Looking for a specialized organic tincture today, I had my daughter with me and knew I couldn’t spend the day meandering from place to place on the off chance somebody had it. First I used google’s local search to compile a shortlist of herbalists and natural health-food stores in my area, then I started calling them.

I had about a 90% failure rate. Most of them went into voicemail after about 20 rings, and the voicemail greeting didn’t answer any basic questions: hours of operation, location, common directions, type of business carried out.

The rest didn’t even go into voicemail.

The one person who answered the phone, told me they had what I wanted in stock. Guess what? They got the sale, along with a few other items I wanted after I made the trip directly to their location.

All of these places struck me as mom-and-pop’s or owner-operated shops. They all serve as a good example of what we talk about here: growing your business through common sense approaches and using web tools to extend any business.

So our takeaways from today’s odyssey could be:

• A ringing phone is a surgically optimized lead screaming CLOSE ME, so maybe pick up the phone and close that sale.
• If you can’t answer the phone within a short number of rings, have it go into voicemail with an informative message: store hours, locations and if you have a website, your URL.
• Then on your website, have an easy-to-use search function, hopefully with some degree of search-engine-optimization that lists everything you carry, or if you’re a service, every type of service you provide. So when people like me type “organic echoberry tincture, etobicoke” your page would likely be on the first page

It isn’t rocket science, yet we find time and again, the few businesses that succeed above their peers take these basic common sense mechanisms and automate them, optimize them and have them operating 24/7.

With the economy cratering and unemployment soaring, we’ve remarked here before that the climate is ripe for a spike in “self-employment”. With this come the inevitable scams that prey on the desperate. We’ll start a channel here to point them out.

Our first “Beware” outfit is a Bait-and-Switch operation called EarnCashFastWithGoogle.com. If you have a facebook account you’ve probably seen these ads, or maybe you’ve clicked through a link to some blog.

The short version is this: A single mother or some guy who has just lost their job, in danger of losing their home, desperate, aware that most work-from-home programs are scams, but decided to try this one out because, hey, it only cost $1 and it was Google, big, publicly traded, above board, etc. And lo-and-behold, no experience required, no selling, not multi-level-marketing, just posting short links to the web (whatever that means) and WOW $5,000 a month without even thinking about it. SALVATION!

There is no program with Google that pays you for posting web links. The closest thing to it is Google Adsense, which you may recognize because you’re reading a page with a couple of Google Adsense blocks in it right now. Yes, if anybody clicks on them, I get paid. And yes, if a LOT of people click on them I stand to make out well. But this is very different from the “program” being offered here.

The sales pitch is being framed in a way that there is some simple program “out there” (in this case Google) where all you have to do is sign-up, follow the instructions and boom: 5 grand a month, easy.

Remember this always: If any path to wealth was truly easy, everybody would be doing it and we’d all be rich.

The ability to make money from Google can pretty well only happen via Adsense and it relies completely on the ability to create a website that attracts targeted visitors in enough numbers that a realistic click rate adds up to a significant amount of money. It is not a matter of paying EarnCashFastWithGoogle the $1 they are asking for and having a check from Google in the mail to you within 48-72 hours. That’s a pipe-dream.

Even if you were to sign up with Google Adsense and create a website that earns anything, you’re about 8 weeks away from your first payout, and that’s if you clear the minimum payout level. If you’re new to this, you probably won’t.

To give you an idea on what it takes to earn money via Adsense (although it varies wildly based on what segment the website is in), I own a hobby website that earns a steady $500/month and gets 4,000 visitors per day. The website is nearly 8 years old and took about 4 years to organically build up the traffic to get to that point.

The folks at EarnCashFastWithGoogle.com want you to believe that if you send them $1 you will be 30 days away from earning $5,000/month from some mysterious Google link-posting program that doesn’t actually exist.

Seems like a lot of trouble to go through for a buck. doesn’t it? Well it gets worse, because what this actually is is called “bait and switch”. There are numerous reports from disgruntled buyers that after signing up they are actually subscribed to several “bonus” programs that cost between $4.99 and $29.99 per month.

This is the scam. To get you to give them your credit card info so that they can sign up you up for several programs “as a bonus” that can easily add up to significant monthly charges to your credit card.

So be careful out there. If you’re suffering through hard times and things look bleak, these “too good to be true” programs aren’t going to deliver you from all your cares: they’ll just add to your problems.

Foremost – determine your niche! You can’t expect to be found on the first page of search results if you do what other 10 million people do. If you create cell phone cases – maybe you should advertise as “pink cell phone case with sequins” or something equally unique and specific.
First – make sure that your site is visible to major search agents at all. If you’ve chosen spectacular Flash movie for your presentation – it may not be so obvious.
Secondly – start geo target your audience. Maybe you rather be seen in Toronto than Australia.
Thirdly – include paid advertisement, register with LinkedIn, Facebook and what have you, and have someone to become active in blogs of your industry to spread a word in a wide variety of mediums.

How to approach an optimization of your site? Be sure that everyone in your company will have their own opinion what looks or works best – it is politics, and it happens everywhere. No matter what your designer/developer will come up with – your CEO or owner will probably dismiss or try to edit in their own way. The only way to really optimize your site is through objective testing, not guessing. Changes to the website can be made/tested so easily and so often now, that testing is the only objective way to come up with a solution that WORKS – by bringing you new customers.
Experiment with new copies of the pages and check how these changes influenced your traffic.

There is not enough time in a day for you, business owner, to track visits to your site, monitor yours and competition’s rankings or plan for online marketing. Someone’s gotta do it, however, unless you give up on marketing all together.

hg

One of the first things to consider is a matter of skill. Are you comfortable enough with your talent to offer it as a service or product? Your service or product does not have to be unique, it must however show enough professionalism and experience to capture and maintain a customer-base. You must be able to interest strangers, not just your friends and family.

Another question is how resourceful are you? If your self-employed business is based on a tangible product, where are you getting your resources? Are they readily available and relatively easy for you to access? If you are not able to warehouse your inventory or raw material, then you will be dependent on a manufacture. How reliable is that source and do you have a secondary plan for supplying your business.

Tracy Coenen in her article “Are you cut out to be self-employed?” suggests that individuals who are embarking on the path of entrepreneurship ask themselves 4 very important questions. (http://www.walletpop.com/2008/01/21/are-you-cut-out-to-be-self-employed/)

First, “have you saved enough money?” The expense involved in starting your own business can be overwhelming and the cause of failure if you don’t have enough.

Second, “are you ready to go beyond the nine-to-five?” As in every new venture, the time you invest is well spent. With your own business, you will definitely need to put in the hours to increase your chances of success.

Next on the list is “do you envision a life of glamour?” If so, either rethink your plans now or hold that thought for a few years while you perform the grunge work involved in starting a new business.

One of the most important questions Coenen asks is “are you disciplined?” For you would need to be. As an entrepreneur, you do not have a punch clock, so hours spent on the job will show on your bottom-line. You are your own boss, so a sick day spent doing your personal shopping or lunching with friends is a direct lost of profit and totally your responsibility.

There are many challenging aspects of self-employment, but there are equally as many rewards. Investing time for introspection and research in your area of business will benefit you from the very start.

That seems to be the indication from this Financial Post poll that found:

“About 900,000 Canadians who plan to start a business by the end of 2008 are among 3.3 million who are looking to be their own boss within the next five years. The biggest growth in desired self-employment was in Internet and online services, while interest had fallen in arts and crafts, retail sales, business services and management consulting.“

Which is interesting to me because ironically, now that I’ve been fortunate enough to enjoy some success in building an internet business, I have spent the last couple years diligently looking for offline investments.

But I cannot stress this enough: I wound up self-employed in the internet sector because I was working in the business and had experience and knowledge there. The surest path to successful and sustainable self-employment is by sticking to what you know. Don’t just pick some sector because from the outside looking in it seems easy and lucrative. Nothing is once you get up close and into it. If was truly easy and lucrative, everybody would be doing it.

Some self-employed just call themselves that and are more or less working “under-the-table”, collecting their pay without income tax or CPP deductions and then instead of setting some aside, reporting their income, and remitting income tax directly, they just keep it all and hope for the best.

Is that “bogus self employment” or just plain tax evasion?

The important thing for legitimate above-board self-employed is to make sure their affairs are as ordered as the traditional employed: set money aside for taxes, probably paid in quarterly installments to Revenue Canada. Even better, incorporate and pay yourself less witholding, in other words, have your corporation deduct taxes and CPP and remit on your behalf.

I found that once I started drawing a salary from my own corporation which was making deductions “at source” other benefits followed (like having an easier time obtaining credit or applying for a mortgage).

Funny to say so since barter is by definition an exchange without money.

Some companies will approach you with a proposition to barter their services or goods for yours. Others require membership to take part in barter.

It is hard to say if barter makes sense for you. Wouldn’t it be simpler to pay for what you need and get money for what you delivered? Financial benefit of barter is rare to be obvious. Why? Because companies offering barter for their goods and services usually set the price high.

I came across this company renting computers and laptops on a barter basis.
If you needed computer for a month, the price was almost equal to buying one from the discount store. So why bother? Well, maybe this company wants something that you produced, and your actual cost to produce it was low – like an artist’s painting… Sure, you spent time painting it and it contains your very creative idea, but you had plenty of time anyway, and you find it hard to sell your products, just for this simple reason that you are not a salesman and you can’t afford one at the moment. But you have this presentation coming up to a large corporate client, and you can’t go there without a laptop… In this situation you can set a ‘price’ for your painting at the market value, and get a laptop in barter exchange. You both benefited, because otherwise you could not get a laptop and that company couldn’t have afforded a great painting you made.

Try for instance B-Commerce. It’s a private, membership-based barter exchange facility. Who needs barter? Well, everyone needs plumber, electrician, dentist, florist or computer repair. There are many more categories of businesses that barter there. It does sound interesting and it’s worth checking.

Barter is also a good way to network. One more way to spread a word about your business – among others seeking services and goods, is to advertise on barter exchanges.

In Toronto you can barter on Craigslist, on U-Exchange, on BCommerce, and others.

Some great entrepreneurs like for instance Razor Suleman estimates that … “5% to 10% of sales by his Toronto-based promotional-products distributor, Snap Promotions, are in exchange for goods and services. Barter has generated sales Snap might have missed doing a straight cash business, and it has cut costs, too. “We’ve been taking the dollars we save,” says Suleman, “and investing them back into the business.” He said in an interview for Canadian Business online. “

Beware that some barter networks aren’t always as advertised: despite promising low fees and lots of liquidity, few of them have delivered the goods. “We started dropping them,” says Suleman, “because the time and energy to manage relationships with these non-profitable exchanges affected our bottom line.”

See this article about barter: http://www.canadianbusiness.com/entrepreneur/financing/article.jsp?content=20041027_115252_3420

Barter thrives on international markets, too. You wouldn’t believe how many barter offers is out there:
http://www.google.com/Top/Business/International_Business_and_Trade/Barter/
Maybe one of them will give your business that extra kick it needs to soar.

If you want to barter with me, my ears are wide open.

hg@minibizweb.com

While the rest of the article poses the question of whether these “techno outsiders” are really welcome or needed doing tech start-ups (the survey also found 43% were looking at the tech sector for their start-up), it leaves us to ponder the larger issue of hard times having a recipricol effect on self-employment numbers.

I remember during the early 90’s recession (not that I even realized there was a recession on at the time), that there were more than usual television commercials targetting the entrepreneur segment. I remember some of them angered me deeply as I was for the most part an out of work college graduate. But the mechanism was unmistakable and I seemed to know it on an intuitive level.

The shift to self-employment was not a conscious decision to become an entrepreneur as much as it was a necessary mental shift I had to make in order to think outside the box and differentiate myself from everybody else in the same boat as myself.

I wasn’t an out-of-work computer programming graduate handing out resumes. Those went into the garbage after a few futile months of job searching. In their place, I printed up some cheap business cards with the words “M Factor Consulting” on them and *presto*, I was a consultant instead. That seemed to work at least marginally better than the former, even if it was a placebo effect in my own mind. I landed more one-off jobs and managed to string them together into something resembling a fledgling career.

With a recession all but officially here (even the talking heads on TeeVee agree that a recession is a near certainty in the US in 2008 and with Canada typically lagging 10 to 12 months we’ll certainly feel the effects here), self-employment in some shape or form will likely surge.

“For Baby Boomers, self-employment may serve as the ideal transition between the 9-to-5 corporate treadmill and traditional full-stop retirement. They may continue to work, but on their own terms.”

The article also touches on succession planning, noting that there may be as many as 500,000 Canadian self-employed boomers getting ready to retire, many of them intending to hand the reigns of the family business over to children, and that those children may have other plans.

“If the plan is to pass the business to the kids, the family needs to talk about it and plan for it … Many business owners are unpleasantly surprised to find their goals for the transition of the business do not match those of their children.”"