Standing Out

I’ve come across more than two handfuls of articles that say that small business owners are ones to haphazardly chase after new ideas, start a million things at once, try this & try that, waste money going in a million different directions, etc. We want to make money. We want to change the world with our sweet new idea. We want everyone to love and adore us for making their lives, their office, their relationships or their future that much better. But once we get our brilliant idea going a bit, our wandering eyes are distracted by that guy’s brilliant idea, and so our wheels get turning to try and figure out how we can make that successful, too.

Like it or not, these theories about the behavior or small business owners and entrepreneurs are actually very true. As entrepreneurs, it’s in our DNA to try new things, discover new ideas and work them out, and to try, try again.

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WANTED: smart entrepreneurs looking to post new (or re-post) content to the Standing Out home-based business blog.

Perks
The major “perk” is that you’ll get to submit blogs to Standing Out and its ever growing population of readers. It’s a relatively new blog but I’m proud of its success so far. Having additional contributors means that the blog could potentially be updated every day (or more than once a day) with great content by my contributors, and that frees me to do some other things like publicize and optimize the blog to get us ALL more readers!

Two months ago we weren’t even on the map in terms of Google rankings. Now we’re a PR3. This is definitely a growing blog. Additionally, the feed is also growing, with new subscribers being added daily.

The second perk is that you’ll get some additional advertising for yourself and your business, as I’ll post the contributors’ profiles as well as links to their websites and blogs, and of course when you post you can include linkbacks & pingbacks to your own blogs as well.

This is a great alternative to article submission!

Post Good Content
The key is to post good content that readers will enjoy and pass on. The content can cover essentially any topic but I want contributing authors to focus on entrepreneurship, growing your business, working from home or similar topics.

You can RE-POST articles from your own current blog on my blog as well. You can do that using Blogjet or simply manually re-posting. I’ll leave your strategy up to you.

Interested?
REGISTER as a user using the link in the bottom-left corner of this blog or by clicking here. When you register, you’ll be set up as a subscriber. I will then contact you to confirm that you want to be a contributor, and will change your user type to “Contributor” so you can start posting immediately.

I’m looking forward to seeing what becomes of this!

Cheers!

Tia

Including TOP universities: Carnegie Mellon and MIT

This isn’t my typical kind of post, but I really wanted to pass along some info I ran into.

http://tinyurl.com/28aw3w

The article lists some excellent courses you should consider taking. Many of these are real, instructor-led courses where you will really learn something - and best of all, they’re FREE.

This is an example of one of the many ways you can get smart about business & it doesn’t cost a cent. It does cost time, but you must be willing to spend it if you want to get serious about growing your business.

Check it out.

I’m starting with Carnegie Mellon’s free Entrepreneurship & Business Planning Course with audio. There are 33 recordings that you can download and listen to, along with course materials: 16 PowerPoint slides, several handouts, a case study and a blog.

Feel free to take the course along with me! I’m going to be posting a digest of the course topics weekly, starting next week.

Cheers!

Tia

I’ve just recently read a post written by Andrew Fife about entrepreneur etiquette when entrepreneurs present their businesses to potential investors.

First of all, I agree with him that it’s completely rude to ask a presenting entrepreneur (if you are also a presenting entrepreneur) a question about their business. Why? Because they are not pitching their business to you. The pitch is designed for the ears of an investor.

My issue with it is this: would you, as a presenting entrepreneur, want another entrepreneur taking up your precious Q & A time? Probably not. You want to spend this time sparking enough interest to get investors to contact you later.

I’m sure that not all curious entrepreneurs ask questions to throw the others off, but the intention is irrelevant when the result is any one of the following:

1. Loss of time. Q & A session time is not unlimited!

2. Frustration.

3. Embarrassment.

These could occur even if that wasn’t the intention.

So be kind. If you find yourself in this type of forum, keep your mouth closed during the pitches of other entrepreneurs. Karma will ensure that you are rewarded with the same courtesy!

Cheers!

Tia

I found the inspiration for my blog today from an article on Entrepreneur.com titled ‘Spirit of an Entrepreneur’ (link to the article at the bottom…hey, you came here to read THIS blog first :-)).

I only got one paragraph into it because of the line, “You hear it all the time from famous entrepreneurs: Long before they were running multimillion-dollar companies, they were flexing their entrepreneurial skills by selling lemonade on the corner, building gadgets in their garage or hosting weekly college beer pong tournaments.”

Question for you: did you ever run a lemonade stand? I can definitely remember wanting to have a lemonade stand. And who knows, maybe we did (I have two brothers and two sisters) at some point, but I really don’t remember. Now, I’m starting to second guess my entrepreneurial spirit!

When does an entrepreneur really become an entrepreneur? This is the nature vs. nurture theory of entrepreneurship. Are entrepreneurs born or bred? I’m starting to wonder. I wasn’t a business major in college, I was a technical writing major. I didn’t take “Entrepreneurship” as an elective in high school (and yes, my high school offered it). Instead, I took German and Choir and other stuff I can’t recall at the moment. I wasn’t really all about making money as a kid, either. I certainly wanted money, but I didn’t come up with savvy business ideas like re-selling my parents stuff or mowing lawns or stuff like that. I babysat, but that was more for the interaction and fun aspect than it was for money.

So what now? Am I an entrepreneur? I run a business. It’s successful. I have clients that are loyal and add more every month. I make money from my business. But does that truly make me an entrepreneur?

And, is there a difference between entrepreneurs and small business owners, really? Maybe. The entrepreneurs listed in the article aren’t just entrepreneurs. They created some of the biggest names in business history - Virgin, Google, Mrs. Fields, Amazon, and Mary Kay.

Are you in their company? I feel that I am not…yet. But the thing is, I wonder if there isn’t some thought or some attitude that you need to have that will take you beyond just success as you define to success as the world defines it.

Link to Spirit of the Entrepreneur article: http://tinyurl.com/3cclvo