Top New Year’s Resolutions for 2010

The confetti's cleaned up and you're back to business. Will this be the year that your company grows to the next level? Or will you be content to grind out another year waiting for the phone to ring? According to small business experts from across the country, the first quarter of a new year offers tremendous potential for small business owners and entrepreneurs willing to make changes.

Resolution #1: Help Your Customers Find You Online
If 56k modem speeds seemed fast the last time you updated your company's web site, it's time for an overhaul. Likewise, if your web design only looks right on a single web browser, consider opening up your online presence to the whole world. Inexpensive Website design services can help you craft an online experience that works just as well on mobile phones as on desktop computers. Using text effectively can improve your ranking on major search engines. Search Engine Marketing campaigns are trackable ads that can bring new customers to you online, and you can use internet marketing or SEM to make sure your advertising money is spent wisely. SEO services can help customers reach you by having your website appear higher in top search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. Sign up on Tradeseam to receieve qualified sales leads for your business.

Resolution #2: Communicate More Clearly, and More Often
Many business experts caution entrepreneurs to spend less time talking and more time listening. Instead of crowing about your latest ideas, use every tool at your disposal to listen to employees, customers, and partners. Web designers can easily implement customer feedback forms into Web sites that highlight common ideas and themes. E-commerce solutions and point of sale (POS) software tools can integrate customer surveys into receipts. Using online social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, TradeSeam or Get Satisfaction, to respond to sales leads, inquiries and complaints shows that you really care about customer concerns.

Resolution #3: Make It Easier for Customers to Make Payments
Tightening up on receivables can make a big difference to your company. Online credit card processing solutions let customers use their own plastic online as an alternative to having to physically visit your store to make a purchase. Many e-commerce solutions for small businesses now offer invoicing tools in addition to traditional shopping carts. E-mailing customer invoices not only saves stamps, it can also result in faster turnaround time for scheduled payments. Many credit card processing services will even automate regular transactions such as subscriptions or contract payments.

Resolution #4: Organize Your Inventory To Reduce Waste and End of Year Write Offs
For retail stores, spoilage, shrinkage, and shoplifting pose three of the biggest threats to profits. Even online retailers must think about stock levels, sometimes at multiple storage locations. Inexpensive POS and inventory management solutions can help you and your team stay informed about what you can sell. Auto-replenishment modules can alert your vendors when you're low on stock. And sophisticated e-commerce solutions can integrate with in-store registers for seamless customer experiences.

Resolution #5: Hire Great Talent To Grow Your Business
Small business owners are probably more sensitive to recessions than anyone else. However, guiding your company through troubled economic times can give you a greater strength than you might realize. As a successful business, you can use this time to recruit some of the greatest minds from less fortunate companies. Ask your Website designer to integrate a "careers" page into your Web site, so you can more easily catalog prospective applicants. Building a strong team during a weak economy can help you thrive during the next bull market.

Resolution #6: Don't Wait For 2012 For Your Next Resolutions
The very best companies don't wait for the ball to drop in Times Square before thinking about how they can improve. Charting your progress on a quarterly, monthly, or weekly basis can help you make smarter short-term business decisions. Instead of forcing yourself to make sweeping changes at the start of the new year, you can focus on smaller tweaks that keep you focused on your business.

SEO Is Critical For Every Small Business This Holiday Season

Establishing an Online presence is not simply a matter of creating a website.  Without a strategy to drive traffic to your website, your business will get lost in today's world wide web of websites. Search engine optimization can take your business out of the wilderness and put it on the Internet's Main Street.

The classic criteria for a successful business is still location, location, and location. On the world wide web, the optimal location for a business is appearing on the first page on Google's search engine results pages (SERPs). Getting there is not as simple as paying for an expensive lease, search engines use a complex algorithm to determine which websites are most relevant to the user's search and which site is most worthy of appearing on the coveted first page.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Strategies

The good news: your business' web presence is not entirely at the mercy of the Google gods. SEO experts have developed a set of White Hat SEO best practices for ensuring a site's visibility to the search engine. Optimizing a site for search entails good website design and content to achieve greater relevance to a user's search term, as defined by the Google's search engine. Some of the factors that Google use to define a web site's rank include:

1. Site structure 

2. Keyword density or frequency

3. Title and Description Meta tags

4. Inbound links


White Hat SEO Services

In order to keep pace with increasingly sophisticated search engine algorithms, search engine optimization has evolved into a complex art form. White Hat SEO services help you optimize your website by targeting the most relevant search terms and optimizing the site to convert the traffic landing on your site based on those terms.

White Hat SEO services typically involve:

1.   Keyword Mining. It's not always clear which keywords and phrases are most likely to lead customers to a particular site and convert for your business. SEO experts have the technical tools and the experience to identify the optimal keywords on which to base a client's online marketing strategy.

2.   Website Optimization. An SEO service can help you  reconfigure the content on your website to help focus on the targeted keywords and phrases that will convert on your wbesite.

3.   Link Building. Recruiting other websites to link to a client site boosts search engine rankings. In addition, SEO companies produce content such as press releases and articles, and place content on other sites to help your website rank higher in Google.

Search engine optimization should be a critical component of your online strategy as without SEO your investment in your web design may be a complete waste as your website would never be found by your potential customers.

Beat The Recession By Filling Your Sales Pipeline With Sales Leads

SIn order to survive in the business world, you have to make every effort to maximize your sales. A sales lead is the identity of a potential customer who has shown interest in your products or services. In order to increase your business, you need to take several steps to increase the number of qualified sales leads especially if you are a small business owner or entrepreneur.

The following sales lead generation tips are helpful in this regard.

You need to have an attractive website design to represent your company on the internet. Alternatively you can also tie up with a business network site and create your business profile on it. You can use this profile to invite and connect to your past and present business contacts and concentrate on those contacts where a mutually trustworthy relationship already exists. This will also help you to advertise your products, and provide information about their suitability, advantages, and benefits so that the visitors can connect with you and become important business sales leads. This will also help you to find products and services that your business might need.

The next important step is to cooperate and tie up with other e-business owners who sell complimentary products and services and have a wide customer base. Their sites would be attracting various b2b leads. With a tie up with them you can widen your reach and get more sales leads. This collaboration will also enable the parent business owner to cross-sell your products and services to their customers and you can cross sell their products. Such business relationships can boost your business. You can take advantage of the credibility of the parent business and building credibility with clients and suppliers.

On the parent website, you can place informative articles that would give insight into your expertise. These can be in the form of informative content on your area of operation, pointers to your previous articles and articles written by others that quote you. You can also show your expertise by answering questions that are posted on that site and share your knowledge. When you communicate with your clients and suppliers you should create an email signature that incorporates the link to the original site’s business profile. You can also share the profile page of your business on major search engine sites such as Google and Twitter. This will automatically increase your business leads and help your business grow.

The other steps that you can take to enhance qualified sales leads is to get in touch with your previous clients and request them to recommend your products and services to the people they know. These clients know the value of your products and are the best people to promote your offerings and create more sales leads. In order to boost sales leads, you must have determination and perseverance. You should also engage in hosting free teleseminars, video marketing, forum posting, writing more articles and blogs, and social media marketing.

It is important to generate a steady flow of qualified leads to keep your business afloat. If you can form an idea of who might be interested in buying your products, you have begun well. And well begun is half done.