If, in addition to these powerful inducements to patronage, you combine shrewdness in buying and cautiousness in trusting, if your goods are excellent in quality and generous in quantity, if your place of business is neat and attractive, and your service marked by promptness and politeness; then it is impossible …

Some customers want to know who they are doing business with. Is your business moving toward giving you what you wanted when you started your entrepreneurial journey? What's the worst that can happen'? If you never try, you'll never achieve. Writing a business plan is one of those skills that …

The globalization of production refers to the sourcing of goods and services from loca- tions around the globe to take advantage of national differences in the cost and quality of factors of production (such as labor, energy, land, and capital). You make sales after you have built connections and trust …

Get started small. Intellectual capital is proprietary information and in-house knowledge of technologies, materials, processes, and markets useful to an organization. You ll use proper, respectful, and easy-to-understand language to make sure your audience clearly gets your message. Show your key people how you want things done and then let …

All that information flowing up to senior managers in the form of plans helps keep the brass informed. Most companies you compete with probably provide good service, good quality, and good prices. A commercial mortgage broker might hold industry forums twice a year with speakers presenting on the economy and …

Outsourcing is a key strategy for startups. In a world where word travels fast through social media, you want to provide top-notch customer service. You built your friendships by spending quality time with them and doing lots of fun things together. The many disciplines in business are often organized and …

Show them pictures of what you have done, what you can do for them, and how you can solve their problems. Offer them a report giving them the answers they need to solve their problem. It just feels all wrong. Remember that brevity is not brusqueness.

Its easy to talk …

After your spouse has filed for divorce or your kids have become strangers to you, the damage too often is done. A sales manager can redirect the activities of salespeople immediately, and an accounting manager can make immediate changes in bookkeeping practices. In addition is the need to decide whether …

Tell them your story. Create financial targets. Social capital refers to established human relationships, both within and external to a company, that create and maintain value. You're probably more acquainted with the basic concepts of doing business than you think.

Unwrapping Customer Service

The ordinary wage system has at least the merit that the reward of the laborer is made dependent only on his own efforts. When you have people problems, it's a reflection on the effectiveness of your leadership. So to make lots of money, making money has to be your top …

Ask yourself those same two questions. For this reason, you want your accountant, financial advisor, or attorney to review your loan documents and spell out everything for you very carefully. A board of directors gives you access to expertise, provided you choose them wisely, but at the cost of giving …

Outline the next actions to be taken by the group (things to do, next meeting, etc.). Getting your financial house in order before you start your business can buy you critical time to make a success of your start-up. While speaking at several industry conventions, I surveyed attendees about their …

Bottom-up can work well in industries that are relatively new, in situations where the lower tiers possess unique expertise or resources, and when the cost of errors is not prohibitive. How often have you had a vendor submit you a price and never follow up? It s definite, comprehensive, and …

Plans and loan applications aren t interchangeable, however. After this has gone on for several years, and the financier has backed some percentage of those plans and seen how events have turned out, he or she becomes very good at weeding out plans with inconsistencies or overblown projections and zeroing …

As a business owner, where do you invest the majority of your time? Although many businesses are founded to develop new, never-before-seen products, they re still built around a product, even though it may not exist at the moment. Stocks are a form of equity ownership. That said, be careful …

Through your vision, you should express your ideals and what you wish to accomplish on a larger scale than just within your organization. In our experience, however, few people have the knowledge and intuition to be investors in other people's small businesses. It is an appealing idea to create a …

This area is often not the top priority for most business owners. Plus by then you will have much more experience to be able to make the most of it. If you are waiting on customers, treat the small customer just as courteously as the large one. But until they …

All companies are incomplete and depend for their operations on resources owned or controlled by particular counterparts, whether customers, suppliers, distributors, development partners or public bodies. You must know this number! Profit is financial gain or return from the use of investment capital in your business. Command decision making is …

At the top of the list are public offerings of stock, which may cost several hundred thousand dollars in legal and accounting fees to put together and require a great deal of your own time and attention. Business deals need accounting information that emphasises comparability, verifiability and timeliness: such figures …

You never want to leave anyone (especially search bots) guessing what your content is about. That's why you need to name URL paths using easy to understand language that spells out the content precisely. When your website has evergreen content that's well-optimized for search engines, it ranks higher in search …

Semantic search is powered by a process called word-sense disambiguation. Search engines (and users) look to the site architecture for clues as to what pages are most important. A key factor is how many clicks from the home page it takes to reach a page In theory, it is important …

When a request is made to a server for a page on a website, the server returns an HTTP status code in response to the request. The length of your posts is also an important consideration. Back in the days of spammy-SEO, almost every post was 500 words long. Today …

Web spider-based search engines employ an automated program, the web spider, to create their index databases. it's crucial to know everything about it. The title tag, an HTML tag that exists in the head section of each webpage, provides an initial cue or context as to what the topical subject …

When Google first started, for example, it broke user queries into keywords, and searched for those keywords in exactly the same format as the user typed them in. Typically, your domain may be set to renew on a yearly basis. Globally integrated marketing communications (GIMC) programs are vital for international …

There are also tools to monitor the rankings, but none can (yet) holistically predict why the changes are happening. What 's important is that Google indexes your site, and when it does, it can find all of your content. If the person says no, they have not done any reviews …

Duplicated content - the same content that appears on multiple unique URLs - is not welcome by search engines and can cause a serious drop in a website's rankings. For small businesses, the best approach to identifying target keywords requires diligent research and the proper mindset. So, from a communication standpoint, from …

Find out who is linking to them. A breadcrumb is a row of internal links at the top or bottom of the page that allows visitors to quickly navigate back to a previous section or the root page. Many breadcrumbs have the most general page (usually the root page) as …

It has become a trend by SEOs to remove older content, especially older content on a news sites, where sites remove content rather than simply archiving it. What are the key purposes of a SWOT analysis? Let users know when they are leaving your site (if it is not obvious …

Find out who is linking to them. A suitable namesake of the colour, evergreen content embodies freshness and sustainability of articles posted on websites. It mainly consists of basic information about a certain topic, which would be improved by writing in a style customized to your niche. Not so fast …

To optimize permission marketing, firms feature empowerment and reciprocity. For many businesses the goal is to get their business to position number 1 on Google, but did you know that there's a new top spot on Google called position zero. You've probably noticed these results but maybe not understood them …

The rise in smartphones means that more and more consumers are using applications such as Siri and Cortana, which respond to questions. Other times your key people may be involved in other projects and you just don't have enough resources. Duplicate content can appear on a website for different reasons …

The implementation phase can vary drastically in size and complexity depending on the project. Whichever is decided upon, just ensure that the most authoritative and robust description exists on-site.If your eCommerce site offers an affiliate program, ensure that you do not distribute your own site's product descriptions to your …

Sometimes the best way to get links is not to ask for them. That doesn't mean you should sit back, do nothing and wait for links to appear. Spend time creating content and making your site as attractive and easy to link to as possible. When creating new content ask …

The main reason to disavow links is to protect the site from "bad" links that are harming the its reputation (and thus its rank on the Search Engine Results Page). We all know that videos are a great way of keeping audience engaged and entertained. But do you know that …

As we know Google’s algorithm updates primarily focus on devaluing links that aren’t relevant. The added advantage to local link building is that these kind of links are almost always relevant. A web page can be given an immediate “freshness score” based on its date of publication, when …

Links aren’t the only factor of importance; you also need to make sure your on-page SEO is up to scratch and that your keyword targeting is on-point. There are many free research tools that will allow you to see how competitive keywords are and which will allow you to …

A reputable website should have great content which is relevant to its specific industry. A site with random and incoherent articles will be spotted by Google quickly, as it’s clear that the site has been set up purely to link to other sites. This becomes a bad backlink. In …

Adding a single search bar to the top of a website, one which shows up on every page throughout that website, is a good way to allow users to search through a website for whatever particular content they want, whenever the urge to search hits them. Many site owners (particularly …

You want to make sure the pages of your website provide great value and are optimized for the keywords you want to rank for. Of course, it is important to have a mobile-friendly website as well. People’s bullshit meters are well calibrated. If you conduct business online, you need …

We’re talking about 50% to 90% of traffic drop. Some of the most historic cases of explosive growth hacking success involved input into product development as well. For years, many webmasters relied on sloppy techniques and used automated tools to build hundreds of backlinks every day. So, when a …