3 replies to this topic

[meta]

Many of you on the forum have expressed pride in the businesses that you've built. I'd like to hear some success stories. What has worked for you? Can you share some experiences or strategies that would help others?

[awall19]

The first guy I ever worked for had me work on his photo site. I did it for next to nothing as a hobby. Turns out the guy is a famous Greek artist and likely I am going to Greece for the unveiling of his artwork in the national gallery which the president from Greece will be opening...thats cool stuff

the weird thing is that he found my website before many pages were listed in any search engine...to this day he does not know how he found my site...

[OldWelshGuy]

Can you share some experiences or strategies that would help others?

I went to see a local guy in a shop, I chatted to him about a small website, he seemed nice enough, down to earth sort of guy. He would not commit to buying, but instead asked me how a company like the franchise he held would go about setting up similar websites for their 38 shops, would it be 38 times the cost?

I dived down his throat and said, no way, all we do is have different front ends just as they now do offline, with them each having 3 or 4 pages specific to their operation, have their catalogue available to all the shops as a back end, and that way they would only pay once for the catalogue, and each cover the cost of their chosen front ends, be it a single page or a few pages.

He said there was a meeting the following week in London it was the AGM (annual General Meeting) all the franchisees would be there, and he would have a word with the people who matter. I then said so who will you be talking to then? he said i will be talking to MY marketing girl, MY finance director etc etc.. Turns out the was THE MAN, when the main company went bust a few years prior, He bought the franchising company and was the Chairman of the company.

MORAL: treat everyone the same, people are people, and you are only scared of high power executives if you think of them as such.

[awall19]

Though I am not the worlds biggest success, I think that just writing down a bunch of what you know is a good start.

Even if it ends up being a throw away site eventually the biggest key is just to learn and write stuff down. If you are wrong people will tell you, but that is how you learn. Eventually people will just kinda wind up asking you to do stuff and you will get busy.

I still do not have a pretty web design and it does not read anywhere as well as it should. I am sure I am loosing tons of customers because of that, but because I wrote a bunch people will eventually just find it.

Also if there is any news in your industry (especially a state of flux) analyze the hell out of what is going on and try to be one of the first to write about it. Someone else will probably end up being the official industry voice for what you are doing, but by taking a chance you will get some of the early adapters to believe in you and talk about you.

Find out what networks are hotspots for your industry. Anytime there is a state of flux make sure you are one of the first to put a logical explanation in writing. If you have little business then you have little risk with a move like that. It does not make sense for you to be conservative until you have a bunch of business to protect.

When Google changed its algorithm on Nov 16 I wrote one of the first articles about it. When the Google Answers guy for search engines answered people's questions he syndicated me. In Google Groups some guy refered to my website saying "I found it." Danny Sullivan linked into my article too!

I got calls from all over the world, and I got to talk to a ton of people. It was actually overwhelming, but things are a bit closer to reality now though... I have time to read books again, and time enough to make long post like this that few will care to ever read