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The technology industry flourishes on the key contributions of Arab American professionals. In his speech at Cairo University, U.S. President Obama announced a powerful vision: to promote the advancement of entrepreneurship and innovation throughout the developing world. The TechWadi Global Entrepreneurship Forum is being held on June 23 for the first time in Lebanon at the Olayan School of Business (OSB) at the American University of Beirut, supported by partner Berytech Technological Pole. TechWadi is the leading networking association for Arab and Arab-American professionals in the technology industry.

The Forum emphasizes accelerating entrepreneurship and venture capital in Lebanon and across the MENA region, and will bring together distinguished individuals who are united in their vision to create a vibrant world-class entrepreneurial ecosystem. Also joining the forum will be a distinguished delegation led by the United States Department of State, including prominent business leaders, investors, and entrepreneurs seeking to expand cross-border ties with the MENA region.

Speakers at the conference will address strategic topics, notably: the key role of mentors and incubators in building the support infrastructure for start-ups; the application of best practices in venture capital, such as managing multi-stage funds; and the opportunities for technology transfer and collaboration between the US and MENA. This conference will offer opportunities for attendees to interact and network with local and international investors, executives, entrepreneurs, and policymakers.

The TechWadi Global Entrepreneurship Forum will also integrate “live tweeting” from the individual conference sessions, using the twitter hash code #GEF2010. This innovative use of technology marks a new era of “real-time” communication at OSB that demonstrates to the region how innovation and technology will drive entrepreneurship initiatives forward.

TechWadi seeks to organize and facilitate access to mentorship, funding, and career opportunities for their members. Based in Silicon Valley, TechWadi reaches over 1,000 technology leaders in the United States and across the globe.

Berytech Technological Pole is a center dedicated to providing hi-tech hosting, incubation, skill training, and mentorship to nascent entrepreneurs, start-ups and small-medium enterprises. Besides physical incubation, Berytech also provides virtual incubation to a number of entities through networking, support, and training.

Building on over a century of prominence in business education, the Suliman S. Olayan School of Business is committed to providing quality undergraduate and graduate programs aimed at developing and enhancing global managerial leadership in the Middle East region and beyond.

For more information about the conference program and to register for the conference, please visit:

http://www.techwadi.org/

Plenty of opportunities to make money from home exist today. The Internet is inundated with them. Here are some great tips to starting your first business successfully!

A home based business internet opportunity is one where your entire process of business can be managed from home with just a simple PC and an internet connection. There are many hundreds of ways to make money online, because there are so many business models available today. Right from internet marketing to freelancing and even to online shops, there are plenty of ways in which you can start earning money from an internet business.

1. One of the most important things when it comes to starting a business is to research well before you begin. Resources are scattered all over the web and a little bit of a search will fetch you huge amounts of information dealing with the type of business you want to start.

2. A lot of people often start a business on a high note but do not take it to the next level of success. This is because they are let down when they do not see money coming in fast. A problem (or perhaps a characteristic) of home based businesses is that they do not reap the benefit instantaneously. A steady stream of income occurs only when a lot of effort and time goes into the starting of the business. So, if you find that the money at first is slow, do not lose heart.

3. There are many models like multi-level marketing, advertising, online selling, online marketing, affiliate marketing and much more. Find out about all of them, and then choose the right kind of a model that suits you best. Of course, it would be only an educated guess but it is a simple one.

So, those are the tips to jumping on your own home based business internet opportunity and starting on the right note. Go and win!

On behalf of the Career Development Foundation (CDF), we welcome the participants and delegates of the 1st CDF Conference on Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the city of Cairo in June 2010. We hope that our joint activity will inspire top quality scientific and professional collaboration in the promising area of innovation and entrepreneurship.

Career Development Foundation (CDF) is considered, one of the main players in entrepreneurial programs, youth Training & Education, environmental awareness, and information technology.

Mission:

Is to provide educational opportunities and self

awareness for public with high potential from limited economic means.

Vision:

Our vision is to provide stimulating educational resources and learning experiences for intellectually gifted,

Foundation focused its efforts solely on training program development and delivery. These programs are offered in an interactive format via lectures, the Internet as well as in classroom type seminars.

CDF’s team is selected from an accomplished group of

specialists in their fields, who have many years of experience in providing training & constancies

Entrepreneurs

We are providing a high quality and targeted training to meet the information needs of prospective and existing small business owners..

Aims:

○ Define what entrepreneurship is, consider how everyone has the potential to be entrepreneurial, and to explore the constituents of the entrepreneurial process.

○ The areas in which entrepreneurs encounter particular difficulties.

○ Actions taken to rectify problems regarding legal status and social security.

○ Support training & developmental programmers for entrepreneurs.

○ To raise awareness among the large number of entrepreneurs.

○ Examine the key resources required to exploit an innovative idea or opportunity to develop an existing business, launch a new venture, or initiate a social enterprise.

○ To support the creation and growth of Women Entrepreneurs, by enhancing management skills.

○ Create awareness of the impact of entrepreneurship on national development.

○ Connect entrepreneurs with potential customers, funding sources and other  resources that can contribute to the success of their ventures.

Environmental Education

○  Our strategy is to reach the public through a powerful network of trusted professionals who can help Egyptians make everyday choices for a healthy life and healthy environment.

○  We provide knowledge to trusted professionals who, with their credibility, amplify messages to national audiences to solve everyday environmental problems. Together.

Objectives:

○ To encourage public & concerned organizations for promoting awareness among the people at all levels.

○ To ensure training and manpower development in environment education.

○ To mobilize people’s awareness for the preservation and conservation of environment.

○ National Environment Awareness Campaign (NEAC).

Career Development Foundation is making plans for the 2010 First Entrepreneurship conference, which will be held in June 27th 2010 at City Stars Hotel, The success of this event is credited largely to our sponsors, who lend their names and financial support to the event. The money we raise goes to the areas in which entrepreneurs & unemployed youths encounter particular difficulties and to raise awareness among the large number of entrepreneurs & youths.

By participating as a sponsor, your organization will benefit from extended exposure through media campaigns and promotional efforts directed toward the supporters of Career Development Foundation. For a small donation, you’ll be able to enjoy excellent exposure to this important segment of your target audience

I started my first business silk tie retailing using a ready made website template and shopping cart. This was because I did not want to spend a lot of money having a site built and did not know anything about web retailing so wouldn’t be able to specify what I needed anyway. It seems to me that this was a good decision. It meant that I could concentrate my work on getting the product, merchandising, sales text and internet marketing right and not worry too much about the other stuff. As I have progressed I have wanted to change some things in the site design but it has been fairly easy and cheap to do so and I have changed only the things that really needed to change. I got my website from www.DPBUk.co.uk who have been good but there are many other companies out there selling ready made retailing websites.

The first step in getting the business up and running was to add my sales text. I decided to aim initially at the UK market only as that is the one I know and is less competitive than the us. My sales text for the front page aims to do a few things; show that I am UK based, show that people can trust and rely on the site (site looks professional, address is prominent, email and phone numbers are listed, money back guarantee and testimonials from customers) and encourage people to browse the ties knowing that prices are reasonable and shipping is free.

Next priority was to make finding the right tie easier. I did this by creating all sorts of categories; by colour, by style etc. Then was the grinding effort as going into every tie in the catalogue and adding it to various categories. This effort was well worth while however, if people can’t quickly find what they are looking for then they will go elsewhere. It is so easy on the internet to pop into the next shop that you must make it very easy for people. Not only did I categorise every tie in to multiple categories, but I also tagged each tie with a basic description so that the Search box on my site would pull up relevant searches. Finally I selected what I thought were the nicest ties for the featured products on the front.

Final priority was pricing. I wanted the pricing to be competitive and to be easily changed, so that I could experiment and find the best pricing. I also wanted to make it clear to people that prices were much lower for the quality than you would get on the high street. I therefore decided to put high-street retail pricing in and then use a Sale to reduce the price to a competitive internet level. This has worked fairly well, although I think I under-priced initially. Now I am slowly increasing prices and it does not seem to be hurting sales. In pricing I wanted to have progressive quantity discounts to encourage people to buy more silk ties, however the cart system couldn’t handle it. In the website administration it did have bands for price by quantity which I filled in for every product, only to find that it only worked if you bought multiples of the same silk tie. I haven’t yet found a way of doing what I want with the cart, but am glad that I left the volume discounts bulk buying of the same tie in. I get lots of orders for multiples of the same tie from clubs, companies and weddings and having the discounts has definately paid off.

Have a look at the site at www.tiespecialist.com to see the design in action.After a week or so have work every evening and weekend the site was looking good enough to go. I placed a few trial orders for silk ties to make sure everything worked. It didn’t. Test, test and test again until it works great. Finally the moment of truth, I was ready to go live and start getting customers.

Google AdWords has been the biggest expense in getting the business going. To have a successfull internet business you have to get people to come to your site. When you start a high-street shop you have passers by to sell to but when you start a new website you have no passers by. Google does not rank new websites highly so no one will find you by accident. The only way to get visitors quickly is to advertise. I figured that offline advertising wouldn’t be very good, much better to sell to people when they are at their computers already. I also figured that banner ads and listing sites are poor value for money. I therefore focused all my advertising on AdWords first and then Overture.

AdWords is a very clever system. Completely automated, it allows you to advertise to people whoare searching for particular keywords in particular countries. For example for www.tiespecialist.com I want people in the UK who are searching for tie, ties, silk ties, woven silk ties, wedding ties, bow ties, polyester ties etc. The adverts appear on the right hand side of Google and you only pay when someone clicks through. In this way it is better than traditional advertising in that you know you get visitors to your site for your adspend.

How far your ad is from the top depends on how much you are willing to pay and your click through rate (CTR). In essence Google maximises the money making potential of each search by showing the ads people are most likely to click on and that pay the most. When I started my website I put in lots of keywords, wrote an ad and aimed it at the UK. I quickly found that I needed to pay 20p to 35p per click to be in the top 3 for the ads. In the first week of advertising I generated 150 clicks or so per day at 25p each on average and got no sales. After the 1st week sales started to come in at the rate of 1 or 2 per day. When I worked out the cost per conversion I was paying £40 per day for 1 to 2 sales, giving a cost per order of £20 to £40 pounds. The gross margin on an average order is only £10 so I am losing money with every order. This is to be expected at first and I was quite prepared to invest in marketing to get potential customers so that I could improve my website and then build a customer base which would give me long term profitability. However to make pay per click advertising work I needed to do a whole bunch of things:

Cut my cost per click dramatically Improve my conversion rate once people clicked through to my site Increase the average order size I have managed to get the cost per click down to less than 15p per click average by doing a number of things.

First of all I tested lots of keywords to find ones for which there was little competition. For example “how to tie a tie” has no one else advertising on it so I can get traffic for the minimum of 2 pence per click. However the keywords have to be relevant to your product and ultimately convert to sales. I have still found that the vast majority of searches are on the simple keywords; tie, ties so I have to find a way of getting in to that space if I want to get decent numbers of visitors.

Secondly, improve the ads. A great feature of AdWords is that you can run multiple ads simultaneously and track the click through rates of each. Then you get rid of the worst performing ads. The key here is to change one part of your ad at a time (so that you know which change causes the effect) and to wait until you have had least 50 clicks on an ad before making a judgement on it (at low numbers of clicks the performance can fluctuate dramatically with chance). As your ad gets better CTR you get more visitors and a higher ranking so you can reduce the amount per click and still get the same performance. I have improved my average click through from 0.75% when I started to 2.6% by running better ads.

Thirdly, remove poor performing words. You will find that there are some words which are not particularly relevant or have lots of competition, where your clickthrough is low and cost high. I have found it is best to delete them. I have also used negative keywords which allow you to exclude certain words. For example with “tie” I found that some people were searching for “tie fighter” so had “-fighter” in AdWords to exclude these searches. This improves CTR and position.

Fourthly, check out the competition and decide where you need to be in the ranking. For my art website www.artspecialist.co.uk selling oil painting reproductions of masterpieces, I have found that for many words the competition are selling painting courses or prints. Why pay high CTR’s to rank above these companies when potential customers will be scanning past them anyway. I have found it really pays to type each keyword into Google and decide where you need to be to match your competitors. On some words I can be bottom and still be the first company selling oil painting reproductions .

I hope you have found this useful. Read more on my blog at http://specialist-paintings-ties.blogspot.com/. In the next article I will take about conversion rates

UK English woven silk tie business at http://www.tiespecialist.com UK reproduction oil painting business at http://www.artspecialist.co.uk Web marketing and internet entrepreneurship blog at http://specialist-paintings-ties.blogspot.com/