theAdmin.orgGrowing a simple software business

Mason over at Small Fuel Marketing just wrote a great post about how small business blogging can grow your business. I want share my own first hand experience of my own business blogging.

This blog has been online since 2005 but it was mostly just a place I stored thoughts and ideas I had. Around July 2007 I started my own software company and decided to start blogging about it with the goal of helping people see what is involved with starting a web business. Since then I've tried to post monthly business reviews to give an in depth view of my business.

Here's some benefits I've received over the past 6 months.

6 times increase in subscriptions

I started with about 20 regular subscribers to my blog. Today I have over 120 people subscribed. To restate that, there are 120 people who are coming to my website daily wanting information I write about. Anyone interested in exponential growth? I am!

Tripled my visitor count

Just from blogging about my business and what I'm doing, I've tripled the number of people coming to my websites. This by itself is good but if you know that I do 0 advertising other than links in comments, this is amazing.

Started a Relationship that will be worth six digits this year

From one comment I posted to another blog, I started a relationship with a very influential group of people. This relationship, along with their network will provide me with at least six digits of revenue this year.

Are you brave enough to take action?

All of this was done with the basics Mason outlined, without any advertising or any networking off the Internet. I think I've spent about 3-8 hours a week updating this blog and connecting with others. Not a bad investment at all.

Head over to the Small Fuel Marketing Blog now and see how your business can grow in the next 6 months.

Eric

I've always been a heavy reader, online and offline but this weekend I finally noticed the hole I dug myself into. I was taking in more information that I could get through and I was falling behind. I resolved then to start taking action to dig myself back out by following 3 simple steps:

1. Stop digging

The first step to getting out of a ditch is to stop digging. In my case I've made it part of my weekly review to drop 5% of my feeds every week. Sorry guys, it's not you it's me. I track enough blogs that I'll hear about industry changing news eventully.

2. Fill in the hole

Now the hole isn't getting any deeper but there still is a massive hole. What's the best way to fill up a hole? Add the dirt you took out of it.

In my case I'm implementing the 2 minute rule for my reading items. Each item gets 2 minutes to decide it's fate:

1. Not Valuable: Delete.
2. Valuable but not right now: tag it in del.icio.us based on the main content.
3. Valuable right now: Read it.

3. Don't get buried again

So now I've stopped digging but new things are still coming in. I'm going to adopt another 2 minute rule for each new item:

1. Not Valuable: mark as read.
2. Valuable but not right now: tag it in del.icio.us based on the main content.
3. Valuable right now but will take longer than 2 minutes to read: Tag as @check for later.
4. Valuable right now: Read it.

Results

So far it's working great. I've cut my subscriptions, checking the new items faster, and taking time everyday to go though my del.icio.us page of items (470 items dating back to March of 2007!).

What steps do you use to keep yourself out of the information hole?

Eric

I’m happy to announce I am releasing my first Redmine plugin, Redmine Timesheet. I’m releasing it under the GNU GPL v2

Purpose

This is a plugin to show timelogs across all projects in a Redmine install. I use it for:

• How long did I work today? (timelogs for today)
• How much of my time is billable work? (timelogs for specific activities)
• How much do I need to invoice for a project? (timelogs for a billable activity on a project)

Features

• Filtering of timelogs
  • by Date ranges
  • by Project
  • by Activities
• “Run Timesheet” permission to restrict feature to specific users

Install

1. Download the archive file and extract it to your vendor/plugins folder. You can also download directly from my Subversion server using Rails’s plungin script

    script/plugin install svn://dev.littlestreamsoftware.com/redmine_timesheet_plugin/trunk
   

2. Follow the Redmine plugin installation steps.

3. Login to your Redmine install as an Administrator.
4. Enable the “Run Timesheet” permissions for your Roles.
5. Add the “Timesheet module” to the enabled modules for your project.
6. The link to the plugin should appear on that project’s navigation.

Help

If you need help you can leave a comment here or enter an issue directly into my bug tracker.

Eric

I’ve been reading up a lot on different ways to manage code using SCM systems because my current ones take way to long to do anything advanced.

• How to use Piston to ease your upgrades - Piston looks like an easy way to work with upstream svn repositories. Currently, I do a huge hack of checking out the trunk from Mephisto and merging in my custom code. On the other hand, moving to git and git-svn might be better in the long run.
• Learning git-svn in 5min - quick writeup on how to use git along with an existing Subversion repository.
• Shoes Meets Merb: Driving a GUI App through Web Services in Ruby - Nice write up of creating a Merb web service. I’m going to have to take a look at Merb soon, it looks like it has a lot of benefits over Rails but is still the Ruby I know and love.

In order to organize my articles, I split my blog into four sections now:

1. Home - all articles from Business and Tech
2. Business - articles about running my business and freelancing
3. Tech - articles about technology and software development
4. Link Blog - posts with links to content I come across that I found interesting and want to share

Another benefit of this split, I now have four RSS feeds to cater to your specific content need. So if your only interested on my freelancing articles, you can subscribe to the Business feed. If you want to follow my progress with Ruby on Rails, my Tech Feed is where you want to be.

All the feeds are listed on the sidebar and below.

Eric

Feeds

• Home Feed (all articles)
• Business Feed
• Tech Feed
• Links Feed