The other side of working from home

"You are so lucky," grumbled an acquaintance at a party. "No commute, no boss, no office politics. I would love to lounge around in pyjamas and work when I want and how I want." "It is not that easy," I protested but he was carried away by his own misery and refused to believe me. I work from home. The key word is WORK but what seems to stand out is home. It seems enviable to many, especially the men who are denizens of the corporate world. Working from home conjures up images of leisure, freedom and flexibility. You don't have to get up to an alarm and rush around getting ready, gobble up a hurried breakfast and brace yourself for the traffic. Instead, you can take your morning breath to the computer which will not complain about your hygiene or dress sense. Shower in the afternoon, if you feel like a shower at all. And when you need a break, just shout out to the spouse/servant who brings a hot cup of tea made just the way you like, along with some fresh pakodas. What's not to like? When I decided to quit a full time job and become a consultant and a writer, I believed that working from home would be a blessing- the ideal solution that would let me work at my time, be with my daughter and keep a gentle eye on the goings on in the household. I saw myself deftly juggling a rolling pin and rolodex, seamlessly switching from the key board to the blackboard. Ours is a small household of 4 including my full time help who is the cook and housekeeper. I could easily manage. I don't cook or clean. I do have some flexibility and freedom. Yet working from home requires truckloads of discipline, oodles of self motivation and nerves of steel. I can recall a day last week when I thought I would have a productive day at work. A typical day when I am not in a workshop or client site begins at 6.30 in the morning when I get up to send my daughter off to school. The husband and I have a brief chat on the plan for the day and he leaves for office. I do my yoga and/or walk, breakfast, shower and move to the study which doubles up as my place of work. I have plans for this day. I need to complete a proposal to a client, attend a conference call , send a couple of emails and write at least 500 words for an article. So far, so good. At 10.30 a.m,I switch on my laptop and start with the proposal." Didi, Colin nahin hai." my cleaning maid pokes her head in. I make a note in my list of Things to Do. I remember that she had not dusted the sideboard. I notice a stray cobweb. Instructions are given.Back to proposal. The intercom rings. I rush to the phone and pick it up only to have it disconnected. Where is the maid and why is she not picking up the phone. Just as I settle down again, it rings again. I ignore it.My housekeeper announces that someone is coming with a parcel. Turns out to be a courier with my husband's credit card. I am asked to produce identification to receive the credit card. I manage to get type up something on the design of a workshop that I am proposing. My mobile pings. It is already the time for my call."Didi, gas khatam hua," says the help. 5 minutes to the call. I tell her to change the cylinder. It is stuck she says. We push and pull and fix the thing togetherI get on the conference call. In the middle of the call, the maid enters and gesticulates wildly. She holds her nose and makes some gagging sounds. Something is not right. I can't focus on the call. Finally, I am done.I rush out to discover that there is a leakage of some sort from the gas cylinder. The kitchen smells of LPG. There is a defect in the new cylinder. She is in the middle of cooking and we are out of fuel. I call some neighbours and someone kindly offers me her spare cylinder. I call the Gas agency but no one picks up. I make a note in my Things to do.The cleaning maid comes in to tell me that she is leaving. She wants a day off. No, I almost shout. You take too many holidays. It is my son's school meeting she says. They have called the parents. Her husband is quite useless in this matter. I negotiate for a late arrival. She will try, she says , making no promises. I relent, one working mom to another. Back to proposal. Is it already lunch time?I get into my wannabe Multitasking avatar. I am halfway through lunch and The Lowland. The Lindt chocolate in my fridge beckons. I ignore it until it becomes an insistent shrill summon. The book is interesting. I continue with a few chapters after lunch. Surely, I deserve a break of half an hour. I promise to myself that I will finish my proposal today. I still have time.2.30 p.m. I go to the bus stop to pick up my daughter. We discuss what happened in school. We have Bio test tomorrow she says. And there is some Hindi project. Something needs to be researched and written about Chanakya. I think school is a great institution but I have my reservations about homework. Especially the kind that makes the parent work at home.Start reading Bio. I will finish my work and we will revise. I check my mails and see that there are two new ones that need to be answered.My daughter comes in to negotiate. I will study Bio and you can research my project, she starts. No way. I have too much work to do. We discuss what she can write about Chanakya. One thing at a time, I insist. Finish Bio and then we will do Hindi. I need to finish the proposal. I notice an email reminder for my credit card payment .I add it to my Things to do.I get an unexpected call from a client. She wants to discuss the dates for a workshop that had been planned for the month. They may need to change it. As we discuss options, my daughter mouths something to me. I shoo her away and try to shut the door. She glares at me and marches off. The maid shouts from the kitchen- something about jeera or Kheera . I ignore her. Finally I finish my call and step out- Can't I even talk for a few minutes in peace, I say but no one cares to respond.My daughter looks at me accusingly. You forgot. I told you the light in my room wasn't working. Now I can't study. Damn. Didn't I put it in my Things to Do. I call the electrician.I reconfirm dinner menu and give the maid money to buy cucumber for the salad from the shop in our condominium complex. I check on the state of bread and eggs and find we need to replenish that too. Why does she tell me these things at the last moment?Is it evening already? I have to make the last page of the proposal. I have to check the research on Chanakya. Why do 12 year olds need to write about Chanakya in Hindi? Why do they also need a printout of a picture which can be seen anytime on Google Images? I open up the Google Hindi website on Chanakya and toggle between that and my proposal. In the meantime, I am also giving my daughter some questions to answer in Bio. My husband calls and asks if I have paid the electricity bill due three days back. Pay it yourself, I want to shout. I make a mental note to make an actual note in my Things to Do.Is it dinner time already? My husband is home. Horrible day, Terrible traffic he says. You are so lucky you don't have to go out to work everyday! I glare at him. We do dinner. I am almost done with the proposal. I tuck my daughter into bed. It is only 10.15 p.m and I feel terribly sleepy. I drag myself back to the computer and send off the proposal. I still have the article to write but my brain has gone into deep freeze. I can't get a word out. I read a few pending emails.I shut down the machine and decide to go to bed. My husband is checking Facebook. Other people seem to have interesting things to do and say. What did you do today? He asks. I rack my brain. I finally sent off that proposal to ABC, I say. That's it? That's all you did the whole day, his look says but he wisely restricts it to a 'Uh uh.'Another day of work has gone by. My Things to Do list has grown exponentially. I shouldn't complain. I know I have to be more disciplined, more assertive, more focused, more tenacious. Some day, I will get there. Someday I will also get myself a little office-away from home.

 http://ibnlive.in.com/blogs/nirupamasubramanian/3585/64908/the-other-side-of-working-from-home.html

Science reveals what really increases Twitter followers

The world of science has some new advice for people who want to increase their Twitter following, and it may sound something your mother used to say: If you don’t have anything nice to tweet, don’t tweet at all.
“Expressing negative sentiments in tweets is the second most harmful factor to growing a Twitter audience,” say researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology. They speculate about why: “This might be because Twitter is a medium dominated by very weak social ties, and negative sentiment from strangers may be unpleasant or uncomfortable for a potential new follower to see.”

C.J. Hutto, Eric Gilbert and Sarita Yardi tracked data from over 500 active Twitter users as they tweeted more than 500,000 times in the course of 15 months. The Twitter users were randomly selected from the public timeline over a two-week period, and then screened for requirements like English language, an active account that was at least 30 days old, with at least 15 friends and 5 followers. Hutto elaborated by email:

Although we did nothing to specifically exclude institutional/brand accounts, a quick investigation of a subset of the ~500 users that passed all filters every 3 months indicates these are mostly “everyday” typical non-celebrity users… Very few (if any) are brand or institutional accounts.

About every three months the researchers recorded each user’s follower growth, and analyzed what it was about their tweets and behavior that seemed to lead to growth.
They say this is pretty groundbreaking work — “the first longitudinal study of audience growth on Twitter to combine such a diverse set of theory inspired variables” — and it seems so.
Another bit of advice based on the findings: Stop tweeting so much about yourself.
“Informational content attracts followers with an effect that is roughly thirty times higher than the effect of [personal] ‘meformer’ content, which deters growth,” the researchers wrote. “We think this is due to the prevalence of weak ties on Twitter.”
In other words, your Twitter followers don’t know you that well and thus don’t care about what you’re eating. Feed them information instead. Among the accounts studied, users talked about themselves in 41 percent of their tweets while informational content accounted for only 24 percent.
Overall, the study tracks and compares three types of factors — the content of your tweets, the dynamics of your social behavior and the structure of your follower network. Or more simply: What you tweet, how you interact and who you know.
This chart illustrates the statistically significant factors with the biggest impact on follower growth (translated into lay terms in the list below):

1. Number of connections in-common with potential new followers (good)
2. High frequency of others retweeting your tweets (good)
3. High frequency of informational tweets (good)
4. Too many “broadcast” tweets not directed at anyone in particular (bad)
5. Too much negative sentiment in your tweets (bad)
6. A detailed profile description or “bio” (good)
7. Profile has a URL listed (good)
8. “Burstiness” of your tweets, or the peak rate of tweets-per-hour (more is good; Twitter agrees)
9. High ratio of followers to following (good)
10. Lots of tweets with positive sentiment (good)
11. Cramming too many useless hashtags into your tweets (bad)
12. Use of long, fancy words (good)
13. Your tendency to follow-back those who follow you (good)
14. Profile lists your location (good)

As always with research like this, consider it a helpful framework but not a step-by-step rulebook. Twitter users in general seem to want you to be positive, informative and interactive — all good advice — just remember you also need to be yourself.

http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/205411/science-reveals-what-really-increases-twitter-followers/

If you are wondering why you are struggling to succeed with your online business, this article by David DiSalvo gives some insight into how your brain might be working against you ...

"Luke: I can’t believe it.

Yoda: That is why you fail."

My research into the traits of influencers and achievers continues, and as I turn more pieces of this puzzle around to fit the whole, more ideas appear to me as a fit for this space.  In this edition, reflections on falling short — more precisely, why we fail despite ourselves.

1. Like Yoda said, you just don’t believe it. 

The crucial part of Yoda’s dialogue with Luke is “believe.”  The human brain is a powerful problem-solving and prediction making machine, and it operates via a multitude of feedback loops. What matters most in the feedback loop dynamic is input — what goes into the loop that begins the analysis-evaluation-action process, which ultimately results in an outcome. Here’s the kicker: if your input shuttle for achieving a goal lacks the critical, emotionally relevant component of belief, then the feedback loop is drained of octane from the start.  Another way to say that is — why would you expect a convincingly successful outcome when you haven’t convinced yourself that it’s possible?

2.  Other people have convinced you of your “station.”

I’ve always thought the “know your station in life” idea to be among the most pernicious we humans have ever come up with.  The only version of it I like is Tennessee Williams’:   “A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.”  Love that Tennessee Williams.  What’s more pernicious than the idea itself is that it’s often heaved upon us by other people, and they convince us that we are what we are and we’d better just live with it because, well, that’s what we’ll always be.  Really? Says who? Show me the chapter on predetermined stations in the cosmic rule book, please. This also gets back to the feedback loop dynamic, because if this external “station” scripting is part of your input, you can expect sub-par outcomes all the time.

3. You don’t want to be a distrupter.

The word “disrupter” has taken on such a heavy, mixed bag of meanings in the last few years.  Reading both popular psychology and business books, I’m not sure if it’s a good or bad thing to be.   One thing seems certain — the notion of disrupting anything–of being the water that breaks the rock–is scary to most of us.  Reason being, disruption is perceived as a threat to our threat-sensitive brains. Disruption means that consistency, stability and certainty might get jettisoned for a time, and that puts our hard-wired internal defense system on high alert. Sometimes, though, you have to override the alarms and move ahead anyway.  If you never do, you’ll never know what could happen.

4. You think, “what if I die tomorrow?”

We all think this from time to time.  And you know what, sure, any of us might die tomorrow — all the more reason not to waste time thinking about it and hamstringing yourself from going after what you want to achieve.  Would you rather die as a monument to mediocrity or as someone who never quit striving?  Which leads to the next one…

5.  You wonder how you will be remembered.

The rub here is simply that, if you “die tomorrow,” will people remember you as someone who clung to stability like an existential life preserver — and is that what you really want?  I know for a fact that many people do want exactly that, because it’s a comfortable niche to occupy on the obituary page.  ”She/he was a good person, good friend, good….”  Good is fine, but it ain’t great. You can’t strive for great achievements by dropping anchor in Goodville.  My take on this is: it’s OK to wonder how you’ll be remembered, but don’t let thoughts of “good and nice and stable” effect that all important feedback loop, because if you do your brain will be happy to oblige with lots of good and little else.

6. You think there must be a pre-established role for your life, and you might be screwing with  it.

This one also touches on the “station” idea discussed above, but it goes deeper than that. We humans are prone to believing in something psychologists call “agency.”  We want to believe there’s a reason for everything, and that everything has a prime mover — an agent, whether human or otherwise. So, we think, what if there’s a reason we are what we are — what if celestial agency has determined it so?  Should we be messing with that?  The error in thinking here is clear — agency is a figment our brains rely on to manage difficulty with as little trauma as possible. The first thing to do is recognize that, and then recognize that the role for your life has only one true agent — You.

7. Your career appears to be well-established and that’s good…right?

Well, maybe that’s good, sure.  The question becomes, is “established” what you really want?  Maybe it is, and that’s cool. But if “established” means you can’t reach beyond certain imposed parameters to achieve anything else that you truly want, then maybe it isn’t so useful after all.  Like most things, this is a personal choice and it doesn’t have a right or wrong answer.  But it’s worth acknowledging that you may very well be “establishing” yourself out of greater achievements.

8.  You are afraid of losing what you have built.

A totally legitimate fear, and one we should kick out of our perspectives as quickly as possible.  Here’s one example why:  Remember this little thing we’ve been suffering through for sometime now called a recession?  Remember how many people lost all or nearly all they’d “built” during these last few years of economic erosion? The reality is, you can lose everything in a heartbeat through no fault of your own, so why allow that fear to stop you from reaching out for what you really want?  This goes in the same basket as “I could die tomorrow.”  Yes, true, we can lose, we can die. So what? Push forward.

9. You think, “maybe I’ve hit my ceiling.” 

The proverbial “ceiling” — so long have ye been with us, and yet so little have ye given us.  I side with the late great Peter Drucker who said (paraphrasing from this classic article on Managing Oneself) if you reach a point in your career where you think you won’t progress any further, then start focusing on the next part of your life.  Actually, he added, you should start thinking about the next part of your life well before you begin it.  The point is, forget about ceilings and focus on achievement. When you start using the cultural shibboleth of the ceiling as an excuse, you are achieving nothing and will continue to do just that.

 1o. Confusion about where to go.

Of all of these 10 ideas, this one is to me the most difficult because it plagues me almost constantly. Gearing up the cerebral feedback loop for achievement is one thing, but without a sense of focus and direction, all of that energy isn’t going to yield very much in the end.  My experience has been that sometimes you have to let the energy flow for a while without too firm a sense of direction and see if focus emerges organically. Once it does, you can then nurture it into a more structured method for getting where you want to go.

 

http://startinganonlinebusinessfast.blogspot.com.au/2013/09/the-10-reasons-why-we-fail.html

9 Ebooks Internet Marketers Must Read in 2013

As a professional dedicated to marketing on the internet, you know how important it is to hone your skills and stay up-to-date with the latest information. Internet marketing is constantly changing, and we’re on a constant quest to keep up with the latest strategies and tactics.
To help you with this task we’ve compiled a list of our top ten must-read eBooks from some of the best sources for Internet marketing.

1. An Introductory Guide to Content Marketing

Content Marketing has become the latest catch-phrase. Everybody seems to be talking about it. But so many  people that are talking about content marketing get it wrong. Content marketing is not advertising, it’s  not the marketing of content, and it’s not social media. Circle S Studio has developed a great beginner’s guide  with An Introductory Guide to Content Marketing.

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2. 26 Ways to Generate More Inbound Customers in 2013

A lot has been written about inbound marketing, but how exactly can you generate customers with it? In  this eBook John Bonini from Impact Branding & Design discusses 26 ways to generate customers using  inbound marketing in 2013.

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3. Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide

SEO is one of the most misused and misunderstood aspects of internet marketing, yet probably the most  important. Black hat, white hat, Penguin updates, Panda updates. The acronyms abound, and we don’t  know who to trust to tell us. So why not go straight to the source? Google has written a great little guide,    their Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide, to help you begin to navigate your SEO journey.

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4. The Beginners Guide to SEO

As if an eBook from Google wasn’t enough, we thought we’d include a second authoritative resource on SEO –  this time from SEOMoz, the company many consider to be the best source for SEO knowledge available today.  You can read their Beginners Guide to SEO either as a series of articles, or you can download a PDF version of  their eBook.

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5. Market Like the Ultimate Marketers

Infusionsoft has taken the marketing world by storm, with their combination CRM, e-commerce,  social media and email marketing tool for small and mid-sized businesses. Every year they hold a  contest to see which one of their customers are using the most innovative and effective marketing strategies.  In this eBook you’ll learn how The Rocket Company used Lifecycle Marketing to grow their business.

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6. 58 Social Media Ideas to Inspire your Content Marketing

So you’ve created a great content strategy, your editorial calendar is set for the next six months, and you’ve  written some great thought leadership articles, eBooks and blog posts. Now what? The Content Marketing  Institute has an answer to your content distribution problems with their eBook 58 Social Media Ideas to  Inspire your Content Marketing.

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7. A Guide to Creating Content for Demand Generation

The term ‘Content Marketing’ contains two words. Unfortunately, many marketers have focused on only one  word: the ‘content’ piece, while neglecting the ‘marketing’ piece. Thanksfully Marketo has come to the rescue  in their eBook A Guide to Creating Content for Demand Generation.

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8. Best Practices Guide to Landing Pages

Being a landing page company ourselves we kind of took a shine to this eBook. Pardot takes a unique approach  to landing page best practices by discussing content on branded landing pages, sending download links in  auto-responder emails, progressive profiling and A/B testing.

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9. Landing Pages: The Ultimate Guide

Finally, we’d be remiss not to include our own eBook. We provide tips on how to create a landing page, how to  improve your landing page, how to test your landing page, and some advanced material. Download Landing  Pages: The Ultimate Guide.

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We also wanted to include a few more resources that didn’t make it on our top ten list, but that we think are valuable nonetheless.

• One of the most important yet neglected aspect of online marketing is customer segmentation. Get Found First does a great job explaining this with their eBook Consumer Segmentation for Online Marketers.
• In addition to our eBook on landing pages and the Pardot guide, we thought Ion Interactive’s book Landing Experiences The Visitors Love was great too.
• Pardot has a few more eBooks (they’re still calling them “white papers.” That’s so year 200!). Check out their content creation guide and 5 Steps to Double your Web Marketing Value.
• Finally, we wanted to share a link to Copyblogger’s 14 eBooks on Internet marketing, with advice on content marketing, copywriting for the web, landing pages, how to build authority, SEO, and email marketing. Check out Copyblogger’s eBooks here.

Read more at http://www.business2community.com/books/9-ebooks-internet-marketers-must-read-2013-0605415#iFTxyulzdWwXgpLm.99

HANDY TOWNSHIP, MICH. — Matt Blauer and Mandy Tefft are making the world a hotter place one bottle at a time.
The husband-and-wife team have been making and selling Papa Turts hot sauce since early 2011.
The seeds of the business were planted with their love of spicy foods and an abundance of peppers in the garden at their rural home near Fowlerville in Handy Township.
“We had all this land, so we planted a big garden and put in a bunch of chili peppers,” Blauer told the Livingston County Daily Press & Argus. “We got a lot more than we bargained for.”
The solution was for Blauer to turn the peppers into hot sauce.
“I messed around with it for a while. Everybody liked it and said I should try and market it,” Blauer said. “It took a long period of trial and error to get the recipe where I wanted it.”
Papa Turts — the name is a play off Blauer’s high school nickname, Turtle, and his becoming a father — makes two varieties of sauce: So Hot It Hurts and Smoked Peppa. The sauce is available in nearly 30 stores and restaurants, and it can be ordered online.
Tefft says the hot sauce is popular at Olden Days Cafe in Fowlerville, where diners often drizzle it over breakfast items such as eggs and potatoes.
“We put it on everything,” she said. “The So Hot It Hurts is hot, but not so hot that you can’t taste anything else. It adds to your food instead of overpowering your food. We put it on pizza. We use it in deviled eggs and Bloody Marys.
“I like the (Smoked Peppa) on lasagna and spaghetti,” she added.
Tefft says her husband is an “awesome cook,” and he often posts recipes that incorporate the sauce on Papa Turts’ Facebook page.
“We recently did a spicy tuna melt recipe online that is amazing,” Tefft said.
Creating a commercial kitchen to make the sauce in the basement of their home required a financial investment of a couple of thousand dollars and approval from the Michigan Department of Agriculture.
“We had to tear up the carpet, put in a triple sink and a hand-washing sink, and put up a curtain and epoxy the floor. We put a vent in, too,” Tefft said.
While the idea for the sauce originally grew from their own garden, the couple rely on other sources for their produce. They get most of their habanero peppers from Wilczewski Greenhouses in Oceola Township.
“It’s two local businesses helping each other,” Tefft said.
Blauer said each batch of So Hot It Hurts sauce — about 120 5-ounce bottles — requires 16 pounds of habanero peppers and nearly 2 pounds of dried arbol chiles, as well as some roasted carrots. The peppers need to cook down for about 90 minutes. Blauer later uses a wooden stick to skim off the skins and seeds.
“It’s a real hands-on process,” he said.
For the Smoked Peppa sauce, Blauer uses chipotle peppers as well as tomato paste.
After the sauce is made, it’s bottled, sealed and labeled by hand.
“We learned pretty quick that places don’t want to sell it if it doesn’t have a bar code on it,” Tefft said. “So we went to Buyabarcode.com and purchased bar codes. Some stuff we’ve just had to wing it and learn as we go along.”
Fans of the sauce can even have custom labels made for the bottles. Hometown Bicycles in Brighton created its own label and sells the hot sauce in its store. Papa Turts has also had personalized labels designed and printed for special events such as weddings and bachelor parties.
Blauer, 40, and Tefft, 37, have two children, ages 11 and 4. Tefft, a 1994 Fowlerville High School graduate, keeps busy as a stay-at-home mom while working to grow the sauce business. Blauer, who grew up in the Detroit suburb of Huntington Woods, is a FedEx driver who owns his own route.
While attending college in Kalamazoo, they met at Bell’s Brewery. The brewery recently began selling Papa Turts sauces, which Tefft called “very exciting.”
Blauer works 10- to 12-hour days, leaving only the weekends for making his namesake sauce.
“When I first started, I’d make a batch every couple of months. Now, I’m working at it one full day every weekend,” he said.
The couple think about the day when Papa Turts can become their full-time occupations and Blauer can sell his FedEx route.
“We’re not quite ready to do that just yet,” Blauer said. “Slowly, over time, I may do less FedEx and more hot sauce until one day I’ll be doing hot sauce full time.”
Tefft said they “broke a little more than even” on the sauce business in 2012, and she’s sure they will do even better this year. When her youngest child starts preschool in the fall, she hopes to have more time to dedicate to Papa Turts. She also plans to revamp the Papa Turts website, where sales currently require a PayPal account.
“We don’t take credit cards, and I think some people just don’t like PayPal,” Tefft said. “When our website gets better and we show up in more searches, we can get the credit card thing going.”
Still, they count people from as far away as California and Texas among their loyal customers.
“It’s been fun; it’s a really cool thing for Matt and I to do together,” Tefft said. “It’s something that we really like that we believe is a quality product.”

http://www.freep.com/article/20130902/NEWS06/309020080/hot-sauce-business-peppers-handy-township

Building A Startup As A Global Business

Thanks to the Internet, entrepreneurs are no longer confined to a local geography when building a new business—the world can be their market from day one.
But building a startup as a global business requires managers with skills and strategy much different from their predecessors of even a generation ago. If you are a global entrepreneur, says Harvard Business School Associate Professor William R. Kerr, “you have to think much earlier and much faster.”
The new MBA second-year course Launching Global Ventures (LGV), developed by Kerr and taught for the first time last winter, teaches students just those skills.
When Kerr started drafting a syllabus for the course, he knew fresh business cases were needed—much of the academic research and course materials on global entrepreneurship he reviewed were dated. For example, earlier HBS courses on international ventures typically focused mainly on the challenges of starting a company in a specific country—such as Argentina or Thailand—instead of launching internationally from the get-go, as many entrepreneurs do today.
Kerr says he wanted LGV to “go straight to global,” helping students understand at early points in the business life cycle how these fledgling ventures can operate across multiple countries. The course would also identify advantages and liabilities of starting an international company, how to manage it locally and globally, and building partnerships and personal networks—an area of continuing interest for the researcher.
Kerr didn’t have to look far for material, with several recent HBS grads—and a then second-year MBA student—starting global companies, the perfect subjects for about half of the dozen case studies used in the course. After many interviews, Kerr was able to glean powerful details on the challenges that these entrepreneurs took on as they built companies operating in multiple geographies. Eighteen months later, he was ready to launch the new course, which puts an up-to-the-minute spin on an ancient form of trade.

‘BORN GLOBAL’ NOT NEW

Forming global companies is nothing new, Kerr says. Phoenicians served as the middlemen for trade across the Mediterranean region, for instance, and Europeans built nation-spanning operations as they explored and colonized, exploiting valuable resources along the way.
Throughout history, Kerr argues, global ventures have been governed by two common forces. First, there must be an advantage to connecting two different places—Christopher Columbus’s desire to link European markets to Chinese silks, say, or Silicon Valley’s desire for cheaper programming talent in India. Second, a global company needs methods and tools to enable the venture, such as long-haul ships for Columbus or the Internet and telecom infrastructure for Skype.
During his research and course development, Kerr focused on three key pieces for LGV cases: identifying case examples of larger trends and phenomena being uncovered by research; describing the most recent questions entrepreneurs are facing, even if the answers are far from certain; and identifying areas where previous HBS students felt underprepared for handling the challenges.
As an example, one case discussed in LGV was EverTrue Mobile Technology Development, which centers on Brent Grinna (HBS MBA 2010), who founded the company when he was a second-year student at HBS. In the case, EverTrue is creating a mobile application that would allow schools to connect more easily to their alumni networks. Grinna was asked to build a prototype of the application for Brown University’s Alumni Association board in two months. Trouble was, Grinna lacked a technical background.
In class discussion, students consider whether Grinna should hire local programmers or a CTO to do the work; outsource the work using a global labor platform like oDesk; or partner with Dashfire, a new venture that takes equity in startups in exchange for development work in India. They also evaluate the managerial challenges that Grinna will face if his team becomes spread across two countries at such an early stage. And there is an opportunity to discuss various online outsourcing models, which represent a major trend in global labor markets.
In the end, students grapple with a very recent phenomenon for entrepreneurial companies—they may start global for the first phases of development and then consolidate into a single location, the opposite of traditional patterns where international operations commence with company growth and maturity.

IN THE CLASSROOM

The LGV cases represent a range of businesses. Kerr kicked off the first class with the story of Celtel International, a Pan-African cellular provider that at the time was operating in 13 countries. He began the discussion by questioning what the venture had gained by operating in multiple countries and spreading its talent across the locations. He then asked when does a global startup become more than the sum of its parts. As an example, the company’s operations in contiguous countries had greatly boosted its product design potential (e.g., cross-border roaming), but it had also lowered the potential diversification benefits that many students highlighted as a key Celtel advantage when operating in Africa.
Another LGV case centers on 2011 HBS alum Rebeca Minguela’s model for Blink Booking, a website based in Spain for last-minute travelers that she cofounded and modeled on the US company Hotel Tonight. Blink offers a mobile application that provides same-day booking of boutique hotels across Europe, taking advantage of market price differentiations to determine the “best last-minute price” for users. Minguela’s larger goal, Kerr says, is to create a global replication platform that will encourage more entrepreneurship in Spain.
Blink Booking served as a springboard for the class to discuss what makes a good candidate for international replication, along with the structure and ethics of these platforms. Students also discussed German incubator Rocket Internet, which clones successful business models and sites like eBay and Groupon GRPN +4.54% around the world. Rocket Internet, a buzz company on campus that has attracted a number of HBS students as employees, is “the quintessential LGV company,” Kerr says.
Kerr expected to see many entrepreneurs on the first day of class but was surprised by the students’ diversity. Although about 60 percent had an active business idea they were working on, a substantial portion came from private equity or consulting backgrounds (e.g., McKinsey or The Boston Consulting Group Boston Consulting Group) and had worked or were planning to work with clients engaged in global ventures. “This was a way for them to develop skills to help with their international client work or when evaluating investment candidates,” Kerr says.
Many signs indicate that the global venture model has become a mainstream option for entrepreneurial companies, which was highlighted during a panel discussion in class that included a local venture capital investor and recent HBS entrepreneurs. Several students inquired how the VC viewed and evaluated founders of domestic-based companies compared with those starting global ventures.
“The VC quickly replied that there is no distinction anymore,” Kerr says. “Even if the startup is based solely in Boston, the world and competition move so fast that founders need to think globally from the start.”


http://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2013/08/26/building-a-startup-as-a-global-business/2/

5 crazy SEO mistakes not to make in WordPress

There’s a nasty rumor going around that WordPress is beautifully set up for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) “out of the box.” Now don’t get me wrong - I’m a huge fan of WordPress - but the core software does need a little nudge in the right direction when it comes to SEO. Tom Ewer from ManageWP.
In reality, if your idea of optimizing your WordPress stops at hitting Publish on your latest post, you’re missing out on a lot of potential. But even those of you who feel that you are doing quite a lot in terms of onsite optimization are probably making at least one of the following mistakes (I know I certainly have done in the past).
So take a few moments to digest the following common SEO mistakes made by WordPress users - I’ll be offering straightforward solutions to each one!

1) Not Providing an XML Sitemap

Sitemaps are a way to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover.
- Google

I have a simple rule of thumb when it comes to learning new SEO strategies - if I hear it on the grapevine I take it with a hefty pinch of salt, but if I hear it from Google I take it as gospel. That’s why my position regarding sitemaps is simple: if Google says it helps them to find pages on your site that they may not otherwise discover, I’m going to give them one.
But that’s not all there is to sitemaps. They can also be used to supply additional information about your website (such as how often you expect pages to be updated) and meta data relating to specific media types (such as the running time of a video). And if you are running a new site or one with only a handful backlinks pointing towards it, a sitemap can make a big difference in enabling Google to discover and index all of the relevant pages on your website.
In simple terms, a sitemap is simply a specifically formatted list of the pages on your site that you would like to be indexed by the search engines. You could create one manually if you like carrying out jobs that can be automated with ease. Otherwise I have a couple of suggestions:
Google XML Sitemaps: with over ten million downloads and an average rating of 4.7 out of 5, you can rest assured that this free plugin gets the job done.
WordPress SEO by Yoast: this free plugin has a number of SEO-related functions, one of which is an excellent XML sitemap generator.
The process of building an updating a sitemap is almost entirely automated. You set a few options as you see fit then let the plugin do the rest. Google says that “[most] webmasters will benefit from sitemap submission, and in no case will you be penalized for it.” With that in mind, why wouldn’t you create a sitemap for your WordPress website?

2) Poor Categorization and Tagging

Few things bug me more than sites that do not utilize categories and tags (sometimes referred to collectively as taxonomies) properly. The simple fact is that categories and tags offer opportunities for increased engagement and traffic, but the bigger issue at hand is that poor use of categories and tags can actually persuade a visitor to leave your site.
This is what you need to know about WordPress taxonomies: if categories are your table of contents, tags are your index When people try to tell me that tags are useless, I ask them of how many non-fiction books they have read that don’t have an index (I just checked five on my bookshelf and discovered that only one of them doesn’t).
Conscientious categorization and tagging of your posts will not only make it easier for visitors to find what they want (assuming of course you create an Archives page that makes accessing categories and tags simple) but it will also boost your onsite SEO. While Google may not rank category and tag pages high in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) (although it certainly does happen), it will be able to get a much better grasp on the keywords that are most relevant to your site by examining them.
Let me give you an example. Say for instance you run a site about zoo animals which has a particular focus on llamas. If you have a tag page for llamas that links to various pages and has various pages linking back to it, that is a strong indicator to Google that llamas are kind of a big deal on your site.
If you want to know more about how to categorize and tag effectively, click here

3) Not Defining Canonical URLs

If you have never heard about canonicalization before then brace yourself - it can be a slightly confusing concept. In order to define it effectively I will turn to Matt Cutts, Google’s Head of Search:

Canonicalization is the process of picking the best URL when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same urls:

• www.example.com
• example.com/
• www.example.com/index.html
• example.com/home.asp

But technically all of these URLs are different. A web server could return completely different content for all them. When Google “canonicalizes” a URL, we try to pick the one that seems like the best representative from that set.

Put simply, if you don’t tell Google and friends which version of a page to index and rank, they’re going to try to figure it out themselves. The last thing you want is search engines having to pick from multiple instances what is essentially the exact same page. The solution is to provide them with a canonical URL.
This is essentially a three step process:

• Tell WordPress how to present your site (i.e. http://www.yoursite.com/ or http://yoursite.com/).
• Tell Google (using Webmaster Tools) which URL type you want them to use.
• Use a plugin (such as the aforementioned WordPress SEO by Yoast) to ensure that canonical URLs are defined on each page of your site.

That may sound complicated but in reality it’s a piece of cake. You can find a complete guide to canonicalization in WordPress here.

4) Not Optimizing Your Site for Google+ Authorship

Like it or not, Google+ is here to stay. You may be surprised to know that it is the second biggest social network behind Facebook, beating the likes of YouTube and Twitter.
But I’m not here to talk about social media strategization. Instead I want to focus on the concept of Google+ authorship and how it can be utilized to strengthen your position in the SERPs and boost click through rates.
If you’ve not heard of Google+ authorship before, you’ve almost certainly seen it. Every search result in Google that incorporates a profile photo of the author is an example. Astonishingly, that little photo has been proven to boost clickthrough rates in the SERPs by 150%. Further, an experiment by Cyrus Shepard from Moz resulted in an additional 56% increase in clickthroughs. In short, by incorporating Google+ authorship on your site, you can attract more search engine traffic with the same rankings.
Getting Google to verify your authorship is not an entirely straightforward process but it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes and will subsequently offer you ongoing benefits. In short, it’s well worth doing. My favorite tutorial is by WPBeginner

5) Not Optimizing How Your Posts Look in the SERPs

This mistake is similar to the previous one regarding Google+ authorship, as it relates to your clickthrough rate in the SERPs.
It is borne out of an ignorance of the importance of what searchers see on Google as opposed to simply where they see it. Although the placement of a website on the SERPs (ie, 1 - 10) is a key factor, people can often be drawn to lower rankings if the titles and/or descriptions are compelling. That is why you should optimize each of your posts to give yourself the best possible chance of attracting a good clickthrough rate.
There are two things that you should concern yourself with:

• The Meta Title: this is what will display on the SERPs in place of any headline you choose for the post onsite.
• The Meta Description: Google may choose to use this in place of an excerpt from your post (which can often be nothing more than a confusing mass of words).

By default there is no way to define these in WordPress - you need a plugin to get the job done. You can either choose a standalone plugin (for which my recommendation would be Add Meta Tags) or a plugin that incorporates multiple SEO features (such as the aforementioned WordPress SEO by Yoast).

What Mistakes Have You Made?

Let’s face it - we’re not perfect. If you haven’t made a few SEO blunders in your time then you’re simply not trying hard enough. In reality, this post could be called, “Top 5 SEO Mistakes I Have Made With WordPress.”
With that in mind, I’d love for you to share your wisdom in the comments section. What have you learned from your forays into the world of SEO that you think others will benefit from reading about? Fire away!


http://www.wordtracker.com/academy/seo-wordpress-mistakes?utm_source=Subscribers&utm_campaign=c9c682f3c7-Newsletter_210&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_6cdc864080-c9c682f3c7-287576792