The Internet and the Dawn of "iBusinesses"

[ad_1]

What is an "iBusiness"?

The iBusiness is a word I coined five minutes back to describe the most powerful breed of entrepreneurs that the world is soon beginning to come to terms with. The iBusiness is nothing but the Sole Proprietorship, freelancer. The rise in the popularity of the internet as a means to do business across borders has heralded the growth of the "work-at-home" typist freelancer. Freelancers across the globe have now grown to dominate the internet with their mastery over various subjects, services and business niches.

Freelancers are simply people that work for themselves. In economic terms, they are sole proprietors.

A sole proprietor means just that- the person under consideration is the only employee of the "company". The individual owns the business completely and does all the work required to bring in the money. Every freelancer is technically a sole proprietor, although not all of them end up registering their businesses due to sheer ignorance.

If you have ever come across a website owned and run by a single person, that person is a freelancer. Bloggers, individual service providers and professionals all come under this category.

How Has The Internet Made This Possible?

With the advent of the internet, more and more service based companies started marketing and advertising their services to the ever increasing consumer presence online. The "web" was and still is considered an alternate universe where consumers and businesses interact and carry out trade without any strings attached. All you needed was a website and some business acumen, and you were right there in between that aggressive bidding and competition.

As more and more companies came over to sell services through this revolutionary medium, the competition increased multiple fold in years. Companies were forced to reduce prices out of sheer competition and outsourcing became the next big result of the internet. While companies themselves could only reduce their prices so far, entering individuals now took the step forward to establish themselves as freelancers and bring down the cost of services further.

One of the most important signals of the internet is its ability to level battle field s

With information on almost any topic being freely available, it became more than easy for anyone to set up their permanent presence online. Employees of service oriented companies found they made a lot more money working freelance for the same amount of work. People with enough savings ordered the courage to quit and started offering their services as freelancers. Since freelancers were in fact just individuals, their prices and charges for a particular service were obviously far less than what companies could even dream of charging.

However, freelancing bought with it a lot of hurdles for freelancers. Previous employees who did not know anything apart from their core service or profession now had to learn how to advertise, market, communicate, sell and bill clients. Nonetheless, freelancers employed their common sense and used the freely available information on the internet to carve out respectable businesses and work with reputed clients. Customers also started to prefer freelancers to companies because of the undivided attention, keen interest and simplified the process of getting things done. Not to mention the great discounts!

So Is Everyone Going GaGa Over Freelancers Today?

That's a really tough question to answer. With more and more people using the internet everyday, the number of freelancers has increased multiple fold as well. But since freelancers only have themselves to worry about, many people did not mind reducing the quality of their services, as long as they made the dough to pay their rent!

This changed the ballgame altogether. The freelancers were all becoming unreliable- learning for themselves a new set of tags that included negative behaviors such as laziness, arrogance, disregard for others and unprofessional behavior.

So now all that was left on the internet was

1. Companies that charged too much

2. Freelancers that charged fairly and did a great job

3. Freelancers that charged fairly and did a bad job

The internet being the great leveler, historically mixed the second and the third categories to make outsourcing to a freelancer a matter of personal and time tested experience that not every customer had the time for. Freelancers with a pathetic service skill set and great marketing skills are known to kill out the freelancers that did great jobs!

So Whats The Verdict?

The bottom line currently though, is that a freelancer remains the cheapest way to get something done over the internet- whether you want to develop software, get marketing and advertising done, build a website, design a logo or write articles and content. But the reliability of their services and the level of quality they offer is incomparable to that of most companies. Remember, companies have hawk-eyed entrepreneurs steering their ships- and they are known to have and perform a lot better than your average work-at-home mom. However, a lot of freelancers work for big companies at the back end as well. Companies are saved unnecessary expenses like vacations, paid leave and dental plans, and hold freelancers more accountable to the work they deliver.

The internet being the great leveler of competition has certainly aided the sprouting of freelance professionals across the globe. But what remains to be seen is whether these freelancers withstand the capacity to maintain quality and standards as companies often tend to do!

[ad_2]