Businesses take off almost every year. A few see the light at the end of the tunnel. Entrepreneurs start off in all earnest, but they do not give enough importance to the importance of prudent planning. You got to be doing the following even before you flag your business off.

Know your target audience: You don’t sell napkins in the blind. Not knowing your target customers can cause a lot more business losses than a spitting out a bad product. Knowing your customers is the core of your entire business strategy. It would be lighthouse for all your marketing efforts.

Bootstrapping: Many entrepreneurs face the problem of not being able to shore up enough seed capital to get started. Some look to woo the venture capitalists, while some of them do the rounds at banks and lending institutions. A few daring ones look fund their businesses with their own savings and then get another job such they could take care of their operating costs. Although it might sound very troublesome and might look like a lot of things on a plate, it would still be the best possible way to start a business without much risk.

Develop a marketing plan: All online business (even the offline ones) ought to have a marketing plan developed. There is simply no excuse for this one. Marketing isn’t something that you ought to be doing when you feel that your sales have hit the abyss or when you have some extra dormant cash lying about your current account. It has to be done systematically and hence one needs to have a solid plan as to what the budget might be every month and what exactly you intend to do to get your word out.

Pre-sell: Business owners spend all their efforts, time and money in trying to set up  and launch businesses. Then they try to find customers. Let’s say you are going to start an online business and you had a web-designing company take the project up. While they are at it, what exactly would you be doing? Would you be tapping fingers? Waiting for them to deliver the site back to you? Why? Wouldn’t it be better if you went around the town trying to grab some orders for your product/service? If you could grab orders even before your business was set-up, maybe it could help you.

Get done with the legal work: If your business requires you to register yourself locally or get some patents done or anything else that might involve local government sanctions, you’d better do it much before starts to avoid unnecessary time wasted on mundane paper-work and endless trips to the local chamber of commerce.

Would you like to share your start-up experiences with me? Please feel free to comment.

A Graphic Designer is an all-rounder. Specialists in graphic design find one tool and become experts at that: Adobe Illustrator expert, Adobe Fireworks expert, Adobe InDesign expert, and so on.

Although none of these tools are isolated and graphic designers tend to use one, some or all of the tools, they spread into niches so that can focus on one area and earn more.

The U.S, and other western countries, has a ton of resource pools for graphic designers to train themselves on. India has barely any. One look at an average westerner’s design portfolio vis-à-vis that of an Indian graphic designer would tell you all you have to know.

I am not saying that Indian graphic designers aren’t skilled; all I am saying Indian graphic designers do only as much as training, experience, and mindset allows them to.

Here’s the most important part: Most of the graphic designers in India are underpaid. That explains why most freelance designers start to work sites like Elance. Slowly, maybe, they start their own design agencies with graphic designer teams working right from here.

According to a post on DesignShack.net by Joshua Johnson, while the median salary for a web designer in the U.S is somewhere around $25000 – $100,000 a year (two extremes), Indians earn about $1000 – $ 50,000 (salaries ranging from entry level designers to highly paid agency heads) a year.

That’s disgusting given that on sites like Elance, Guru, and oDesk, the maximum number of contractors and companies are from India (which means to say that most of the work on Logo Designing, Brochure Designing, Web Publishing across platforms, video editing, Animation, etc., are mostly outsourced from India.

Resources and Training: The Vantage Point for International Graphic Designers

Graphic Designers in Western countries have a better grasp of basics of design such as typography; design elements such as color, white space, and scale; best practices in design; and much more simply due to availability of resources, training, and opportunities.

Resources (just a glimpse): Smashing Magazine.com, Sitepoint.com, Sixrevisions.com, Netmagazine.com, Designshack.net, and tutsplus.com(envato)

Further, there are thousands of blogs written by expert designers along with tons of books and other resources. Can you point me to a few blogs (along with their portfolio) by expert graphic designers in India? I didn’t see any.
Could you show me books authored by Indians that match the level of say, SmashingMagazine’s book bundle? How about any of the other books available at sitepoint?

Let alone authoring books; it’s not really necessary. Are our graphic designers even buying or investing in the right education?

Training

In addition to those resources I mentioned, there’s video-based training available on the web today. Lynda.com, for instance, covers everything from the basics of Excel to the latest in Video Production, Photography, etc. Is there a website like that in India? Of course, Lynda.com is available for anyone in India but how many Indian graphic designers are signed-up for it?

Opportunities

The average hourly pay for graphic designers in the west is around $25 to $75 per hour. Companies in the U.S, U.K, and parts of Europe, have taken to the web in a big way. Digital Publishing is a huge business. No wonder our fellow graphic designers are paid so well comparatively.

There are websites like themeforest.net where a single file, vector image, wordpress theme, HTML template, or a Facebook Fan Page Template can retail at a low price and is downloaded hundreds (or even thousands) of times.

Look at this example:

The PSD file retails at $10. It’s been downloaded 338 times.
Total amount earned by that graphic designer $10 x 338 = $3380.

Even with the cut Themeforest will take, that’s a lot of money for an average Indian. Don’t you think?

All that money for one file, and one-time work!

I don’t see many Indians here. Did you spot any?

The Pathetic state of Indian Graphic Designers

It’s been 7 years that I’ve been on a lookout for the right graphic designing team. Here comes a fresher loaded with HTML and basic CSS. He has no idea about HTML5 and CSS3 – the standards that the web will move to in the future.

I realized that those who are incredibly talented and are skilled in these areas stick to in-house jobs with large corporates. I doubt this too since I didn’t see a single Interactive PDF rendered by Adobe Frameworks Pro, for instance.

It’s a sad thing. All this talent and got no money to boot.

I asked a designer friend today about Adobe Creative Suite CS5.5 and whether I should invest in it. He says, “I never bothered. Hell, even my company didn’t have it until a few months ago. Moreover, no Indian client pays as much to recover costs”

Graphic Designers: Are you listening?

Are you a trigger-happy, photo enthusiast? Did you ever want to see if photography could earn you money? Most photographers in India tend to go through the usual “been there done that” routine of setting up a photo studio, etc. Don’t just be the photo person at family events. Make a career or business out of pixels. There are plenty of ways to make money from digital photography, even if you are in India. Here are at least 6 ways to do that:

Haul up Stock Photos and Make a Residual Income

Every online publisher needs images, photos, vendors, and illustrations for that extra visual appeal to the otherwise boring text. Digital, Royalty-free Stock photos are of the most popular resource pools publishers use online.

Think of a theme to work on each time you set out for a project. For instance, if you wanted to build a collection of photos( that you can later sell the rights for), think if of a theme such as “human expressions”.

Click your photos of random people anywhere appropriate and edit them. Go to one of the following sites which are popular Stock Photography resources for publishers. Each time a publisher downloads a copy of your photo, you get paid royalty. Isn’t that cool?

Best sites to sell copyrights/credits for your photos:

istockphoto
shutterstock
Gettyimages [They have an indian office too] fotolia
Jupiterimages
Punchstock
Images
Acclaim Images

Of course, if you are a publisher, blogger, magazine owner, designer, etc., you might want to take a look at the following:

25 Free Sites to Download Royalty Free Stock Photos from
15 Best Places For Designers to Get Free Stock Photos Online

If you are a digital photographer, pick up your camera, think of a theme, click photos, edit them, upload them, and make money.

Wedding photographer

I didn’t know this genre could be a fruitful, highly satisfying, and incredibly demanding at the same time until Peddu Eshwar — an accomplished,highly skilled, and very successful wedding photographer — rolled out as a self-employed wedding photographer in India, based out of Mumbai.

If you’d like to talk to him, send him an email or leave a message on Facebook referring me. Do check out his Facebook Fan Page and his blog to check out his portfolio.

Another expert photographer in the making, although I am not sure if she found her specialist genre yet,  is Manisha Panchawati. She is in Mumbai now and works as a Freelance Photographer.

She was the expert hand behind some of the most stylish pics produced for a close friend. I remember her saying that her portfolio also included a few celebrities, models, etc. You can check her out on Facebook.

I then realized that if anyone had a third of skills Peddu or Manisha have , it could be a truly lucrative and substantially sustainable way to make money from photography. Maybe that should give you an idea as to how to get started.

Totally irrelevant Note: What’s with Mumbai and Photographers? Eh? 

Newspaper pics

It’s time to get away from marriages, events,and private parties and get out on to the streets. Newspapers and magazines always look out for great visuals to go with their content each day, all the year round.

If you are the out door, adventure types, this could just be the gig for you. Become a photo journalist yourself through your own blog and/or sell your pics to these publications for a healthy sum.

E-commerce Store Photo Specialist

This is a new area of application for digital photographers in India. E-commerce sites depend heavily on images to appeal to their customers who arrive at the store. Amateur photography could only mean a disaster for these companies, right? That’s when you pitch in to take various shots or angles at their products so as to produce appealing photos to entice customers.

Local photography business

As far as India is concerned, this is one of the oldest way to make money using photography. I highly recommend you don’t go for this one since it places too much emphasis on location, word-of-mouth, and sales by chance. The customers you are likely to attract aren’t going to be the best pay masters and you will have to scratch and win your sales.

Forget this one. If you are reading my blog, it tells me a lot about you already. Technology is way ahead of those one-guy stores in busy city and town intersections.

Photography website

If you knew me better, you will realize that I have the nasty habit of thinking of a website for almost everything.A photography website was expected, then.

• If you know a lot about digital cameras and photography, create a website to sell photography products. Keep visitors and customers coming back with engaging content on various aspects of photography.
• Start a membership site with tons of content, video classes on photography or even local meet ups for your members throughout the nation.
• Directly sell photo copyrights off your website.
• Use the website as a portfolio to get business.

Pictures are beautiful to look at. They have a way of capturing a life which is otherwise constantly in motion. Human expressions are best captured using digital photography and India is one of the best places in the world for you to swing into action simply because most people aren’t as talented as you are. Although, it’s an expensive endeavor, it has more money making potential than any other money making idea.

Photo Courtesy: damienweighill.com

It’s been a few days now since this blog started. I, however, purchased the domain name about 4 years ago from Lunarpages with the Intention that I’ll start my own Internet Business. I won’t get into the usual drill of what businesses are the best to start with since I already posted “Top 3 Kick Ass Ways to Earn Money Online In India” and I intend to add more to that list later.

What I wanted to talk about was altogether different: I wanted to introduce you to a disease of sorts; perhaps “condition” would be a better word? Ever since I started my consulting practice online (which originally started with Freelance writing for clients all over the world), I started on a small scale. I grew slowly, learned from experience and I have full-fledged consulting practice now.

Yet, it’s a service-based business. I mostly don’t outsource any of the writing work, if any.  I only farm out work such as Web Development, Web Design, Virtual Assistantship, and Social Media management. Over 80% of my business rests on writing or producing content though. As you can, I have to be at work to make my money.

I also have these grand plans of “traveling and working” – both at the same time, Location Independent professionals as they are called.

I have this itch for starting and running new businesses. Since my service business is already in full-swing and is a good source of income for me, I need more [ yeah, you can call me relentless or greedy even].

What the heck is a Semi-Start Syndrome?

Don’t bother to “Google it”. I just made that up myself. I define this syndrome as the habit of continuously ideating and then evaluating only to research a little more into the idea to discard it altogether.

Here’s an example:

I came across a particular website called WPMU DEV which is a membership site charging you a monthly fee in exchange for hundreds or thousands of wordpress themes, plugins, and support. It also offers a multi-site option for entrepreneurs who wish to provide their clients with WordPress hosting on their own. Plenty of business models can already be found on the WPMU Dev showcase.

My mind went into the entrepreneurship mode. I started thinking about the various possibilities. What can I do with it? What do I gain out of it? Here’s what I thought:

• I will provide basic web designing services, as they are called here in India, but with a twist: Charge clients a recurring fee each month through my fetchprofits flagship brand,, say about 2499 INR. In turn, I’ll set their website up, add content to it regularly (as in maintaining their company blog), do social media management, email marketing, etc.
• Create a community here at Rebelpreneur.com and provide unlimited hosting, wordpress set-up, and all tools and resources to help my readers get started with their online business.

You’d have though that I should start, right away. I spent a day just thinking about these ideas. I went so far as to think about how to market these businesses, etc.

I then come across a few posts on the Internet ranting about the fact that there’s really nothing much about it.  Oliver Whitman of Seo Chemist wrote a blog post titled “WPMU Dev: A Scam? ”Another friend of mine, Ivan Byross of Open Source Varsity also told me that I can have all of this multi-site functionality in other ways and it’s not necessary to buy this, really.
That officially kills my business idea. So, I leave that idea about and I am now thinking of something else altogether.

You get the idea now, don’t you? That’s how quickly ideas germinate and die.

Just saying, you know?

Photo Courtesy: w3bly.com

The rising tide of internet-based businesses has made working at home popular among many young adults and stay-at-home moms. Instead of applying at various corporations, many graduates these days opt to apply online. Instead of baking cookies to sell, stay-at-home moms prefer to work online. Being a virtual assistant has become a popular occupation. Here are the top six benefits of being one.

No overhead expenses

Starting your own business means that you have to have capital of your own. The overhead expenses can be brutal. With an online job you won’t need to worry about office space, employee salary or inventory. You will get to save money since you won’t have to commute to and from work or eat out during lunch time as you will be working from home. In short, working from home can enable you to save a lot.

No tax

Most VA’s are paid through Paypal. Since they do not have a formal employee contract, they are not considered as “regular employees”. Thus their income can’t be taxed.

Unlimited potential income

When it comes to being a VA your potential income is unlimited. You can earn as much as you want. How? By taking on multiple employers. The beauty with being a VA is that you don’t have to do everything. You can outsource. You can hire other people to help you out. This is how your income can grow.

Time flexibility

Time is more important than money. Money when lost can be recovered. But time cant. One advantage of being a VA is that you get to have a flexible time schedule. After all, you work from home so your boss can’t see you every minute of the day. As long as you get your work done you can play with your kids, attend their recitals and participate at school bake sales. You can earn plus be a hands-on mom.

No need to have expensive formal education

Companies often choose the people with the highest IQ’s, GPA or academic degree to be their employees. The good news is that online employers are not so particular when it comes to that. Of course having formal education will give you an edge over the other applicants. But even if you’ve only graduated high school you can still get hired. What’s important to employers is that you get the job done.

More employer choices. The number of employers looking for VA’s is vast. You can take your pick – seriously. The trick here is to apply to as many employers as you can so that you can pick the one with the best offer.

After having burnt fingers through blazing scams and ever rampant shady deals, life would seem to be lost somewhere among those million and odd pages of the Internet. I suppose they are still counting.

Now, if you have given up all your hopes on trying to make a comfortable living by working out of home, I’d wager that you are doing it way too soon. If I am not mistaken, you had been looking at easy ways to make money online, but then, you should have been looking at the normal, sober and a little more difficult – than – easy ways to make money online. Make as much as you deserve to make. If you kept at it long enough, you would make more than you make at your day job.

1. Virtual Assistant: Yes, why not? I mean, you come back home after surviving the eccentricities of your day job and look to help a lot of people on the Internet struggling with something or the other. It is big business now with a lot of work-at-home moms & students trying to eke out a living and all kinds of people getting on to it big time.

2. Writing: Just like everything else, if you didn’t know anything about writing, you could take up a course. If you did dabble in writing when in school, maybe you look at making it a source of your income. Try freelancing, freelance copywriting or resume writing. You could render your services to businesses too who struggle to come up with proper write-ups for their memos, brochures, newsletters and product literature. This is a big market is indeed very competitive. Life isn’t easy, is it?

3. Website development design and graphic design: This is crowded too, just like writing. But then, the world is too big for any one single market and clients keep hopping from vendor to vendor anyways. As long as that happens, we are in business. Graphic design is expensive in the developed countries. If you could master the art and render your services, sprinkled with a little bit of walk-the-extra mile customer service with consistent quality in the work produced, you would make yourself happy, alright.

The above mentioned three ways aren’t something that was conceived in a super-secret lab. It is common and you would find the Internet littered with it. However, as we humans tend to be impatient and go towards the easy ways, they have not been tried. I would suggest you gear yourself up, polish your skills and put them to work. There is no FREE, EASY or QUICK money anywhere. There is only money that is given to you in exchange for your products or services. Caspice?

Photo Courtesy: yourhrexperts.com

 

“India is a nation of shop-keepers”

… says Kishore Biyani in his book ‘It happened in India’. While that is certainly true, the maturity, the suave and the class that differentiates the truly great from the mediocre among businesses in India is yet to make a mark in this country.

The statement is quite a heavy one, given the fact that while on one hand India has truly emerged from the ashes and is making a mark globally as the ultimate destination for all businesses and a market that is still a gold mine for all kinds of products and services, what is appalling is the fact that there is a dearth of proper training for scores of small business entrepreneurs and absolutely no help and advice for the young and budding ones.

As if this wasn’t enough, the entrepreneurs who did break-out and are running some businesses or the other, have a total disregard to customer’s interests, their plights and no one gives a second thought to anyone who had once come in to their stores and purchased something. The very act of coming in and buying something is the end of any kind of relationship between the client and the merchant – a total anti-thesis for what is not to be done in an era of intense competition and rampant value creation.

Most Indian businesses have a supreme nonchalance to anything that looks like a customer. Poorly trained staff, disregard to the interests of the customer, rude accosting, indifference to customer service and a little less than pathetic customer relationship management practices.

No one cares if your mobile phone connection has a problem or if your credit card keeps getting charged. No one is bothered is your car needs a service or if your loan account statement needed a clarification.

No one gives a damn. It looks like we have just given up on our pathetic state of customer support here in India.

I don’t know when exactly Indian businesses would get to understand the simple but yet enormous power of customer satisfaction and the kind of rave business that can be generated just based on this single aspect in one’s business planning.

If you looked at it in another way, it would turn out to be a great opportunity to any aspiring entrepreneur to work out a simple business plan with greater emphasis on customer service than anything else and see his business soaring sky-high only because this business might do something that ought to have been done anyway.

The answer is a resounding yes and you’d have seen time and again that it has always worked wonders for some entrepreneurs.

However, what you need to think about is the fact that online businesses might have to be operated a wee bit differently from the conventional offline business models, but then, it is still a business and it needs to be nurtured like a baby.

It needs to be tended to and any signs of prosperity or success would be visible only after a certain amount, of time assuming that a great deal of perseverance, patience and determination have been exercised.

There is no such thing as ‘get-rick-quick’ anywhere out here. The fundamental truth is that it either takes sheer luck to have been born rich or you’d have to work real hard to earn real money. Period.

It is better if you understood this simple fact and start working hard until there comes a point when your business starts operating and running for itself or until you have leveraged your business enough by hiring people who can do all the ground work for you while you sit and strategize, think and implement.

A simple website can make you a lot of money, if only you would stop thinking of it as a ‘website’ and start thinking about it as a business. Trust me, you still have to work very hardPeople are online searching for information and if you can provide them bookmark-able content that makes them come back to your website again and again, you are in business already. Here are the following ways your website would make money for you

• Monetizing your website with adsense, text links, conceptual ads etc
• Affiliate marketing – merchants allow you to promote their products and services on your website and give you a commission if any of your visitors clicks-through and purchase the same.
• Offline, local advertising – This one is truly getting your hands dirty and assuming that you have an amazing readership akin to a newspaper or a magazine, you could convince local merchants to buy advertising space on your popular website.
• Selling membership to premium content on your website – You could try other variations like allowing for upgrades from free membership to premium ones and provide content that is hard to find elsewhere.
• Selling info products like e-books, CD-roms and the like off your website which stores some important information relevant to the theme your website is all about.

Selling information is the best possible thing you could online since there are no hassles of logistics, shipping, product returns, refunds and everything else that a business has to contend with. In India, specifically, there really aren’t many sites that have any sort of content what so ever and most of the websites that do try to have some content is down right pathetic.

The demand is all there to lap your supply up, but are you listening?

If you are an Indian and have been searching for a web hosting solution, I am sure you would have spent quite sometime trying to find the best possible hosting solution for your website or blog. Now, first things first: there are very few hosting providers here in India who provide you great value for your money.

Forget the most popular ones like Net4india , Rediff and Indiatimes – pathetic is not the word I would like to use here, but that is exactly how I feel.

No reliability, no customer support, high prices for absolutely no range of services. Ruled out. Period.

Since it is hosting and it is predominantly done online, I would recommend you forget about India and start looking across the internet for the best possible deal. Doing research is very critical since you really don’t want to end up in a rut having made an uninformed decision about choosing your web hosting provider.

You might not have known this, so take note of what you need to ask:

• The infrastructure: see if they have generators, servers and data centers to provide you the level of service that you expect. If you don’t know or if it is not mentioned on their website, just ask!
• Ask for the uptime guarantee because there is not point in having a website that is next to impossible to find.
• Look for back-up technology and find out if they give you a way to back up the contents of your site.
• Look out for the space and bandwidth considerations. One look across the Indian web hosting providers would prove to you beyond a measure of doubt that you’d never get the bargain that you are looking for.
• The web hosting industry across the world has come of age now and it is easy to easy different classifications of hosting today. Shared server hosting, collocation hosting, dedicated servers, customized hosting solutions and reseller hosting are just one of the few types of hosting and you would do well to find out what exactly you need.

Indian web hosting industry still has  along way to go unlike those in the developed countries and the prices are still way too expensive in India than it is in the US, UK or Canada, funny though it might sound. The appalling thing about it all isn’t that the prices are high here than the fact that most of us don’t even realize that there are bigger and better bargains available if only one bothered to look yonder.

If you are looking for some of the best hosting providers go for:

• Lunarpages
• Hostcats

Let us be candid, first off. There is really no way under the sun to be able to earn money without investing your time or money or both, unless you have been lucky to be an heir to millions of rupees worth of property. Since most of us aren’t, we need to accept the fundamental truth that we need to work hard for our money.

Whether offline or online, we need to ensure that we invest either time or money and then work hard to garner some kind of return on investments. In our world of online businesses, if you had seriously thought of it as a business model the world is increasingly taking to, you need to realize that your free domains, free web hosting and free blogs will only get you so far. If you were looking to earn a lot of money and become successful, you need to break away from the shackles of the evil ‘free’ stuff.

Remember the maxim – You get what you pay for! If all you had ever wanted to do was to share your thoughts on your cute little kitten, this is not for you. But if you had always wanted to leverage the power of Internet and pioneer a business out of its sheer scope and enormity, you need to look to invest in things like your own domain name, hosting packages and everything else that needs to be had in place to get you where you ought to go.

The reason why you won’t really be able to earn any money is primarily because something like free.youdidnotbuydomain.com is very difficult to remember and people have an increasing tendency to forget anything that is difficult to remember. Apart from this, a lot of features are not available to users looking for anything free and as age old as the fact is, the more money you have the better things start getting.

Moreover, your free hosted, free domain site is not very search engine friendly. Now, search engines, if you may recollect, is what people use for majority of their searches online and is probably the best possible way to get your site indexed and searched for free, if only you had an actual domain name and paid-up hosting.

Just as there is no free lunch, there isn’t any thing free that can make you a millionaire that you so want to be. So, let go of your inhibitions, rebel and invest.