Ways to Make Money Online

When money is tight, an extra $1,000 a month could be life-changing. Although an additional $12,000 a year might not sound like a ton of money, for a single-income home, or for a family with a hefty car payment or medical bills, it could make all the difference.

You can start an online business if you have the right attitude and willingness to learn. Follow these steps to utilize your spare time and invest it into an online business.

• Find what interests you most and what are you good at – This is the starting point of setting up your online business. Spend enough time on thinking about this. Write down whatever comes to your mind and then make a short list of 5 such business ideas. Finally, you can come down to one such niche area, which you love the most or enjoy doing in your spare time.
• Develop your own website – The next step is to write blogs or articles about your interest area on a website. You don’t need tech skills for building a website. You will find online resources where you can get ready-to-use templates. You will get visitors to read information on your website. Your website contents should aim to solve their problems. For specific information, you can develop a video or present expert’s interview clip or info graphic and can ask for viewer’s email address in return. For additional free resources, visitors will share their email ids with you. In this way, you regular visitors become your subscribers.
• Start selling – Once you generate the list of subscribers, you can start selling your product. For example, if your niche area is tutoring, you can actually develop an online course for which your loyal visitors will pay you fees. Once you provide them quality information for free, they are ready to buy such services from you. People compare the cost of actual tutoring and the pain of commuting with the online resources.

Once you follow these steps, then the sky is the limit for how much you can earn. Keep updating your website contents to get repeat visitors. Keep growing your number of subscribers and enjoy being a successful businessman!

Steps to Design Start-up Business Plan

Launching a business without a plan is like going on a road trip without a map or GPS to guide you. Whatever may be the type of your start-up business, you have to have a business plan in place. Its real value lies in the process of researching and thinking about your business in a systematic way. Another advantage of having a start-up plan is that, you can present it to the investors to give them a clear idea about your business.

Start-up plan is nothing but the “to-do” list of everything to start your business. Once you list out the actions that need to be taken, assign a responsible person for every action and write down the deadline by which it needs to be completed. Any task without a deadline will never get completed.

Review the following steps to write your start-up plan:

• Mission statement - This is your reason for starting your business. Maybe you want to provide a specific service that's missing in your community. Your mission statement should explain your reasoning in a few clear and effective sentences.
• Your own background and information – Add a section about yourself, mentioning your qualifications and experience.
• Employees’ information – List the names of your employees, if you have already identified them or else you may write the titles, job descriptions, the responsibilities they would be handling etc. You may also include the salaries and benefits you are planning to offer to your staff.
• Market study – This includes the description of market that you are targeting. It includes either the geographical locations or people of particular age groups.
• Competitors - Besides their name and business type, note a brief reasoning as to why each business is considered competition. End with why your business will overcome the competition and be successful.
• Partners - These would be the distributors, vendors and contractors that you may need to hire as part of your business.
• Description of your product/service - Be specific about how you plan on producing or providing the product or service, and how you will deliver it. You will also need to explain the methods you will be using to sell the product or service and what modes of marketing your will implement.
• Financial section – This includes information about your credit status, sources of funds, business expenses and projected sales and profits.

It typically takes several weeks to complete a good plan. Most of that time is spent in research and re-thinking your ideas and assumptions. Be sure to keep detailed notes on your sources of information and on the assumptions underlying your financial data.

If you need any help in launching your business, register at TheGongzuo.com for free. We have mentors and advisors to help you in every single task – from building your start-up plan to market your product/service.

Bluetooth, Wi-Fi…..How These Terms Were Born?

Certain terms, which were once part of technical jargon, have taken place in our normal vocabulary. Ever wonder how these terms originated?  You will be surprised to find out the facts behind it.

• Bluetooth - Bluetooth comes from the name of an ancient Danish king called Harald Bluetooth. What's significant about King Bluetooth is that he united different regions and allowed them to communicate with each other.
• Wi-Fi - Wi-Fi, as it turns out, doesn't stand for anything. Phil Belanger, a founding member of the Wi-Fi Alliance, has gone on the record as saying the term was nothing more than a catchy word created by a brand consulting firm.
• Troll - While the imagery of a goblin-like cave monster seems awfully apt, there's actually more to the term than meets the eye. The word “troll,” you see, is also a verb meaning “to fish by trailing a lure or baited hook from a moving boat.”
• Wiki - Credit for the first wiki is commonly given to a guy named Ward Cunningham, who came up with a site called WikiWikiWeb. Ward was wooed by the word wiki when he traveled to Hawaii, where he saw a “wiki wiki bus”. “Wiki” means “quick” in Hawaiian.
• Ping - Ping, in its current form, traces back to a Unix-based network administration tool created in the early 80s. The program sends a data packet to a network-connected computer and then measures how long it takes for the system to respond.
• Spam - Spam, according to most popular accounts, comes not from the questionable canned meat but rather from a 70s-era Monty Python sketch.
• Cookie - The most common explanation suggests the term comes from Unix. In Unix, a “magic cookie” refers to a chunk of data that's passed between two programs.
• Bug – In 1946, Grace Hooper joined Harvard, where she traced an error in the computer due to a moth trapped in it. This bug was carefully removed, the word ‘bug’ is still being used to describe defects.
• Hotmail – Its founder tried all kinds of names ending with “mail”. Later he chose “Hotmail”, as it contains all the letters “HTML” - the markup language used to write web pages.
• Java - "Java" was selected from a list of suggestions, primarily because it is a popular slang term for coffee, especially that grown on the island of Java. As the programmers drank a lot of coffee, this seemed an appropriate name.
• Python - Named after the television series “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”.

….And You Will Be Hired in Silicon Valley

Your resume is perfect, you are qualified, you have applied to hundreds of jobs in Silicon Valley, and yet you are not getting hired, right? Well, if this is your problem, then you are not alone. 

If you want to fulfill your dream of being an employee of the most sought after region for techies, here are tips:

• The easiest way to open yourself doors of top tech companies in the Silicon Valley is to enroll in some of the graduate schools. San Jose State University, UC, Berkeley, Stanford, San Francisco State University are among the top universities in the US from where the tech talent is placed by the hottest companies. So, if you have degree from one of these schools, you are in demand!
• Most of the candidates want work for Google, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. But the reality is for every open position, they get around 250 applications. The competition is fierce for getting into these companies. So, you need to look beyond these companies. Consider start-ups which have started receiving funding. You can contact them directly and send them your resume. Remember, start-ups are not getting 250 resumes for every open position they have.
• Make your resume tells the recruiter only the important points – your contact information, education and work experience. Don’t include your other interests, hobbies in resume. Resume should have action verbs like “Designed”, “Developed”, “Created”, “Sold” to describe what you have done so far that could benefit his/her company.
• Network with the people who are already working there. Ask them how they got the job, which skill sets are in demand in their companies, hiring process etc. Most of the times it is easier to get interview calls if you apply through employee referrals.
• When you go for an interview, show your passion for that company. The interviewer should see your excitement to work there.
• Generally, Silicon Valley companies don’t hire management trainees. They want their employees to be productive right after they join. This doesn’t mean you have to have at least 5 years of experience to get hired. But, during interview you have to show your ability to grasp things quickly and get started immediately. You cannot expect a long term training program before you start contributing here.
• Regularly browse through the job search sites such as TheGongzuo.com to know what the Silicon Valley tech companies are looking for. You get a fair idea about which skills to pickup to increase the probability of getting hired.