I think there are two kinds of people doing business on earth today. The old idea and the new idea. The old idea started out fine, people trading with winners on both sides. As it grew things became more competetive and we got a new kind of business deal that had a winner and a loser. Someone in the equation scores to the detriment of another.

The internet is different. If you have an online presence, whether you are a service provider or a retailer, a professional or an artisan, you can connect to a much larger sphere of influence online. It takes time and energy but you can do it and instead of being exploited or needing to exploit others yourself, you can connect to the mutual benefit of all you connect with.

Let me tell you my little story. I returned to the city of my birth, Johannesburg, when my father passed away just less than a year ago now, and spent several months following his death in a small study in my brother’s house. I wrote about my work and who I am and what I can do for people. I put pictures of myself all over the place, and pictures of my work everywhere too. I became a person on the internet. Just because I was up there, ‘in the airwaves’ other people who were also there noticed me and things started to happen. I got calls to go and look at decorating jobs. From all over the place. I went and saw and some were not suitable, and other’s were. I decorated a kitchen and I was commissioned to make a group of polystyrene sculptures. Both more interesting jobs than I had sometimes been forced to accept working only on word of mouth and what limited print media I could afford. The internet advertisements stayed live for months without needing to be reposted and because I was thorough and worked at it the thing was really ticking when I left Johannesburg. I am still taking calls for decorating in Johannesburg but I don’t do the jobs. I am free to pass them along to other painter decorators I know.

Before I came online the University of Johannesburg had never heard of me. Now they want to use my services to build their parade floats.

Maybe I will go and do that for them again next year, I’ll see. Right now I’m busy trying to help as many people set up an affordable web presence as I possibly can. It’s the only way forward. The only way to expand, little by little, the total exposure you or your interests or your business have.

Only so many people get to go on t.v. but the net is a way to connect with those kinds of numbers of people without being Tom Cruise.

So in typically of me I set off from my brother’s house and, toting a laptop, continued my online search for things to do to make money.

On the train on the way to P.E. ( I decided to cycle from there up into the Baviaanskloof)

I get phone calls quite regularly from all over because of the various options I have been investigating on the net. From forex trading to building houses.

To copy writing. When I did eventually get to Knysna. ( I hitchhiked out of the Baviaans, the new bike not being what I had hoped.)

I checked into a cheap caravan park and started nosing around for work. In the usual way of going around and looking for work I didn’t turn up muuch. But on the net I found an amazing resource. A network of websites that werent really doing much in the way of content but which rank in all the right places for search results for google. It took me ten minutes to learn how to run a site and start writing features for the restaurants in Knysna. Google is even easier when you know what to do and how to do it properley. I learnt how to employ myself as a writer on these sites.

I’ve made a couple thousand rand this way, and it may have been easier than carving up polystyrene.

I’m still no millionaire but I think with what I’m learning I might become one sooner than you think. As long as I keep communicating on the net, I only stand to gain. By connecting as much as I can and really being there on the internet I am building my own future.

Carey Jones is an competent and useful handyman. He has many years of experience. But these are tough times and there are just as many handyman services competing in a shrinking market. So in desperation and with a certain degree of scepticism he has turned to the internet.

That was a week ago. Now, after fifteen to twenty minutes instruction, he is web mastering is own web site and is busy profiling all the businesses he can find in Knysna’s industrial area. He is contacting them, offering them free features which he posts on the site. Then with a bit of help from the rest of us he is getting it all seen on Google. Carey is making himself useful, he is offering a free service to businesses that need the exposure and it shouldn’t be long before someone asks to pay for value added advertising space on his site. In the meantime however he has yet to earn and no on likes pounding the pavement without getting paid for all the effort.

And this is where everything changes direction. The internet is not all IT. It is not complicated, its not expensive and even old people can master it with a bit of effort. It is just another tool that we can use to get the results people and people running businesses in particular, are looking for. Carey has a mandate from a local business directory, Find It SA, to offer the businesses in his area a discount on any orders for print adverts they place. This on the understanding that he is able to deliver at least ten new clients that didn’t advertise with them last year. And this irrespective of whether it is an order for a R450 bold text listing or a R20,000 back cover page. So in other words all Carey has to do is to persuade the people he is servicing that in addition to everything he is doing for them on the net, it is in their interests to advertise at a discount with a publication that is aready well established and widely respected in Knysna.

And this is not all. If we can build a partner network of reliable service providers on the same basis, he can offer everything from business cards, to banners and why not web sites? It all comes down to a question of service and trust.

I started asking questions years ago. Since which time so many have drifted by, more than I care to remember, let lone reflect on. But when it all started, it didn’t take that long before I got bogged down. Sandwiched between those who do not understand the difference between use and abuse and those who do not understand that all use is not abuse. Nothing has changed and trying to make sense of it, spins you in every direction at the same time.

For reasons only they understand, they will go out of their way to waste your time, to weave you yarns and tales of daring do which have only one intention. That is to cloud the obvious and keep you busy doing nothing at all for an awfully long time. Interesting and educational if that sort of stuff  does interests. But expensive if you do not have the time to waste and totally unnecessary if you simply want to get your site seen.

First and foremost you want to set up your page titles using the key words which you believe are going to bring you the traffic and sales you want. Next you want to start building one way links that point back to your site. The best way to do this is to find a list of links directories which accept free submissions and to start submitting your site. But this is where you will start asking the first of may questions:

Can they harm my ranking?

No. You will never get penalised for incoming third party links you have no control over. You can only get into trouble for linking out to sites which do not play by the rules. So take care when adding links to your site. Stay away from link exchanges be they three way, four way or any other way. Always assume that the other party knows more than you and has every intention of doing you over.

Do they work?

Yes they do but they are a low value high, volume asset. Some will accept your site but most won’t. And most of those that do will eventually fall over and you will have to replace them.

So why bother?

Because this is how you get started. It is the starting point. Just don’t expect a silk purse for all your hard work and try to keep it in perspective. They do work but recognise them as the filler they are and understand that you need to commit most of your available time securing links from quality sites, networking and community building.

What is a quality link?

The answer to this is simple. A quality link is a link from a site which won’t give one for the asking.

What about PR?

Forget it. If anyone is offering you PR it’s faked and totally meaningless anyway. It is merely a metric marketing types exploit to pad the bill.

So what’s the alternative?

You want to separate your link building from everything you do to community build and generate traffic to your web site. Link building has a purpose, it is a specialist field intended to  fine tune your linking campaign and give you site weight and substance. You want targeted back links, making use of anchor text that points back to your web site. And most important of all once you have found the sites you want to use you don’t want to have to go back and replace them all. This is not rocket science. Common sense mostly but also not as easy as it should be.

Where do you find these sort of  links?

You don’t. It’s a closed shop. This is where they draw the line. This is where all the smiles and friendly banter comes to an abrupt halt. Hell no, they are not going to share. And this is where we started asking the questions we believe are important.

What is Google Friendly?

What is not?

What is ethical?

What is not?

What can we do?

Conceptually micro-business empowerment is a no brainer. Ideas are cheap. Particularly if one is looking at the net. And if we stick strictly to the theory, all one has to do is to set up a site, specialise, provide useful information and get it seen. That should do it. That is all there should be to worrry about. Theoretically we can, anyone can create a useful resource. Information that is getting used will without question create added value opportunities. So why not an empowerment programme? What could be simpler?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing, that is if one didn’t have to add people to the mix. This is where the problems start. It is people who complicate things. They always have opinions. They always have reasons. But seldom the sense or a need to adventure. And this is a very good reason to do everything possible to cut all the unnecessary baggage out of our picture. So yes, we will admit to it. We are creating sites for Google and Google alone. Besides those of us who are doing stuff, people are incidental, uneccessary even. Extra’s who add nothing to the plot.  We provide them, that is anyone finding one of our sites, with useful information. But we do what we do without charge. And they do what they will with our information, without obligation. We expect nothing.

We provide useful information because that is what Google insists on. We provide useful information that is free because that is the way the internet works and we understand that the whole is just a sum of many, many parts. We accept and understand that if we provide useful information, that gets seen, it will be used and that this is what adds the value to whatever it is we are doing.

I found Tedius Theu in my garden. He is an unremarkable sort of person whom I only took notice of because he knew the difference between a weed and a herb and a flower. And for that he is now sorting the local service providers into Nurseries, Landscapers, Tree Fellers and Garden Maintenance services on edensgardeners.com . He is listing them along with their telephone numbers and invites them to submit features, he will post for free. And that’s it. Job done. All he has to do is to keep the listings fresh, add a new post every three months or so and to get the site to appear for as many search terms as he can.

This in turn gives him plenty of time to work on his links directory where he hand picks quality sites to populate the resource he is building. At the same time, he offers to review sites submitted by web site owners who are looking for back links to improve their rankings on Google.

Theoretically Tedius is doing everything he needs to do to start generating a micro-income from his web site.  He is making himself useful to the wider community. He is contributing rather than abusing the resources he has access to and he is learning how to grow the skills he has. What more can one ask of a Malawian Gardener?

It is difficult to know where to start or what to write about the stuff we are doing in the Workshop without it all beginning to sound patronising and naive. But so what; and but for the want of trying. Here goes.

We live in a coastal town which is recognised as one of South Africa’s premier tourist destinations. But that is it’s curse. The natural beauty  We are either too busy or too quite. There is no happy medium. Feast or famine. And it is all these hungry people who do the damage. They arrive, build another house, strip out more of the fynbos and then they go on to build yet another damned golf course because they eventually get bored with natural beauty. They need more.  And still more. There is never enough.

Undeveloped plots of land have changed hands at prices in excess of twenty million rand. Yet we, this self same “community” cannot afford to support a botantical garden let alone to feed the children who are growing up not knowing where their next meal is comming from. There is something wrong here. Something that needs to change in this Paradise of ours. And change it can.

I am afraid I am one of those who believe implicity in the power of the web. I do not understand why it is not possible for literally anyone to get onto the internet and for them to learn how they can make themselves useful. Forget about the laptop they need. Forget about the cost of the connection they will need and the fact that most people expect to get paid for the stuff they do – instead throw in Google. This so that whatever they are doing, it gets seen. And there you have a recipe for a dish that could theoretically answer all those difficult questions

“Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to use the Net and he won’t bother you for weeks.”—Author unknown

Community upliftment program offering long term value directory links to search engine optimisation consultants and link builders . Web based self help programmes empowering communities in need.