Good blog post about the real cost and accounting behind consulting and contracting.
http://blog.asmartbear.com/consulting-company-accounting.html
Whether you need a virtual assistant to help manage your schedule or a programmer to create a web site, there are a number of outsourcing opportunities. I’ve used odesk.com, with limited success…although most was due to lack of preperation and clearly defined requirements. Here are some others:
Tim Ferriss blogged about giving a good presentation – there are a number of good tips in there, depending on the situation of course. Much of the advice is actually from Al Gore’s speechwriter given through an interview, so there is someone certainly speaking from experience.
Source: Four Hour Work Week
Whether you want some secondary income or you want to diversify your portfolio of income streams further, take a read of Moolanomy’s post with over 40 different alternative income streams. Â This is a follow up to his previous post entitled Building, Diversifying and Shifting Your Income Streams.
Source: Moolanomy
ReadWriteWeb had a post on 36 tips for startups. Everything from software to finance to legal, focused on the early stages of a startup. Note from ReadWriteWeb: These tips originally appeared as separate posts on the BlueBlog, the blog of AdaptiveBlue. [Ed: Alex Iskold is founder and CEO of AdaptiveBlue, as well as being a feature writer for RWW.] Since the posts were quite popular, we decided to share them with the ReadWriteWeb audience during the holiday season.
Source:Â ReadWriteWeb
A friend sent me this link, an interesting essay by Paul Graham on the transformation of web startups.  These companies are following a very similar pattern as products – new ones can be produced quicker and cheaper, making competition greater. Read through his analysis and thoughts on the future.
Source: Paul Graham
I have been reading Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss and it has a lot of great points on productivity. It also has good ideas on how to start a new business that isn’t service based – so your time isn’t correlated 1:1 to your revenue. One tip is to outsource tasks, including anything from personal daily tasks to common work activities to generating business plans. You can hire the equivalent of a Harvard MBA for $15 or $20 an hour. Some companies/sites that can provide outsourcing include:
Also check out Tim’s blog for some more interesting insight.
My dad sent this link to me. It’s a great lecture from a Carnegie Mellon professor who is dying from cancer. It’s over an hour long, but worth watching even if in bits and pieces.
Source: Google Video
I read a post at LifeHacker about starting up a blog that you are ready to take to the next level. The original post from Matt Huggins listed 55 different articles that every serious blogger should read. It includes:
Source: Matt Huggins
