Hello again

Today we want to talk about where you can find affordable resources. Important things you need are information and software, and a few other bits and pieces to build your business (you also need products, but this will be covered in a separate article). Where do you find these at prices you can afford?

Finding affordable resources
Other than networking, the best source of resources is the Internet. If you are not already good at it, you need to practise surfing the net. Most people start with Google (www.google.com for worldwide or US searches and www.google.co.uk for United Kingdom searches).

Personally I use Dogpile www.dogpile.com or www.dogpile.co.uk - because they cover about 14 search engines including Google and Yahoo.

Dogpile, I believe, has a flexibility that makes your search efforts more effective. Its a little complicated, but I think it works well:

• If your search term is a single word, enter it in the search bar, for example, autoresponder
• If your search term is a phrase enter it using double quotes: autoresponder software
• If your search term involves more than one phrase, use double quotes and + signs before each phrase: +autoresponder software+free download (with no spaces except between words)

The double quotes ensure only pages displaying the phrase are listed, not pages displaying the individual words. Similarly, the + sign ensures only pages displaying both phrases are listed, not pages displaying the individual phrases.

Another good source of information on the Internet is through links. When you do a search and land on a page that interests you, you usually find a number of links that lead you to other pages and other websites.

Sometimes this takes a bit of time because the link you click leads you to a page that may have links that interest you, and this leads you to more pages. You can spend an entire afternoon and never return to your original page.

Heres a bit of good advice: When you land on a page that interests you, write down the URL now! Its very frustrating to leave a page filled with useful information, never to find it again (this has happened to all of us).

Another good source of information is your mentor. You must be careful not to abuse this. Although I indicated in the last article that your mentor is anxious to hear from you because you are on his or her list, there are limits. When you network with the best, you are dealing with very, very busy people, so choose your questions carefully. Dont bother your mentor with trivial matters.

Software
You need all sorts of software to manage your business. We have talked about some of these needs in other articles, and we shall talk more in the future. There are three sources of software. You can:

• Create it yourself
• Commission it - pay somebody to create it for you
• Buy it ready-made

If you are already experienced at creating software, you may ignore the rest of this article. You know far more about the subject than I, and no advice I can give you would be useful.

You can commission a piece of software you can pay somebody to create it for you. We shall discuss this in detail in Article Thirteen.

You can buy it ready-made. Here, too, you have several options:

• You can pay top money for top-shelf, all singing, all dancing software packages
• You can pay less money for not-so-good-but-nevertheless-still-useful software packages
• You can download free trial editions from the entire range of software you can use for a short time
• You can download free versions of some software you can use indefinitely

Software prices can be all over the place. For example, you can pay 750 for a webpage building package, you can pay 20 and everywhere in between. The 750 package will offer you more flexibility more features that will allow you to create pages that look exactly like you want them to look.

However, sometimes the higher priced, more flexible, more powerful package is also less user-friendly: you need to have a bit more experience to be comfortable with it. Before you buy any package check it out with your techie. If the 20 package will do the job for you, dont spend any more.

Quite often you can download a free trial version of a software package, and this is true throughout the range of prices. Your evaluation period is typically 30 days. At the end of this time, you must pay for it if you want to keep using it.

There are also free versions of some software you can download and use forever. Typically the free version only has a minimum of the features of the one you buy (looks like a front-end product, doesnt it?). Again, if the free version will do the job for you, use it.

Thats all for this time. See you soon.

Next time we shall talk about commissioning software. This is when you pay somebody to create a piece of software that is entirely yours.

Thanks for listening

Copyright 2006 Mary Rice-Johnston & Golden Goose Direct. All rights reserved.