Hub You - Internet and Businesses Online

Virtual Meetings Cut Travel Costs
A majority of companies have higher travel expenses than they need," says Alisa Jenkins, senior director at Bredin Business Information, a business consulting firm. "This doesn't mean you have to cut out all travel. There are still many cases where meeting face to face is best. But there are also good ways to meet virtually that can make many of your business trips unnecessary."Alternatives to business travel - such as web conferencing with Microsoft Office Live Meeting or similar products - continue to improve with advances in internet and related technologies, most agree. We'll address the options, including video conferencing, teleconferencing, online collaboration tools and the web conferencing in detail below.But first: When do you absolutely need to meet? Here are some scenarios mentioned by experts:You are meeting a new client.You are introducing new people - perhaps your replacement - to an ongoing but important business relationship.You are attempting to close a significant sale or cut an important deal.You are delivering a product that you must demonstrate.You need to resolve a controversial or complex problem, or discuss top-secret matters such as an acquisition or merger.You need to meet with an attorney to discuss legal matters.You need to solicit money from an investor.You are making sales or training presentations and your materials are best presented in person.Your competitors are meeting face to face with a c

between visited and forgotten. Hopefully, when you created your website, you included the kind of useful information web surfers are looking for. Your content is what makes your website important, it’s what keeps people coming back, and it’s what helps you rank in the search engines. Keep your content relevant, current, and easy to navigate. Some examples of content that you should include on your site, and keep updated, include:
- instructions for assembling and using your products
- technical specifications
- maintenance schedules
- warranty and upgrade information
- frequently asked questions (FAQs)
- articles/information bits on your industry, products, or services

You’re already an expert in your field, so show it off online! Write hints and tips, articles (like this one!) and more. Post this information on your website, but also, submit it to article and press release websites. These types of directories house hundreds of articles on all different topics. If you can’t write, then visit an article site and download some relevant content to use on your website. Here’s the bonus: if you write and submit, your bio and website link go with your article. Anyone who wishes to use your content must keep your bio and links intact. BAM! You just added links throughout the world wide web, back to YOUR site! Watch those FREE rankings go up in the search results! Giving your website some gas by filling it up with quality content is step number four in our 5 FREE Steps to Jumpstarting Your Website.

When steps 1-4 are complete, you’re ready to turn the key and shift into drive. You’re marketing your website on all your promotional material (for free), your site is ranking with the search engines (for free), you’re sending regular email messages to customers and growing your list (also for free), and you’re keeping your content relevant to both customers and potential customers (again…for free!). So now it’s time to take off! Once your site is doing things to help grow your business, it’s time to turnover it over with step 5 -- new ideas. If you’ve started your website for Ecommerce, it’s time to enhance customer service. If you’ve begun as info only, it’s time to sell or take orders online. If your restaurant started a site just to add its menu, then

Intermediate Ways to Ebook Writing
Profitable ebook writing does not need to be a cumbersome project. If you stay organized, you can accomplish much in a short time. Here are some intermediate ways to write an ebook.Stay Organized with and Outline Because an ebook can get out of control so quickly, you should use an outline that is carefully planned out. Start with a table of contents and expand it gradually, then fill in where you need to for the final paragraph form. Keep it within its boundaries every step of the way.Try Adding Art Work People love pictures and drawings, there is no doubt. It also helps them remember and learn your material, so use them whenever it’s appropriate and will serve a purpose. You don’t want to over do it--that will just be distracting and annoying. Also feel free to use photos, but if you have people in them get photo releases signed by them.Edit, Edit, then Edit Again You want your book to be perfect when it finally does hit the bandwidth. Make sure it’s ready for prime time be rereading and editing. Proofread for errors as well. To be on the safe side, you may want to hire an editor to look it over. He or she will fix spelling, grammar, and also make suggestions on how to make the writing better.Post it and Advertise Once it’s posted on your website, don’t let it languish. Advertise it, blog about it, get readers to review it, etc. Promote your work on the internet as much as you can and watch your orders grow.

So you have your own website. Congratulations. Now, what exactly are you doing to get people to visit your site? Just like a brick and mortar storefront or an office suite in the commerce park, your website isn’t just going to become a popular hangout spot for clients and prospective customers. You’ve got to tell everyone about it!

When you open a restaurant, you put up signs, you take out a newspaper ad, you buy space in the yellow pages, you turn on the lights, you open the door, you tell everyone you meet about your new business. Your website deserves the same treatment. If you fail to promote your site, you’ve basically just spent a thousand dollars or more on a standard lot in cyberspace with no roads in and no roads out. You need to get the word out on your new company website, and here’s the best part… it doesn’t have to cost anything at all, if you’re willing to take the time and make the effort to do it yourself.

So…how does a small business owner jumpstart his or her website? You may consider hiring a professional to do it for you. Your web design and development firm built your site for visitors, but probably did not include promotion along with it. A good ad agency will raise the topic when quoting on your site. An experienced marketer knows it’s always best to group your promotions and cross-sell at every opportunity and should have suggested handling your web traffic. But in case they missed the boat, you can still contact a full-service ad agency to help. Of course, that’s not the FREE methods mentioned in the title of this piece, so for those who’d like to take a shot at handling it themselves, this article tells you 5 FREE steps to jumpstarting your web traffic:
1. Connect the Cables
2. Start the Engine
3. Get it Running
4. Give it Some Gas
5. Put it in Drive

Everyone who’s ever owned a car long enough to pay off the loan knows that an indispensable part of the trunk contents is a set of jumper cables (the other is a gallon of water). You never know when you’ll be stuck somewhere with a car that just won’t get going. Same with your website. It’s there, but it’s going nowhere unless you first get it connected to something that’s already running or capable of running. Whether you already have established business or not, you’ve got to connect your website to every promotional piece you create. This means adding your web address to:
- company stationery (business cards, letterhead, envelopes, invoices, quote sheets, receipts)
- business signage (windows, counter displays, and company vehicles)
- ads (yellow pages, newspapers, and local magazines)
- everything else (boxes, bags, cartons, promotional pieces and more)

Everything that gets your name and phone number, gets your URL (web address). This shouldn’t cost you anything if you wait until it’s time to reprint. But, if you want to get started today, you’ll need to redesign and reprint new promotional pieces to add your site. Since jumpstarting requires the cables be connected, it’s a great way to get your site visited sooner rather than later.

It’s important not to lose track of one key point, there are 2 sets of clamps on a set of jumper cables. You must make sure your website is sending the right message back to visitors. It must look and feel like your existing promotional pieces. Your brand identity is dependent upon it. And your website must clearly identify who you are, where you are and what you do. Your contact information is as critical online as it is on your business cards. Make sure the electrical current is flowing freely between both vehicles if you’re ever going to get rolling!

Okay. So your cables are connected, and now it’s time to start the other engine. The most important engine on the internet is the search engine. You want to become very friendly with Mr. Search Engine – because he knows lots and lots of people. You want his friends to be your friends. Search engines, and their brothers, Directories are the traffic cops of the internet. They basically tell people where to find the files and pages they’re looking for out of billions of documents on the world wide web. So…you can’t have them over for dinner, but…you can get them to know about you by sending them an invitation to visit your site.

Search engines use robots and spiders to crawl all over the web and take inventory of the files and their content, it’s a computerized process. You can wait weeks to be crawled, or you can help the process along by submitting your URL to the search engines directly. Well over 80% of internet users take their first step via a search engine like Google, AltaVista, or HotBot.

Directories like Yahoo, employ humans to compile lists of websites and web pages from the millions available online at any given time. You can also help the directories find you by submitting your site to the proper subdirectory inside these engines. Directories will “consider” your site on a free submission. If you want a guarantee, you’ll have to pay for it.

So, as soon as your website is complete and live, SUBMIT. List your site on as many FREE (there it is again) engines as you can find. Check out www.directoryguide.com for a list. You should resubmit your site every few months especially if you have had content changes, page additions or other major changes to your website. Make sure you submit to the “local” yellow pages and white pages online too. Most offer free listings for businesses.

If you haven’t already done so, confirm that your web developer added page titles and keywords to your website. If you aren’t using metadata like this, you need to. Search engines utilize the keywords and compare them to your content. They return your title and page descriptions in search results. Don’t expect the best ranking without metadata, so call on a pro to get your pages optimized. Consider your keywords carefully. They will be ones that are basic to your business or industry. Put the most important words and phrases first in the list.

Search engines like the popular sites. So, another way to make your site attractive to the search engines is to have lots of friends. The way to gain popularity is to have lots of good websites linking to your website. When a search engine returns results, they rank the pages based on relevancy and popularity. Your goal is to always be in the top five or ten listings returned on a search. Popularity pays off in ranking your site higher than other less noticeable sites (thousands of them!).

Getting popular doesn’t have to mean spending money. Sure you could spend thousands and thousands on ads to get onto the first page of search results (basically buying your friends), but why? If you can get your site linked up, you’ll get the engines fired up about you. You’ll find more info in steps 4 and 5 below.

Step 3 – Get it Running. Once the engine starts up, you need to let it run for a while to get the power flowing to your site. While it’s idling out in cyberspace, run off with promote your site via email. There are two email tactics you need to think about. The first is your email signature, the second is email marketing.

Your signature is unique, and your unique web address is as important as your name and phone number in the closing of every email you send out (business and personal). You and your employees must include your company’s digital signature. It should include a clickable link to your URL. This form of viral marketing is both FREE, and easy. Your email software will have a place to format your digital signature. Find it and use it.

Email marketing is one of the most effective tools to market your website and to showcase products and services. Permission-based email can be extremely targeted by including only those people who’ve expressed an interest in your business, product or industry. By building and maintaining your own house list, you ensure you’re compliance with anti-spam laws. There are also reputable list brokers who can help you choose a list of email addresses to prospect to with an offer, coupon, or other introductory special. Of course, list rental isn’t free, but you can certainly start building a list of your own with friends, family and current customers. You can ask for email addresses and permission to send on every inquiry your company receives both online and off. Build your list, keep it clean and offer an easy way for people to unsubscribe or opt out. Most important, send relevant and targeted content, a clear call to action, and pay close attention to your subject line. You want your mail to be opened, read, and acted upon. Armed with this info, you can easily create simple text emails for FREE!

Done correctly, email marketing will become an extremely powerful tool for sales and customer service. When you’re ready to make your email campaigns even more diverse, in-depth and creative, call on a professional marketer. But whether you keep it simple by doing it yourself, or hire someone for the task, don’t let this one get by you.

Pushing down the pedal helps boost the power. Step 4 of our FREE Steps to Jumpstarting your Web Traffic involves content. Quality content makes the difference between visited and forgotten. Hopefully, when you created your website, you included the kind of useful information web surfers are looking for. Your content is what makes your website important, it’s what keeps people coming back, and it’s what helps you rank in the search engines. Keep your content relevant, current, and easy to navigate. Some examples of content that you should include on your site, and keep updated, include:
- instructions for assembling and using your products
- technical specifications
- maintenance schedules
- warranty and upgrade information
- frequently asked questions (FAQs)
- articles/information bits on your industry, products, or services

Business Debts Damage SME Cashflow: How Do You Manage Late Payers Effectively to Keep Solvent?
Somewhere in the first three months of running a small business, most people find that chasing late payments is a fact of their life. It is unpleasant and expensive to take non-paying customers to court. What is more, the drawn-out process distracts you from building your business. As bad debts lead to reduced cashflow and eventual bankruptcy, I take care to teach my start-up clients these easy steps to avoid late or missed payments.Know what you are expecting to be paid forThe foundation to minimising bad debts is to ensure that every invoice that you issue helps your customer to pay promptly. At the time of making a sale, find out when their monthly accounts are closed and when their payments are processed then you can time your invoice to fit their payments cycle.Your invoice should show: your business name, your contact details, a description of the products and services supplied, the quantity and type of goods, the price charged, the VAT (or sales tax) amount and your settlement terms. If the invoice is clear and carries the appropriate detail, you can quickly agree with your customer what they owe you when you deliver the goods.Watch your customers' accountsAs you issue invoices, add these to your accounts so that you can regularly check what money you are owed by each customer. Be aware when any payment is overdue from a customer.As you network in your business community, list

t to connect your website to every promotional piece you create. This means adding your web address to:
- company stationery (business cards, letterhead, envelopes, invoices, quote sheets, receipts)
- business signage (windows, counter displays, and company vehicles)
- ads (yellow pages, newspapers, and local magazines)
- everything else (boxes, bags, cartons, promotional pieces and more)

How To Set Up an Existing Business for Website Marketing - Useful Business Strategy (PT2)
When aiming to establish a business like and ethical presence online, in order to generate sales you Must Give :-6. Your shopping cart or order page the options of accepting as many secure forms of payments as possible whether credit cards, debit cards, online line cheques, snail mail cheques - preferably banker's draft. Accept orders through various forms of media i.e e-mail, snail mail, fax, text message, telephone etc;7. An absolutely professional structure to your webpages i.e logo, ease of navigation, faq's etc;8. An idea of exactly what you would want the visitor to buy from you ahead of any free or complimentary offer you may have on your website. These freebies should be a post transaction thrown-in as a "thank you, please buy from me again" method of marketing.9. Assurance that you have exactly what the visitor is looking for. The relevancy by search approach as promoted by Google and their Page Ranking strategy is being applied here( that's a whole new episode by itself).10. Attention to the methods and approaches in advertising strategies. Evaluating consistently and improve the "psychological impact" element of your ad copies.And Now For The FreebieHere's the freebie : 7 tips when launching or considering to join an affiliate program:When Starting Your own or joining an affiliate program on must have or give :1. A reasonable knowledge and accurate information on the product you are marketing. weak,semi-strong and strong A.C.C.U.R.A.T.E information should be

first step via a search engine like Google, AltaVista, or HotBot.

WEBconference Applications For Production
Problems Within companies, coordination of information, whether technological or professional (related to architecture, engineering, or other kinds of practices) is of utmost importance. Project coordination always calls for sharing of schemes, plans, and timetables. Sometimes, the coordination of meetings takes up more time than the actual meetings. Undoubtedly, the satisfaction of the clientele and the relationship with them are of capital importance. That said, building that relationship requires time.SolutionVirtual meetings conducted through web conferencing have all the functionalities needed to share documents on the screen as well as to transmit them. The same applies to a Powerpoint presentation, a project diagram done with Microsoft Project, or an image. By opening an interactive white board, the participants can work together on a scheme, with a virtual pen. Moreover, the availability of the colleagues can be known from the indication given by the IP software, Skype. This way, meetings can be held on demand and in time, thus eliminating the need for having to wait for the right time for everybody to get together for that purpose.ResultsA better coordination of the resources required for the development of products or the realization of projects reflects directly on their quality as well as on the time needed for their completion. The better coordination of the working teams is generally translated i

eed to let it run for a while to get the power flowing to your site. While it’s idling out in cyberspace, run off with promote your site via email. There are two email tactics you need to think about. The first is your email signature, the second is email marketing.

Online Business Ethics
Very simple: Be a source of integrity. Don't be phony, people will know and not come to visit your site again. Even worse, they will post a bad review somewhere on the web and others will not even come to see for themselves. If you don't know about something, don't pretend that you do. Respect your customers, or prospective customers, and offer them something of value. Give good information that will draw your customers' attention and this will help to build trust. It also gives them a reason to stay or come back again for more. Follow-up with your customers, but don't be a pest. Basically, don't spam, don't steal, and don't lie.Just as in an offline business, there are ethics and standards that should be followed. If you are starting an online business, you've probably spent some time online already and can see that there are hundreds of thousands of businesses trying to sell their products and information and services to you. Study how they do it. Spend some time visiting the websites of your competitors, much like you would when preparing a business plan for an offline business. Look for and evaluate the following characteristics to determine the integrity of the business as a whole:What are they selling? When you first come to their index page, can you quickly and easily figure out what they are selling? Is it a real product, an information product, a membership or a service? Do they offer something of real value right off the bat for free such as informative content or a related ebook? If you ca

The final step to jumpstarting traffic is really not the end of the road. The internet is different daily. Search engines change their algorithms, new technology is available almost by the minute, consumer tastes and preferences are in a constant state of flux. In this environment, you need to keep your website and marketing tools up to date if you want to stay competitive. Subscribe to free E-zines, newsletters and other information sources that will keep you current on what’s new and what’s hot. Keep your marketing efforts tuned up and it will always be rush hour on your website.

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Remember that the selling process is more about your clients and less about you.

It is easy to get started taking paid surveys! Most of the websites that are operating these types of business don't charge a membership fee, and offer to pay high commissions to participants that complete online surveys. These websites are secure and it only takes a couple of minutes to complete the registration process.

One of the biggest challenges to a webmaster is how to generate traffic. More traffic to your website equates to more sales. So how does one generate extra traffic to their website? Search engine optimization, email campaigns, pay-per-clicks, banner advertising, are among some of the tactics that are popular. Another method of generating traffic is through expired domain names.

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