Monday, January 20, 2014

Make a profit in your business - The Business Bakery Kitchen program review

Over the past few months I've been taking part in The Business Bakery's Kitchen Cookalong* as part of setting up my new business Tig's Garden.

The Kitchen Cookalong is a paid course designed for smaller businesses to really sit down and figure out their pricing so they know how much they want to make, how much they are making, what their costs are and how to improve their overall income.

I've looked into pricing a lot when talking to various businesses (service and product related), and even in my own service-based business made changes based on what is and isn't working financially. As we all know, we can't keep running a business if we're not making a profit. But the Cookalong really gets down into the nitty-gritty of where your money is going.

Now while the sessions do dig deep into the details it is quite light on the work overall. Each cookalong generally takes 20-30mins, you get two Cookalongs via email a week, and a week off to catch up each month, which is great for anyone who needs to work on their business but doesn't always have a lot of time. And it doesn't matter if you still fall behind, Julia is always there to answer any questions you may have and there's a Facebook group for brainstorming with fellow Cookalong participants.

The Kitchen Cookalong is a great program for small businesses who are wanting to know how much of a profit they're actually making, or want to be able to pay themselves more.

For more information about the Kitchen Cookalong visit The Business Bakery website.

*this article has affiliate links

Saturday, January 18, 2014

Connecting Adobe Contribute to your website

This is a quick, no image walk through for setting up Adobe Contribute. Depending which version you are using there may be a step or two different, but it is basically the same, and it is a fairly logical setup.

Adobe Contribute allows you to connect to your website to make changes and updates. If you would like to know more about Adobe Contribute, or download the trial version visit this website:
http://www.adobe.com/products/contribute/

To set up Contribute (This only needs to be done once per website):

Click the Website Connection icon

Click Next

Type in your website address (you only need to put http://www.websiteaddress.com, you don’t need the page names eg. http://www.websiteaddress.com/index.html)

Click Next

Choose FTP from the Drop Down menu, which will bring up some fields to fill in.

Type in your FTP details (You will have received (or will need to get) these from whoever is hosting your website)

Click Next, this will attempt to connect to your website to make sure the FTP details are correct. Note that it may take a little while to complete this step.

(This step may or may not appear depending on the version) To find out what folder on the server you need to select click on
Choose…
Select the appropriate folder (Most likely public_html or your domain name, but if you are unsure you should have, or be able to get, this information from your host)

Click Next

You may be asked about Subversion Connection, this is optional (and may or may not appear depending on the version).

Click Next

Enter your name and email address.

Setup is complete!

Now every time you open Contribute, your website will appear as an icon on the starting page which you can just click on to open.