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Today I was at the Broadway foodcourt in the Brisbane city mall eating lunch with a couple of friends, Ed and Chris who both work for Marketing-Results. Ed made a comment about when he was younger he wanted to be a food critic. I’ve also contemplated this but not seriously - more in a “I wonder what it would be like” kind of way.

Back in oldschool days, a time before the Internet and web, you had to be a journalist before you could ever consider becoming a food critic. You probably had to study a degree and fight to land a job at a newspaper or magazine.

Nowadays it’s all changed. With the invention of the weblog or blog, any dedicated writer can establish themself as a critic for almost any field. If you want to become a food critic all you have to do is set up a blog, give it a name like “Yaro’s Brisbane Restaurant Guide” and get eating and reviewing. If you can write reasonably well, keep content coming and get indexed in search engines with a few good link exchanges you can establish a readership. With that readership you have power.

Consider you write a glaringly positive review of your local spanish restaurant. The power of the blog is that you are giving out personal recommendations with every comment you make. If your blog has a large following one positive review can send a stream of new customers to that restaurant. That’s a power you can leverage.

The logical benefit of being a food critic would be free food. Contact any restaurant, tell them you are an online restaurant reviewer and what a positive review might do for them, and bam - instant free meal! Send them your URL if they don’t believe you and tell them stories about the impact your commentary has had on other restaurants.

The trick with this is to remain locally focussed. Stick to your geographic area or field of interest and keep the focus sharp, niched and clear. Make sure the title of your blog says what it is you do -”Brisbane Restaurant Reviews”. This will help you place better in search engines too.

The beauty of blogging is you can take this principle to almost any industry. Provided there is not significant competition you can establish yourself in whatever area you are interested in. Like reading sci-fi books? Do reviews on your blog and then contact sci-fi authors or bookshops for free books. Enjoy yoga - review the local yoga studios and then score free classes.

Of course these are just some local “perks”. If you were serious and developed a large audience you can start to reap some financial returns too. This may include advertising (e.g. local restaurants pay to be listed on your blog), newsletters, subscriptions, premium based content (for example archive your reviews in a database and charge a fee for access), etc etc. You are limited only by how many ways you can think of to provide value to your audience.

Yaro Starak
Blogpreneur

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In the recent Skype update they have switched to a centralised contact list system so no matter where in the world you log in you will have your full contact list available (much like other IM software programs have had for a while).

This got me thinking. Right now we have a client/server model for the Internet. You maintain one computer with all the software running on it and you then browse the web and have content delivered at request. Your personal systems are maintained on your personal computer either at home or work, or on your mobile laptop. That’s a lot of dependency on one or few machines.
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I have a list. It’s a list that gets bigger almost everyday. It’s my to-do list for my business that serves two purposes. First, and perhaps most importantly it stops my brain from exploding. My list acts as a mini brain-dump allows me to get thoughts onto paper so they don’t get lost somewhere in my head. Secondly of course a to-do list gives me some direction and tasks to be completed.

I can’t remember where I sourced the brain dump idea, but many months ago I read an article about brain dumping for business owners. Basically the idea is to write down every thing you want and the steps required to get there. We are talking everything from the little day-to-day things to the big picture, ‘I want a house, wife and two kids’ deal. I did a haphazard brain dump after reading the article but decided that full on brain dumps weren’t for me. I can’t focus long enough to get the entire contents of my brain onto paper and then prioritise it.

However I did continue to use the brain dump concept on a daily basis. I maintain a collection of simple text files on my desktop. One is a ‘things to do’ file, another is an ‘ideas’ file and then I have separate ones for certain business projects. I also walk around with a notepad wherever I go to be certain I jot down any revelations I have while out and about. You would be surprised how many great ideas you can have just doing the daily commute walking from place to place.

The best thing about these little textpads is that they reduce my stress. You ask how? Simple, once I write something down I forget about it. I don’t worry about needing to do it anymore because it’s been filed away for me to look at again sometime in the future. If I didn’t do this I would have a thousand business ideas floating around in my head and an amazingly disorganised pile of things to do scattered throughout my brain.

The funny thing now though of course is that I spend more time writing down things to do rather than actually doing them!

Yaro Starak
Young Entrepreneur

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While in Canada I was thinking a lot about how to automate BetterEdit so that more of the job processing could be handled by web applications. I tossed around all kinds of ideas including a fully automated system where the client selects the editor they want, makes payment and the whole editing process is handled online with no interaction with admin. This of course would reduce my role (admin) significantly as I would only be needed for support, rather than also processing and coordinating jobs between clients and editors.

I contacted some of our editors to ask for their opinion and while everyone was supportive a concern kept popping up - how can we maintain personal relationships with our clients if they interact with an automated system? Over the last few months as new jobs have come through from Canada and we have ‘met’ clients for the first time, they have tasted our service and provided feedback, and repeat clients from Australia have returned like old friends, I have further noted how important personal interaction is.

One of my own peeves is customer service and in particular phone support. Like most people I hate waiting in phone queues, I hate how you often have to bounce around from department to department. My impression and happiness with a company often rests on how well their support staff can handle my query. If it is quick, simple and directly addresses my needs then I walk away satisfied and often will spread the word just because of the good experience. I have learnt this holds true for email support of BetterEdit clients too.

The personal interaction between editors, clients and admin create a ‘human’ environment that if handled well and meets everyone’s needs, will stimulate growth. For every client that walks away impressed with our service, often thanks to the dedicated personal support of our editors, we create a great referral source. Personally I like nothing more than receiving positive feedback from our clients and for those brief moments I don’t even worry about making money from it, the kudos is reward enough.

Of course it doesn’t always work out ‘all roses’. Sometimes mistakes occur, deadlines are missed or needs are not met. Occasional a client expects more than is possible. Sometimes email doesn’t get through in time because I have been sleeping in Australia when work has been coming through from Canada or vice versa.

Once I had a client confuse dates because they sent through a document early in the morning, about 1am their time and they mistakenly requested return for the document a day later since they didn’t realise they had worked passed midnight. Consequently we sent the job back 12 hours too late and they refused to pay. I felt angry because it was their mistake but after writing out a couple of ‘heated’ responses (and then deleting them before sending) I simply refunded the payment, wrote off the job and wished them luck with their studies. I wanted to make sure the damage as a result of this job was kept to a minimum and I’m sure an email flame war was not going to leave a good impression.

There is still reason enough to warrant some automation. I am mindful of the need for clients to have personal contact and maintain a simple email submission method, but perhaps the payment/invoice process could be more automated and steps could be taken to allow two different admin officers to maintain jobs so that we could offer 24 hour monitoring of admin email. The problem I face now is finding the skilled people to create something from the ideas in my head and keep costs to a minimum.

Yaro Starak

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Jetlag is a bitch. I didn’t feel it heading to Canada but coming back to Australia I’m feeling it. So far I haven’t managed to sleep past 5:30 AM yet. In honour of my tired state I offer up a mixed bag blog post today…

I was walking the downtown streets of Brisbane city today for the first time since getting back to Australia. I was heading down Adelaide St, passing the many bus shelters and I noticed the ads where moving. Yep they have installed sliding ads so each bus shelter rotates between two ads rather than just a static single ad. The movement tends to catch your eye too. Smart move advertising company but when did little Brisbane get so cosmo.

This one for all those Australian young entrepreneurs out there - Chris Khoo, one of the guys that manages YNOT in Brisbane (that’s Young Network Of enTrepreneurs) has moved the forums to their own domain at www.youngentrepreneur.com.au. Check it out for some good local Aussie business chat.

The Bnoopy Blog has been updated with an interesting article about The Long Tail Effect. This is a blog from Joe Kraus, the co-founder of Excite. It’s not updated too often but when it does it usually has some gems of content and obviously the reputation of the founder helps to popularise it too. His entry, The long tail of software. Millions of Markets of Dozens, explains an interesting trend. He breaks down the concept in detail so I won’t recount it here - you can check it out for yourself.

I have been chatting to a new friend that manages the site YabbyLand, which is a very ambitious Elance-like service. The thing I’m most impressed with at the site is the ‘flavour‘ and feel. It’s well themed with some neat character graphics that help you use the site. They have a good system in place but like a lot of new Internet business they face the problem of convincing people to use the service. They are quite dedicated to the project so I’m sure given enough time and persistence it will take off.

Continuing with the Skype theme I’ve been running - I’ve been really getting interested in all things Skype and the Skype Journal is a great blog source for all the latest news in the Skype world. It really hit home how much of an impact Skype is having when I found that both my parents are using Skype, but not just to keep up with me while I was in Canada. My parents, while being reasonably computer savvy (for their age, heh) aren’t quick to adopt new technology. The fact that they have learnt to use Skype and recruited their friends onto Skype shows that no matter what generation you belong to, Skype is accessible. Killer App anyone? This thing is going to be huge.

Yaro Starak
Young Entrepreneur

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