Web Pro Help 888.627.7851

Tips for asucceeding in small business: Give more than your competition
By Lori Bratz
WebProHelp.com

If you have a small business, you know that consumers are guarding their spending now more than ever. In order to compete, and sometimes even to stay in business, small businesses need to offer more than their competition. Consumers are forgoing personal services such as haircare, massage, even extracurricular activities for their children because they simply have less dollars to spend on non-essentials. Consider making a space in your business to accomodate and entertain smaller children, enabling families to skip the cost of childcare when they visit your place of business. Clear out a corner, put down some washable carpet squares and a safety gate. Add some safe toys, a dvd player, some video games and you have instantly added value to your business.

• Leave a comment... Comments Off

Businesses for mothers
By Lori Bratz
WebProHelp.com

Everyone excels at something that could be turned into a business offering; especially mothers. Mothers have to be hard-working, organized, patient, adept at settling disputes, and able to multi task, sometimes under a good deal of pressure. Perfect qualifications for a CEO! If you’re like most people, you have dreamed of owning your own business. The good news is that your dream is certainly within reach.

The main rule of thumb? Do everything legally. If you’re seriously planning to start a business, get online and find your state state department of licensing web site. www.sba.gov/hotlist/license.html.

Be responsible.

Get a license to do business. It only costs a few dollars to get licensed.

Pay your taxes. If your business is doing so well that you have huge income tax, then congratulations! You’re a success!

Here’s a list of several business ideas that you can do from home. You can probably add more great ideas to the list if you’re willing to put in some time and creative thinking!

Accountant
Administrative Services
Adult Day Care Provider
Aerobics Instructor
Animal Boarding
Animal Training
Aquarium Cleaning Service
Artist
Art Instructor
Auto Detailer
Auto Repair
Baby Sitter
Bail Bonds
Baking (cookies, muffins, etc)
Balloon Supplier/Delivery
Bed & Breakfast
Billing Service
Boat/Sailing Instructor
Bookkeeping
Cake Decorator
Caterer
Clown
Computer Instructor
Computer Programmer
Computer Repair
Cook (preparing meals for families or businesses)
Courier
Dance Instructor
Data Entry
Decorator
Drapery Maker
Dressmaker/Seamstress
Embroidery
Flower Designing (silk)
Food Delivery
Food Stand
Freelance Writing
Furniture Restoration
Gift Basket Service
Golf Instruction
Graphic Artist
Hair/Nail Salon
Home Health Care
House Cleaning
House Sitting
Insurance Agent
Jewelry Maker
Knitting and Knitting Instruction
Lawn/Yard Care
Landscape Design
Language Instruction/Interpreter/translator
Laundry
Medical Billing
Medical Transcription
Midwife
Music Instructor
Musician
Painter
Party/Event Planner
Personal Fitness Trainer
Pet Grooming
Pet Sitting/Walking
Photographer
Quilting Instructor
Quilt Maker
Secretarial Service
Sewing
Sight-Seeing Guide
Singing Telegrams
Ski Instructor
Stenciling
Tax Service
Tennis Instructor
Tour Guide
Tutor
Vending Machine Route
Wallpaper Hanger
Wedding Planner

• Comments Off

Business owners are known for 2 qualities: #1. Tenacity and #2. A big ego!  Let’s face it, if you own your own business, you are probaby a confident,  success-driven individual who is willing to take chances.  And while those qualities certainly contribute to your success, business owners must be careful to NOT let that ego get in the way of common sense when it comes to their business website.    Time and again, I see a perfectly sound business struggle to find customers because they insist on using their name as a domain name!   Ego, ego, ego.  

Thing one: No one is searching for YOUR NAME to find a product or service.   Unless someone has already recommended YOU (in which case you don’t need to spend money advertising to find me), I’m not searching for Joe Smith.   

Thing two: Exception, if you are famous (Kristen Stewart), or if you are a busy as you want to be and don’t struggle to find customers (LoriBratz.com), OR if your name is Donald Widget, and I’m shopping for Widgets, then you’re all set.  Otherwise, you need to set your ego aside and choose a smarter domain name. 

By the way, if you MUST satisfy your urge to have a self-named website, you should know that you can have more than ONE domain name for the same site.  SO, you could be JoeSmithRules.com and also SeattleChiropractor.com. 

Make sense? If I needed a chiropractor, I might search for these keywords: Seattle chiropractic care, Seattle holistic chiropractor, Seattle chiropractor, Eastside back relief, sciatica pain relief Seattle , back adjustment Seattle , licensed chiropractor Seattle …

What do you think people would search for to find you?

• Leave a comment... Comments Off

The secret of website optimization is that there is no magic involved at all.  Forget about tricking the search engines and work on defining your business correctly by logical, descriptive keywords. 

Combating common website optimization mistakes:

List Spamming:  Some “Website Specialists” believe that the best way to get “juice” is to spam list services like Craigslist.  Posting to public forums every day only serves to annoy the community and will guarantee that you are flagged and removed and possibly even banned from the service.

Instead:  Post to lists no more than every three days and delete your old listing.  Exercise common courtesy.

Posting junk:  Never try to “trick” your audience into clicking your links.  That just costs you time and bandwidth.   Driving unqualified traffic to your website is about as useless as inviting triangles to a circle convention. 

Instead: Be as clear and descriptive as you can, and post only where you believe your target audience to be.

Using useless adjectives in meta tags:  This is a common mistake made by the best of writers.  Adjectives, or words that describe other words like, “Best, brightest and premiere” are not effective for meta tags because people who are looking for you are not searching for those words. 

Instead:  Use simple noun combinations that describe your business or service and physical location; Seattle Catering, Puyallup Flat Roof Replacement, Capital Hill Document Storage.

Be sincere in your aim to give the most comprehensive description of exactly what your business does so that people who are looking for you can find you as quickly as possible. Thoughtful logic will tell you exactly how to optimize your website.

• Comments Off

The internet is now the #1 source consumers turn to to buy products and services. 

Are You Ready? The first place your customers go to find you is the web. Your internet presence will most often be the first impression you give to a potential new customer. Make sure it’s great. Can You Be Found? Millions of business owners and consumers use the internet to find information, research companies, and make buying decisions. If you have a website, you need to be loud and clear. 

Here are the 5 basic steps for website optimization:

Step 1 is site optimization (proper page titles and descriptions, meta tags, labeling images with alt text, etc).

Step 2 is listing you in key places on the internet.

Step 3 is narrowing down keywords: getting down to the nitty gritty with who are target audience is!  

Step 4 is optimizing your site’s content (articles and info) with those target keywords.

Step 5 is writing up style guidelines for the site (rules that your writers, web helpers, contributors should follow:  ex: always use alt text with an image).

• Comments Off

The most frequently asked question I get is, “How can I do this myself?”  Let’s first establish that building your own website is like installing your own fence instead of paying a contractor.  It’s not going to look professionally done.  It won’t be very hardy and you should expect it to break down more quickly than it would if you had invested in a pro.  That said, you CAN do it.  And, like building your own fence, you will be required to learn how to use the tools.  You can’t just go toss some lumber and some nails on the ground and walk away.  You have to actually build a framework.  What is the main thing you want your website visitors to do? Buy a widget? Buy your service?  That is your Call to Action.  Make sure visitors know exactly what you want them to do when they arrive at your site.  Create a clear Call To Action and put it in the body of your page.  

Website Basics

Other pages might include About Us, Testimonials, Other products for sale, etc. So, go sketch out a plan for your site, keeping in mind your Call To Action!

• Leave a comment... Comments Off

Every once in awhile I get a frantic call from someone who can’t see their web changes because they are looking at a stored version of a website.   One solution is to install a “no cache” meta tag in the header of the site.  It looks like this:

meta http-equiv=”Expires” content=”0″ /
meta http-equiv=”PRAGMA” content=”NO-CACHE” /

Certainly you should encourage your clients to do some basic browser maintenance. I found this helpful step-by-step resource for helping non-technical people manage their PC housekeeping, written by the I.T. department at the University of Indiana. 

“Each time you access a file through your web browser, the browser caches (stores) it. In this way, the files (including any images on the page) do not have to be retrieved anew from the remote web site each time you click the Back or Forward buttons. You should periodically clear the cache to allow your browser to function more efficiently. http://kb.iu.edu/data/ahic.html“

• Leave a comment... Comments Off

10 things you need to know before you spend money on keyword advertising
By Lori Bratz
WebProHelp.com

The best customers are the ones that come looking for you. I could sit and cold call businesses all day long and try to explain why they need me, but it’s much easier to pay search engines or strive for high organic placement to send me qualified leads: people who are looking for my services already. It’s good to strike while the iron is hot, and when keywords turn into hot customers, send them to me.

What do you need to know to buy keywords that actually convert to sales?

#1. Know your bottom line. An alarming number of business owners have NO idea what percentage of their money is being spent on essentials or how much profit they are earning, consequently, they don’t know what they can afford to spend on advertising. Do not start buying advertising (or anything else) until you know your bottom line.

#2. Know your customers. Who are the people that want to buy your product or service? Where do they live? Target those people in that area only. Highly targeted ads are more expensive, but they also deliver more qualified leads.

#3. Know your sales cycle. How long does it normally take consumers to purchase your product after they decide they may want or need it? Usually, the more expensive a product or service is, the longer the buying cycle. If you’re selling a $50 radio, you will probably see lots of conversion right away. If you’re selling a $15,000 roof repair job, the sales process will take a lot longer. Your audience is taking time to make an informed decision, gathering information, taking to experts, financial institutions, insurance companies, etc. If you stop advertising before the buyer completes the buying process, then you wont be there when they are ready to make the purchase. Be prepared to go the distance.

#4. Have a realistic advertising budget. Remember the old saying, “You need to spend money to make money.” I always tell my clients that if the conversion is there, they should spend as much as they can on their advertising. That is, if it costs you $10 to make $100, why wouldn’t you do as much as you could? Throwing just a few dollars at advertising is like throwing it out the window.

#5. Know your acquisition cost in order to get started. That is, how much it costs you right now to get a customer. For example, if you spend $200 mailing out flyers, and you get 10 customers in your store, then your acquisition cost is $20. It costs you $20 to get a customer. Online advertising works in much the same way. Don’t expect the internet to magically send you customers for nothing. Anything worth having is worth working for. It’s a numbers game. Go go go.

#6. Know your availability and inventory. Are you advertising so aggressively that you can’t keep up with your orders?

#7. Know your industry. If you are selling a product or service that is in a highly competitive market with major, corporate-backed budgets, consider niching. A niche is a specialty product or service. If your market is highly saturated, your keywords will be far less effective than a new or un-tapped market.

#8. Know your competition. Study your competitors ads to see how they are representing themselves and then make your ad more inviting to customers. If you see that your competitor is offering your main product for less, then offer free shipping. Note: You must NEVER click a competitor’s ad. That is plainly and simply stealing. When you visit your competitor’s site, type their URL into a browser. There’s plenty of customers out there for everyone. Fraud click is the lowest, most reprehensible behavior on the net.

#9. Know when to try something else: You can learn what keywords people are searching to get to you by studying your search engine account page and you own website statistics. If you have keywords that aren’t converting, then simply stop spending time and money on those keywords.

#10. Hire a professional: There are lots of people who claim to be SEO specialists, but only a few truly deliver on these claims. You truly get what you pay for. Look for someone with proven results.

• Comments Off

Government Contracts: How to Bid
By Lori Bratz
Webprohelp.com

Everyone thinks that winning a government contract is a big payday.  Think again.  Most companies earn only 15% profit on their governement contracts, which is, of course, a decent margin.  In addition to the contract NOT being a huge financial windfall, there is an enormous amount of paperwork and preparation involved.  You may want to hire a consultant who specializes in government contracting or commit a dedicated staffer to just do the legwork.  

Don’t bother sharpening an elevator pitch.  The federal government does not take unsolicited calls or proposals from the general business public.  They are interested in creating as level a playing field as they can.  When the Federal Government needs a vendor they open the bidding to all registered, qualified vendors.   So, roll up your sleeves and prepare to do lots of legwork so you’ll be ready when/if the Federal Government invites you (and all your registered competitors) to bid on their projects.

Step 1: Make sure your website is in good order.  Your website needs to look professional, be easy to navigate and have no objectionable content.  The Federal Government is populated with lots of very serious grownups.  They will not award a government contract to an organization that does not look like it will take the responsibility seriously.  That goes for most of the big companies that have sizeable project budgets.

Step 2: You must be registered with Dunn & Bradstreet.  D&B serves as a central location that lists all businesses with a 9 digit DUNS number.  It registers and keeps track of all businesses seeking to work with the Federal Government.  You will not be able to get a DUNS without getting a Master Business License with your state.  (This article assumes that your business is a legitimate, tax-paying entity).

Step 3: Set up a comprehensive profile with the Central Contractors Registry. You’ll need your DUNS number for that. 

Step 4: When you are invited to bid on a contract, make a serious and reasonable bid.   You don’t want to bid so low that it’s not profitable.  Once you are awarded a contract and agree to the terms, you have to deliver to the letter of the terms.  Make sure it’s worth your time and that you can actually satisfy the contract.

Good luck to you.

• Comments Off

How to write a Business Plan

The following information is an excerpt from the SBA’s website. For more information and the complete article, please visit: http://www.sba.gov/starting/indexbusplans.html

What goes in a business plan? This is an excellent question. And, it is one that many new and potential small business owners should ask, but oftentimes don’t ask. The body of the business plan can be divided into four distinct sections: 1) the description of the business, 2) the marketing plan, 3) the financial management plan and 4) the management plan. Addenda to the business plan should include the executive summary, supporting documents and financial projections.

Elements of a Business Plan
1. Cover sheet
2. Statement of purpose
3. Table of contents

I. The Business
A. Description of business
B. Marketing
C. Competition
D. Operating procedures
E. Personnel
F. Business insurance
G. Financial data

II. Financial Data
A. Loan applications
B. Capital equipment and supply list
C. Balance sheet
D. Breakeven analysis
E. Pro-forma income projections (profit & loss statements)
Three-year summary
Detail by month, first year
Detail by quarters, second and third years
Assumptions upon which projections were based
F. Pro-forma cash flow
Follow guidelines for letter E.

III. Supporting Documents
Tax returns of principals for last three years
Personal financial statement (all banks have these forms)
In the case of a franchised business, a copy of franchise contract and all supporting documents provided by the franchisor
Copy of proposed lease or purchase agreement for building space
Copy of licenses and other legal documents
Copy of resumes of all principals
Copies of letters of intent from suppliers, etc.

• Comments Off