My online business has failed

online business failure

One of my online businesses has failed. It has died a slow horrible death and I was too stubborn to recognize the signs that it was time to shut things down. As a result, I’ve wasted a considerable amount of time, resources, energy and money trying to keep a business running that should have winded down at the beginning of the year.

I wanted to quickly document this story for a few reasons. One, I hear that unburdening your soul is therapeutic and when it comes to this whole experience, I know I am in need of some kind of therapy. Secondly, I want to share the lessons that I’ve learned from this failure. Lastly, I think its important that I acknowledge the mistakes and failures experienced throughout this process so I don’t repeat them. I have the odd habit of taking longer to learn from previous mistakes than I really should.

So here’s the abbreviated story. Continue reading “My online business has failed”

My near death experience with a so-called SEO expert

One of the things that I regularly help clients with is finding talented and qualified freelancers to assist them with projects on a part-time or full-time basis. For the most part I have been rather happy with the people I have helped find and have placed but during a recent project I learned a very valuable lesson; it makes more sense to spend more time during the interview process and reference check than it is to have to clean up the mess that someone else leaves behind. Continue reading “My near death experience with a so-called SEO expert”

Tips on selecting a freelance team

Over the last couple of months I have not only been completing freelance writing tasks, I have also been helping a client with a few development projects. I have been responsible for putting project guidelines together, posting projects at various freelance services and finally selecting the individuals or teams that I wanted to work with to complete the job. There have been some positive and negative experiences so far and as a result I have developed a few rules that I will follow in the future in order to make the process run much smoother when searching out freelancers. Continue reading “Tips on selecting a freelance team”

Finding inspiration on Yahoo! Answers.

Lately I have been finding it hard to find inspiration for blog posts on my own sites as well as for some of my regular clients. I am pretty lucky in the fact that most allow me to write about whatever strikes my fancy as long as it relates to the Internet, marketing and preferably both at the same time.

Sometimes this freedom can be somewhat of an issue when a lack of inspiration takes hold. There are days when I can produce 2,000 – 2,500 words an hour without any issue. The ideas are flowing, the structure is simple and the articles or blog posts take very little work to complete. Yet there are other days where countless hours are wasted because I couldn’t come up with ideas or concepts for articles and would have rathered a client say “Please write about topic A and topic B”. Continue reading “Finding inspiration on Yahoo! Answers.”

Some tips on freelancing

I have been doing freelance design, site promotion and writing for several years and have learned a few things along the road. While most of my experiences have been positive, a few negative experiences early on made me wonder whether to continue pursuing projects on a freelance basis. Here’s some tips and wisdom I can offer you if you’re considering some freelance work.

Continue reading “Some tips on freelancing”