Owner: Ben Means Business URL:www.ben-means-business.com Join Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:49:37 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: The No Nonsense(Ok, maybe a little), All-Inclusive Guide for Entrepreneurs....and Christians too (occasionally)! Site statistics:Click here
Hold Off on the Business Plan- Read This First! 2008-04-21 06:31:59 It seems that more and more people are deciding to leave their 9-5, choosing rather to launch out into the deep, unforgiving waters of entrepreneurship. Many of them, however, return to the docks drenched in debt and deplete of all ambition. Unfortunately, this will be the fate of most small business owners but it does not have to be yours.So what will stop the grim reaper from dragging your business to the bankruptcy yard in the sky? Will it be your brilliant business plan? Your enormous budget? Maybe that adorable smile? Uhmmm...NO...No....and...Heck No! All of these things will contribute to your success as an entrepreneur(especially that smile) but there are some questions that you need to ask yourself about yourself that will ultimately determine your success as an entrepreneur.WHY DO Read more:Business
, First
10 Commandments of Surefire Home Business Success! 2008-04-18 14:17:11 Traditional business owners have more than enough obstacles to overcome in order to become successful. "History" is one of the major ones as 50% of new businesses fail within the first year and 95% fail within the first 5 years. Home business owners, for obvious reasons, have even more obstacles to overcome. Therefore, their success rate, though it cannot be properly tracked, is much lower. So what can you do as a home business owner to help your business beat the odds? Well, keep the commandments(the ones in the Bible and these):)
1) Be Professional
The reason why this is the first on the list is because this is always a problem with home businesses. People usually find it difficult to maintain the same level of professionalism at home as they do at a 9-5. But believe me, professionalis Read more:Business
, Commandments
, Surefire
, Success
, Business Success
Why Negativity is Great for your Business 2008-04-17 09:16:55 There are hundreds of things that must go right in order for you to succeed as an entrepreneur. Let's just be honest.......it's difficult. However, it becomes ten times more difficult when you begin to listen to your critics. Ok, so maybe you've went into a few hundred "surefire" business opportunities and none of them have materialized as of yet; Or maybe they have shown some promise but not to the extent that you originally thought. That shouldn't cause people to lose faith in you and to speak negativity over every new idea you bring to the table, should it? Well.......honestly.............YEAH, IT SHOULD!Those people usually only propel you to greatness. Without them you become tired and and are more apt to give up. Every successful entrepreneur has had to deal with it. I know that soun Read more:Business
, Great
The Defining Moment 2008-04-02 13:07:25 One of the most difficult things for most entrepreneurs to do is to stay motivated. There always seems to be an overwhelming amount of discernibly justifiable reasons to give up and to concede your ambitions for contentment. One minute your up at all hours of the night carefully constructing your business plans, or on a family outing and the whole time your thinking about what you will do when you get back to your laptop; One short month later you can't think of one good reason why you should put any more of your time into that dead businss venture.I've seen it time and time again...........................................................................................in myself. I had been working pretty hard on trying to obtain business for our Export Trading Company and things were actu Read more:Moment
It's Been a Long Time 2008-03-12 08:00:22 Well, it seems like forever since I've written on this blog but it feels good to be back. So much has happened since I last posted here. Some things good and some things bad. One good thing was that I was pleasantly surprised to see that this blog was still receiving hits even though I hadn't posted since June. My Google Page rank went up and everything. That is incredible! I really appreciate all those who continued to visit this URL while I was on my little hiatus.I am now in a position where I can begin to write again and I plan to publish at least 2 posts a week. My focus will still be to publish posts that will empower entrepreneurs. So check back later this week and there should be something to help push your business to the next level. God bless!
Choosing the Perfect Business Name 2007-06-13 11:18:22 The name is one of the most important aspects of your business. Once you've decided to become an owner, the name is probably the first thing that most people start to consider. While I do think that there are probably some other concerns that should be addressed first, considering the name of the business should absolutely be given some priority.Sometimes people will decide upon a name simply because they are tired of putting thought into it. I guarantee that this will come back to haunt you. Make sure that the name that you choose will be a sustaining representation of what your business is about. I have listed a few things that you should consider when naming your business:1) Is it Descriptive?This is probably the first thing that you want to ask yourself when you have tentatively decide Read more:Business
, Perfect
The Key to "True" Financial Freedom 2007-06-11 14:57:39 Every entrepreneur has dreams of developing financial freedom through their business. However, you have to ask yourself at what point are you independent and how much will this freedom cost you. Success cost something and most of time the price of success cannot be measured in dollars and cents. My experiences have caused me to measure potential business opportunities differently. I now consider how much time the venture will cost me in comparison to the amount of money I will make. Freedom
for me is more about time than it is about luxury. As Yaro Starak states, I would rather make "$5,000/month working 2 hours per day than make $10,000/month working 10 hours a day." It's all about what is important to you. If you view potential business opportunities this way it will help you to make Read more:Financial
The Seasons of Your Business 2007-06-03 22:47:37 We've all been to the point where we feel like our business (and/or our life) is just not where we want it to be. You feel like your doing everything you should be doing but things just don't seem to be going your way. Sometimes it may seem like the work that you are doing is actually doing more harm than good. Well, I can assure you that this is not the case. I can also assure you that you are not alone in feeling this way. Everybody who has ever become wealthy has faced a similar time during the course of their business. The key to overcoming this situation is to keep everything in perspective. Let me explain...I was talking to my father yesterday and something he said (sorry, can't remember exactly) caused me to remember a sermon he once preached at my church. As I started to think abou Read more:Business
Turning Opportunity into Prosperity 2007-05-31 11:19:17 With all that I have been through in the last week or so I have a lot of things stored up that I need to say. My experiences have caused me to re-evaluate my life and my businesses. I have realized that a lot of times my focus was not in the right place, and therefore, my business did not flourish the way that I expected it to.Are You Guilty of This?...I Am!We all sometimes become self-absorbed and think that we have it all together. We will come up with the perfect business plan, conceptualize the ultimate marketing strategy, and attempt to carry out the plan according to our own brilliance. Well, I have recently realized that every ability and opportunity that we have is simply another opportunity to glorify God. We were given these opportunities and/or abilities for that purpose.So they Read more:Opportunity
My Wild Wild Weekend 2007-05-27 18:15:48 Yesterday, I decided to take a little trip to the hospital to find out why I had been having frequent chest pains and shortness of breath. I figured I would come in, get some tests run and be out of here with a prescription before nightfall. Well, my little visit didn't quite go the way I planned. Which is why I am sitting here writing this post from a hospital bed. After getting the test results, doctors seem to believe that I have some heart complications(including an enlarged heart). They have yet to determine the cause of them but felt the need to admit me to the hospital for more testing.IN TOTAL SHOCKTransitioning my mind from what I thought would be a simple visit to the possibility of something life changing has been difficult. It has just opened my eyes to how much I actually take Read more:Weekend
The 411 on Sole Proprietorships 2007-05-23 15:20:46 I have been avoiding this series of posts since I started this blog because I didn't think that they would be much fun to write. However, I feel the time has now come to start to discuss business models. Therefore, I will devote my next few posts to discussing Sole Proprietorships, Partnerships, DBA's, LLC's, Corporations, and S-Corporations. These will each be individual posts and should shed some light onto which model would work best for you.The first business model that I will cover is called a Sole Proprietorship. Sole Proprietorships are the most common form of business. The two main reasons for this are because they are the easiest to start and they require the least amount of start-up money. Sole Proprietorships are simply businesses that are owned and operated by one person. So an
Emotions-The Leading Cause of Death 2007-05-21 14:25:22 As human beings, all of our behaviors are influenced by emotion. When it comes to entrepreneurship, this can be both a gift and a curse. I am not one of those Fortune 500 zombies who believes that emotion has no place in business but I do think that uncontrolled emotion is the quickest path to business failure. There are times when the use of emotion is beneficial but the key is learning when it is appropriate to allow those emotions to influence your decisions.Emotions cause people to make impulse commitments during the heat of the moment. For instance, have you ever been shopping for a car and come across one that you really did not like much only to find yourself considering the purchase? Emotions are the main cause of this consideration. You are either tired of looking, not sure you'll Read more:Leading
, Cause
Is Faith Crippling You? 2007-05-18 10:56:46 We, as Christians, tend to lean too much on faith. Yes, faith will take you a long way...BUT...only when it is being applied through action. We cannot expect to be profitable simply because we are favored by God. I believe that God will elevate our businesses only when we have taken actions that justify elevation.It bothers me to see Christians with no drive to be successful. I am not one who gets caught up in the whole "prosperity gospel" movement, but there are certain aspects of their message that have merit. The belief that Christians have to be poor is unfounded. So why is it that we tend to settle so much?Most Christians say that they don't want to seek things because they are just "waiting on God" to give 'em to them. I can assure you that you are not waiting on God for anything; Go Read more:Faith
Business Lessons from Parable of Talents 2007-05-16 06:02:49 I was scrolling through the Bible today looking for something to read when I came across a familiar scripture and realized that there are several things we can learn about business from it. As I read over it, I was amazed at how the principles of this passage apply to entrepreneurship, investing, etc... The story is one that most people will be familiar with. It is the story of the servants who were given talents by their master. Just in case you don't know the story I'll paraphrase it here before I begin breaking down the metaphorical content."A man was going on a journey and decided to entrust some of his property to his servants. Each was given talents(money) according to his ability. To one servant he gave 5 talents, to another he gave 2, and to the last he gave 1. The servant who had Read more:Business
, Lessons
, Parable
, Talents
Blogging Pitfalls to Avoid 2007-05-14 22:33:16 I read a pretty interesting post today over on Blogging
Tips.com. It was actually a guest post from Mani Karthik of Daily Dose of Internet. The title of the article was the Top 5 Mistakes I Did When I started Blogging. Despite the obvious grammatical inaccuracies in the title, this was actually a good article. There was nothing particularly deep about the article but it was very re-assuring to someone like me who is new to blogging. The author kind of re-iterates many of the things that you already know but does touch on a couple of things that we tend to overlook. In my opinion the most useful point of this article was when the author wrote about selecting a blog template that i viewable in all readers and who's HTML scripts are easy to navigate by search engine crawlers. The latter of th Read more:Avoid
An Addition to This Blog 2007-05-14 00:03:07 Ok....In light of some recent events in my life, I have realized that I have been failing to include one of the most important parts of me in this blog. It is the fuel for everything I do and is the reason that have been able to achieve anything at all. Yup, you guessed it...It is my belief in God!What you can expectYou can expect me to incorporate Christianity into my posts and to post my understanding of a scripture that I read recently. I also plan to post about some of the current events that relate to religion. Especially if those events apply to entrepreneurship in any way. The main focus of this blog will still be entrepreneurship, but I will attempt to utilize scripture, as well as my personal experiences to both motivate people and to provide a little spiritual nourishment if poss Read more:Addition
Top 5 Strategies to Google Adwords Glory! 2007-05-10 22:55:55 Advertising with GoogleAdwords
can be one of the more rewarding methods of advertisement for any campaign. However, using Adwords takes some knowledge and can become very expensive if the correct techniques are not applied. So I've created this 5-tip manual as the completion to the few Adwords tips I have been giving out in the past. This manual should help the novice or more experienced Pay Per Click marketer take their Adwords campaigns to the next level.My initial experience with Google Adwords
was not a very good one. I made every mistake possible with my campaign. I simply found out which keywords were most popular and I tried to bid whatever dollar amount necessary to get me into the top spots in search results. Well, needless to say, that method costed me a lot of money and I never Read more:Strategies
Group Writing Project 2007-05-09 09:14:49 I am busy writing a pretty meaty post that I'll publish tomorrow so I don't have much to publish today. However, I do have a nice piece of information for you guys. It's an excellent opportunity to get a build more traffic for your website or blog.The opportunity is a blogging contest hosted by Darren Rowse at Problogger. The winner gets a prize of $1001. All you have to do is write a post about "Top 5" whatever. It can be about the "Top 5" anything(ex:If your site is about radios, you can write a post about the "top 5 brands").Everybody who submits a post will get a link on his page so its worth it even if you don't win. Visit Problogger to see contest details. Read more:Group
, Project
Top Blogger Salaries 2007-05-08 12:14:21 Paula Mooney has created a list of the salaries of top bloggers. This article is very well put together and seems to be pretty factual. There were a few surprises in this list and there are several things that we can learn from it. The first thing that I noticed was the deviation between the top earner and the average salary of the list. It let me know that there are a few bloggers who are doing extremely well but the rest of the pack are all well below those bloggers.The amount of money made by the average blogger on this list did not wow me at all. It actually let me know that there is still tremendous room for growth in this industry. It also reminded me that making money from blogging is very difficult and that money can't be the only reason that I do it. This is no problem for me beca Read more:Blogger
, Salaries
, Top Blogger
Is College Necessary for Entrepreneurs? 2007-05-07 12:25:21 I am posing this question because I continue to meet self-made people who claim to have had no formal education. Actually, most of the successful entrepreneurs that I know did not possess a college degree when they started their respective businesses. Although, some of them have gone back and attained degrees after their business was established, the fact remains that they did not need them in order to get their business moving.Now I, for one, grew a lot as a person during my undergraduate course work(Maybe that was worth $60,000....probably not). However, I cannot say that I learned a lot about my field that I could not have learned through self-induced reading. Therefore, I am under the impression that I would have been better served by actually doing an independent study of entrepreneur Read more:College
, Necessary
, Entrepreneurs
Increase Your Google Page Rank 2007-05-06 15:13:53 As most of you know, Google
's Page Rank has become extremely important for websites. It basically ranks you on how important/popular your blog is. Advertisers use it to determine whether how much an advertisement on your website is worth. So, I've found a pretty cool way to increase your page rank.Most blogging platforms automatically have "no follow" tags in comments section as a default so that search bots do not use the links from commenters to increase page rank. This helps to discourage people from spamming your blog with comments. Well, there is a movement going on right now where select bloggers have removed the no follow tags from their comments section so that other bloggers get some PR juice when commenting on their blog.Learn about how this can increase page rank at Paula Neal M
Keepin' It Real- A Lesson for Leaders 2007-05-05 12:51:30 Whether you are a business owner, manager, trainer,etc...there is one thing that will immediately help you to gain the respect and adoration of your employees. Believe it or not, IT IS NOT YOUR TITLE. You have to be very careful not to portray yourself as being a "know-it all."People will always identify with somebody who is real, genuine, and touchable. This attribute is of the utmost importance as a manager. You have to remember that your title alone brings tension to the relationship between you and your subordinates. You do not want to add any extra fuel to that fire.You have to also be sure to present yourself as someone who knows the job well but does not know everything. It is always better to voice your understanding of something and offer an opportunity for insight than to be publ Read more:Keepin
, Leaders
Entrepreneurs Beware 2007-05-05 11:21:30 Is it just me or is this world becoming increasingly obsessed with lawsuits? It is getting to the point that "tort exploitation" can almost be categorized as a business industry. It always interests me to see the things that people sue for these days. Even more interesting, is the fact that our judicial system often justifies these ridiculous cases by awarding money to every customer with a complaint. What happened to the days when you would just not visit a particular store anymore if you didn't like the product or service? Those days are obviously long gone.I'm tired of shewing the neighborhood kids away from the large field on our church grounds because of fear that they could sue the church if injured. It's ridiculous! This should be simple: If you injure yourself while playing on some Read more:Entrepreneurs
, Beware
John Chow Review Exchange 2007-05-03 18:24:30 Almost everybody should know about this by now but John Chow is offering anyone a free backlink in exchange for a review of his site. His blog that helps people to make money online. For those that are not aware, John Chow dot com is one of the most popular blogs out there. If you review of his blog, he’ll link to it in his next batch o backlinks. A link from a site of that caliber should definitely help to increase your page rank. Even though tons of people have already taken advantage of his offer, he is still running this deal. So if you feel that his site is relevant to yours, you may want to take advantage of his offer. Read more:Exchange
Another Great Backlink Offer 2007-04-29 16:36:04 I don't want to overwhelm you guys with backlink offers but I had to introduce you to this one. I suggest everybody with a website take advantage of this. Darin.cc has a blog that reports information on Search Engine Marketing. It is a very informative site. I especially like the two articles on Pay Per Click advertising( Part1 Part2). Those are excellent articles to supplement the two articles that I wrote on the same subject (My PPC-Part1 Part2).Darin is offering 2 links to your blog if you review his blog and he is throwing in a FREE Platinum IAWMD Membership($75 value)! He will also give you a link on BigTagCloud.Com which is growing pretty quickly. That is pretty good compensation for a short review. So be sure to check it out. The IAWMD membership alone should be well worth it. Read more:Great
, Backlink
, Offer
The Best & Worst Entrepreneurship Story Ever Told! 2008-04-22 11:45:55 The Real Detroit ScandalOut of respect for my colleague, his identity shall remain anonymous(for now). The wounds of this experience may still be fresh and I wouldn't want to add insult to injury. So for the sake of this post he will be referred to as "Jackson"(don't know... just go with it).Amid all the recent talk of Mayor Kilpatrick's indiscretions, I think it's time to draw attention to something that happened in the Motorcity that is a lot more newsworthy(and no, it's not about crime). The "real" scandal in Detroit has nothing to do with adultery, text messages, or gangsters in uniform. The main character of this story is not a high ranking official or a sashaying call girl(for that type of "news" please click here).This is a story about entrepreneurship, scandal, rags to riches (then Read more:Entrepreneurship
Links for 2008-04-22 [Digg] 2008-04-23 00:00:00
The Best /Worst Entrepreneurship Story Ever!
The Real Detroit Scandal! This is a story about entrepreneurship, scandal, rags to riches (then back to rags), and "the man". Absolutely TRUE story...Read now or it could happen to you!
Read more:Digg
Social Networking vs. Business Networking-The Art of the Smooz! 2008-04-25 15:45:28 Social Networking is one of the most important things you can do for your business. Notice that I used the term "Social Networking" instead of "Business
Networking". Yes, I know that the two are supposed to be different, but as usual I tend to disagree. I think that Social and Business Networking cannot actually be separated. When people get the feeling that you are only associating with them because of what they can do for you, it causes them to remain distant(which limits the help you can actually get from them)....And as you probably know, It is always easier to get things done with people who know you(or at least think they do).This is why for networking purposes, it is more important that people like you as a person than it is that they know about your business. Now I am not saying th Read more:Social
Business Class 101: The Fall of EOS Ariline 2008-04-28 11:02:26 As of today, EOS Airlines is officially closing it's doors and has filed for bankruptcy. EOS was one of four "business-class only" airlines that opened in the last two years. Maxjet, one of the others, closed in December. As always, there are things we can learn from these business failures. So let's take a look. Oh, and just for fun, we'll call today's lesson "Business
Class 101" (pun intended).What caused the Bankruptcy?Well, right off the bat I see some potential problems. The first being that this airline decided to create a very small niche in an already shaky industry. The airline industry was hit hard by the events of 9/11. Gas prices have also been on a steady rise since that time. So why would you want to own an airline, that would charter cross-country flights carrying only 48 pe
Business Failure Rates-The Shocking Truth 2008-04-29 07:16:25 Business Failure Rate statistics are some of the most widely misqouted statistics in the world. I've heard everything from 90% of startups fail in their first year to 20% fail in their first year. I think it's safe to say that the actual business failure rate is probably somewhere in between those numbers. I can understand why this is such a hard statistic to keep though. There is no surefire way to track every sole proprietorship, home based business, ebay entrepreneur, etc...that decides to start collecting money for their services. This is why I think that somebody needs to take the liberty of breaking these statistics down and displaying failure rates for each type of business entity.For instance, a corporation will probably not fail at the same rate as a sole proprietorship simply bec Read more:Business
, Rates
, Truth
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