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Home-based business and homeschooling: Can it work? Can children at home learn not only academics, but also the practical tasks of dealing with clients, thinking on their feet, coming up with creative solutions to problems?

Institutional schooling tends to be spoon-fed; it’s limited, with students given prepared problems on paper. What kind of education can a home-based business provide to fill in the gap?

Read the latest installment of Family Business Journal, in which a father deals with a problem with his young son, “Work with your hands if your will is stubborn.”

The blog is written in a third person, novel-style:

Sure, Kenneth was hurt that the job had fallen through - a large one by his standards in his small one-man business. The reason it flopped was that Kenneth couldn’t agree to an opened-ended agreement that his prospect wanted, and the prospect chickened out.

The website, whose author is anonymous except for the fictional name, portrays not only problems and difficult experiences, but also solutions or plans that the business owner finds to overcome the problem in the future. The business provides online publicity and promotion. Other situations encountered are the difficulty of making time for tasks while working from home, cash flow problems, how to price jobs, and developing a good business plan.

To read the ongoing story, go to Family Business Journal.

Ever want to just ask a question of a business without getting put on a mailing list? Why not just type in a question on the business’s website, and get a real live person who answers your question right then?

That’s the idea behind a website-enabled chat box, or IM. Check out Chat Roll, a free and amazingly simple script that is put on your website. No, I don’t have a business relationship with these people, but I’ve been playing with their free service on one of our websites under construction. It works well. They also have paid chat services.

Here’s what they say:

“Get up and running in 60 seconds. Simply copy and paste the one-line Chatroll Module code into your existing website, blog or CMS.”

Well, it took me more than 60 seconds — more like 15 minutes. That’s because there’s a way to do it with WordPress, as a plugin, as well as for a static-page website. Fifteen minutes is still quick. Give it a try and let me know how it works for you. That’s Chat Roll.

A new website for a retired school teacher looks attractive and contains an innovative way to draw visitors.

The website at www.RobertKellyTutor.com contains a widget that carries Kelly’s blog entries on Facebook. When Kelly adds a post on his Facebook page, it automatically is entered on his website blog. Saves time, don’t you think?

The website was created by this website’s parent company, TreeFrogClick (TFC), to attract students interested in advancing their language arts skills. “We now see the need for a solid social media presence,” said Kevin Banet, TFC president. “That’s why we either encourage our clients to post regularly, or offer a package to update their blogs for them.”

If you would like a personal website like this made, in addition to social media services like Facebook, please go to TreeFrogClick, or call Kevin Banet at 708-393-4098.

One thing I do is post on my Facebook page about once a week, when I upload the latest homily on Great Catholic Homilies. I make an interesting comment about the homily and of course put the link there. I have also set up a widget for the Facebook page which is inserted into a page on Great Catholic Homilies called — well, what else — Blog. Each posting on Facebook automatically goes into the Blog page. It’s bringing ‘em in. Nifty, eh?

“See the ‘Edit’ button at the top of your screen?”

“I don’t see anything like that. What software am I supposed to be in?”

“Microsoft Word. What is on your screen?”

“Nothing.”

“Did you turn your computer on?”

“I thought it was on. Where’s the switch?”

Believe me, it is a case of the blind leading the blind. I’ve been frustrated, and I know my clients, miles away, have been too. (Of course, they’re not as ignorant as in the above example, however.)

The new training method,  on the other hand, is to direct people to YouTube, which has amassed thousands of how-to videos, many of them made by amateur videographers who get the message across by showing you how it’s done right on the screen. These geeks may sniff now and then if they have a cold, but they get to the point without a lot of big-company blah-blah.

For example, if you want to know how to add images to your WordPress-built website (which we here at TreeFrogClick use), just learn from Asha at the YouTube channel SocialMediaNinjas. He is probably from India, but his English is good enough. He uses a screen-capturing software, maybe Camtasia, to show you just where he is on the screen and what to do. In a few minutes, you can often find what you need.

Some videos are slick with music and fancy graphics, made by tutorial companies, and these are good, too. What is interesting is that the common man’s videos are usually just as good as those with the fancy wrappings. In any case, you can learn how to use all kinds of software. Just go to YouTube, type in “How to Use Microsoft Word,” and you’ll see 1,700 listings.

In the upcoming redesign of our TreeFrogClick website, we are including the below sample videos to help our clients learn the software the easy way.

WordPress Tutorials

WordPress updates its versions from time to time, so your admin page layout might look a little different than what you see on these videos. You will still be able to figure things out once you see them.

How to Edit a Page in WordPress, by ExcelNetMedia. Good simple intro. 1:45 min.

How to Add Images To Your WordPress Blog, by Asha

Tour of WordPress, by ExcelNetMedia. Overview

Google Apps - In the “Cloud”

Google Apps is a great file, calendar and website sharing program that works like an intranet, with password protection.

Google Apps Quick Tour, by Google. How you can share live documents on Google’s server among many collaborators in different locations. 1:58 min.

How to Use Google Calendar, by Bohemicus.

Using Google Apps Sites for Small Businesses, by AVL Marketing. Google’s internal website feature. 10:02 min.

Other Software

Microsoft Outlook 2007 - Setting Up Email Accounts by My Digital Works. 2:59 min.

Muscular and determined, swift-legged skaters speed around the track at the Olympics being held now, but most of their hard work came in the months and years before this big event. It’s the same way with getting a high ranking in the search engines.

Website visits quadrupled with TFC SearchRank

As a business person, you are up against a lot of competition. What can you do? There are two basic ways to get a high ranking in the “natural” search results (as opposed to pay-per-click listings) in Google, Yahoo, and Bing search engines.

1. Post Many Pages

Google, which has around 70% of the search market, is like a hungry bear in the springtime. It looks for the best fish in the stream, and those are the ones that are swimming the fastest. In the same way, the websites that are producing pages using keywords that are relevant to, let’s say a bicycle shop, such as “bikes,” “parts,” “seats,” “cross-country,” or whatever, will get a high ranking.

Therefore, post many many pages describing your business service or product, on a regular basis. A great way for most businesses to do this is to build your website with a program called WordPress, which allows for the easy posting of many pages in a blog format. WordPress also allows you to change your web pages from any computer, with the use of a password.

2. Get Incoming Links

The other way to raise your rank is to have many incoming links from other websites to yours. These other websites should be relevant to yours, and you will fare better if they themselves are popular websites. Thus, a bicycle shop that has an incoming link from the League of American Bicyclists, which itself has a high ranking, would be very good. If you have good contacts among your associates, make use of them and ask them for a link to your site.

Another way to get incoming traffic is to post press releases on any of the free press release sites. The best is probably www.PRLog.com. While search engines won’t use these to boost your rank, the press release websites themselves have higher rankings than your website, and readers will find out about you through the articles.

Search Engine Optimization Takes Time

All in all, it takes time to build up your ranking in the search engines. It’s called Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and such services will tell you that it takes at the minimum three months to see any bump in incoming visits, six months to see more, and a full year before the method really kicks in. You can track the number of web visits, and where they come from, with the use of Google Analytics, which is free.

It is probably true that the businesses and non-profits that would benefit most from SEO are those that need a high number of clients or customers, and have much turnover traffic, rather than those who rely on a low number.

WomanCare Services in the Chicago area has seen its web visits increase from nine per day to more than 35 per day in a two-year period. (See graph above.) This success is due to our SearchRank program, of TreeFrogClick, Inc. in the Chicago area. For more information, call Kevin Banet at 708-393-4098.

Doing business in heavily unemployed Michigan, ProVideoJobSeeker.com certainly has many nearby potential customers. And this Detroit-area company provides a unique service in its one-minute videos for those seeking employment. It’s more than just a “talking head.” Shown behind the job seeker can be seen photos, graphics and even an image of the person’s resume. The overall effect is an attractive and professional-looking presentation.

“Only a few years ago, the cost would have been several thousand dollars. Now, you can have Super Bowl quality at a fraction of the investment,” says Dick Bradley, company owner. The company’s “e’mercial” is produced for $285. The video can be linked from one’s email or website, or displayed on Vimeo.com, which, although not as popular as YouTube, reaches a more professional audience. The video can also be embedded on one’s personal website or posted on social media sites such as Facebook or LinkedIn.

“We feel that the purpose of an ‘E’mercial is to showcase the ‘Real You,’” says Bradley. “And the best way to do that is for you appear in your own ‘E’mercial.”

The reporter was asking whether our client had seen a recent Time magazine article on Natural Family Planning. Local media often look to the big guys such as Time, the New York Times, the Washington Post for news ideas, and this reporter probably found our client by simply typing “Natural Family Planning Chicago” into a search engine. You can try this and you will find our client’s site, www.naturalfamilyplanningchicago.com, coming up first in the rankings.

That was good news for us at TreeFrogClick. We built the site in September 2008, and then began our SearchRank program for them the following March. With this program, we research and write three original articles about Natural Family Planning, birth control, and related subjects per month. As you can see in the graph above, the website visits have gradually increased. We also post the same article on our network of press release sites. (See the PDF info sheet of the graph above on our TreeFrogClick website.)

In addition to this, our client is now linked from the popular sexuality website, RHRealityCheck. While this website, which promotes birth control and abortion, is the polar opposite in ideology from the Natural Family Planning site, they consider our client an authority on the subject. And incoming links from authoritative websites on the same subject give a kick in search engine rankings.

It’s this kind of help that will make your website rank high in search engines and deliver more visits.

1. Can’t find Google

A man who is not too familiar with the ways of the web called us asking how people who did not know about his non-profit could find his website. When told to look on the website Google, he got to the website and asked, “It’s not here. All I see is this blank space and the words, ‘I’m feeling lucky.’ ”

2. Website — adios

A business owner in the Chicago area lost his website when a former employee, who built the site, refused to give the business access to the website. The former employee had registered the domain name in his own name rather than the company’s.

“Why don’t you prosecute him?” we asked the business owner.

“He went back to Mexico and we can’t reach him,” was the answer.

3. Missed the big time

Years ago a friend of mine asked me for a $300 loan to start up a computer company. “I’ll give you returns on your investment if the company takes off,” he pleaded. “I’m thinking of naming it something unique, like ‘Microsoft.’” I turned him down and the rest is history.

Well, OK, the last story is completely made up, but I got you to chuckle, didn’t I?