Home Working Ideas

From a money-making perspective, the opportunity presented by the World Wide Web is two-fold: it’s global and it’s open to everyone.

Whether you are selling second hand cars or professional web design services, the fact is more and more people turn to the internet in the first instance to search for the best value-for-money options available on just about anything.

With literally billions of people online across the planet, anyone with a simple networked computer can ‘go global’ and take their brilliant business ideas to the world. This does, of course, assume that a brilliant business idea is in place – the rest can be achieved through following a few simple techniques to ensure any budding entrepreneur is visible on an increasingly crowded internet.

As an online business, you shouldn’t cut corners with your IT – it is both your shop-front and your warehouse, so it pays to get it right. Any revenue earned in the early days of your business should then be reinvested back into you company to help build your IT infrastructure.

Your website should be professionally designed, developed and written – that much probably goes without saying. But just as crucial today is your website needs to be properly optimised for Google, Yahoo, Bing, Baidu…whatever search engine has the lion’s share in your target markets.

The beauty of search engine optimisation (SEO) is that it is largely free if it’s done effectively. Sure, you can pay for Google AdWords and agencies to help with your optimisation, but SEO is an ongoing process which is why it pays to learn the nuts and bolts of SEO yourself to save you money in the long run.

Let’s assume you have secured a top 5 position on Google.de for a very competitive term in your industry, e.g. ‘Web Design Services’. That’s great, but how do you replicate that success abroad?

Firstly, you have to fully translate and localise your German language website into other languages. Only a professionally qualified, native speaking translator should be used for this job as a website must really resonate with consumers in your target market – any grammatical errors will be picked up and won’t look good for your business.

You also have to optimise your foreign language websites, so that you also rank highly on other ‘in-country’ search engines such as Google.fr in France or Google.co.uk in the UK. Never translate your German keywords directly into another language though, even a correct translation may not be what people use to search for products and services locally – they may use synonyms, acronyms or any other variation of the search terms.

But online marketing aside, the one often-overlooked benefit of operating an online business is reduced overheads. The money you save on premises and having staff working from home means you can offer more competitive prices to your customers and win valuable custom from your already-established competitors.

Thanks to the internet, many more businesses operate remotely in a home-office setup and this is a good way for businesses to streamline their operations and cut needless financial waste. With that in mind, you need to consider how you manage your internal communications.

Good communication is at the heart of any successful venture. With remote working, the need to optimise and streamline communications is even more so. If you can’t tap a colleague on the shoulder to ask a question, or have an impromptu brainstorming meeting in the canteen, then

alternative mechanisms must be in place to ensure communication doesn’t breakdown. And this is where technology comes into play.

Technology is the core, underpinning facet of 21st century remote- working. So what equipment should a home-worker have at their disposal? Well the very basics would have to be a high- spec laptop/desktop computer and a high-speed broadband internet connection. But that in itself isn’t always enough.

Communication channels must be opened up to replicate real-life meeting spaces as much as possible. First of all, all remote-working employees must have access to a teleconferencing service, where 3 or more people can dial-in and talk to each other in real time. This can’t match a physical meeting room though and full collaboration only becomes a possibility when everyone can see the same things.

Most people will be familiar with Microsoft Office. But this doesn’t really allow real-time collaboration, which is where Google Docs comes into play. Free to use, people can chat on a teleconferencing service whilst accessing the same textual information as each other in Google Docs, with all edits updating on all screens instantly.

It’s perhaps also worth using a service like Skype. Again, this is free to use and its in-built instant messaging service is useful for sending files or requesting information. It also has a very useful video-conferencing facility built-in which is good for one-on-one, face to face chats.

This is just the very basics of setting yourself up to succeed in an online business. The internet is a vital tool for 21st century businesses, but the truth is you’ll still need to put a lot of hard work, effort and dedication into achieving your goals. There are no shortcuts to success!

About the author

Christian Arno is founder and Managing Director of Lingo24, an online translation/localisation company with clients in over sixty countries. Founded initially as home -based business in 2001,Lingo24 now has 120 employees working both in offices and remotely around the world. They had a turnover of over €4m EUR in 2009.

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