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Whatever type of online business you choose, you will need a website. It will be the face of your online business, so choose a domain name that is easy to remember and reflects your brand. In fact, if the URL can be the name of your business, all the better. Note: While a .com site is still preferable, almost any suffix will do today.
Once you have your domain, you can use website builders like WordPress, Wix, Shopify, or Squarespace to create a professional-looking site.
Pro tip: Ensure your website is mobile-friendly, as more than half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices now.
Social media should be one of your main ways to market your business, engage with customers, and get your name out. Indeed, Forbes says that 77% of small businesses use social media to connect with customers.
You will need social channels and handles that reflect your business name and URL. They don't have to be exactly the same, but they do need to be close.
Example : My site is called PlanetSmallBusiness.com. My social handles are all @PlanetSmallBiz.
The point is to make money, right? So you will need a way to accept payments online. Popular point-of-sale options include PayPal, Stripe, and Square.
Once your website is live, it's time to attract customers, but no one yet knows you're out there. You will need to market the heck out of your new online venture.
Use social media, email marketing, and search engine optimization (SEO) to drive traffic to your site. Consider also starting a blog or a YouTube or TikTok channel to build authority in your niche.
Before formally launching, test every aspect of your website and social channels, including the checkout process. Make sure everything runs smoothly. You might even consider a soft launch to get feedback from friends or a small group of customers.
One of the best parts of e-commerce and online businesses is that stats arrive in real time and pivoting is easy. Once your business is up and running, regularly review your metrics. Use tools like Google Analytics to track your traffic and conversion rates. Adapt as necessary.
Here's the thing to remember: Starting an online business is a journey, not a race. Stay patient, stay focused, and don't be afraid to make adjustments. With persistence and the right approach, you can turn your big idea into a thriving online success.
Steve Strauss is the president of a boutique content company, The Strauss Group, and is a bestselling small business author and columnist. He can be reached at www.MrAllBiz.com, or at [email protected] .
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What happens when death becomes the ultimate marker of one’s commitment to one’s freedom? Jacob Dlamini explores this and other questions in his new book , Dying for Freedom: Political Martyrdom in South Africa. This edited extract, from the chapter Dead and Proud, focuses on Steve Biko’s attitude to martyrdom and to the political uses of death (30).
Steve Biko ’s death on 12 September 1977 generated arguably the most significant hagiography and iconography to come out of the struggle against apartheid. Artist Paul Stopforth was among the first to respond critically to the murder, producing a collection titled the Biko Series .
Stopforth reworked the forensic photographs from Biko’s autopsy to show not just the brutality to which Biko was subjected by his killers but, significantly, the manner in which they inadvertently made the killing look like a crucifixion.
In his book, No One To Blame? , about deaths in police custody in South Africa, human rights lawyer George Bizos titled the chapter on Biko “The passion of Steve Biko”. Bizos was not the only one to see Biko’s death in terms of Christian notions of sacrifice. Reacting to the death of her husband, Ntsiki Biko said :
I think Steve expected to die at the hands of the Security Police. I think all of us expected it. But Steve was prepared to sacrifice his life for the black cause. He felt his work was so important that even if he died it would be worth it.
Biographer Lindy Wilson also took a scriptural approach to Biko’s life. Remarking on Biko’s birth in 1946 and on his name, Wilson wrote :
The name Stephen was prophetic of the manner of his death. It connects with that of his biblical namesake, Stephen.
The biblical Stephen accused Jews of being false to their faith by failing to acknowledge Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah. The Jews stoned him to death.
Biko grew up in a Christian family and, despite his later scepticism towards the church, retained the religious influences of his upbringing. When the government banished him in 1973 to his home district of King William’s Town, effectively forcing him to abandon his studies at the University of Natal Medical School, he assuaged his mother’s fears by asking her about the purpose of Jesus’s mission on earth. When she answered: “To save the oppressed”, Biko said : “I too have a mission”.
According to Wilson, it was then that Biko’s mother realised that
there was something deep in this child and I had an understanding of what was going on.
In fact, Biko’s religious casting of his own activism was a key reason for his charisma and public standing. This casting cemented Biko’s faith in the correctness of his cause. This faith, coupled with a fierce intelligence, gave Biko a sense of confidence that unnerved the apartheid security police. They saw him as a man out of place, a native who did not know his place.
As Bizos said ,
The state considered Biko dangerous, not because he had ever taken part in violent activities, but because of his formidable intellect.
Biko drew from his understanding of Christian ideas about sacrifice and from his upbringing in an African household a notion of dignity that guided his politics and shaped his philosophy. Father Aelred Stubbs, an Anglican monk who became one of Biko’s closest friends, remarked on Biko’s profound sense of dignity:
I am sure that there was a kind of inner fortress of integrity that he would not suffer to be violated … He had a much greater fear of betraying himself than a fear of physical violence even to the point of death. He had conquered fear by his inner conviction of his outer undefeatability if he was prepared to give everything. That kind of quality grows with exercise.
It is not that Biko lacked fear. He had a keen survival instinct. But he valued dignity. He preferred death before dishonour.
The power of Biko’s intellect and the fact that he, unlike Nelson Mandela, never took up arms against apartheid demand that we take seriously his pronouncements. This means that we must remember him not simply as the charismatic leader who gave his life for freedom but as the embodiment of a much older Greek and Christian concept of martyrdom, namely the idea of a martyr as s/he who bears witness. Biko married reason with proselytising in ways that made him an excellent organiser and a powerful witness.
He understood the importance of organising and the need for faith in action. As he told a group of church leaders in 1972,
I would like to remind the black ministry, and indeed all black people, that God is not in the habit of coming down from heaven to solve people’s problems on earth.
The reminder was as provocative as it was timely. Biko and his fellow activists in the black consciousness movement effectively turned the popular saying “God helps those who help themselves” into the more politically charged slogan
Black man, you are on your own.
As a newspaper columnist, Biko used his writings to define and publicise his philosophy of black consciousness. He and the black consciousness movement challenged negative associations with blackness by asserting that “Black is beautiful”.
Biko and his movement turned the term “black” into a powerful tool for the assertion of their right to dignity. By emphasising black beauty and by insisting that blacks take the task of liberation into their own hands, Biko and his colleagues inaugurated a form of politics that helped revive a moribund liberation movement, mainly the African National Congress.
When thousands of young South Africans left for exile in the wake of the 1976 Soweto uprisings and after Biko’s murder, many of them joined the ANC . They brought with them a philosophy that inspired the ANC, still stuck in staid Marxist debates and beholden to Cold War loyalties, to emerge by the 1980s as South Africa’s premier resistance organisation. These activists’ insistence on black initiative pushed the ANC to refine its own philosophy of non-racialism.
It is no coincidence that the ANC first opened its membership to non-Africans in 1969 and elected its first white executive member in 1985, both milestones tied to significant dates in the formal emergence of black consciousness in South Africa. Even the jailed Mandela was moved to a grudging respect of Biko’s movement, lauding its
powerful ideology and an able youth leadership.
Biko’s most eloquent philosophical statement was the essay “Black consciousness and the quest for a true humanity”. Published in 1973 in a volume about South African perspectives on black theology, the school of thought developed by American theologian James H. Cone , the essay sought to relate Cone’s ideas to South Africa. Biko argued that racism in South Africa grew out of economic exploitation.
The leaders of the white community had to create some kind of barrier between black and white so that the whites could enjoy privileges at the expense of blacks and still feel free to give a moral justification for the obvious exploitation that pricked even the hardest of white consciences.
Out of this had developed a culture that made racism both individual and institutional. Biko rejected the idea that the solution to South Africa’s fundamental problem, meaning apartheid, lay in a nonracial coalition between black and white.
He said black South Africans could not look to their white counterparts for their freedom.
We must learn to accept that no group, however benevolent, can ever hand power to the vanquished on a plate. We must accept that the limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
That is why, he continued, the South African Students Organisation (Saso) that he led adopted the slogan
Defining his philosophy, Biko said :
Black Consciousness is an attitude of mind and a way of life, the most positive call to emanate from the black world for a long time. Its essence is the realisation by the black man of the need to rally together with his brothers around the cause of their oppression – the blackness of their skin – and to operate as a group to rid themselves of the shackles that bind them to perpetual servitude …
Dying for Freedom is published by Polity .
The article was updated to change the headline.
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What Is Action Research? | Definition & Examples
Thus, action research is often a cyclical process. The action research report that you write is based on this process. Typically, an action research report is written in the same way as you would write an original research article. However, you need to ensure that your report has the following components: The context or background.
Action Research: What it is, Stages & Examples
History of action research. Tracing its roots back to the mid-20th century, Kurt Lewin developed classical action research as a response to traditional research methods in the social sciences that often sidelined the very communities they studied. Proponents of action research championed the idea that research should not just be an observational exercise but an actionable one that involves ...
A Simple Guide to Writing an Action Research Report
What is action research and how do we do it?
Action research is a research method that aims to simultaneously investigate and solve an issue. In other words, as its name suggests, action research conducts research and takes action at the same time. It was first coined as a term in 1944 by MIT professor Kurt Lewin. A highly interactive method, action research is often used in the social ...
Specific goals of this handbook are to help educators do the following: Define and explain Action Research. Demonstrate an understanding of how to use the recursive nature of Action Research to improve their teaching of instructional literacy. Provide examples of the Action Research process in action.
The action research family is wide and diverse, so inevitably different people say different things about what action research is and what it is for, and who can do it and how. You need to know about these issues, so you can take an active part in the debates. Taking part also helps you appreciate why you should do action research and what you ...
Get Help with Writing Assignments; Definition. Action research. ... Action Research (AR) is an ideal methodology to enable practical and emancipatory outcomes, as well as to generate relevant and authentic theory. Consequently, it has gained popularity worldwide. However, this emerging paradigm of AR in the Social Sciences has been widely ...
Humans. International Cooperation. Action research is a form of research that enables practitioners to investigate and evaluate their own work. It is increasingly used in health care research; it is a research strategy in which the researcher and practitioners from the setting under study work together in projects aimed at generating ….
There are several benefits of using action research in education, including the following: It helps teachers to become more reflective practitioners. Through reflection, teachers can learn new strategies for improving student outcomes. It helps teachers to develop a shared understanding of teaching and learning.
Action research is a way for you to continue to grow and learn by making use of your own experiences. The only theories involved are the ideas that you already use to make sense of your experience. Action research literally starts where you are and will take you as far as you want to go. DESIGNING A STUDY.
Sagor (2010) defines collaborative action research as "the team inquiry process, when a group of individuals who are a part of a specific PLC, grade-level, or teacher learning team engage in inquiry and research.". These teams can become a means for collaboratively engaging in action research and developing data that is relative to the school.
(PDF) A Practical Guide in Writing Your Action Research
You can find resources for action research at www.actionresearch.net and. www.jeanmcniff.com. Please contact me at [email protected]. Thank you! Jean McNiff 12th September 2008. Jean McNiff: Planning, designing and doing action research. Page 2.
In conducting action research, we structure routines for the continuous confrontation of problems regarding the health of school communities using data. These routines represent the five essential stages of the action research cycle. They include the following. 1. Identifying a problem area. The first step is to identify a unique problem.
1 What is Action Research for Classroom Teachers?
First, you may want to develop criteria for gauging the effectiveness of your research process. You may need to refine and modify your criteria and your thinking as you go. For example, we often ask ourselves if action research is encouraging depth of analysis beyond my typical daily pedagogical reflection.
In the rapidly shifting world of education, action research helps prioritize which changes are worthy of extra attention. Action researchers pick a slice of their practice and dive into the research literature, then they use data to evaluate success and draw conclusions. 3. Action research promotes collaboration.
Suggestions for Writing the Action Research Report *. There are five structural elements for an action research report. Although these elements will be described in a particular order, they need not be that way in your report. In fact, they do not even need to be separated from one another. The first element of the action research report is a ...
The research methods you use depend on the type of data you need to answer your research question. If you want to measure something or test a hypothesis, use quantitative methods. If you want to explore ideas, thoughts and meanings, use qualitative methods. If you want to analyze a large amount of readily-available data, use secondary data.
Action research helps the teacher to reflect on his/her teaching process and enable the person to avoid prejudgments or depending on making guesses. It helps in avoiding wrong and misguided judgments. This is vital for every teacher. It helps one to be more serous, reflective and attentive.
Importantly, we found that many homes don't have the 'family feel' that helps children feel at home. There is also a huge shortfall in support and training for carers.. To draw attention to these issues, we've produced a series of reports: Each of the UK's four countries has its own children's social care system, so each report covers that nation and its individual policy context.
PhD: An uncommon guide to research, writing & PhD life By James Hayton (2015) PhD: an uncommon guide to research, writing & PhD life is your essential guide to the basic principles every PhD student needs to know. Applicable to virtually any field of study, it covers everything from finding a research topic, getting to grips with the literature, planning and executing research and coping with ...
Once you have chosen your business type, the next step is to create a plan of action. You don't necessarily need a business plan (especially because most people either never finish writing one or ...
He understood the importance of organising and the need for faith in action. ... Write an article and join a growing community of more than 189,400 academics and researchers from 5,038 institutions.