Can small business owners be successful “Jack of all trades”?
The phrase “Jack of all trades, master of none” sprang to mind yesterday as I was writing a sponsored post about a internet marketing company and the potential value of using an expert to drive traffic to your site. It made me think if you really can succeed in being an all rounder in a online small business.
As the owner of an online travel business I feel that my big weakness is in the field of IT. I’m fortunate in that one of our sons is a 3rd year computing student and he set up my website and blogs for me. However during term time between his studies, part time job with a search engine advertising firm and his leisure interests he doesn’t have much time left to be my IT consultant.
I could write the most wonderful articles and destination guides for my website but if they are not found and read by potential customers so what? However you could write mediocre content, stuff it with keywords, be really good at search engine optimisation and have a flood of visitors to your site, who then think what rubbish content and quickly click away.
So ideally you need to have excellent content and a constant flow of targeted traffic. Sounds simple but…? Perhaps be an investor, identify a profitable niche market, hire the best writers and the best IT people and sit back and wait for the money to roll in? I’ve often thought that blogs which are part of a network such as b5media are of to such a good start as each of the blogs has links to all the other blogs in the network which gives them are a reasonable ranking immediately. It would take me ages to build up the same number of links.
As a small business owner what’s the best solution for you, assuming you aren’t a master of all trades? Maybe a partnership where writers and IT experts collaborate? Or if you see yourself as a writer you hire an top notch IT consultant or vice versa? How are you going to pay the expert before you you start to amass your fortune?
My approach to building up my travel business has been to continue with part time freelance employment as a social research interviewer. This is not just for the income but to get out and about, away from sitting at the computer for hours every day. Plus I’ve had the services of our son at a pretty low rate of pay. I try very hard to master as much of the IT as I can even attempting horrors such as the basics of html.
Do you think there is a place for the small business owner is the current competitive online environment? What is your strategy as an online entrepreneur?
on January 8th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
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