I have a question for you: What do you do, with the resources you have?
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This post was prompted by an interview on BBC Breakfast this morning. The discussion centred around whether workers should be allowed to work remotely and why some companies insist on their staff being in the office.
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Last month I celebrated 14 years in business, which has me a little nostalgic thinking about what has changed over the years. In a way, I have come full circle in how I run my business. I am home-based again, and I have no full-time employees any more. The one big difference from 14 years ago is that I am exactly where I want to be. I love being a small empire of one (hat tip to @jesshibb for that phrase).
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I hate to do lists.

There I said it.
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Working for yourself is the ultimate for many people.
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Shortcuts offer us promises, which they seldom if ever deliver. However, because so many people want super-fast results, the Internet is packed with people offering them.
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Last month I talked about optimizing your site architecture for Panda. This is of course important, but it is only one component in optimizing for Panda. As everyone who read Mike Moran’s recent post on this blog knows, Panda rewards quality content. And Penguin punishes low-quality sites. So content quality is obviously very important for search effectiveness, perhaps more important than site architecture. (more…)

What kind of first impression do you create, when people find you online?

I often follow links from Twitter and Facebook to small business websites and blogs.  A lot of the time, these sites look amateur, dated or both.  No matter how good the actual services offered by these businesses are, their shoddy Internet presence means most people won’t take them seriously!  Prospective clients arrive, see a low quality site and instantly build a negative initial impression of that person or business.

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The San Francisco Bay area is the clear leader in the internet startup world. Approximately 50% of the early stage fund raising in the United States is in California, with Silicon Valley and San Francisco dominating. Some days it seems like it is impossible to start an internet company anywhere other than the SF Bay Area.

But it can be done. Entrepreneurs everywhere are succeeding in getting their internet businesses going! I’ve polled some of my entrepreneurial and venture capital contacts outside of San Francisco to see what advice they could offer for successfully building an internet venture in their towns. The following is some of the great feedback I received. I’ve organized their responses (and some of my own thoughts) into seven tips on how to grow an internet business when you don’t live in sunny Palo Alto.

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Over the past couple of months, I’ve been able to leverage Twitter to develop some pretty nice relationships in my local community and amongst my SEO peers. I’ve been introduced to and have had lots positive interactions with many new people, as well as continued developing relationships with older connections.

I wrote an article a couple weeks ago that was received fairly well entitled, “13 Tips to Get More Twitter Followers.” It detailed some simple – but useful – strategies that have worked for me personally in terms of gaining a larger Twitter following.

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