The piece is more serious than that of the one here and was written to help business owners understand crowdfunding and how it can help them get up and running.

The full piece can be found here:
Crowd Funding your Startup business by Neil Sisson 

I’d love to hear your feedback.

OR…

You could do something different with that €20 – €100, and in fact you don’t even have to wait until Saturday. Don’t worry I’m not going to suggest you buy a goat, or any other animal for a 3^rd world family…

No I’m going to suggest that you take your Guinness money every once and a while and do something that while not always patriotic is really fun. Something that your inner geek will rejoice about.

I’m going to suggest that you take your beer money and spend it helping give birth!

Now hold up there hoss, I’m not advocating some weird ‘pay to be a midwife for a day’ scheme or anything like that. I’m not talking of the kind of birth involving the small pink, screaming offspring of a complete stranger, but rather a more technological variety of midwifery.

Just like you and I, mobile apps are delivered into this world by a stork that drops them off at mobile application developer’s houses. The storks, after all that flying, are really tired and pretty hungry so the mobile application developers have to feed them and give them a place to stay for the night. Both of these things cost money, so the mobile application developers need to raise seed capital in order to be able to birth these wondrous creations of the binary world.

And that’s where we come into the picture, with our Guinness money.  

AppsFunder.com is a site designed basically to allow us (as in your good self, and my good self, and any other good selves out there willing to be separated from their Guinness money) to make micro-investments in mobile apps which helps the mobile app dev to bring them to life.

Now, let’s get one thing straight – I said micro-investment, not micro-donation or micro-philanthropy. There’ll be no goats made, shipped or harmed in the birthing of the app you’ll be investing in and what’s more if you choose wisely you will make a return on your investment.

So, for arguments sake, let’s say you were browsing around AppsFunder.com and you saw an app that would:

1)      help you choose an outfit from your wardrobe for the pair of shoe’s you just took a picture of (thereby justifying your purchase)**

OR

2)      explain step by step, with pictures, how you could tweak the engine of your car to get an additional 30bhp output from it, using only a toothbrush and a stick of chewing gum (MacGiver’s Petrolhead app)**

You could immediately choose to back the app’s development and in the process make yourself a tidy little return on your investment, not to mention a copy of the app when it gets released! Oh, and the pride of knowing that without you the awesomeness you helped bring into the world probably wouldn’t exist!

(** I know, I know – if gender stereotyping were a crime I’d be in deep shit…but just between you and me, I bet you read one or other of those apps and thought it would be pretty cool??!? Right??)

So tell me, have you ever crowd funded anything? Ever helped bring some cool new tech to life?

Next Wednesday evening I shall be speaking to the delightful people of the Alternative Wedding Supplier networking evening organised by One of a Kind Weddings each month.  The event is completely free to attend for anybody working for a company operating in the wedding industry in Ireland.

I will be giving a brief talk on social media monitoring, how you can keep an eye on what’s being said on-line about your company, your brand and your products.

Are you aware that people are probably talking about you right now?

Knowing about those conversations and engaging with them can pay massive dividends in customer loyalty, increased sales and goodwill towards your brand. Monitoring what’s being said is the first step towards really effective social media efforts.

Responding in a timely fashion to criticisms about your company online can be half the battle in creating a really great brand name, high levels of engagement with prospects and even can help you improve your products and services over time.

Looking forward to it!

* Photo used courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/visual_dichotomy/

The last 2 years have been an awesome roller-coaster of a ride that have seen all manner of things come to pass. For starters my Internet marketing & web design business has really exploded in growth. In addition I have a number of exciting JV iron’s in the proverbial fire. All of these are extremely complex and will require a significant amount of planning to see if any of them are viable and would work on the long term.

This blog was originally set up to discuss Internet marketing, social media, SEO and blogging. However with my re-brand to Web Sales Marketing it became clear that that was a better forum for those topics. I am writing in a lot of different places at the moment on different topics, all of which will be updated as they change and grow, or shrink as the case may be.

I am also currently writing a book, but I’m not going to say anymore about that here.

So for now Neilsisson.com falls between two stools, and as such I’ve turned it into a sort of HQ where potential business partners, interested parties, head hunters and anyone else who care’s can find information about me…