Author: Chesney

Idea Accelerator™ is for people who have the fire to innovate whether deciding to start something on their own or re-imagine and re-invent what they do at work. Hotwire your inner circuitry with the ideas and articles you find here.
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Ideas crisis: 3 lucrative tools you can use to instantly pump ideas

Idea - Foster's Chill Head
Idea – Foster’s Chill Head (Photo credit: fostersartofchilling)

Home owners faced the worst drought in half a century in the US. Water rationing and conservation became imperative. So what could home owners do about their lawns?

Many decided to paint their lawns with green organic dye. It’s incredible isn’t it, that homeowners would rather spray their lawns green than replace them with indigenous grasses or even endemic plants that need little water?

Although spraying residential lawns may be new, golf courses and athletic fields have used green spraying for years to get a more deep green lush appearance.

Dyeing grass makes water conservation screen around the gills but the point I’m making is that new ideas often come about when people face crises. They have to do something to change or respond to events. It brings challenges and opportunities.

Small business owners and start-ups aren’t usually looking for ideas to solve lawn water problems but they often need to come up with ideas in a hurry. Continue reading “Ideas crisis: 3 lucrative tools you can use to instantly pump ideas”

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Do you make these mistakes in advertising your products?

Land Rover advert
Land Rover advert (Photo credit: Ben Terrett)

The petrol price has sky-rocketed to such stratospheric levels that companies have been forced to pull their sales people off the road.

Now more businesses are looking at selling through less direct sales methods such as print advertising, telesales and online sales messages.

The effective sales appeals that salespeople are able to make when selling face-to-face, reading customer clues on the spot, are much more difficult in shorter written messages. Continue reading “Do you make these mistakes in advertising your products?”

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Hot Karoo town feels the heat… from foreign competition

024I am sitting in the Wimpy at the Engen 1 Stop in Beaufort West, a town in the semi-desert Karoo. It is 3:45 PM and the temperature outside is 32°C. I have driven four hours from Cape Town seeing the vast landscapes of shrubs, hills and blue sky.

The wind is blowing outside and the poplar trees swaying with their green leaves shaking about. My food is already 15 minutes late and I open the local community newspaper because I know my chicken and salad is going to take at least half an hour.

I flip through the newspaper and my eyes stop at the editorial on page 4. This is what interests me: Continue reading “Hot Karoo town feels the heat… from foreign competition”

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Low-income markets hold promise for business owners with imagination and innovative ideas

flowering Karoo, near the Highway N1 between L...
Flowering Karoo, near the Highway N1 between Laingsburg and Prince Albert Road Western Cape, South Africa (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In recent months I have travelled through the Richtersveld in the Northern Cape and the Karoo in the Western Cape. Vast expanses, unique flora and hardy, friendly people who live and work in these semi-desert regions.

When you arrive in the small town of Philipstown, De Aar, Carnarvon, Calvinia, Laingsburg, Beaufort West and Hanover, you are stuck by the large number of young people, unemployed people begging for money and the mostly run-down retail shopping areas.

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Who’s supporting business in these hot, dusty Karoo towns?

Northerrn Cape
Northern Cape (Photo: Chesney Bradshaw)

After driving for hours through the hot, dry and dusty Karoo, you get back home to the city and miss those wide open spaces.

The veld with small bushes and shrubs that extend to the mountains on the horizon. Clear visibility enabling you to see so far that you wonder about the distance that you can see with the naked eye – is it 23 km or 30 km? The vistas are big and leave you with a good feeling that there is still so much land out there that’s unspoilt, unpolluted and even untrodden. Continue reading “Who’s supporting business in these hot, dusty Karoo towns?”

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From the road

Simon's Town (Photo: Chesney Bradshaw)
Simon’s Town (Photo: Chesney Bradshaw)

A young man hitch-hiked from Cape Town to the Eastern Free State to attend a funeral in a rural area. He can’t afford the taxi bus fare because the price has gone up. The rising fuel price is bringing the return of the hitch hiker.

A craft shop in Hanover, a pass-through town in the Karoo, displays crafted furniture, paintings and ornaments – all made with care and quality you’d previously only find in city stores. Even back water crafters have upped their game. Continue reading “From the road”

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Want five proven ways to get your news release published?


Breaking news banner logo
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I haven’t sent out a news release for some time and wanted to try out the e-news release services available in South Africa.

My e-book on the business side of blogging was up on my blog and I was curious whether I could get free publicity, how easy these e-news release services are to use… and how effective they are.

With no prior knowledge of or experience with these news release services, I searched in Google until I found some that looked reasonably credible.

Cost-shock
My first shock was the sites that charge well over R275(+/- $30) to distribute your news release. These obscenely high prices are just not worth it for the start-up or small business, and especially not for a small start-up blogging business. I’d rather steer clear of people like this who act as news censors with high-priced toll-gates to news distribution.

Registration impossible
Don’t miss a word of this… several of the free e-news release sites were so poorly designed that it was impossible for me to register on them. Surely, if these sites are not even user-friendly, how can you expect them to have the competence to send your news release to the relevant print and online publications?

A few that worked
Among the many e-news release services, only a handful worked. That is they enabled fast and easy registration and were able to confirm that my news release had been published.

Impact
I have yet to find out the impact of the news release services I used. It’s still too early to tell. But one important thing that concerns me is that I have no way of knowing where these sites sent my news release. Do they just simply publish releases on their website or do they send them to media outlets?

I could have sent my news release to media outlets direct but curiosity got the better of me. I wanted to do this as an experiment to find out costs, ease-of-use, customer service, professionalism as well as impact.

Whatever means you use to distribute your news release, it’s critically important to write your news release so it engages editors as well as readers.

I promised you five proven ways to get your news release published. If you need a copy of this news release tip sheet full in your details below and I’ll email you a free copy.

Stay inspired
Chesney Bradshaw

Send me my copy of the Publicity News Release Tip Sheet NOW!

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If your competitor keeps you awake at night, you must read this now

Noordhoek
Noordhoek (Photo credit: Paul Watson)

I’ve just woken up in a strange place, tossing and turning in the dark with the autumn wind howling against the mountain side. I’m staying for a few days in a cottage high up mountain, next to a vineyard, with a view down below of the Atlantic Ocean.

In the night with the cottage creaking from the wind all the primeval fears come out. Winter is coming and there could be trouble the way the global economy is going. Business is down in this coastal town where I’m staying. Walk through the malls and main road and you see windows plastered in paper – several businesses shut down.

A business-owner I was talking to yesterday mentioned that a competitor was setting up shop nearby. Although some business owners simply brush off competition with “there’s room for us all”, it’s never a simple matter to decide whether competitive threats will make an impact or not.

It’s easier to explain what’s happened than to predict. When a business fails people want to know why. Was it the competition, the owner, the bank, customers, technology? One of the reasons or a combination makes sense. But it’s a lot harder to forecast, estimate, predict, divine what can and will happen in the future.

If you look at the advice small business owners themselves give to fellow business owners, you’ll find three main themes:

1 Ignore your competition and get on with obsessing about your business and customers.
2 Analyse your strengths and weaknesses. Identify opportunities and minimise threats. Differentiate with personalised service.
3 Make friends with your competitors, love them, unite with them, help each other.

Two main distinct groups here: the aggressive warriors and the relationship builders.

For me who has had “don’t just stand there, do something!” drilled into my early survival and witnessed many businesses successes and failures, I would keep an eye on them but keep stepping up my value for customers.

Did you know that the McDonald’s brothers started out in the drive-in food business? Stiff competition and their increasingly high-cost, labour-intensive format made them decide to sell their drive-in business and open a new hamburger restaurant in one of the new strip shopping centres. That’s where they began to develop the concept of speed, lower prices and volume. The system they were about to build and innovate would be the beginning of a revolution in food service.

Competition is good because it keeps you on your toes. But what’s far better is innovation – finding ways to look after your customers and attracting new ones even if it means a step-change in your entire business model.

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Ideaaccelerator.co.za founder introduces book on blogging for university students

How you can make money from bloggingFOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Ideaaccelerator.co.za founder introduces book on blogging for university students

25 March 2013, Bloemfontein – Ideaaccelerator.co.za founder Chesney Bradshaw has just published “How You Can Make Money From Blogging”, a guide for university students on making income online through blogs.

Written by Chesney Bradshaw, who has 10 years’ experience as a corporate Webmaster and four years blogging on innovation site ideaaccelerator.co.za, the book is designed to give university students practical advice and proven strategies to help them start blogs that can be turned into viable businesses. Continue reading “Ideaaccelerator.co.za founder introduces book on blogging for university students”

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The secrets of how a mom turned an old smoker into a cash machine

Omul fish, endemic to Lake Baikal (Russia). Sm...
Smoked fish for sale. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was talking to a Chinese restaurateur the other evening about foods in South Africa. He’s newly arrived from mainland China and wants to know the different kinds of foods that South Africans eat and is fascinated by the different cultural influences. He makes a delicious tuna seaweed wrap by the way but that’s another story.

We got talking about the many ways chicken is prepared in the country from rotisserie grilled and deep fried to flame grilled. I mentioned that I had recently bought a smoked chicken from an organic farmer who had discovered a 300-year-old family recipe using hickory wood. The newly-arrived Chinese restaurant owner said he had seen a smoker in America and would love to give smoking a try.

I couldn’t help thinking of the old smoker that my father bought when I was growing up in Kalk Bay. He bought it from a man who had gone into smoking fish commercially out along the old Kommetjie Main Road above the Noordhoek Valley which was only farming land and small holdings in those days. A pioneer, he had been unsuccessful in making a go of it. Continue reading “The secrets of how a mom turned an old smoker into a cash machine”