know your business niche, give good service – ebusiness tips

Know your business niche and give good service are two tips from Melissa Norfolk, the author of the Australian and New Zealand edition of Starting an Online Business for Dummies.

More tips from Melissa and information about her book are here.

how to make money from online communities

A bunch of Kiwis have set up a growing online community (based to start with in England) around cycling for charity and have pulled some impressive sponsors on board who recognise the value of the community.

To build a self-supporting community, they recommend:

• Understanding the profile you’re helping your community members build – make it something they’re proud of.
• That every action in your community, is an opportunity to promote, add life and currency to your community.
• Knowing the goals of your community and the numbers or metrics that define your community’s success.

four web businesses amongst top Kiwi start-ups

To see what is hot in the e-business space right now, check out four of New Zealand’s top start-up companies for 2008 — four web businesses praised for their strong ideas and great execution.

Here’s an article explaining them, and below are links to their websites:

Bookhabit – an online book store with an innovative business model for self-publishers
Endemic world – an online design store for N ew Zealand products
Unimarket – an online (SaaS) multi-tenant eProcurement solution
Celsias – a website that helps people and organisations do practical things to combat climate change.

how to start an online business

There was a pretty informative six-part feature in the NZ Herald recently about how to start an business, that focused on online business. It covered everything from having that killer idea, to getting the right share-holders and finding backers, pitching for funding and exporting and also how to sell it.