Subject: Starting a Business � What is a Business Plan?

> So you\’ve decided to start your own business - congratulations! It\’s a
> huge leap from letting someone else take care of taxes, accounting,
> payroll, inventory, and/or a myriad of other activities necessary to run a
> business. However, running your own business has its advantages, too.
> You get to be your own boss, set your own hours and days to work, and are
> responsible for your own success. It can be a great way to free yourself
> from the tedium of 9-5 and work at doing what you love, but you have to
> begin by asking a few questions:
>
> 1. Are you doing what you love, or just doing something you�?Tre good at?
> A desire to get away from the regular working world can be a good
> motivation to work for yourself, but you have to be excited to get up in
> the morning to do what it is you have chosen to do for a living.
>
> 2. What is it you are planning to do? What niche is it going to fill? Is
> there a need for what you can provide? Will the market bear another
> entry?
>
> 3. What technical skills or talents do you have? Just being able to do
> something may not be marketable enough to convince customers or financiers
> that you are a good financial investment.
>
> 4. Who are your competitors in your chosen profession and how are you
> going to do it better? Why should customers come to you? What do you
> have to offer that no one else does?
>
> Once you are satisfied with the answers to these questions, it is time for
> the decision of what kind of business structure you will use. Will you be
> a sole proprietor, responsible for every facet and the penultimate
> authority as to how to run the business? Will you enter in with a
> partner, the better to share the cost and workload, but also the profits
> and the business decisions? Perhaps the decision will be made to
> incorporate, with its financial safeguards but more complex and costly
> structure? At this stage, legal advice is recommended, if only so that
> you fully understand the advantages and disadvantages of your chosen
> structuring plan. Many lawyers will provide a free or reduced-rate
> primary consultation, though often not more than an hour. When the
> structure is finalized, a name for the business should be decided upon, if
> not already having been done so in advance. It should be easy to
> remember, avoid initials and single letters (B & L & R, Inc. will be
> difficult
> to remember for customers) and try to say something about the business
> (Bob�?Ts House of Hobbies is easier to remember and spell).
>
> Next, a business plan is a vital step in laying out all these topics and
> proposals in a standardized format. A good business plan serves as a
> formal statement of the new company�?Ts goals, financing, structure and
> legal considerations. It acts as a �?oresume�?� to prospective investors
> and is the primary documentation they will use to evaluate whether or not
> your business will be worth investing into. It also provides the
> proprietor(s) with a chance to see the workings of the new business in
> black and white. A basic business plan should at the least contain a
> balance sheet, income statement and statement of cash flow, as well as a
> proposed financial budget for the first year, or as long a period as
> necessary if a year is impractical.
>
> So with these quick tips, plan for success, and good luck in your chosen
> endeavor!
>
> © 2006, Wholesale Pages UK. All rights reserved.
>
Article by: imzee

Subject: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) � An Overview

> Run a search on any of the 200 major search engines, and the results will
> come up in similar orders on quite a few of them. How a website
> owner/operator gets their website to the top of a list is called Search
> Engine Optimization, or SEO. Optimizing a website involves many of the
> same techniques, whether the aim is to optimize for Google adwords, Yahoo,
> Ask Jeeves or others. There is a list of what not to do as well, and that
> list is applicable to all engines, as it mostly refers to tricks and hacks
> unscrupulous designers use to try to trick the engines. These kind of
> pages generally get removed by automated tools and don\’t generally last
> very long, so they are not recommended to bother with.
>
> Website optimization starts with content. If the content is irrelevant,
> the website will not last long in the rankings, no matter how many
> keywords are included. The best way to get relevant content is to get an
> expert to write the content. General content may be more friendly to
> beginners, but in the search optimization arena, content is what is going
> to keep readers coming back and webmasters linking to the page. Many
> search engines use link counters to rank sites. If enough people like and
> value the site, they will link to it from their own site as an example of
> expert help for visitors seeking more detailed information than they can
> provide, or are willing to provide. Often, general-interest sites will
> link to expert sites, thereby also driving their own traffic up as the
> initial portal to those expert sites and improving their own rankings in
> the optimization listings. The quality of the sites linked is also a
> major factor in the rankings, as quality sites such as
> Microsoft and Google are going to be more effective \”heavy hitters\”
> than a link to Bob\’s House of Website Optimizing.
>
> When the content is being created, keywords are the \”anchors\” that
> search engines hook onto, but just filling your content with keywords
> risks being dismissed as a spam site, as many spammers merely fill a page
> with keywords, hoping to hook anyone searching for anything. These kind
> of pages are usually removed quickly, but they exist nonetheless.
> Specific keywords are the key–instead of Search Engine, use Search Engine
> Optimization for Google, or combinations of the key words or phrases.
> Optimization for Search Engines in one area, then Optimizing for higher
> Search Engine rankings in another increases the chances of an engine
> ranking your website content a little higher than it may have otherwise.
>
> The guidelines for content also go for Meta tags such as the title. Title
> is very important, as it is one of the bigger spots for an engine to
> catch, as well as the hook that draws a surfer in once the rankings have
> been displayed. A recommended length is 50-80 characters (including
> spaces), with keywords located near the beginning in case the window is
> resized on the screen. A good example would be \”Search Engine
> Optimization tips and tricks for Google\”, instead of \”How to do
> important SEO for websites.\”
>
> Search Engine Optimization–what to avoid: Don\’t use huge strings of
> keywords without relevant content–you may be labeled as a spammer and
> blacklisted off the engine(s) you\’re trying to climb. Stay away from
> pop-ups, excessive load times (by keeping the page clean and using fast
> hosting servers), and lots of flash animation, as this takes time to load
> and also detracts from the readability of the site.
>
> More specific information can be found by typing \”Search Engine
> Optimization\” into any major search engine like Google or Yahoo and
> following the links. Good luck!
>
> © 2006, Wholesale Pages UK. All rights reserved.
>
Article by: imzee

Subject: Importance of Branding: What\’s in a Name?

> Branding is perhaps the most important facet of any business–beyond
> product, distribution, pricing, or location. A company\’s brand is its
> definition in the world, the name that identifies it to itself and the
> marketplace. A model may be beautiful, but without a name, she\’s just
> \”that girl in that picture.\” Where would Norma Jean be without Marilyn
> Monroe, or who would imagine Coca-Cola as just a soft-drink manufacturer?
> A brand provides a concrete descriptor to customers and competitors alike,
> a name for a product or service to distinguish it from anything else. Bob
> may run a hobby shop, but trying to advertise as \”The hobby shop a guy
> named Bob runs down the street a ways\” is financial suicide. Each
> customer will have to describe the shop, who Bob is, and what the shop
> does every time someone asks about it. This makes the process of
> recommending a good hobby shop too much work for the average customer, and
> far too much work for a user looking for hobby shops on
> the Internet. A customer looking up Bob\’s hobby shop will have an
> easier time of it if he or she knows to refer to it as \”Bob\’s House of
> Hobbies,\” and the customer can then refer others to Bob\’s hobby shop by
> name, increasing the potential advertising exponentially.
>
> Developing a brand involves more than just picking a catchy name and
> placing an ad in the newspaper–a brand is more than a unique string of
> letters denoting a particular product; a successful brand is a mnemonic
> trigger that makes a consumer feel a certain way when the brand is thought
> of. For those who drink cola-flavored soft drinks, which is more
> appealing on a hot day: a cold cola soda, or an ice-cold Coke? Coca-Cola
> has spent 100 years developing their particular brand of cola-flavored
> soda as a refreshing beverage and a seminal representation of a market
> segment. Coca-Cola has used a combination of direct marketing, give-away
> techniques, and multi-product cross-branding to achieve maximum brand
> recognition and visibility in not only its immediately competitive market,
> but in markets as diverse as Coca-Cola branded race cars and house wares.
>
> Brand loyalty is an integral part of building a brand, as consumers
> usually have a choice of products in the same market segment, and so a
> successful company will come up with a way to keep consumers re-buying
> their product or coming back to their location rather than going to a
> competitor. These brand loyalty-building efforts may come in the form of
> coupons, incentives such as many grocery chains\’ technique of \”grocery
> discount cards\” or \”loss leaders,\” meant to draw consumers into the
> store, where they will hopefully buy products along with the discounted
> fare at a higher profit ratio. In exchange for these discounts and
> grocery cards, many companies collect information about buying habits and
> average spending amounts, the better to tailor advertisements and
> better-focus future promotional efforts. Once a consumer is hooked, brand
> loyalty tends to result in higher sales volume, as well as loyal customers
> being less sensitive to price changes of their favorite brands
> (within reason, of course), as well as less sensitive to competitors\’
> incentives. Studies have shown that it takes 5 times as much money to
> gain a customer as it does to retain one. That\’s 5 times as much money
> as could have been spent on other things.
>
> A brand is who your company is, and what it is selling–it is as important
> as naming a baby, and should require the same amount of effort to develop
> it, but if done well, can mature into a successful and profitable adult.
>
> © 2005, Wholesale Pages UK. All rights reserved.
>
Article by: imzee