Saturday, January 5, 2008

Footnotes

Happy 2008!

At this point, everyone’s probably making new year’s resolutions that include the usual about making money and losing weight, and reflecting back on what went wrong with 2007. Don't spend too much time looking back, you can't change what's passed, so take a quick assessment, make some notes for moving forward, and brush your shoulders off. I’ve also taken on a couple of new ventures just one week into the new year, but why waste time?

Got $100 lying around?
Continuing on the theme of “broke” entrepreneurs, I want to highlight this concept of starting a business for under $100. Entrepreneur.com has an entire section of businesses you can supposedly start for $100 or less, but frankly, most of the things they list are a little on the cheesy side and I’d like to see more real life examples of people who’ve actually started some of those businesses.

This site, The Hundred Dollar Business, started out as a blog and grew so popular that it was born into a full fledged site. I absolutely love it. $100? And you’re off? You’re talking MY game right there. Lots of great information and ideas there, I can’t recommend it highly enough. Can you start a business for $50? $25, anyone? It would be interesting to see exactly how low you can go!

Where is the love, eBay?
eBay has changed the way they display eBay Store listings. I already had reservations with the way they previously demoted Store Listings to the bottom of page, which established a sort of hierarchy, putting the eBay seller’s listings at the top of the results, and store owners’ listings displayed at the very bottom, list style without thumbnails. Like most people, if I’m searching for an item, I’m going to browse the items from the top of the list and probably make a choice before I reach the bottom, so the store owners are in a sense penalized out the gate.

Well, now eBay has further collapsed that structure to include a link at the bottom of the eBay sellers results, that says, search eBay stores for this item. So now I have to click a link to even see the stores’ listings. The only time the store listings figure prominently in the results is when there are no seller listings to push them further down the page.

I’m curious as to why eBay is dropping the visibility on the stores, when this represents consistent revenue for them, whether or not there’s a sale. It’s unfair and I think detrimental to the performance of the stores. They must not think there is any competition for them in this arena so they can do whatever they please.

I did say, Backup, didn’t I?
I mentioned before the tedious recovery of my hard drive after a format. After several attempts, the product Easeus Data Recovery did recover nearly all of my data, however, I’m finding that a large portion of the documents are recovered but damaged. I’ve opened some, because I see the name and I recognize it as the file I want, but when I open it, its something totally different. And many of the mp3s bear one name but play a different song altogether. So while the recovery was a success, due to me taking so long to recover and continuing to use the computer in the meantime, a lot of my data was scrambled and overwritten. My fault completely. Whenever you have a crash and you plan to do a recovery, shut the computer down, don’t let anyone use it if you hope to do a full 100% recovery. I knew this but didn’t follow my own advice. Anyway, another advantage to being an Easeus customer is not only the free upgrades, but they freely recover files such as Microsoft Word, simply by emailing them to the tech support team. They’ll fix it and return it to you within hours. I can’t praise them enough!

My 2008 Resolutions for RBE
I expect things to be slowing down with my day job, so I'll have more time to devote to doing what I really love, which includes this blog. I'd like to focus on more success stories and profiles of Broke Entrepreneurs that I've met mostly through authoring this blog and the comments and feedback submitted. I also resolve to get back to regularly updating - its not that I don't have the content, I actually write content nearly everyday and just save it to my flash drive but after a while, if I haven't posted it yet, I go back and read it and change my mind. I've had a contest set to launch for months now - I promise I will get that going by the end of the month because it will be a great way to kickoff 2008.

Here's to a new year of launch and flight!

1 comments:

Entrepreneur Life said...

I started my business for around $250 and it has expanded nicely, I should pull 6 figures this year.