I was fortunate yesterday to receive a timely reminder to pay attention to my core vision; the reason that Avallach Technology exists in the first place. the beginnings At the heart of everything is a strong desire to create a business that provides tools and/or services that cater for the “little guy” – the definition of which has now been refined to “work-at-home parents, home-based business owners and similar hobby or micro businesses”. In other words, the really small end of the business spectrum. Simplifying this further, it is strongly linked with a personal urge to say “f*$% the system”. A desire, if you will, to create and inspire a new business order. a new business order The world of business has lurched towards extreme corporatisation; disproportionate power and control, over consumers and employees, is wielded by a handful of international business entities. At the same time, there has been a massive increase in personal consumer debt and families are struggling to make ends meet. This in turn has led to an increase in interest in home-based business. poor service for home business “Work-at-Home” is a relatively new business reality which has many differences with the traditional “SME” (small-to-medium enterprise) sector. For [...]
One of the first decisions ever made about Avallach’s web service offering had nothing to do with features, pricing or some technical thing. Right from day one, the service was designed and intended to be the platform on which the serivce site itself ran. The cliché is that “we eat our own dog food” – however, cliché or no, it describes the situation exactly. You see, by running the main WAHMBoozle! site on the WAHMBoozle! platform a few critical and interesting side-effects occur: Constant monitoring of the service availability Real-world experience as an end-user Tips and Tricks offered in the community are based on hands-on usage Service and software development benefit from direct feedback Above all else, being a user of the system has a profound effect on excitement and passion levels that give the business a massive boost that I can’t imagine would be possible from too many other sources. Do you eat your own dog food? If you don’t, perhaps you should!
One of the great things about a New Year is the way it makes you rethink, reshape and re-assess things, pretty much automatically. Even if you are sworn off making New Year resolutions (as I most definitely am), it is almost impossible to escape the New Year effect. Getting Focused One of the things that struck me about the Avallach and WAHMBoozle! websites was the fact that there was still a degree of fuzziness. The main thrust in recent times has been to provide an affordable way for Work-at-Home Mums to get a website for their business, with practical “hands-on” help in achieveing that. Somehow this message doesn’t always come across. Clarifying the Message Over the Christmas break I spent some time thinking about how to remove this confusion; the answer was to start with a clean slate and build a web site that is 100% focused on creating successful WAHM business websites. The result is WAHM Website Success – a site that is dedicated entirely to the idea of helping WAHMs create successful business websites. By having such a sharp focus, the message comes through loud and clear! A Valuable Lesson Learned If you’re considering getting a website (or [...]
Too many good ideas die premature deaths, victims of over-planning, procrastination and doubt. That’s one of the main reasons I LOVE home-based “hobby” businesses; typically these are operated by people who simply enjoy doing something and decide to earn a few dollars from doing it. No extensive planning process, no 700-page business plan, no time spent trying to secure start-up finance. It’s lightweight, “agile”, flexible and built on passion and desire. Of these things, the last two are the essential ingredients in any recipe for success. Don’t Get Bogged Down All too often people have flashes of inspiration and then proceed to commit “ideacide”, allowing themselves to fall victim to over-analysis, listening to the small voice that says “it’ll never work” and generally becoming convinced that their idea is a non-starter. Ideas are, at first, delicate creatures that need nurturing and protecting until they have grown strong enough to stand on their own feet (metaphorically speaking). Allowing yourself to get bogged down in negative impulses, stalling things in the name of “proper planning” and finding all sorts of reasons to NOT act on those ideas is the equivalent of pouring weedkiller on your prize begonias! Forget About “Business” One of [...]
“There is no great genius without a mixture of madness” ~ Aristotle ~ After some recent soul-searching, and focused thinking around the basic idea of “how can Avallach be made even more relevant and valuable to the WAHM community?”, I have introduced a fairly radical new approach. The central element to this stroke of genius (or sign of madness, depending on your view of it) is to no longer charge for my personal time – not even the reduced “token” charges that existed before. The most visible aspect of this is the availability of a “Kick Starter” plan that provides home-based businesses with a comprehensive web site, for just $77 up front and around 50 cents per day for ongoing maintenance/support. Have You Gone Mad? Traditional, conventional thinking dictates that you can only earn a living by exchanging your time for money; in other words wages. The main focus of many small businesses, sole traders and consultants is to increase that rate of remuneration as much as possible. Many argue that you need to “go niche” and increase your personal value, heading for the psychological barrier of “$100 per hour”. So this change, then, would appear to fly in [...]
I’ve just read a long, convoluted rant about why you should hire a search engine specialist, how your business is missing out if you don’t and lots of other similar stuff from… you guessed it, someone selling search engine “optimisation” services. So I figured this was a good time to reiterate my previous point – if you’re a Work-at-Home Mum, if you have a budget-sensitive business (full or part-time) then you probably worry that you “need” SEO. You don’t. The funny thing is, the article was talking about how Google are starting to put a lot of focus and emphasis on “social signals”. In other words, your web site might start being ranked on how often people “talk” about it online (+1, Like, include your link in posts/comments etc.) As a micro business owner, you don’t need to pay someone to look after that stuff – all you need to do is be passionate about your business (pretty much a given), jump onto a site like Facebook ( yup, I reckon that’s a given for many of you too) and do what you would normally do with other people; socialise! Over time you will make connections and friendships, start talking [...]
“Why is Google under-reporting my web stats?” That question is often asked by friends and clients and to be honest, until recently, I made a number of assumptions about why this seems to happen. I generally attributed things to issues with the javascript, data being lost in the sheer volume processed by the Google servers and possibly issues with individual browsers and Internet connections. To a certain degree I wasn’t that far from the truth, however the bigger picture seems more complex than this. JavaScript “Fail” Google Analytics relies on a snippet of JavaScript embedded in your web page. As such it’s effectively a component of your page that could fail, somehow not succeed in “calling home”, get blocked or simply not load. If any of those things happen, the page view and site visit won’t be recorded. Lost Data? Google are a huge company with vast computer resources powering their operations/ This doesn’t mean they’re not susceptible to the occasional problem with hardware and software. Having worked for a busy hosting company myself, and specifically with services that process web site traffic logs, I feel pretty well qualified to say that sometimes things don’t work as expected, and data [...]
I’ve been in IT for more years than I care (or am able) to remember now, and change is without doubt one of the industry’s constants. The pace of change is unbelievable too. I mean, who hasn’t bought a top-of-the-range computer only to find it is surpassed just weeks later? Even when you’re used to that, there are occasions when changes can surprise you. The Apple iPad is a classic example of that I think. The latest surprise package of change is the latest chapter in the Facebook story. Recently I was talking about the social network battle between Facebook and Google+, how both were great as general purpose social activity, and how neither really fulfilled the needs of the typical Work-at-Home Mum business. So today Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of the Facebook team upped the ante, announcing a new era of social apps and opening up the potential of the Facebook platform as a whole. I haven’t had time to fully absorb the new information yet, however I’m already thinking that there could be a significant impact on the direction taken with WAHMBoozle! and ExpressWAHPz. Change is a wonderful thing, it really does keep you on yoru toes!
Perhaps it is because I was born in the “nation of shopkeepers” that online commerce fascinates and interests me so much. Whatever the reason, I am truly excited about the current wave that is just starting to hit our virtual streets; Social Commerce. I’m sure you’ve all heard about “Social Networking” by now, and are probably reading this via Twitter or Facebook. It has been a major shift in the way people use the ‘net, and like all new cultures and “paradigms” it is still struggling to fully define itself. Ignoring Google+ for a moment, many believe that the great social network wars have been won by Facebook, and this victory (albeit temporary, such is the nature of technology wars and victories) has seen the likes of MySpace and LinkedIn securing a niche within the social networking universe. LinkedIn is undoubtedly the world’s number 1 in business networking, job hunting and CV publishing, while MySpace has successfully redefined itself as a social entertainment service, with a strong emphasis on music. Identity Crisis? Facebook is currently home to an active Work-at-Home-Mum community, a community that has come up with many innovations that can expand the reach of any such business. Inventions [...]
Have you noticed how so many web developers and hosting providers offer advice in the form of a checklist? You know the sort of thing… “7 things you need to know before…”, “The 10 Things You Must Ask…”. It’s fantastic isn’t it? All these lovely people freely helping you come to the “right “decision – in other words, to decide to put your business with THEM. It’s true, giving away free advice is a well-established marketing technique, and there is a lot of good information available through that type of article, blog post etc. However, you do need to take such advice with a pinch of salt sometimes. Loaded Questions You see, when you start to analyse some of these lists, you start to see that they are questions that the developer would prefer you to ask them. They are almost invariably a reworked listing of that company’s particular strengths (or what they see as their strengths), rather than the set of basic rules they are dressed up as. That’s fair enough, if you can’t lead people to your own services on your own web site, then where can you do that? At the same time, it is my personal [...]