It is obvious that business is about managing money. You'd be surprised to know that majority of Online Businesses, web developers, designers, advertisers and bloggers cannot manage money. This is probably one of the biggest reasons why web 2.0 sites go after funding the VC firms look into management and want to see a manager with at least MBA running things.

Managing money is about what you can, cannot and should not buy. Just because you have money doesn't mean that you should spend right away. Sometimes the biggest mistake a starup makes revolves around spending money at the wrong time towards the wrong thing.

Managing Money is about being smart and thoughtful with money, here are a few ways to be smarter with money

Expenses

No matter who you are or what you do you've got expenses whether you like it or not. Being smart with money would allow you to analyze your expenses, take out the unnecessary ones or bargain for better deals. For example, there are hundreds of options for having a cell phone plan, but researching a little about you talking habits allows you select the most appropriate plan that over time saves you money. You can apply this to cars payments, office lease, Internet and tv bills, computers equipment, starbucks coffee, lunch and dinner.

Employees

If you are working on your own then you are your own employee and not your own boss. If you are in the online business and you're making money then the chances are that there multiple employees working in that company. Most startups, as soon as they come in contact with money they go crazy with hiring thinking that the same money they're making this is going to continue to next year and year after that. Not so fast, in the online work you can be on top one months and at the bottom by years end. Never estimate or speculate when it comes to online. Keep you team small, and hold on tight to your money.

Hosting

Hosting can be very cheap or very expensive, but did you know that it doesn't matter what kind of hosting you start with for as long as it is flexible enough to grow as you grow. If you have a blog, or thinking of starting one, think for a second what is your blog going to be, if it's a hobby blog then a cheap shared hosting with $5-10/month hosting is good enough, but if you intend to really promote the site and make a bit of income on the side while holding your day job then stay away from shared hosting and go with a small Virtual Server for $30-50/month and as the traffic to your site grow so can your server resources this way you don't have to spend more that you need.

I know a few startups that before they even had a decent application on their hand they were going around shopping for servers and co-location options. As a startup stick with small, go with a small Virtual Server, this way if you hit big you can easily upgrade to fully dedicated servers and multi server with load balancing options but don't blow the money you don't have right from the get go, what if you're doesn't pick up at all, all that money wasted!!!

Marketing

Every business, website or blogs needs to be marketed otherwise how would people find out about it. But did you know that in this day and age the most effective marketing doesn't actually cost a penny? all it costs it time! in the next article i will be talking a great deal about this.

Whether your project is a startup or small business site, you should stay away from marketing at all costs. Marketing is basically spending money to promote your site by buying advertising space, paying for editorial features, mail outs, and the list goes on. Your Marketing effort is measured by ROI - Return of Investments and since as a startup to small business your level of brand reputation is low all your marketing efforts will go to waste anyways. Instead of marketing you should Campaign. Campaigning doesn't necessarily cost money, there are a lot back alley ways to getting your name out there without needing to spend a dime!

Campaigning is much harder than marketing which is one of the biggest reasons why most businesses take the easier way out. My philosophy is "No Sweat, No Result" meaning you have to work hard, you should NOT start thinking of cheating the system right from the get go, in other words stay away from the lazy route.

To Campaign first measure your competency with available opportunities, know where you are most strong and leverage your strengths to enhance your brand by giving it personality. I know an entrepreneur who was great at public speaking, so to promote his business/brand/product he kept participating in all sorts of forums and conferences. He aligned his speeches so that he can integrate a part of his brand into them. In a way his was selling his brand indirectly and was getting paid a lot of money to promote his own business.

Focus on speed, develop a competitive instinct, know that it's a jungle out there, you either kill or be killed. In this world R&D does NOT mean Research and Development, R&D means Rub and Duplicate as soon as possible, never let your business lose it's competitive advantage to another party. Come out with a simple idea you can stamp into everyones brain then expand the idea by adding more aligned products and features. Do NOT tangent into off topic industries, for example, if your site is about cars, don't tangent off into talking about politics, but instead expand by adding motorcycles, or motor sports and so on, keep everything relevant because your existing customers are the most profitable ones.

Campaigning is time focused. you cannot expect a campaign to last you a year, most campaign run for only a few months. The beginning of a campaign is a critical time, you have to be able to come out hard and fast. To do so, Exploit the gravitational center of your industry with space and energy. Find out what drives your industry and try to be controversial, or critical and at best interesting. People love to read about controversy and cannot stand criticism while they constantly seek better benefits, and blogs love to write about what people like to read.

Forget about soft selling. Replace soft selling metrics like satisfaction, delight, impressions and gifts, with hard campaigning metrics like big benefits, revolutions and evolutions all with revenues and margins in mind. Your business should be focused on building revenue streams rather sales channels.

Don't just run an ad for 3 months while thinking you have 3 months of nothing else to do. In 3 months you should constantly update and upgrade your site, enhance the user experience, experiment with different campaign strategies, and live in a suitcase going from city to city, newspaper to newspaper, radio to radio. You have to let everybody know that you are serious about this. This is no longer the time where you can get away with BETA software and half baked business ideas. Each business idea has only one chance to make an impact, sitting around and spending money on ad dollars wouldn't get you there! It's you against the whole world!

Today Internet is extremely crowded and polluted, and day by day it doesn't get any better. Many applications and blogs start and die everyday. A project you think is brilliant is already being thought and developed by several other groups and any day now they are going to beat you to the launch platform. But don't worry too much about being the second or third site arriving to the starting lineup, the road ahead is extremely bumpy and difficult. The faith of your online project is not defined by who launches first but by who gets it right!

By getting it "right" i don't mean the perfectly designed and developed site, nothing will ever be perfect, but "Right" as in what people wanted all along; "Right" as in efficient, beneficial, reliant and easy. Getting right is a guessing game because it's hard to predict who want what and if you can fit it within that need category, but is it?

Getting it "Right" requires lots of research, asking the right group of people the right type of questions, considering their well being ahead of your greedy demands. It is about understanding that if you give people what they want they will probably give you want you've been daydreaming about during all those long hardworking hours. But there are a few other ways as well...

So How can you get it "Right"?

1- Dummy proof everything!

The purpose of your site and topic of discussion MUST be visible. If you have a blog and you're constantly writing on your blog but no one can figure what you're site is about then that's a huge problem. There are millions of blogs that seem to be talking about everything, they announce news, business mergers, parenting, child care, beauty, cars and videos and podcasts, all in one little blog with a naive notion that the larger the broadness of the topic the larger audience they are going to attract to their site. CNN and BBC can do that but then again they have billions of dollars to make sure that they can, you don't!!!
Design of the layout of a site is one those areas that MUST be dummy proof. Making it clear where navigations are located, where each menu is suppose to take you, and how people can get around your site with ease. You must make registration forms something people would want to fill out rather than something you're doing because everybody else seems to be doing it as well.

Make content easy to read, whether it's the headlines, body of the content, static pages, and etc... everything must be identifiable and understandable. The easier you can read content the more engaged people will become in your site. Content is all about typography, from line spacing, size of fonts, choice of fonts to colors and what have you. Here are a few sites that talk a great deal about design and typography:  Link1  link2   link3

2- There are so many other things you probably have not considered yet!

I've read in many blogs that they didn't make the right choice when choosing a hosting company. they started with a cheap host or an unreliable one and as soon as they saw some nice traffic their  site went offline. This has happened to many blogs and it keeps happening to many more so before you jump on web business make sure to chose the right host, there are several cheap and reliable hostings out there, 1and1 or dreamhost are the two that come into my mind. if you're seeing a healthy dose of traffic you can upgrade to more performance known hosting companies like MediaTemple, Peer1, Voxel, and etc.

Load time is just as important as anything else. New visitors to your site have 5 seconds or less patience time. Meaning, your site should load under 5 seconds. Several things attribute to this cause. I don't want to become too technical, but the major factors are heavy use of graphics, a large number of database calls or queries, slow web hosts, heavy use of Java-scripts,  large home page size, large number of DNS calls, and the list goes on. You would need a technical help from a professional or freelance developer to solve many of these issues, so if you have somebody that is designing your site you can ask them to take care of the above issues as well.

If you're starting your own blog then there are a few choices you're probably considering, you can go with free blog apps like Typad, Blogger and BlogSpot or Open source CMS like Wordpress or MovableType or Drupal which sit on your own domain and server, or a CMS that costs money like another version of MovableType, and several others. Let me make it clear right here that unless you're trying to do extra stuff with your site, all of the above option basically do the same thing and if you can generate traffic then you are probably able to make money as well. Typad and BlogSpot live on some server off some where you'll never know, you don't own your domain and migration is hard not to mention that you can't customize all that much. Wordpress, MovableType and Drupal can be download, customized, and installed on your own domain and server, they are also expandable by adding plugins and other features. Though Wordpress, MT and drupal are free and open source but customizing costs money, you may need to hire a developer and design familiar with the program to be able to do everything you want the site to be. The costs are not that high but be prepared and do extra research.

You shouldn't start your online project with advertising and ad focused content and services. If you have a new blog or a web app and already you're site is bombarded with ads, it is a big turn off to the new users. Since you're site is very new and your traffic is very low your ad dollars don't kick in anyways, so save some face and remove those ads so the content and the substance of your site can breath and build you some reputation. Ads make sites really ugly, specially the google ones, not having ads at the beginning tells your users that you value and appreciate their willingness to visit your site and you're not just working on the site to make a quick buck but to help them in one way or the other. As your sites starts to grow and traffic is coming to your site in bunches (more than 1000 hits per day) then start adding ads, but still very slowly.

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Above is a brief overview of what you need to do to be prepared to launch your website. It's basically what this site is all about. I've done many project and have built many websites and the above issues keep repeating themselves over and over when working with new clients. In early meetings i spend many hours explaining why it costs them so much to build or consult them on their web project and when i explain the factors involved then they slowly start to come around. i hope this helps you guys with your own projects.

10 years ago i started building website, what started as a hobby and fascination turned into a healthy source of income. I put myself through design school by designing websites and the education i received allowed me to look at websites from a psychological and strategic point of view.

It is not an easy task to sell strategy with a website design pitch. Price wise is much higher and graphically it might not make much difference but of course the results are like night and day. I have a very solid track record that i'm very proud of, i have never worked on a web project that included strategy and failed!

so when i talk about web strategy in construction phase, what do i mean?

3 Strategic Elements every site should have

• Characteristics
  
• Objectives with Benefits
  
• Focus

If you research any of the successful website you will all of the above elements in them. Similarly if you'd like to know if a project is going to fail or not all you have to do is to figure out if the above elements are available or not.

Characteristics

Content and softwares are soulless. They are just a piece of information laid out on an even more soulless canvas. Content by itself is not attractive, but we can give it a zing by giving it a little bit of attention. Content represents the voice of the author, therefore to give content soul we must setup our writing guidelines to have more personal voice embedded into our content.

Some of the blogs that you read constantly and love use the personal voice to give their content soul. When you read these blogs you can imagine the writer writing them, that's very powerful.

The design of the website should also reflect you, the owner of the site. The worst thing a designer can do to his/her client is to make any project a personal and self reflective project. If you are designing a blog for another blogger try to understand who he/she is and try to deign it to reflect them simply because they are going to be the writers of that blog and if the soul of the content doesn't match the design of the site then people wouldn't be able to trust the writer right away. This is probably the biggest reason why i suggest to every client to stay away form already design templates. Worst case scenario, if they like to go with a template try to convince them to at least customize the color to reflect their personality.

Objective with Benefits

People don't buy Concepts, they buy Benefits!

If your site doesn't offer benefits to people then there isn't much reason for them to visit your site. at the same time if your site only offers one benefit that they can take at anytime then people don't have another reason to visit your site again!

Benefits are the very reason people build loyalty to any site. They are also give your site value. So you want to strategize your site to offer benefits as constantly and as frequently as possible. The more benefits you give out the more loyal people will become and the faster you will grow.

for blogs, benefits are as simple as writing "How to" Tutorial articles, for example, how to build a logo with photoshop, or How to save money, or How to fix a car. How To's are just one example, Tip, Tricks, Secrets, Special Offers, and educational articles also serve a lot of benefits people appreciate as well.

Focus

Focus is hard to achieve, and even harder to maintain. Focus is knowing what your site is about and maintaining the same Niche Market focus everyday and every year!

It is hard, i admit, how much can you write about the same topic over and over again and not just worry about running out of ideas but also worry about boring the hell out of the audience.  To avoid boring people keep revisiting the soul of your content, also revisit my Branding Article. When Choosing a Niche Topic you're actually choosing a Niche Target Market. Target market has to be big enough to make business sense but not too big and broad that it wouldn't stick. Also it is a great idea to have multiple Niche blogs to avoid boredom for yourself as well.

so before you start yet another blog, rethink why you want to start it, if it is going to be a hobby are you willing to keep it a hobby but if not

While all projects are different from one another but there something they all have in common. To have a successful website or any other type of business you have to go through the process. If you think success goal is a million dollars you have to realize that before you can make a million you have to make your first $100, then your first $1000, then $10,000 and so on until you get to your goal. Even if you achieve your goal doesn’t mean that all if safe and you don’t have to worry anything else. With every dollar you make you add a dollar to the things you have to worry about.

Things to consider, if you’re starting a blog or have blog, there are more 125,000 blogs that come out everyday, more than 2,000 web services launch every week and many more other sites like ecommerce, corporate and portfolio sites. The biggest problem is that the internet users in general grow by only %3 to %5 a year, so all the new sites as well as the older sites compete for relatively the same piece of the pie.

Before the start of 3 Phases

Before you jump into the mayhem of getting through the 3 phases and becoming successful you need do a few things so that you can enter Phase #1.

What you need to do:

1. Research
2. Plan
3. Brand
4. Strategize
5. Develop a functional product or service
6. Do some tests

***If you’ve done all of above and now are ready to jump in then who am I to stop you so let’s get to it.

3 PHASES OF SUCCESS

Survival

Basically the survival of the fittest, the more prepared. You don’t necessarily have to have feature full or absolute perfect product to enter, as long as it’s functional and delivers what you have promised. Also you don’t to have a lot money, having money is a bonus but not the differentiator.

125,000 blog/day, what you want to do is separate yourself from majority of these other blogs. %99.99 will fail before they even enter survival phase, if you are on the same ship as them, well guess what, you will fail with them.

This phase requires you put in as much energy and resources as you possibly can. 18 hour work days are just beginning, you have to market your brains out, and sometimes you have to invent new ways of marketing and promoting your site. At the start of this phase nobody gives a crap about you, your product or services no matter how brilliant and unique it is. This is when survival of the fittest gets a whole new meaning.

Survival is also about knowing that while you’re working your butt off there are tens of other projects that are trying the same thing. If you have a new blog and dying to get a mention by other more popular blog owners then consider this, most of the popular blog owners wait out the opportunity simply because they don’t want to write about a blog that could die in a few weeks not to mention that they are constantly being bombarded with your own competitors and they can only mention a very few at a time so they rather bet on the safer projects.
Survival is not something you accomplish like passing a test. It is something you have to do day in and day out. For as long as you have competitors fighting for a piece of your traffic you’re stuck in survival mode.

Some of the site currently in Survival Mode: TechCrunch, Mashable, Twitter, Yelp, Glam, Federated Media, BlogAds, OpenID,

Some of the site downgraded to survival: Microsoft, Yahoo, YellowPages, Skype, Technorati,

Establishment

Still survival, but it’s on a different level. It’s when you have overcome all challenges and now you’re on your way to becoming mainstream. Your challenge is not about getting traffic but about keeping traffic. Innovation has become your biggest hassle, your competition is fierce and ruthless, and your server and maintenance costs are going through the roof.

It’s a great place to be! But if you’re not careful and aggressive somebody else will take your place and send you back into the first phase.

Establishment phase is like a VIP room, you may have a chance to get in but seats are limited only the best get in, but if they don’t keep at it they will be asked to leave.

Some of the site in Establishment: Google, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, FireFox, ING Direct, DIGG,

Leap

The dreamland, or could be hell. In this phase your biggest problem is the users that use your site or product. They are very demanding, they want constant innovation and if something goes wrong everybody will talk about it. I’m not going to get into this too much.
 There are only a few website in this phase that I can think of. Like Ebay, Amazon, and … 

NOTE: This website is mostly about the Survival Phase. In my Opinion if you are in the Establishment or Leap phase then helping you is beyond me what you need is big consulting companies like BCG,  McKinsey and Bain