In an excellent interview by BigThink.com, Jason Fried of 37Signals discusses the value of being self-funded vs being funded by venture capital, why ad supported software works for Google but not others, the culture of ‘interruptions’ in the workplace, advice on developing a product or service, and the irrational fear of security in cloud based products and services.
Internet Business Ideas Introduction
The Design Quotes “Internet Business Ideas” is an ongoing regular series of articles highlighting untapped niche internet business ideas. We believe the internet is a great place to start a business and to help budding entrepreneurs, we bring you this series. Included is an overview of the business idea and a step by step plan on how to get started.
If you are interested in this idea, please let us know in the comments and feel free to request a design quote from our designers to help get you started.
You can also subsribe to our Internet Business Ideas RSS feed.
Overview
One of the easiest internet business ideas to get up and running with is to become a Virtual Assistant. A virtual assistant is someone who offers remote administrative support to other businesses.
Skills Needed
- Desktop Publishing: You will need to have at least an intermediate knowledge of wordprocessing and spreadsheet usage.
- Writing Skills: You will need to be able to write clearly and concisely. Much of this will be used writing emails.
- Customer Service: It is likely that you will need to make and receive phone calls on behalf of the business that employs you.
Equipment Needed
- A computer: You don’t need an especially powerful computer, since most of the work you performed will be wordprocessing and emailing.
- Internet connection: This is a no brainer. You will need to send files back and forth to your clients as well as regular emailing.
- VOIP phone: This can be software or hardware. We recommend using Skype since the initial outlay is much lower.
Best Practice Guidelines
To be a successful virtual assistant (VA), you will need to be highly independent. Most of the people hiring you are hiring you because they do not have the time to complete the tasks themselves. As such, it is very common for them to provide you with only basic instructions. It’s imporant to understand that this does not mean that the work you submit to them should also be basic. It should be thorough, detailed and clear. For example, a client might ask you to “provide a list of all flower shops in Melbourne”. Firstly, ask as many questions as you can before starting. In this example useful questions to ask would be:
- Do you want the list in a spreadsheet or a word document?
- What information needs to be collected? I am thinking that Business Name, Address, City, Website URL, Email Address and Phone Number would be useful. Is there anything else that needs to be collected?
- When do you need to work completed by?
Top 10 Tasks Required by Virtual Assistants
Research: Research is a broad area and can include anything from collecting mailing addresses to finding the latest trendy technology topics. Research definitely requires strong analytics skills.
Data Entry: This usually requires you to source a certain type of information and store it in a standardised format.
Transcription: Listen to recorded audio/video and type everything said.
Writing and Editing: You may be required to write/edit short articles, letters or even press releases.
Customer Service and Sales: Receiving and making phone calls to business contacts and customers.
Step by Step Plan
- Set up a personal profile / portfolio website. This website promotes you personally and should include a CV and a history of any related work. We recommend using a free service called Magnetize: http://magntize.com/. This nifty site gives you a free online business card which you can use to link to all of your online profiles such as Twitter, Facebook and any online marketplaces you use to source work like oDesk.
- Register yourself on at least one online job marketplace like oDesk. Create a profile and list your skills and experiences. oDesk is a hub that connects providers with jobs. They also handle all of the billing which is very handy.
- Get yourself an invoicing system so you can bill clients you acquire outside of oDesk. We highly recommend using Freshbooks. Freshbooks is free to register and has the most professional and easy to use interface we have seen which is important from your client’s perspective.
- Register an account with PayPal so you can accept payments electronically. Freshbooks and PayPal integrate nicely together. When you invoice your clients with Freshbooks, they will be able to pay with their credit card or PayPal account.
- Download and register a free Skype account. If your clients needs to you to accept calls, you can buy a dedicated local phone number in the client’s place of business.
- Finally, once you have had a few clients set up a dedicate website of your own and expand the business by hiring your own virtual assistants. Of course we recommend using Design Quotes to find the best web designer to build a professional website.
If you are considering starting a virtual assistant business, let us know in the comments. Feel free to link to your magntize and oDesk profiles.
Resources Mentioned
- Design Quotes
- oDesk
- PayPal
- Skype
- Magntize
Once you get a list of web design quotes, choosing the best quote is easy if you understand what you want. If you want a simple informational website, perhaps with basic e-commerce and no tricky interactive features, you should look for a web site design company that specialises in small business website packages.
If you want a web site that addresses complicated business problems, connects to your existing databases or customer service systems, or offers e-commerce that’s more than point, click, and buy, you will want to find a website design company who work with your business as a consultant.
There are many aspects of a web design project. When asking for and comparing web design quotes, it is best to be specific about what you want. This way, there are no surprise costs half-way through the project.
A web design quote might address any of the following:
- Billing and Payments
- Blogs
- Booking Systems (Rooms, appointments etc)
- Donations
- Dynamic Photo Galleries
- eCommerce
- Forums
- Help Desk / Bug Reporting
- Interactive Map
- Member/User Management
- Newsletter Subscriptions
- Polls
- Ratings and Reviews
- Social Networking Profiles
- Video Player
- Website Monitoring and Analytics
- Interface Design
- Form Design
- Database Design
- Web Hosting
- Domain Names
The first step in choosing a web site design company is conducting a phone interview. Here are some questions to ask. (If you’re looking for a freelancer, almost all of these still apply.)
- What are your strengths as a site development company?
- Do you understand my business and customers? (It’s not the end of the world if they’re unfamiliar with your industry, but they should be eager to learn.)
- Do you handle design, development, hosting, and e-commerce? (Ask only about those you’re interested in, of course.)
- Will you do the work, or outsource it to others?
- Can you help us with content creation or ideas?
- Will you test the site in various browsers? Which? (A site that works fine in one browser may break in another.)
- Can your developers connect the site to our customer database/inventory tracking software/sales software?
- Will we be able to update the site content ourselves?
- Do you do site hosting? What kind of guarantees do you offer?
- How long have you been in business? Can you provide some sample sites for me to look at? (Be wary if you may hear the answer that “most of the sites we’ve worked on are intranets, not available to the public.” Any company deserving of your business should have at least a few sites to show you.)
- What kind of support do you offer if our site breaks or needs emergency updates?
In addition to looking at sample web sites, you should also check a design company’s references. Talking to their other clients can give you the good picture of what it’s like to work with a particular web site design company. Get at least three, and ask them specific questions:
- Did the firm meet deadlines?
- Were they flexible?
- What aspects of their work were particularly strong?
- What areas were not quite up to your expectations?
- Did they help you plan and organize the web site?
- Did they set and meet realistic goals for your company?
- Would you work with this company again?
Armed with the right questions not only will you get the information you need when evaluating design quotes, you will also appear savvy which will mean the designers will respect you. Mutual respect and with lots of communication will lead to good prices and smooth projects.
When working with web designers it is easy to get lost in all the jargon. For example:
Designer: “Would you like your quotation to include an CMS quote or do you want XHTML compatibility?”
Customer: “Umm… yes?”
The more you know about what you want, the better the end product is going to be and the better deal you are going to get. So let’s have a look at the six major types of websites and their typical features.
1. Static Website
Pros: Cheap to build
Cons: Expensive to maintain
Used by: Start ups and small service based businesses
A static website is the most common website for small businesses. The word ’static’ refers to way the information on a web page is loaded. The best way to explain this is to compare a ’static’ photo gallery with a ‘dynamic’ photo gallery.
A static photo gallery has the gallery photos inserted into the web page. Click to see an example of a static photo gallery. When the website owner wants to add photos to this gallery, they will need to employ the skills of a web programmer because the photos are part of the code. They are loaded from inside the web page.
A dynamic photo gallery has it’s photos stored in a database and loads the files from the database and into the web page. Click to see an example of a dynamic photo gallery. When the website owner wants to add photos to this gallery, all they need to do is upload the photos to the database using a web interface. This makes updating the gallery much easier.
Example Static Websites:
Get static website quotes at Design Quotes
2. eCommerce Website
Pros: Sell products online and take payments online
Cons: Time consuming and expensive to set up
Used by: Retailers
eCommerce has quickly become the most popular type of website. With the wild success of eBay and Amazon, more and more businesses are looking for ways to sell their products online. The main factors that make a website an eCommerce website is not just that it sells products, but that it provides a special administrator’s area where the website owner can add new products at any time. Much like the dynamic photo gallery, an eCommerce website is a dynamic product gallery.
Example eCommerce Websites:
Get eCommerce quotes at Design Quotes
3. Flash Website
Pros: Looks fantastic
Cons: Slow load times and can negatively affect search engine rankings
Used by: Fashion industry, web application, web games
Flash websites use a special kind of graphics by Adobe. Flash allows designers to be very creative without worrying about the limitations of technology. Flash allows for lots of animation and interactive elements. Fashion catalogues often use Flash so that there is an added level of glitz. One of the main criticisms of using Flash is that the text in your website cannot easily be read by search engines such as Google. This means that a flash website is much less likely to rank highly in search results.
Example Flash Websites:
Get Flash website quotes at Design Quotes
4. Content Management System Website
Pros: Article and news management
Cons: Difficult to set up, often hard to learn to use
Used by: News portals, article websites, review websites
A Content Managment System (CMS) is a website which focuses on the authoring, editing and publishing of website articles and news. The articles in a CMS are stored in a database and are displayed in the website the same way photos from a dynamic photo gallery are. The advantage is that a CMS can allow many users (editors, authors, admins etc) to update the websites content through the website itself. This means that a web programmer does not need to be employed every time an article is added. Another feature of many CMS platforms is plugins. Plugins allow you to extend the functionality of your website. For example, you could install a dynamic photo gallery plugin in your CMS, giving you both articles and photos.
Example CMS Websites:
Get CMS quotes at Design Quotes
5. Blog Website
Pros: Simplistic article and news management
Cons: Not as flexible as a CMS
Used by: Individuals with an opinion
A blog is a recent type of website. It is a simplified CMS that allows everyday users to post their thoughts and opinions as often as they like. Blogs are more and more often being used to manage articles as well. Blogs are often seen as part of a corporate site because it gives a friendly voice to the company.
Example Blog Websites:
Get blog website quotes at Design Quotes
6. Social Network Website
Pros: Allows groups of people to interact, provides lots of advertising space
Cons: Expensive to set up, hard to attract a user base
A social network is the most recent website phenomenon. A social network is like a community of blogs, email and games all rolled into one. Social network websites are few and far between because the success of a social network depends on having a large community of users. However more and more organisations are beginning to create their own small niche social network websites.
Example Social Network Websites:
Get social network website quotes at Design Quotes
