The Wandsworth-based company lets parents book a workspace – a hot desk or meeting room – and a place in the on-site OFSTED registered crèche for their child, at times that suit their specific work requirements.  This flexibility will be ideal for independent professionals, entrepreneurs, freelancers, remote, home-based workers or employees who are able to work from home at least one day a week.

“Remote working is on the rise. We are creating a space where parents can work without the overheads of having their own office, while having their child looked after in the same building. This cuts down on the stress of trying to commute from work to collect children on time and it means they can spend more time with their child during the day,” explains Shazia Mustafa, the mother of two behind the brainchild.

“Most importantly though, it gives parents the flexibility they need. Most childcare establishments require a child to be booked in on fixed days every week, usually for a set number of hours. Parents often find themselves on waiting lists just to get their child a spot and often don’t get the days or times they need.  For people with varying levels of work, this inflexibility costs them a fortune, particularly as they still have to pay for the care, even if their child is sick and can’t go. We’ve taken away all of these problems by allowing parents to book space on a pay-as-you go basis,” she says.

Shazia also thinks it will be a great way for home workers to meet like-minded parents, share ideas, network and have more social interaction than they’d have if they worked on their own in a home office. And for mothers who aren’t sure what to do once their maternity leave ends, Third-Door gives them the child-free time they need to put ideas into action.

To celebrate the opening, Third Door is running a competition in which a prize worth £4,000 can be won including free Third Door membership, 30 hours of free workspace/childcare, a Business in a Box package (including logo, business cards, letterheads and website), 3 hours of consultancy with business experts, a smart phone and laptop – everything needed to start up a business.  To enter or to find out more about Third Door, go to www.third-door.com

Leanpub

Imagine that authors can actually make money writing books.

The way that Leanpub accomplishes this is to empower authors to apply Steve Blank’s Customer Development and Eric Ries’ Lean Startup principles to the process of writing and publishing a book.

Specifically, Leanpub allows authors to self-publish and sell their books–while they are in-progress. This lets authors determine if there is a market for their book and build a community of readers around their book. This community building is vital, since it not only helps authors build buzz around their books but also helps them get real feedback from real readers who are invested in the success of the book.

At Leanpub, we enable authors to publish early, publish often and listen to their readers.

The insight behind Leanpub is that the writers who are the best at doing this are bloggers, and that the best platform for writing a book is actually a blogging platform. So, we’re taking the world’s best blogging platform, WordPress MU, and making it into the best platform for writing and self-publishing books.

If the programme appeals to you then please sign up here and then we advise signing up to our step-by-step guide on the partner site. This will teach you everything you need to start generating a steady income from hiremyparents. Please check out the sign up page before sending us any questions by email, more is explained there, or please make a comment below.

TURN ON YOUR SPEAKERS

www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHEfXnIvUeI

Yesterday we came out of testing and launched the hiremyparents Partner Programme that pays you to refer our great service and get paid. And this isn’t some 5% breadcrumb deal. We pay our referrers a massive 75% of all revenue created.

This percentage of sales combined with a no-brainer offer to customers means that one of our beta partners pocketed over $5000… in a week!

How? How?….How? – I’ll tell you.

Our PartnerResource Website (this is what’s taken the time) is chocked full of graphics, article, ebooks, emails, tutorials, reviews… everything you need to promote hiremyparents. If you don’t have the skills and knowledge to use these tools… no problem – we have put together a daily step-by-step to do course that will send you an email each day with ‘things to do today’ inside. Follow the steps and slowly build a revenue that will continue to grow and provide a residual income on auto-pilot.

This is no get-rich-quick scheme, we wouldn’t do that to our reputation! The bottom line is – if you don’t get your 75%, we don’t get out 25%! So we’ve made it as easy as possible to earn, and earn quick, through our programme with the kind of results that will ensure you continue to promote hmp into the future.

Take a look at the programme now. It’s available globally and there is absolutely no commitment necessary. If you feel it isn’t for you (ha) just walk away.

Any questions you have should be directed to Steve, your Partner Manager, at steve@hiremyparents.com, or, leave a comment below.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2ux9fiGDx8

Thankfully we’ve had an in-house team of web squirrels to find these jobs from the launch of hiremyparents so I’ve been able to do less and less of it over time. Slowly stepping backwards, smiling all the time, no sudden moves. I can now focus on the parts of hmp I enjoy, things I’m good at.

However, there are home business owners out there that do everything. Think about it! Everything! The marketing, the buying, the data/web updates, customer service, fixing the crap that always seem to take up half a day, sales calls, blog, production, follow-ups, coffee – everything!

Its small wonder that most go to the wall with the owner’s heart in tatters and 2 mortgages hanging round his/her neck.

The answer is, of course, outsourcing. Find yourself a quality and trusted job board (hint hint) and put your needs up there and wait for the the resumes. But hold on that’s more bloody work. Before you know it your inbox is filled with resume chuckers that throw you an email just because your job’s in a certain category. So what do you do?

Filter them!

Instead of giving an email to send responses to give potential outsourcees a link to a Q&A form. You can set one of these up for free at places like http://www.surveymonkey.com/. Here you can get details of experience, expected wage, qualifications and whatever you feel relevant to the position.

The effect of this is twofold: 1) you get to know what you want to know about the applicant not what their resume wants you to know, and 2) you get rid of the resume chuckers – only people that really want the job and believe they can do the job are going to fill out a fairly lengthy form.

If you still get flooded with potential outsourcees then filter them again. Send them to another form that really drills down on your needs. After that you can be fairly certain that a) the individual really wants the job (half the battle when you’re outsourcing), b) they’re qualified for the job, and c) they’ll do it for a price you can live with. Result!

 

The final result? My best advice? Don’t. Specifically, you don’t.

I’ve spent years, literally, learning the fine art of SEO (search engine optimis(z)ation), if they had a degree in it (they probably do) I’d have a doctorate, and I wish I’d never started.

It’s a bloody nightmare. The degree of accuracy required combined with the mind numbing tasks involved means it’s a full time job, which means your real business suffers.

If you’ve got the resources – outsource it. Find some sallow faced, short sighted hermit to put everything in place and then change everything again when google or yahoo change their algorithms. You. You concentrate on the business.

If you’re skint then just do the basics. Go to google’s webmaster section and put a day aside just to get your head around the concept and the basic rules. Follow these rules as you add content to your site and you’ll be 80%’ish of the way there. To get 100% of the way just takes too much time.

The one thing that you can do to tip the odds in your favour, if you haven’t got a small army of SEO hermits, is to boost the quality of your content. Google’s (etc) one and only job is to ensure that their users, the searchers, find the most relevant results for their search.

If your content (blog posts are best) is good then web2.0 will link to it. When you have 10′s, 100′s, 1000′s of twitter/bebo/facebook/digg/mixx/delicious links pointing at your post google is going to think you’re relevant to something. Along comes the google spider and, if you’ve learnt the SEO rules, decides that your content is relevant to a given topic. Bang! Job done. Next time someone types in a phrase relevant to your site you will now be found higher up the search results – because your content was good.

• Concentrate on your skills and talents and reflect those in the content you post.
• Let surfers easily link to it via web2.0.
• Make sure you follow SEO basics
• Write some more quality content

hiremyparents will soon be releasing its ‘Luddite’s Guide’ series to members and readers of the blog. A completely free guide to getting the basics right for your website and getting the traffic it needs. Come back often for updates, or better yet, subscribe via email or RSS for news on its release.

PS – please make a comment or web2.0 me to practise what I preach.

Related Optimising Your Website Articles …

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If you’re one of our members then you’ve probably noticed a few changes around the hmp site. It was good before but now it’s the best. And this isn’t an idle boast. We’ve listened to our members, we’ve combed the web and we believe we have brought together the very best resource on the web for anyone looking for a flexible life with a flexible income.

• Our job board now has over 600 flexible jobs on it, growing daily.
• Our new ‘Extra Income’ section shows the very best in instant income opportunities from around the web – vetted by our members
• The Library now has over $250,000 worth of courses, guides and software available for our members to download …and sell!

Combined with our expert panel, our member useable social network and customer service second to none we are ..the best!

Here ends the lesson.

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The thing is, it does work. Why do some people make a fortune and some don’t make money at all? Simply put, because the people who make thousands or millions in cash knew all the lies in this business.

So what are the big internet lies? Below are the biggest internet lies that you should know:

1. Starting And Running A Business On The Internet Is Expensive
Do you know that you can start your business with zero cost? You can actually earn your income by joining a very high quality affiliate program. Usually, as an affiliate marketer, your job is concentrating on marketing only. All the follow up, delivery of the product, answering questions from customers and so on are done by the owner of the programme.

Usually the ‘expensive’ statement often comes from people who are living in non-U.S/European countries, especially if the country’s local currency is weak compared to the U.S. Dollar. If it is not a currency issue, it is a vision issue. See and think small to get small. See and think big and your results will have a tendency to match your thoughts.

2. You Can Make Easy Money from the Internet
Most people believe you can make money overnight and by doing nothing at all. This myth is what sets the realistic apart from the unrealistic. You have probably heard of stories of how people make 5 to 6 figure incomes in the shortest period of time imaginable.

These stories might be true but did you know most of them had failed miserably several times before they made the real money? They learnt from their mistakes and moved on. It may seem as if some gurus are overnight successes with the wild numbers some people have brought in during a day or a week selling information or products online.
Some interesting facts about overnight success – it normally takes months if not years to realize. In other words, they prepare, they create joint ventures, they get ready and then build up anticipation for a launch – then BOOM it explodes!

3. You Must Know HTML, Programming And Graphic Designing In Order To Start Your Business
You don’t need to know all of these at all. In fact, one of the biggest shockers was the discovery that most of the biggest web gurus today don’t have the first clue as to how to build a web page.

These gurus earned more money because they knew how to reach people. They either outsource (hello?)for professional help or establish Joint Ventures with other individuals who can compensate for their lack of knowledge in any one of these areas.

As a matter of fact most successful people are true successes because they only focus their time on what brings them success.

If you want to create your web pages without having to learn programming, HTML and designing skills, just find someone else that can do it for you. There are many professional web designers you can find on hiremyparents.

4. On the Internet, There Is No Need to Know How to Sell
This statement has made people who hate selling attracted to the ads that read “no selling required”. Think for a moment; is there any logic at all that you can make money without doing anything at all? Usually these programmes are unworkable and some are run by fly-by-night operators.

In this business, don’t try to sell to other people. Instead, you inform your potential customers. Show people what their lives would be like with what you offer and you will have a sale without selling anything at all!

5. You Don’t Have To Build A Mailing List At All
Laughing out loud – that is like saying, “I don’t want to be in business”. Put this in your head, your mailing list is as important to you as the “Yellow Pages” is to a conventional B2B business.

“The money is in the list”. You’ve probably heard this from most gurus out there. But you should also have this word in your mind, “The money is in the relationship”. The idea of networking with people is unattractive to most who hate to sell.

Remember though, you are not selling anything. You are just showing people their life and how it can easily be enhanced by what you have to offer.

All the above are just some of the big Internet lies. Actually there are a lot more Internet lies you should watch out for. You have to be smart in order to really achieve more success than you could possibly imagine on the internet, and it’s as hard work as any conventional job, but if you crack it your potential client base is planet Earth.

Related articles…

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Here are the things you need to know about how iPhone and Android have changed mobile advertising and why you, as a job seeker or marketer, need to make the call now.

Your customers are on more than one carrier – A complete mobile marketing strategy must consider reaching audiences subscribed with all the various mobile carriers (e.g., Verizon, O2, Orange, Sprint, AT&T, and T-Mobile).

Marketing begins and ends with numbers – The mobile marketing platform has lagged behind the web in terms of the ability to provide advertisers with critical metrics and control to measure and optimize their ad campaigns. Expect Google’s acquisition of AdMob to have tremendous implications for mobile advertising. AdMob serves ads for more than 15,000 mobile sites and applications worldwide and openly shares the mountain of actionable data they are collecting. AdMob has announced that it is supporting the Palm Pre/Web OS phones, demonstrating their cross-platform capabilities.

You don’t necessarily need to have an app – A recent WhitePages and MediaVest study showed that advertising performance is just as strong on the mobile web as it is on an app. The downside of apps is that consumers need to upgrade to get new versions of the apps, while a mobile site can simply be updated. A mobile site does not necessitate the consumers to do anything for it to update, all the burden is on you, the marketer, and that is good. As long as mobile carriers can scale their 3G networks to meet demands, the future of wireless is very likely to go back to the mobile web.

Location demands persistence and endurance – While location will be a key driver in the future of mobile advertising, the mobile industry will need to overcome a few challenges in order for location-based marketing to truly take off. One, the popularity of applications requires persistence and the ability to run more than one application at a time (Apple needs to wake up on this one). And two, battery drain from frequent GPS/location requests and poor cell tower coverage.

A different call to action – The key to the success of any marketing campaign is to make it easy for the consumer to react. For one, easy click-to-call actions have been seen to have contributed to +5% conversion results for advertisers.

If you want to learn more about how to reach your audience via mobile marketing I highly recommend Mobile Marketing Leadership. Only for those with a bit of cash to spend I’m afraid but definitely the No1 resource out there for this growing market.

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