Startups face lots of problems. In some situations, you can blame the current economic slowdown and in some cases things are always the same. Let’s take a look at some of them:

Evaluating the competency of the core Idea: Every idea looks good until you are really into it. Like Godin says, “What works, works“. But, this does not mean that you should go through the whole process of trial and error. Neither has it meant that, you should spend all your life in evaluating different aspects of the project. If you feel that you have enough reasons to start up, go ahead and do that.

Finding the right funding agency: It is comparatively easy to satisfy yourself about the impending success of your project. But it is often very difficult to convince a venture capitalist. And more importantly it is harder to find an angel investor who would just let you do your job. Are you ready to be kicked out from one door after another?

Finding the right people: In most of the cases the entrepreneur has some ideas about what he or she is going to do. But if you really want to grow and develop the best product for your target market, you need good people to work with. And trust me, it is very tough to find the right kind of people and it is tougher to keep them on board.

Setting up is not that easy: Nothing much to say about it. Sometimes opening savings accounts may be a serious and time consuming job. The same rule applies to finding the right place and environment within the budget to start the company.

But still, if you are in search of a goldmine, these are almost no obstacles.

Ask any SEO expert and he or she will say that to get good business you need to rank high and to rank high you need good content and inbound links. There is no doubt about it. These are the basic elements for good ranking.

But what do you want? Great ranking or good business! I don’t think that I will need to explain to you why good ranking does not always mean good business.

In the process of ranking high with good content and great links, we often ignore the design aspect of a website. I am not a designer but I believe that a good design is very important to get you good business.

What can a good design do for you?

1. A good design keeps the visitors in the page: It is not good enough to have great content unless they can be properly and easily navigated. A good design highlights every important part of the content making it easy for the visitors to get whatever they were looking for. If you do not care about design, try doing business with all your great content jumbled up in a single paragraph.

2. A good design keeps the visitors in a page as long as it is necessary: You necessarily do not want a visitor to stay in a single page for forever (unless you have a gaming or p0rn site). You must make the visitor make a move to complete the business. A good design can guide the visitor to make a positive decision.

3. The design is what attracts first: whenever you land on a website, what is the first thing you notice? Believe it or not – it is the design that carries you to the headline and other part of the content. Do you really think a multicolored website with blinking buttons all over it will win you!

To be Continued:

We have already hard about life streaming. A lot of you may also have experienced life streaming in different platforms.

What about having a brand streaming platform – a platform that will collect and showcase latest information on a brand (your brand) in a single page!

What does Google do?

Think about a situation where you search for a brand name in Google. It will show you the most authoritative pages on that brand from different parts of the web. Unless you are using Google Experimental Search (Alternate views for search results), there is hardly any chance of seeing the latest write-ups on that brand. And I think that Google is more interested in providing you the best result rather than the latest page. I know you are thinking about Google Blog search or news search. But they represent limited resources. The same is true about Technorati.

What does twitter search do?

It will search for the brand name in real time and show you the results. You get to know what people are thinking about the brand in 140 words. But, in case of twitter too, the resources are limited. It can never go beyond Twitter and the problem is that the brand has a much larger playground.

What about a user supported platform!

For example, think about a platform where the end users (includes you and the brand owner) will be responsible to submit an URI of a recently published story. But it is a tedious job. It is much easier to streamline your online activities rather than keeping a brand image in a single page.

Any suggestion on what can be done!!!

What is the best way to know what your target market wants?

I know, a lot of people must be thinking about analytics and other similar services that tells you what the visitors had been doing in your website or blog. And after that, you may try to guess what they really want to hear from you. Isn’t that the answer?

But those figures and graphs just points to some assumptions. You actually grow as you wish. If you ask me, I would say that the best way to know what your visitors really want is to ask them straight. Let them tell you what they want to read in your blog. Simple – isn’t it! Simply get an online survey software, run it and you are done to get the most appropriate response from the visitors of your blog or website.

But, there is a catch. Ask any good marketers like Seth Godin or inventor like Steve Jobs and they will tell you that people do not really know what they are looking for or what they actually need. And if you really want to be successful with the campaign, you must not ask them direct questions. The success lies in the art of questioning. For example, if you ask them what they want to read in the blog, they may come up with some vague answers. On the contrary, if you ask them if they like reading a specific topic in your blog, they might come up with a better idea or answer.

I am not asking you to be tricky or straight in your surveys. All I am asking is to ask the right question to your audience.

Want to prove me wrong?

Ok, just answer a simple question: What do you want to read at NBB?

(If you are not answering, I may be right.)

Ok, we have talked a lot about different online business models so long. We have talked about how to develop an online business, promote them and earn more money. Today, let us take a look at the online to offline scenario.

Web has totally changed the way we do business or even think about business these days. A lot of us only wish if they could somehow remove or replace the existing socio-political barrier. It is much easier for anyone and everyone to reach any business opportunities in just a few clicks (let us keep China and other similar countries apart).

As business grows, people often come across situations where they wish they could open a bank account in US or other EU areas for ease in business. And, if they only could open an almost anonymous account like they can normally do in PayPal (it does not take long to create a fake email address and associate it with your credit card to open a PayPal account), things would have been smoother.

I never knew about any such solutions until I came across this company that helps you in setting up offshore bank accounts. They also help you in structuring and management of asset protection trusts, offshore banking, merchant accounts, offshore incorporation, company formation and other financial services.

It is not easy to make any of these happen – especially for small business owners without enough international connections. But now, fewer connections should not be any problem for offshore asset management.

So, you have a great idea and think that it is right time to start a website or blog!

Wow nothing can be better than that. Unless, it requires huge investment, it is always a good time to start. You never know, somebody else may also be evaluating a similar project. And, in my short experience, I have met many people who simply watched their ideas growing in some other place.

Whenever someone starts thinking about starting an online venture, consciously or unconsciously, the first thing that comes to their mind is selecting a good domain name. Undoubtedly, this is a very crucial step. The name will stay with you as long as the business exists. And when someone is ready with a domain name, they go out to find cheap hosting plans. Especially, if it is the first online venture, people make such mistakes.

Does it matter to have a great site if it remains down for most of the time? Will it do any good to you? Do they have server in the country where you are targeting your website! And more importantly, is your website hosted in that specific country? Is this company secured to host your business? Are you sure that they are not hosting your website in bad neighborhood!

How do you find this out?

Read the offer carefully: For example, here is a Web Hosting that hosts websites for Canada. It is a BBB Certified company and their identity is assured by COMODO.

Read User Reviews about the website: This is the best solution. Just do a Google search with the company name to read reviews about the company in different forums. This should give you some real idea about the company.

Do they have what you need: for example, check out if they have PHP 5.0 if you need it or updated cPanel support etc.

And always remember that there is nothing like cheap hosting. If you want to go cheap, you may need to compromise with quality and availability.

Which platforms do you use to promote your blog?

There may be Twitter, social bookmarking sites like Stumble Upon or Delicious, other blogs and other social networks in your list.

These are all external platforms that you may use to promote your blog – or I should better say, you use these external platforms to communicate with the target market.

Now what about your blog? Which features of your blog do you use to communicate with the target market / visitors / readers!

Traditional blogs mainly use post content and comments to communicate with the target market. And sometimes they actively promote blog feed to hold the existing reader base.

However if you follow the recent trend in professional blogosphere, people are employing alternative platforms to keep in touch with the target market. For example, they are not quite satisfied by offering content as a post. They move a few steps ahead and offer more content as newsletters. Professional bloggers like Darren Rowse is also following the trend in his blog. And another big name Jason Calacanis tried to shift his communication channel from blog to a personal mailing list.

Email marketing today is not just about selling products or informing the existing users about new arrivals. It is more like a viral communication medium and you can easily put it inside the “permission marketing” bracket. More importantly email marketing does not require huge technical knowledge or investment. It is as easy as publishing a blog post.

Take a look at Active Campaign’s email marketing software and their features. It will not take more than 2 minutes for you to understand why you should or should not invest in email marketing.

What about starting your own web hosting company almost at the rate of hosting your own website or blog!

Does it sound impossible? Actually it is not. Starting a web hosting company does not require you to spend money to buy your server, set up and development, maintenance or ongoing technical support etc. You can actually start a web hosting company @ ?99 per year (?8.25 per month). Isn?t it the amount you normally spend to run a professional website or blog!

To start your own web hosting company, all you need to do is to register a reseller account with another web hosting company. That is it. With a reseller account you get the right to resell the hosting space to other people. And with a reseller account you can host unlimited domains, setup your own hosting plans for the clients, assign individual control panels to your customers, website builder for your customers and many more things.

Don?t believe me? Take a look at Picka Web. They offer a reseller hosting account for the same price in UK. For ?8.25 per month, you actually get 8 GB space and 30 GB Bandwidth. Good deal!

We often come across situations, where we can easily take the opportunity to sell a hosting plan ? even if you never had a plan to get into online hosting business. Just calculate how many people have already consulted you about starting a website or blog. You could easily start an online web hosting business with them.

Worried about technical support? They provide 24×7 technical support in case you or your customers need one.

What happens in the offline marketing environment? A single advertisement or advertorial is served to everyone. And more importantly, the ?everyone? includes both converted and prospective clients. However, in the online marketing environment, we have passed that period long ago. It is now about one to one communication. You have all the time in the world to identify micro groups among your target market and serve them according to their needs. Today, flexibility is the key to success.

Now, I am not going to discuss different ways of one to one interaction in this post. We have something more critical to deal with. I will write another post on marketing communication in the online environment later.

It is very easy to say that, it is the age of one to one communication. However, just imagine a situation where you may everyday need to communicate with thousand of visitors. Is this at all possible (financially and physically) for a small business if you need to communicate to each and everyone separately?
No. I don?t think it is possible in the linear terms. But you can really do that and in fact you are always doing that online.

What about the content or even the design of your website? What if you change the way you perceive a webpage! Let me make it a bit clearer. What is the role of the FAQ page in your website? The FAQ page solves some of the common questions asked by the target market. Now, what if you turn every page of your website into a problem solver!

As, it is the time for one to one communication, the target market is actually standing beside you. He or she can see you and you just cannot hide yourself behind the big curtain called ?brand?. You must come out and face the wall. And here comes the profile page of your blog or the about us page of your website.

In my last post, I was discussing the importance of selecting the right set of keywords. Today, I will push the topic further.

What is the normal SEO process followed by most of the companies (especially those who outsource the SEO tasks to other companies)?

They identify a set of keywords and optimize content accordingly. Once the content is ready, they start link building for the campaign. After a few months, they change the keyword list and continue the same process.

What is the problem with this process?

Whenever you change the keyword list and shift your link focus, there are all the reasons for your ranking to drop very soon. The process somewhat is exclusionary whereas, it should focus on including more keywords to the existing list. Yes, you sometimes also need to exclude some keywords. But, it should solely depend on the performance of the keyword – the conversion ROI.

As the site starts growing mass and search engines start sending you traffic for different keywords, you stand a better chance to identify the best keywords. Trust me, the analytics report can tell you much more than WordTracker or Google.

All you need to do is to identify the right keywords that can offer you better conversion rate and niche visitors. Focus on these keywords and identify specific page for each set of keywords. (Do not target all your keywords on the home page unless you have a one page website.) Look for long tail keywords that are performing well or got chances to perform well under favorable conditions. And this is where you can actually outgrow your competitors as far as return on investment is concerned.

What if your site is not old enough to offer you enough data on long tail keywords? You may think about using the Search-based Keyword Tool from Google. Avinash Kaushik has written a great post on it.

Analytics report has the key to make a campaign successful.