Josh Anstey’s Blog

Following on from my article, ‘Who are you and why should I care’ I found this interesting article that is along the same lines.

It reinforces how important your online reputation is, and how you need to make sure that your online reputation is positive, consistent and portrays the image you want the world to see.

Click here to read the article by Tyler Cruz on Learning to Manage your online reputation.

Did you like this article? You may be interested in my article, ‘Who are you and why should I care’ or ‘The art of the Elevator Pitch’.

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I read an interesting article on Biz-Blogger.net called ‘Who are you and why should I care’. I have talked before about the importance of marketing yourself and how you position yourself. This is even more important for online entrepreneurs, as we live in an age of instant information. You really need to have thought about this, and be ready to answer the title question of this post, ‘Who are you and why should I care?’

Some questions the article suggests you think about and know how to answer include:

• How am I different?
• What do I stand for?
• What can I provide?
• What are my product strengths?
• What are my product weaknesses?
• What does the market want?
• Am I an innovator?
• What can I personally offer to the product/service?

Read the full article, ‘Who are you and why should I care’ on Biz-Blogger.net as it has a few good pointers.

Something that relates to this is the elevator pitch article that I wrote about a while back.
Click here to read my article, ‘The art of the Elevator Pitch’.

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Hey there! The internet is vital in marketing and networking yourself. It shows people who you are, what you are all about, and gives them a really good insight into what they are going to get if they go into business with you.

For those marketers, networkers and entrepreneurs out there I would like to give you a great example of how someone used their blog to land their dream job. Remember, your blog promotes you and it is often the first thing a person will look at before meeting you.

As an entrepreneur, a few ways that a blog can assist you are by:

• Attracting business offers
• Bring in business partners – determining if someone wants to go into business with you
• Showing your knowledge, experience and entrepreneurial flair
• Positioning yourself as an industry leader

Here is an example of how you can use your blog to land yourself your dream job or business opportunity.

Matt Coddington is a web designer, and he used his blog as his resume to land himself his dream job. Click here to read his blog about what he did. He also writes the Net Business Blog.

As you can see, your online presence is a great way to position yourself so that you can benefit. So remember, when writing each blog post, the world of opportunity that it can bring to you.

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There is nothing worse than a meeting with no momentum and participation, or a meeting where certain people are not given an opportunity to participate.

Here are 5 tips to encourage participation in meetings:

1. Monitor your own level of contribution – often as entrepreneurs we can get over-excited and steal the show. Make sure you are not the only one participating as you don’t want to come across too dominant or pushy
2. Steer the momentum – it is great if everyone is so enthusiastic about the topic but make sure you control the meeting if they try to talk over each other. If this happens, quieten everyone down, and announce an order to go around the table and hear everyone’s opinion.
3. Encourage everyone to participate – this is your meeting and you’re responsibly that everyone participates in the meeting. If you see somebody sitting quietly in the corner, or not contributing, encourage them to participate. This can be easily done in a number of ways such as asking them if they have anything to contribute to this topic, what their opinion on the topic is, or suggesting to the meeting that you go around the room and get input from everyone
4. Be enthusiastic and supporting – it is important that you are lively and enthusiastic and that you support suggestions made. There are still positive ways of acknowledging ideas that may not be practical or useful without hurting or insulting people. Being enthusiastic and supporting will make people want to participate and contribute
5. Watch body language – this can give you a really good indication of how the meeting is going, and what the person’s thoughts are on the issue. If they are leaning forwards, this means there is a good chance they want to add something, and may not be able to say it. If this happens, actively engage them and ask for their input. On the other hand, if someone is sitting far back and has removed themselves from the conversation, try invite them back in and ask what they think about the topic.

These are 5 simple tips to encouraging participation in a meeting.

Related posts include:

• Preparing for meetings – who to invite
• Preparing for meetings – 7 important points to organising the agenda

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A well organised agenda is one of the secret keys to a successful meeting. Spend some time before the meeting preparing the agenda.

7 important points to organising the agenda are:

1. The purpose of the meeting
2. The division, committee, team or attendees of the meeting
3. Date, time and location of the meeting
4. The expected length of the meeting
5. The items on the agenda – who is responsible / presenting for which item
6. Time allocation for each agenda item
7. Pre-meeting reading / preparation requiredRemember to send around the agenda well before the meeting (at least a day or two). This will allow everyone to see what is going to be discussed at the meeting, prepare accordingly, and propose any other items that they wish to discuss.

I hope you can use these 7 important points to organise your agenda so that you have a successful meeting.

Click here to read my previous post, ‘Preparing for meetings – who to invite’ and a follow on post from this article, ‘Preparing for meetings - 5 tips to encourage participation’.

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Knowing how to prepare for meetings is a really important skill that is quick and easy to learn, but often many entrepreneurs have no ‘meeting’ experience, and therefore don’t prepare for meetings effectively.

On top of this, there is the question of who to invite to the meeting. It is safe to say that people generally do not like meetings. Furthermore people really don’t like meetings that they didn’t need to be at. There is no worse impression on people than wasting their time with pointless meetings.

Strategically inviting people to the meeting is the key to avoiding these issues. Preparing for meetings effectively will ensure success and that everyone invited is playing a role in the meeting.

Here are some key points of who you should invite to a meeting:

• Key decision makers
• Senior managers in this area
• People who are experts or have key knowledge about a certain area of interest
• Certain stakeholders in the issues
• Anyone who will have to design, develop, implement, monitor, create or manage the outcomes of these decisions

Remember to carefully think about who is required at the meeting and who the meeting is optional for. Sometimes it is better for senior management just to be updated about the meeting afterwards as this is a lot more time efficient if their direct input is not needed. Others who did not need to be at the meeting can be updated via a quick chat, phone call or email.

As entrepreneurs, it is important to determine who is required at meetings, and strategically invite people. After all, you may be starting out, and this is a perfect impression of where ‘first impressions last’. Rather saves someone’s time now than waste it.

Preparing for meetings and inviting the appropriate people is often a challenge for entrepreneurs with no experience, so this should be a good guide to get you going. It will help you run a successful meeting and avoid people thinking of the good old saying ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’.

Have a great meeting!

Other related articles: ‘Preparing for meetings – 7 important points to organising the agenda’ and ‘Preparing for meetings - 5 tips to encourage participation’

Have you read my ‘Diary of a Start-up #1’ series?

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Welcome back to my ‘Diary of a start-up’ series.

Today I am going to remind you how important it is to take advantage of your age. It is very exciting to be a young entrepreneur, and trust me when I say that a lot of people are just as excited about it as you. Society is becoming more accustomed to young entrepreneurs and are willing to embrace and support them.

This is something I learnt when I started my web design business. We were definitely ahead of our time in the sense of being young entrepreneurs, and encountered a bit of resistance, but overall we were able to take advantage of our age. You will always get the people who do not trust you, or don’t believe in you, but this is a perfect opportunity to prove them wrong and show that you mean business. Show them that your entrepreneurial flair won’t stop at anything. I found this to be a really positive beneficial attitude to have.

In my experience, I found that most people are really energized when they encounter young entrepreneurs and often want to deal with you to see what you have and can offer. This is really great, so make sure that you don’t disappoint.

Take advantage of your age to get in the media. As they say, all publicity is good publicity, and using your age to create media hype and a story can do wonders for your business. New reporters love nothing more than to showcase the work and enthusiasm of a young entrepreneur, so get out there and in the spotlight.

In summary, take advantage of your age because:

• People love dealing with young entrepreneurs
• Your age is a great story to get you publicity

These are two really simple points, but nonetheless important in generating strong business and making the most of being a young entrepreneur.

Read my previous post, ‘Diary of a start-up #1’.

Keep your eye out for future ‘Diary of a start-up’ posts. Make sure you don’t miss them by subscribing to my blog.

I am pleased to announce that I was mentioned in a blog carnival on the ‘Business Opportunities and Ideas Blog’. Whilst John, the writer of the blog disagreed with my post mentioned, it did provide some good discussion and through generation.

In any case, you can check out my appearance on the ‘Carnival of Small Business Issues #26’.

There are some interesting posts in this carnival.

Thanks John for adding me to the carnival!

What a great exciting month October has been for blog.joshanstey.com!!! We kicked off the month with ‘Networking with Business Cards’ which is really useful in getting a better idea of how to use your business card to your benefit.

‘UPOD – Pronounced “You Pod” – Under Promise, Over Deliver’ gave entrepreneurs some business insight and ideas for future projects and developments. This is quite an interesting theory.

We are in the middle of what has been coined ‘Web 2.0’ and what better way to explore this than to post ‘Web 2.0 Galore’. A few great Web 2.0 sites and web 2.0 logos are on show here.

The benefits of mobile phones were seen in the article ‘Mobile Phone Opportunity’. This is definitely some food for thought for all you entrepreneurs out there.

‘Advertising Collection’ was a list of advertising websites that are a great resource for advertisers. You can never have too many resources, so this list is guaranteed to give you some very useful information.

Who would have thought there were rugby entrepreneurs? The 2007 Rugby World Cup provided some interesting ideas and insights into the mind of the entrepreneur. I explain this with my post, ‘The Rugby Entrepreneur’.

A quick view of how those that inspire us are living in ‘How to live like a billionaire’. There are some images of where the wealth these guys have created has taken them.

I found an interesting site that made online advertising really simple. Check out my article ‘Online advertising made simple’ to find out more.

My ‘Diary of a Start-up’ series started. This was very exciting, and gave a few tips and tricks from some of my experiences. Keep your eye out for more of these by subscribing to my blog.

‘Second Life Virtual Career Fair’was really interesting and amazing to see where the web has taken us.

No entrepreneur can go without it. It is so important to the success of a business. ‘The art of an elevator pitch’ explains all you need to know and how to master it!

If it’s Web 2.0 why can’t we have Marketing 2.0? ‘Tools for Marketers 2.0’ gives some tips and sites for being a 2.0 marketer.

My post ‘Internet breaks barriers, making US less relevant’ is topical, in the news, and gives every entrepreneur opportunity!

I was lucky enough to attend an ‘ACS Young IT Talk’ and this provided some interesting ideas and posts including ‘A straight line career path doesn’t exist’ and ‘Short term pay, long term gain’. These are really interesting and there is a lot to learn from them.

‘Are entrepreneurs scared of failure?’ was an interesting post that was thought provoking and is a must read.

Finally, we rounded the month up with ‘Marketing and Networking YOU!’ As an entrepreneur, you have to read this article so that you can make the most out of marketing and networking yourself to benefit your business.

What an exciting and developing month October has been. November is shaping up to be even better, with lots more information, tips and tricks for all you entrepreneurs out there. If there is an area or topic of interest that you would like me to blog about, send me a message here.

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I was reading an interesting article about word of mouth marketing and getting YOU out there. It is important to remember that you are your businesses most important asset.

Why?

As an entrepreneur, you are marketable, of interest, topical, and the brains and brawn behind your business. Its time to start marketing and networking in the new world, and there are many ways to use yourself to market your business.

Some tips from the article include:

• Make yourself news – make sure that whatever your business does, you turn it into interesting and useful news. It gets you and your business in the public eye and is a great way to position yourself as an industry leader
• Ditch the (traditional) media list – keep it in the marketing mix, but open up to the online world, and the next generation of marketing (this includes blogs and the Web 2.0 world)
• Create an online press center – these days, your website is the first port of call for you or your business. Create a press center, with press releases, testimonials, statements and advertisements. Make sure if people come looking for it, they find it and take something away with them.
• Think big. Target narrow – think big to assess your businesses market, who your target market is and how to get to them. Then target narrow to make sure you communicate and engage effectively with them
• Make yourself easy to find – Don’t play hide and seek. Get out there and make sure that you are easily found at the click of a button. This will really benefit you in the long run with lead generation

These are just a few ideas on marketing and networking YOU and how that will benefit you and your business.

There will be more to come on this topic in the near future.

Click here for the original article.

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