Wow – another whirlwind week connecting with all kinds of people running their own enterprises in a wide variety of markets. What struck me about them is that each embodies the entrepreneurial zeitgeist in their own, individual ways.
So often we define ourselves as, perhaps, ‘internet marketers’ or ‘affiliate marketers’ or ‘Kindle authors’ without taking a step back and realising that we are all entrepreneurs with common needs. I’ve been self-employed so long I sometimes forget that it takes a specific skillset and mindset to succeed when you are flying solo or maybe leading a small team simply because I absorbed it so it becomes part of my everyday being.
With that in mind, I want to devote this week’s Weekend Takeaways to sites that address the needs of entrepreneurs like you and me, adding to your overall skills as a self-employed person powering your own business as well as reminding you to take that essential wider view.
The first site I’d like to mention is Taking The Plunge which is all about how to be successfully self-employed and contains numerous excellent articles on the subject, ranging from How To Cope With The Isolation Of Being Self-Employed to Seven Qualities To Be Successfully Self-employed. Of course, there are also products being plugged and you can sign up to receive a free report but you’ll gain a great deal from simply browsing the posts and reading those that apply to you:
http://takingtheplungeseries.com/
A real time-suck for the average entrepreneur is dealing with all those tedious tasks that need doing but aren’t really within your area of expertise. I know, I know – everyone yells ‘outsource’ but sometimes that doesn’t pan out as planned or is just not affordable right now. One site I can recommend for walking you through those technology tasks you could really do without is Technology Tiger – make friends with it and you’ll kiss goodbye to banging your head in frustration against your computer screen:
http://www.technologytiger.com/
My earliest introduction to the concept of marketing via the internet came about because one of my publishers kept banging on about ‘Guerrilla Marketing.’ As any author will tell you, publishers love any kind of marketing that’s cheap or preferably free but, in this case, they were actually on to something (although they still tend to hold an arcane view of what it really involves). This site holds an excellent repository of articles from one of the original Guerrilla Marketers with the ideas behind them holding fresh (and being constantly updated). Try it for a whole new take from within the trenches:
http://www.gmarketing.com/articles
And finally, no newsletter on entrepreneurialism would be complete without mentioning Entrepreneur magazine online: the place to go for the latest business news and strategy for all of us making it on our own and proud to do so!
That’s it for this week – as always it’s lovely to hear back with your news and views and I hope you are spending a wonderful weekend wherever you are.
