a way of summarizing people's opinions into one collective verdict. And the people in the crowd need to be independent, so that they pay attention mostly to their own information, and not worrying about what everyone around them thinks.

Why are we not better off finding an expert to make all the hard decisions?
Experts, no matter how smart, only have limited amounts of information. They also, like all of us, have biases. It's very rare that one person can know more than a large group of people, and almost never does that same person know more about a whole series of questions. The other problem in finding an expert is that it's actually hard to identify true experts. In fact, if a group is smart enough to find a real expert, it's more than smart enough not to need one.

Money Bacon

is a term we've been using for awhile, which is similar to signal vs noise, except in situations where there is more signal to decipher than noise. When you get too much varying points of signal, some of it excellent (money) and some of it Bacon (still wonderful, but obviously not good for you). Obviously too much of both is bad for you, but not too many people would turn away money or bacon. So we get into these types of Money Bacon scenarios when we are researching answers to our thoughts. Incomplete answers or half truths we find while doing research are the bacon. It's yummy, and not noise, but it has potentially serious side effects. Answers found through crowds however, is Money, good quality material that puts your mind at ease. As I said earlier, too much of either can be a bad thing. The May 2008 issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which is published by the American Psychological Association ran a series of experiments of varying levels of options, and found that too many options leads to undesirableness to continue searching and mind fatigue. Our minds are wonderful at deducing small amounts of options, but when we open up avenues of hundreds, or worse thousands of options at a correct answer, we get mind fatigue and our minds just can't process that information succinctly. We end up with doubt, anxiety, and uneasy feeling that perhaps this one answer out of hundreds is the wrong one. So we keep searching.

The Problem Today, Search

The search engine is both a saving grace but also still not at the point where we need it to be. Answers are not immediately available for any type of question entered into that magic little box. So we int roduced tools to try to man age how we ask and search for questions on the internet.

I'm certain we've all had this scenario, one time or another. We have a very specific question that we type into Google, and get a series of blogs answering the question. They blog post offers an answer or some tips, and yes, it might be an answer, but is it the right answer? Sometimes, but typically not, and depending on the site you visit, there's only half truths put in print, so your liable now for figuring out this puzzle piece together to ensure you have the right answer. Now your job is to laboriously go back and forth between search results and see differing opinions on the same question, but are they right? Who knows? Money Bacon!

Then there are traditional message boards, typically a top-down chronologically ordered or threaded conversation with sometimes a single response per page. This format does have many varying opinions all in one place, but then you have to hunt through sometimes 20 pages of material for the answer, or follow the full thread in order to understand what happened from pages 5 - 10. Sometimes you get the right answer, it is done in crowds after all, but seeking through 20 pages of content, off-topic blabber and "me too" posts is definitely a time waster. Let's just say we got the first 10 iterations of the "message board" wrong for question and answers, and better for conversation, though not great.

How WhenBusiness.com Works

Some sites get it right, CNN Small Business Answers works sometimes, but good luck trying to get your questions answered, they only answer a select few every week. A few? Really!? Thanks CNN. Yahoo Answers sometimes does as well, but the amount of repetitive questions found is still difficult to deduce so many right answers.

We started WhenBusiness.com because we wanted to have the ability to notify a user that a question has already been answered as they're typing a question. You have the ability to vote on questions that you would like to know the answer to as well, instead of writing a "me too" post.
This makes the most important questions rise to the top of the list. As well as the ability to vote on the the best answer, here the wisdom of crowds is essential. The best answer will always follow question. So if you want to see in order of correctness or completeness, the list of answers you can, with the most correct up top. If you think you can contribute to that answer, you can simply edit the answer, keeping in mind the intent of the originating author.

The Power of the Crowds

It's amazing to have watched the entire growth of Wikipedia, while certainly there are many inaccuracies, the amount of correct information is indeed riveting. For a collection of complete strangers to say, here, create a page on mostly anything you want and make it right, it's quite an accomplishment. Together, with the crowds, we can make WhenBusiness, a top option in answering small business questions for and by the crowd.

If you have a moment, I recommend this Ted Talk on "The Web, and Random Acts of Kindness" by Jonathan Zittrain.