Entrepreneurs-Journey.com Down-To-Earth Advice For Bloggers and Internet Marketers

After all that reminiscing in the history of BetterEdit in my previous post it’s time to get up to date with the latest BetterEdit news.

Today I had one of those wonderful energetic and productive days. I’m sure you know what I am talking about. You wake up full of energy and it lasts for the whole day. I think today, for the first time in a long time, I put in a full 8 hours worth of work, and then some.

My primary activities were the new BetterEdit navigation system and library. As a loyal blog reader you can have a sneak preview of what the new site is going to look like and check out the new library as well – follow this link. It hasn’t been polished yet so please excuse the typos if you find any.

I spent a lot of time working on writing good keyword focused and natural sounding copy today. I have to send out thanks to Will Swayne for reviewing and providing advice regarding my website copy. Also a big super thank you to our resident professional editor, Chelsea Allen, who kindly volunteers to proofread all my copy before I launch on the world wide web. There is nothing worse than when an editing and proofreading business has typos in their website copy. I try and avoid it, but I’m not perfect and it has happened in the past. (Don’t get me started on my feelings about the guy that emailed and offered to ’sell me’ where a spelling mistake was on the site for $100 – how rude!)

The new library is going online soon and while we only have a few articles at the moment, some very good articles mind you, I will slowly add more as time goes by. The purpose of the library is to increase the bookmark value of BetterEdit.com. I was recently surprised to find in my site stats (provided by AWStats) that BetterEdit.com is presently holding down a 50%+ ‘added to favourites’ stat, which is very, very impressive. How good is yours?

Yaro Starak

In my first brief history post I gave a very condensed history of how I originally got the idea for my business and then took the steps to implement it. A few months after starting the business I left it alone to stagnate for a year or two while I did some personal growth things like finish university, travel to Tasmania and break up with a girlfriend. When I finally came back to my business I was starting with the infrastructure in place, a few thousand dollars in savings and a desire (or lack of) to never get a full time day job. I should also point out that most of my friends where in full time day jobs just out of university and earning nice graduate salaries. My dad was very suggestive that I get a normal job first, get some experience and then maybe do my own thing. Alas, my desire to control my own timetable dictated that I didn’t want to be ANYWHERE before 9am, especially working for someone else, so I decided working on BetterEdit was worth a shot for at least the freedom of choice it allowed me regarding my working hours. Let’s not forget I totally believed in the idea as well, so I had to give it a proper shot.

The government lends a hand

One day I was driving in the car with my dad and I was talking about how I knew if I could just get the word out there my business would be successful. If I had more money for advertising I could try many different things. My dad started talking about a friend of his that was getting paid to write a book. I asked my dad if I could speak to this guy. One phone call later and I had learnt about the New Enterprise Incentives Scheme (NEIS) program. The NEIS program is a government funded scheme that pays ‘life support’ income to you every two weeks for a year while you run your business. I went to an information session, and two months later, having written a proper business plan, fronted at a panel interview and having been assigned a nice business mentor I was on the scheme for a year. I received just under $200 per week, which technically I was supposed to use to support me whilst I spent time running my business, but since I was still living at home with minimal expenses I could use the money towards marketing BetterEdit.com. If you are an Australian and you would like to learn more about the NEIS program try googling for it. If you are not an Australian I suggest you hunt around for similar business start-up grants or sponsorship programs as they can provide much needed cash and business mentoring.

The NEIS program did two things for me, it gave me a little cashflow to play with and more importantly, it psychologically confirmed that I was running my business full time and taking it seriously. I can’t stress how important that second point was for me. I now had justification to work full time towards making my business successful. I was getting paid to do it. With a new found determination I went to work to get my business off the ground.

Marketing an online business

How do you market an online proofreading and editing business? This is a tough question. I’m still not sure today how best to do this but back a few years ago I had tested only one method, putting up posters at university campuses. I knew this worked to a degree, but being a good business student I had a lot more ideas to try, and try I did!

Before I go on and tell you what I did that worked and what I tried that didn’t I should point out that everything I did was within my own means. The main factor that dictates success for a business is the entrepreneur behind the business. I chose methods of marketing that fit my personality, which I was prepared to try. Some more outgoing people may consider more outlandish publicity stunts. You can read Richard Branson’s autobiography for some good examples of ballsy things a young entrepreneur can do.

Buying ads in print magazines

Over the next twelve months I tried the following methods to advertise (this is not in sequential order by the way – it’s all a bit of a blur now):

I collected all the magazines at the newsagent that targeted writers. There weren’t many but I figured this would be a good way to reach the author/writer market all around the world. I collected all the ad rates for each magazine. Unfortunately it was just too expensive to do a traditional advertisement but a few magazines had classified sections which where under $100 to advertise in so I tested this method. One American magazine I put in for three issues, two others for one issue. The result, not one client initially, but fast forward about six months and I got one query. Not a good start.

I decided to focus only on the student market and would leave the author and business editing markets for a while.

I came across a business in Australia that specialised in advertising in campus newspapers. They acted as an agent for a bunch of the leading student produced publications at the biggest universities around Australia. I decided to spend up big on this one which was a mistake. I should have tested smaller. I can’t remember how much was spent but around $1000-$2000 to target a lot of campuses. I can’t remember getting one client from this method but my tracking referrals wasn’t as good back then. Needless to say the ROI was poor. I came to the conclusion that the people that read student papers were not my market. I don’t think international students struggling with English will pick up a campus magazine. More often these publications serve as an outlet for budding journalists and activists to have a rant about whatever issue was pissing them off at the time. Political wannabes, union members and social activists were reading these publications, certainly not my target market.

University student clubs and societies

I decided that not only was I going to target students, it was international students that really were my primary marketplace. The niche was getting smaller.

How do you reach international students? I thought international student clubs and societies, of which there are many at every university, were worth trying. You’d think it would be easy to sponsor clubs and societies at universities. They always seem to be running an event so I expected them to be eager to contact me after I tempted them with the sponsorship carrot. It wasn’t the case though. Initially I hit resistance from student unions to even just get the contact details for clubs and when I finally did locate email addresses or leave notes in pigeon holes the response was poor. It turned out that the small clubs were so disorganised that they could never get their act together to work with me and the big clubs were so professional I had to spend $500 to get even the tiniest amount of exposure.

I spent $500 in cash and prize sponsorship to sponsor a huge talent competition run by a group of Taiwanese clubs. This let me run a PowerPoint slide along with the other sponsors at the event. My slide was shown about every ten minutes for about ten seconds during the whole show on two large projectors. My banner was also listed as a sponsor of the event in the event timetable brochure. The net result: three queries and one job. Again this was very bad ROI.

During this time I also arranged to have little ads in email newsletters sent to various clubs and had flyers distributed in welcome bags during orientation week. Neither of these methods proved very fruitful.

Free publicity using press releases

This is a sample of the initiatives I tried that in my mind failed. I had more success in terms of ROI when I managed to get some free publicity in a local newspaper and in a small pocketsized Internet magazine. I was actually surprised at how easy it was to arrange and it only cost me time.

As I wrote about in my first brief history post, Geoff Cook used his story as a tool for free publicity. A young person running an Internet business from his dormroom at Harvard during the dotcom boom was something interesting and helped him get unbelievable free coverage that literally pushed the awareness of his business to a global scale. I didn’t expect that, but I could certainly leverage my age as a story.

I had recently made it to the top 100 finalist round of a fairly well known youth business plan competition called the Nescafe BigBreak. Whilst I didn’t get to the winners stage where I could compete for cash, I thought it was a good selling point and something I could use for publicity. I wrote out a small press release highlighting my age, that I was a young person starting an Internet business and that I had recently been a finalist in a national youth business competition. I tried to make it as easy as I could for a journalist to use my story and emailed off three different sized press releases and some media captures of my business logo and website. I sent it off to the editors and journalists of my local papers and Internet related magazines. Two responded positively and I got a feature article in the North West News and NetGuide magazine.

Posters have always provided the best ROI

During the time I experimented with different marketing methods I never stopped putting out posters every week. I made sure that each campus had a fresh run of posters at least every three weeks (I planned for every two but I got lazy). Most of the jobs were coming from posters or repeat clients that had either heard from a friend that had used our service or seen a poster. Since postering cost me about $0.04 a poster and a little labour and time, it was providing much better ROI than any other method I tried. Whilst walking around campuses putting up posters was becoming very tiring and I dreamed of the day I could hire someone to do it for me, it was very good for me physically too. The exercise and opportunity to get away from the computer and be outdoors was refreshing my mind. Often I came up with more ideas while walking around a campus. The exercise and ‘meditation’ of doing something repetitive and mundane was helping me be more productive and ultimately helping my business.

Today I continue to experiment with many different promotional methods and in particular have started to pick up my online marketing methods. I post in forums and newsgroups. I write press releases and work on my website copy, link exchanges and SEO. I experiment and use trial and error mixed with intuition. It’s ongoing process that will continue as long as my business exists. Even this blog is a promotional tool.

If you want to read more about my current day-to-day marketing efforts (I encourage you to learn from my mistakes) then please bookmark my blog.

Yaro Starak

This is a quick post to let you all know about the Blog Business Summit just about to happen in Seattle. The focus – how to make blogs work for your business – is certainly a hot topic at the moment. You can read more about the event at http://blogbusinesssummit.com.

I’ve started to spend some time trawling around the net looking for other individuals writing blogs about entrepreneurship. In particular I look for the more personal individual stories as opposed to “business lessons” that the big sites churn out day after day.

A friend of mine that runs an Internet marketing business, Will Swayne, has a blog that is about online marketing and publishes a lot of articles on this topic. I took a look at his links to other blogs and started reading Bnoopy – An entrepreneurship blog (love the name – it’s just fun to say Bnoopy).

One entry included a fantastic quote from Admiral Jim Stockdale which was used to explain the Stockdale Paradox. This was the first time I had heard about it, but to cut a long story short, this soldier survived for 8 years in a POW camp where he was constantly tortured. His methodology or cognitive thought process that kept him alive is the paradox. Here is the quote:

“You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end – which you can never afford to lose – with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be”

The author of the blog explains the concept in more depth in his full blog entry and also goes on to explain how this applies to business. His point is that entrepreneurs are ideas people, extremely positive, end goal focused optimists that sometimes fail to grasp the reality of the current situation.

A lot of business theory will tell you about planning, budgeting and forecasting. You should plan for the future and set precise goals to measure progress. Managing a business at the early start-up phase often means that you fly by the seat of your pants. Personally I don’t have detailed forecasts, budgets or any significant financial documentation beyond what is required for bookkeeping. However I do have goals, but they are *fuzzy* goals, not written down on paper. I know where I want my business to be eventually, but I don’t create excess stress by pressuring myself to be there in one year, or three or five. I work with my present reality and use my end goals and business philosophies to motivate me. Intuition steers the present. I like to think that right now for me, this is what the Admiral would recommend.

I admit I would definitely benefit from more detailed budgeting but the reality of my situation is that I must DO the business now rather than PLAN for business in the future. Is this is a mistake? It might be, but presently it suits me fine and keeping the owner happy is my number one business priority.

Yaro Starak

I was having a chat with friend of mine on MSN. He is also an aspiring young entrepreneur and he was commenting that I appear a lot more focused on my business than some of his other friends who like to talk business but have trouble taking actions towards creating something. I asked if these friends of his were still in school and he said yes. I remembered back when I was studying I knew one thing, I didn’t like the prospect of a day job when I graduated and running my own business was definitely the way I wanted to go. I just didn’t know what sort of business I wanted to start.

Now that I have been running BetterEdit for a number of years and having started and closed or sold a number of other small enterprises along the way I can look back on what I have done and how I learnt to focus and take action, at least more than I used to and only on one project at a time! However I think a brief history is in order so you can see the processes I went through to get as much focus as I have now.

My story might provide you a valuable lesson, as often when you start a new business you have lots of untested ideas, grand plans but not a lot of focus on the little things and as a result you don’t take actions. A lot of business is trial and error and a journey of self discovery for the entrepreneur – he or she has to like what they are doing for the business to succeed after all! But you have take trials to make those errors or you won’t learn what works and get past the theorising and brainstorming stage. Nothing is more exciting than when you make that first sale.

I started BetterEdit around 2000-2001. I received the initial brain spark from www.cyberedit.com (now http://www.essayedge.com) after reading a news article in a Yahoo magazine about Geoff Cook the founder of the business. Geoff started his business in 1997 editing students’ entrance essays to get into colleges in the United States. Without going into too much detail, Geoff’s business was very successful and he himself became a millionaire. This article from Wired Magazine is one of the most important publicity articles Geoff received and really helped to increase his exposure and inform the consumer of his business.

I took the idea and applied it to the Australian marketplace, which is a bit different because students don’t have to write an entrance paper to get into university. However there are a lot of international students with English as a second language in Australia, so I believed that proofreading and editing could be a market. At the time I had just completed a group project which was a perfect case study. One of my group members from Asia had awful English and I spent a whole night editing his writing. I had also just learnt HTML and was eager to build websites as I was falling in love with the Internet. My mother’s partner was out of work and being a trained teacher was quite a capable editor, so I had all the ingredients. I spent a couple of days building the website and a business was born.

Fairly soon after that point however I left the business to focus on studies. I wasn’t in the right place in my life to devote the energy BetterEdit needed. The business started and basically stagnated for a year, however it was working because we had a few loyal clients, it just wasn’t growing because no one was doing anything to tell people about it. Fast forward to 2003 and I had just returned from a trip to Tasmania with a girlfriend. This was meant to be the start of a fruitpicking journey around Australia but ended prematurely. I also broke up with my girlfriend. I had no job, I was a business graduate with no desire to return to studies and no commitments to anything. Talk about opportunity!

I decided to give BetterEdit a really good shot and went to work on it. Over the first few years without me my family had managed to locate one or two good contract editors by sending job notices to the local universities. I checked that they were still willing to receive work, which they were. The website was still up and the email systems were working fine. All I needed to do was get the word out that our service was there.

Next blog entry I’ll talk a look at my first steps at marketing an Internet business.

Yaro Starak