20 Small Business Tips, For Success

These are just some general tips to keep in mind as you design/operate your small business:

1. Take the time out to explore and understand whether or not you are compatible with running our own business. Some people are just plain happier and better off financially on the other end of the paycheck.

2.Get your personal finances in order. Before you jump into the entrepreneurship world, get your own money matters squared away.

3. Pick your niche. Many small business owners succeed in businesses that are hardly unique or innovative. Take stock of your skills, interests, and employment history to select the business that is best suited for you.

4. Benefit from your business plan. The exercise of creating a business plan is what pays the dividends. Answer the tough questions now before the meter starts running.

5. Do not think you need bankers and investors at the outset of your business. The vast majority of small businesses are bootstrapped.

6. Acquire the proper background. In the early months and years of your business, you will have to acquire many skills. Gain the background you need to oversee all facets of your business well, but determine what tasks you should outsource or hire employees.

7. Remember that nothing happens until a sale is made – How many good products go nowhere because they do not reach the shelves? Sales drive your business. You will need a good marketing plan to sell your product or service.

8. You have to see a customer to know one. N o matter how busy you are, spend at least 25% of your time with customers. You cannot make the proper business decision without understanding their viewpoint.

9. Solve your customers’ problems. The best way to satisfy your customers is not by selling them products but by giving solutions to their problems. There is a big difference.

10.Quality takes minutes to lose but years to regain. Quality is not a destination, it is a never ending journey. After you have strayed from quality’s path, your journey maybe sidetracked forever.

11. Put profitability first, rewards seconds. In small businesses, profitability must come first. Find out how to measure your cash flow and understand key financial ratios.

12. Hire supporters. If you intend to create a growing business, your number one duty is to assemble a great team of employees.

13. Do not do it alone. Find such help from small business peers, a mentor, even trade associations. They can help take some of the trial and error of beginning your business.
14. Vendors are partners too! Treat your vendors like customers and watch your partnership grow.

15. Make use of benefits. Understand how to provide insurance and other benefits for your employees and cut your tax bill at the same time.

16. Ignore regulatory issues at your peril. Federal, state, and local governments require licenses, registrations, and permits. Obey them or face losing your business.

17. Know the tax laws. Invest in understanding tax issues that affect your small business.

18. It’s the people! Whatever happens to a small business happens at the hands of the people who work for it. The evolution of the business is a result of their efforts.

19. Fast, good, cheap. Pick any two. Serious trouble awaits those who attempt to be all three in the market place. Stick with what you do best.

20. Develop a passion for learning. As your business grows, you need to change and grow along with it. One common denominator can be found in all successful business owners and that is a passion for learning.

Website visitors for your business – Building strong website traffic.

It is worth looking at some values and strengths of a few technical and promotional elements of your website that will help you to lay a foundation in building profitable online success. Once you have decided on your market and have chosen a relevant domain name for your online business, you need simple and effective tools and methods to put and keep your business on a profitable track. Ideally you will want to make use of easy-to-use methods that keeps visitors coming to your website. Lets look at a few practical ideas.

When a visitor comes to your website you have to get their follow-up information by collecting their email address. It is important to ‘enable’ your web site to automatically deliver quality content such as a newsletter to visitors and allow you to follow up with extra information when necessary. Top marketers agree that this forms a large percentage of their online success. How do you do this? You create forms on your web pages, giving visitors the chance to subscribe to your opt-in list, newsletter or report. This allows you to introduce your service and offer something valuable in order to build relationship. Email follow-up through autoresponders is totally free and an absolute necessity for implementing. All you need to do is integrate the autoresponder into your web site via a form so that you can pre-load it with your newsletters. You may say that you’re not a writer, but what do you know about your industry? Write it down and put it into an informative newsletter. Subscribers can now begin to see you as an expert on the subject and look to you for the solutions that your business is already offering.

Once your newsletter is up and running, you can use these very same tips and ideas you share with your subscribers and also write a weekly article about your product or service, and then submit it to ezines online. This is very easy to do and will have great response for your business. There are tens of thousands of ezine publishers online that needs good content, and will give you valuable exposure for your business. You will have many sites linking to your site and people will be able to read what your business is about and visit your website. Then they will also be able to subscribe to your newsletter which provides even more information about your product or service. Each article has got a resource box at the bottom which allows visitors to visit your web site. Write your 4 to 6 line resource box by viewing some samples online and making up your own. Finding details of ezine publishers can quite easily be done through looking up in search engines.

Let’s go a step further and look at newspaper classifieds. By using little snippets of ideas from your newsletters and articles, you can come up with short eye catching promotional messages to use in newspaper classifieds. There are newspaper companies that offer state wide and nation wide advertising in their papers, often covering readership in excess of 2 to 3 million. By placing 10-15 word tiny classified ads all over the globe can dramatically increase your website traffic. A big mistake people make when doing this is to try and make sales directly from their ads instead of just generating leads for later follow-up. You would want to get your leads to your web site first from where they can subscribe to your automated content.

Lastly lets consider the eye opener an affiliate program can have for your business. With the right product or service it is by far the hottest way of building your business and customer base. Submit your program to affiliate directories across the web. You’ll have affiliates making sales for you and not paying a cent in advertising until you’ve made the sale! Your advertising will be covered by your affiliates, and you can concentrate on providing customer service and continue follow-up with your increasing customer base through newsletter delivery and other product offers. By becoming familiar with how important it is to stay relevant in implementing these factors will benefit your business and you will find that you’ll be achieving better results.

What Should You Know About Search Engines and Pay-Per-Click?

Here’s a fact for you, 85 to 95% of websites are found through a search engine.  You may have the most incredible website on the Internet, but it will receive little or no traffic without search engine visibility and ranking.  Can you imagine a billboard in the Sahara desert?  Who sees it?

So, how will searchers find your website? What types of search engines could they use?

Search engines fall into two categories.  The first is referred to as natural, organic or standard.  The second is called pay-per-click, paid inclusion or paid placement.

Natural, organic and standard are interchangeable terms describing a search engine that bases its search rankings on a ranking algorithm.  The algorithms involve a number of criteria and parameters, all relating to the content of the website, the website’s size, the number of incoming links to the website, and the content’s relevancy.  You will hear terms such as keyword relevancy and keyword density to describe various components of the algorithms.

For the standard search engines, you, your webmaster or hired search engine optimization specialist could spend considerable time optimizing your website to achieve top rankings. The goal is for your website to appear on the first or second page of the search engines’ results when your target user searches keywords or keyword phrases.

The good news is rankings on standard search engines are free.  The downside is the tremendous amount of time and effort required to achieve exceptional search engine rankings.   Let’s confess to each other that top rankings on standard search engines can be tough and timely to achieve!

The interchangeable terms pay-per-click, paid inclusion or paid placement describe a search engine that bases its search rankings on a “bid for position” basis.  Simply stated, you “bid” a price to be in a specific position of the search rankings for a particular search keyword or keyword phrase.  For example, the #1 position on the search phrase “pay per click” recently required a bid of $3.55 per click, whereas the 15th position required only a bid of 55 cents.  As a result, your differential website advertising costs between position #1 and #15 can be considerable.

With pay-per-click search engines, your ability to bid high can dramatically impact your website’s search engine ranking when the search results display website domain names or URL’s for the search keyword or keyword phrase.  The benefit is your website gains visibility with the searcher, but you are not charged the pay-per-click “bid” until a searcher actually clicks on your website domain name or URL displayed in the search engine results. The selection of your website in the search engine results is called a click-through.

In general, click-through rates range from 1% to 5% of the number of impressions.  What is all of this?  A click is when a searcher selects or “clicks” your pay-per-click ad.  An impression is one display of your pay-per-click ad on the search engine results.  So, the click-through rate is a measure of the total number of ad clicks versus the total number of impressions in a period of time:

Click-Through Rate % = Total Number of Ad Clicks / Total Number of Ad Impressions * 100

Let’s do the math for our #1 position bid of $3.55 per click.  In September, 2004 there were 21,535 searches for “pay per click.”  First, let’s assume a 1% click-through rate. The top bidder spent $764.49 (21,535 * 1% * $3.55).  Now, at a 5% click-through rate the top bidder spent $3,822.45 (21,535 * 5% * $3.55).  Budgeting and controlling marketing expenses with such a broad range of potential costs could be tough.  Plus, such costs could be the tip of the iceberg. We still must consider derivatives of the keyword or keyword phrase. So, was being #1 worthwhile?  That depends on your website’s cost per visitor, conversion rate and profit margin of your product or service.

From what we’ve covered so far, you should realize you can achieve a top or high ranking through the pay-per-click search engine. But, a high ranking will cost money and these costs can be volatile. Meanwhile, the standard search engine remains free.

However, pay-per-click offers one significant advantage.  It enables you to achieve website visibility with a high ranking instantaneously or overnight.  If you want to draw traffic to your website fast for any reason, pay-per-click can make that happen. Remember, maximizing the standard search engine process takes time!

Let’s summarize the pros and cons of pay-per-click marketing:

Pros

* Improves your website’s ranking and traffic quickly.
* Tests the marketability of your product or service swiftly.
* Determines the ability of your web site to convert visitors to a call to action or make a purchase promptly.
* Identifies which keyword phrases will provide the best conversion rate rapidly.
* Provides complete control of the search engine campaign, both position and cost.

Cons

* Cost

Many individuals criticize pay-per-click because of the costs involved. But, have you really thought about the cost issue?  Unless you or someone in your organization has expertise in search engine optimization, you’ll probably pay several thousand dollars in fees to a search engine optimization specialist to improve and optimize your website to achieve higher rankings in the standard search engines.  So, my question to you is.  Are the standard search engine rankings really free?

At the end of the standard versus pay-per-click search engine debate, it’s like the old saying, “There is no such thing as a free lunch.” Or, it’s like the old commercial, “You can pay me now or you can pay me later.” The reality of the debate is you must evaluate your specific website situation and utilize the search engine approach that maximizes your website promotion goals and investment.

Why You Need an Article-Marketing Strategy before Posting a Single Article Online Part-1

Part 1 of a 2-part series

First, Define your Bulls Eye

If you’re going to write and post articles on the Internet, be unambiguous about what you expectthem to accomplish. Don’t start writing just yet. Think beyond the mechanics of writing an article or deciding where to post it.

It’s one thing to spin out an article or two. It’s quite another to incorporate them into a strategy that builds your website traffic, reputation, and business. All your marketing methods should work together – online and off.

Your Strategy Clarifies:

– Who you’re trying to reach
– How to find them
– What you want them to do next (does your website support
that aim?)
– Your primary goal and message
– How articles (with particular titles and keywords) mesh
with your other marketing

Article marketing is nothing more than a way to get information (not advertising) broadly distributed on the Internet. It can’t compensate for a muddled or dull message. And it won’t build your site traffic unless it connects to readers in an interesting way.

Write Articles that Trumpet a Unique Business Message

A frequent business error is treating each customer- attracting activity as though it stands alone. Yet each method works better when echoing a common message that links to the others.

To quote Roy Williams, the Wizard of Ads, http://www.wizardofads.com “It’s hard to tell a powerful story badly. But it’s easy to tell a weak story well. I’ve never seen a business fail because they were “reaching the wrong people.” But I’ve seen thousands fail because they were saying the wrong thing… It’s amazing how many people become the “right people” when you’re saying the right
thing. Believe it or not, it’s advertising third, customer delight second, strategy always first.”

Maximize your Customer-Attracting Methods

Last year I wrote an ebook showing how to make the business website and Yellow Page ad work together to bring new customers. It made the point that each promotional method has its own strengths, and reaches different groups http://www.yellowpagesage.com/smarts.html By them working together, each approach does a more persuasive job.

As an example, the directory ad should display a website address. A recent study found that over 60% of people surveyed only call Yellow Page ads that show a website (even if they don’t intend to visit it). Besides, the website lets the business provide information that won’t fit within the dimensions of an ad.

A single approach can’t cover all your bases. The same applies to article marketing.

Article Marketing Strengths
– Ability to deliver an interesting “sample” of your expertise
– Long enough to be informative (600-800 words)
– Reaches and speaks to tightly focused interest groups
– Quickly delivers the message throughout the Internet
– Long shelf life – some websites keep articles posted for years
– Builds on the keywords that your website uses
– Incoming-links from websites that post your articles

Plan More than One Article at a Time

You can’t develop much momentum with one article. That’s like shooting a gun with a single bullet, or a PPC (pay-per-click) campaign for just one term. The odds of hitting your mark aren’t too good. Several articles written to reinforce each other generate more mileage. As you get more articles out there, people start paying attention, and you can target more keywords. Repeated publications develop a personality that readers recognize.

Plan a number of titles in advance, with a theme building from one to the next. Keep each one tightly focused, but related to the others. In that way, you develop the in-depth “voice” of an expert. And your information won’t lapse into ho-hum generalities. Write first-rate articles when you rely on the extensive free resources http://www.promotewitharticles.com at Article Marketing Academy.

Try writing some in a series (like, Part 1 of 3 parts) to build anticipation for future segments. Also, your message won’t be confined to the 600 to 800 word article limit. Since each article in the series resides on your website, readers needn’t wait to read them all (giving them an incentive to visit your site). Later, the whole series can be offered as a special report or ebook (once related material is added).

Write with your keywords in mind. Maintain your primary message, with a different twist for parallel niches. Go to the extra effort to say something new. That’s easy when you provide stories, examples, case studies from your own experience. As you dish out practical assistance in your articles, readers will be eagerly watching for your next ones.