Organize Your Business For Profits

Often new entrepreneurs can be overheard to make remarks like, “This is my third year in business and I expect to finally start making profit this year.” Not! A real business should be set up to make profit from day one. Starting an unprofitable business just doesn’t add up. Let’s take a look at a sound business approach to profitability.

Situation Analysis

Head to the USA Small Business Administration website and grab your free information on how to create a business plan at: http://www.sba.gov . Work your own business plans out on paper to get a picture of your current and projected situation. Include a Financial Statement (get one from your local banker). Draft details of your 4-P’s: products, prices, place of distribution and promotional strategy. For help, head back to the SBA site links above and public library for helpful books on the topic.

Objectives

Next list your objectives - -which need to include earning a profit. No one wants to work for free! Be realistic, but do plan to reach out ahead a little more each year. Check current industry trends for projections and recent statistics.  Set GOALS and review them on a regular basis.  Personally, I review my goals and affirmations on a daily basis twice a day.  This keeps subliminally attuned to prosperity and success.

Campaigns / Promotions

How will you advertise? List ways you will promote your company. Use a combination of online and offline strategies and techniques for maximum potential and outreach. For help, head to the public library for marketing books and industry and niche books about which methods work best and which don’t before you plunge ahead. For example, lots of people recommend advertising in the Yellow Pages. This could be a costly mistake your first few years and there could be much better methods of advertising or using those dollars instead. So do some research.  A book I would personally recommend is called “The Purple Cow” by Seth Godin.

Evaluation: Test and Track

Take a regular step aside to see how you are doing. I would analyze your business quarterly and at the minimum annually.  You should go over your expenses versus income statements to see where you stand. Trim expenses where possible, and keep your belt tight.  If you do not treat your online business like a business, you are destined to failure.

Follow these steps and plan for profit. There’s an old saying, “Fail to plan and you plan to fail.” What are you going to do? It’s up to you!

by: Shane Wilson

In one email blast, up to 20 – 30% of your emails can be filtered out in a heart beat. Others can bounce and even more can remain unopened for a variety of reasons. Key facts surrounding email deliverability are listed below for your convenience.

CAN-SPAM Compliance

With the introduction in January 2004 of the Federal CAN-SPAM law, email rules and regulations went into effect to help with safer and more efficient handling of email and to mainly stop spamming. To make sure your email is compliant, a couple of main rules needed to be taken into account. First, you need to supply a valid postal mailing address in all or your commercial email messages. And secondly, each message needs to contain an unsubscribe link - that works – and removes recipients from further emailing per their request.

Opt-in

To avoid spam and people signing you up for emails you didn’t request, most major email companies require opt in. This means you must ask subscribers permission before subscribing them to lists and before transferring them to new lists (like uploading their database to new autoresponder companies). Some people even choose double-opt-in, meaning you need to confirm your subscription by clicking a link in an automated email reply to your form sign up request. This helps stamp the time and ISP to provide validity in case protesters come forth saying they did not sign up and point the finger at you, saying you are a spamming (which can cause your hosting to be revoked).  I made that mistake once, never again.

Freebie Addresses

When people sign up today, they are so sick of email spam that they often use throw-away email addresses from free sites like Yahoo.com or AOL.com. These are difficult to use long-term with marketers and especially those trying to transfer lists.  This is just part of the business though.  Some marketers have even resorted to stating on Opt-in forms that they will not accept MSN, Yahoo and especially AOL email addresses.  This is foolish and can cost you a lot of subscribers.  As long as you make sure you are following the rules and show people how to White list your email address, your email’s should be delivered without any issue.

Content Filters

To protect readers from spam and other unwanted messages, many of which can harm computer and software systems with viruses and bugs, filters are in place with email hosting companies. Targeted for filtering are items including: attachments, some images (text messages are preferred by some providers over HTML, for example), URLs to undesirable websites within your message, harmful and spamming-type content in the body of your message and in the message subject line.  I would suggest no more than 3 links in your email to your subscribers.  2 in the body of your message and one
in the P.S. of your email, that’s if you use one which you should ;).

So before jumping into email campaigns, study any Help areas your email or autoresponder company provides. I personally use Aweber and have not had a problem using their service.  You can find more out about them at http://www.aweber.com.

Learn what works best in order to get your emails to their destination. And learn the laws. Ignorance of the laws is not an excuse to do what you want. And the results could harm you and your campaigns.

How to Get Quality Links to Your Site

You can have the best website in the world. However, if it doesn’t show up in search engines then it doesn’t matter now does it. When people are looking to shop and they don’t know how to quickly and efficiently find your products or services, your not going to make a sale, your competitor is. One way to get your site shown up in the top pages of the search engines is to attain incoming links.

Obtaining incoming links is not a hard thing to do. There are plenty of companies out there on the Internet that specialize in this and one of them is Link Metro. I mention Link Metro because it is one of the companies that I use and have done well using them. There are other ways to obtain incoming links but first let me give you a tip.

When searching for incoming links make sure that the sites you get them from or swap with( you put their link on your site and they’ll put yours on theirs) are in your same market. The search engines like to see the incoming links to your site are from the same market or industry. They look at it as adding relevance to what people are searching for and this will increase your PR or Page Rank according to Google. Listed below are some other ways to obtain incoming links to your site.

(1)You can begin by emailing people who have quality sites and ask them to exchange links, placing their on a link page you set up just for this purpose. Anotherwords, have page on your site like: yourdomain.com/links.html and put their link on that page. Again, make sure the companies you decide to do link exchanges with are in your same market or industry.

(2)You can submit articles to article directories about topics in your market or industry. In the article you can either include a link to your website within the body, making sure not to make it sound like a “sales pitch” or you can include your website link in the about the author section. Do not overlook this way of getting incoming links. This alone has accounted for hundreds of incoming links on just one of my sites.

(3)You can get software that helps you find quality sites to link to that are compatible with your market or industry. Some of these software can submit link exchange requests and manage the process and link exchanges for you. Simply conduct a search for a phrase like this, “how to get quality links to your site” in your favorite search engine and see which software packages turn up in the listings.

(4)You can hire 3^rd party companies to find and submit your site to link directories, increasing your rank with one way text links. This is simple, just hire a high school kid to do this for you. Have them site down for a few hours during the week and give them like $10 an hour. Make sure you train them on exactly what you want and they can take care of the rest.

(5)You can find out who is linked to your competition, then email them and ask them to link to your site, too. Find out with free tools like Link Popularity Check located at: http://marketleap.com/publinkpop/default.htm . I use this often and have found it to be an invaluable tool. Be sure to check it out.

(6)You can follow these steps:

(a)Download the Google and Alexa toolbar. You can get the Google tool bar here: http://toolbar.google.com and the Alexa Toolbar here: http://download.alexa.com/index.cgi . The Google toolbar will show you a site PR and the Alexa toolbar with show the sites popularity ranking. The lower the number the more important the site.

(b)Type in keywords to find sites that would be compatible, not competing, with yours. Make sure the sites have good a Page Rank and a links page.

(c) For the ones you find in (b), create an Excel document and list the sites in one column, their contact email address in another. Put these sites on your links page and continue to step (d).

(d)After you’ve completed linking up on your end, email the site owners to ask for links back, showing them the links you’ve placed of theirs on your site. This will hopefully “nudge” some to link back. In your request, write out the specific link you would prefer with any keyword phrases.

That’s it. Make sure you get as many relevant links as possible. The more you have the better chance you have of increasing your PR and you search engine rankings.