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Archive for the ‘Link Building’ Category

Taking Your Company Public: The Anatomy Of The Perfect Business Plan

June 17th, 2010

With legions of halfwit, template loving business plan wannabe writers polluting the web it’s no mystery that companies are having a tough time getting funding. It use to be that when a company was ready to get down to business for serious expansion they would call a consultant that would help them bring all the pieces together in a strategic fashion and then this consultant would take their extended industry knowledge in combination with the unique concepts of the client’s business and he would author a business plan.

This business plan would include everything that the venture capital firms, angel investors, private investors and institutional lenders would need in order to make a quick, no nonsense decision about whether to fund the company and how much equity they would get in return.

Today with the cancerous cloud of predatory consultants seeking out startup business prey to suck dry that businesses are too broke and exhausted to move forward with a solid consultant after they have been through the costly obstacle course and fun house of mirrors set up by wannabe consultants who reel in their prey with a few big words and industry terms and at the end of the day, they are going to put your business plan together with some cracked template software that spits out overly generalized business plans that receive laughs and snickers before being tossed in the trash by investors and venture capital firms.

If you want a real business plan, call a consultant that is completely submerged in the venture capital industry and has experience with plugging businesses into the capital machine. An consultant will first give you a consultation so he can assist in any corporate structuring or turnaround issues that need attention before the business plan is together. After the company’s structure is complete with executives, solid management, strategic partners, advisory board and board of directors, there is still one more thing to do before the business plan. You must decide what mechanism you’re going to use to raise capital. Are you seeking debt or equity investment or both, how much equity you will give away for the amount of cash you’re seeking. How many shares does your corporation currently have and so on. You’ll most likely need to put together a private placement or consider taking your company public on the otcbb. After all this is done then it’s time to write the business plan.

Don’t shoot yourself in the foot, don’t write the business plan yourself, when you’ve found a consultant, here are the topics that should be covered in the business plan (this knowledge will help you audit their work before you even hire them). The table of contents should read, at a minimum, like this: executive summary with objectives, keys to success and strategic advantages; Market, Market: Growth and Development Analysis with Industry Analysis and Location Based Services; Current company position with Company overview and vision, key successes to date, technical achievements and commercial position, include info about your technology platform. Talk about your management team, product and services offering, competition, market entry/ Five Forces Analysis, barriers to market entry, comparable business model, target market needs, target market characteristics, market demand drivers, PEST analysis, SWOT analysis, marketing implementation and strategy overview and tactical components, process development map, financial model and projections.

There you have it, the process to follow before the business plan is written and the concepts to be covered in the business plan so that you get the attention you need from investors and the money you deserve for your business.

Link Building

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Internet Marketers Can Keep Their Customers Happy, Too

May 14th, 2010

Many internet marketers don’t realize how important customer service is, even to businesses that are web based. Customer service is at least as important to online businesses as it is to offline based businesses. Think of how much competition there is on the web, with thousands of sites fighting over the same potential customers. How can you stand out in this crowd? The answer, of course, is your superior customer service! If you are able to communicate well with your customers and make them feel appreciated, they are more likely to continue buying from you. If your business is set up to avoid any personal interaction with customers, it’s likely you won’t have many returning visitors or buyers. If you follow these suggestions, you will be able to start giving your visitors good customer service.

Never underestimate the importance of the “thank you” e-mail. This one gesture can change the way people see you, even if you do this by simply sending out an automated e-mail message to each customer thanking them for their order. Doing this is very easy, as almost every e-mail service gives you the ability to send out an automatic response to orders, where you can tell everyone, “thanks for being a customer,” or something similar. So set this up today! This one gesture that doesn’t even cost you anything can increase your business!

Run a giveaway for past customers. This will also remind people to contact you. This doesn’t mean you have to give every customer something for free. You design the contest. If they win, people get really excited. You could opt to pick a random name from those who reply to your email. Then, you could offer that person a free service or item. This question can be in the form of a simple trivia question or you can use it to get feedback on your business. Either way, the responses will be overwhelming. You could even get email from individuals who were not your original list.

It is a good idea to offer freebies to your customers periodically. Don’t be stingy here, though, as sending a mundane newsletter will probably not inspire much excitement. You should tailor the offering to your business, so if you are an article writer you could offer a free article on a topic that the customer has requested before. If your work by selling affiliate products, see if the affiliate company can offer anything free from their back office and then have them send out the products to the people that are on your list. Everyone loves something for free, and they will be more apt to buy from you again.

When you focus on it, you can provide good customer service to your website visitors and clients in many different ways. Remember that many people are still afraid to shop online out of fear of being ripped off. There is no better way to relieve such fears and get people to trust you than to offer good customer service that is also personal.

Link Building

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Pay Per Click Advertising Evens The Playing Field

March 11th, 2010

It use to be that larger companies had an unfair advantage on the internet, after all they could afford a much larger advertising budget and much stronger SEO management than their smaller counterparts putting them in the top of the search results each and every time.

It wasn’t until Google realized what was happening, that something started to b done about this unfair advantage. Google realized that the larger businesses were dominating the web and started to brainstorm various ways to give those businesses that were just starting out the same advantages as the larger ones.

The solution that Google, and eventually the other major search engines, came up with is pay per click advertising. Pay per click advertising basically allows a business to pay the search engines money to improve their position in the search engine’s results list. Businesses who choose to use pay per click advertising pay the search engines for every visitor their web site receives from the search engine results list. The more you are willing to pay per click, the higher up in the results list your web site will apply. Pay per click advertising, in conjunction with a web site that contains a large amount of relevant content that is related to the search keywords can help increase your position in the search results significantly, and increase awareness for the business, without the expenses associated with a large advertising effort.

The advent of the pay per click advertising option has finally made it able for smaller business to compete with larger businesses on the internet. In many cases smaller businesses offer better quality products, and better customer service then larger businesses, because every customer is more important to a smaller business, however it was always a challenge for them to compete with larger businesses with large advertising budgets. Now customers are being made aware of all of their options, which allows them to choose the better product, and the better provider, rather then the larger business.

If you own a small business, pay per click advertising is definitely a great way to increase the visibility of your business. When your potential customers are performing a search, through one of the large internet search engines, pay per click advertising increases the odds that they will see your site, which will send more and more customers to you. Just make sure that your small business is ready to handle the sudden influx of customers that pay per click advertising will bring.

There are numerous companies that can assist you with building traffic to your website in order to achieve larger page rankings. For assistance from one of the top companies in the business log onto seo moves at www.seomoves.com.uk.

Link Building

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Backlink Spreading (or Drip Feeding) Explained

March 2nd, 2010

Creating backlinks to your site is the primary way of getting it to rank well in Google and other search engines. The more links you create and the better targeted and more authoritative those links are, the better the site will rank. But of course, it’s not quite that simplistic and several factors affect the value of a particular backlink.

Over time Google has highly refined its ranking algorithm and these days it is no longer a case of simply throwing as many backlinks as possible to the target page. In other articles I will discuss many of the factors that affect the quality of the link itself, but in this article I want to focus on the frequency and pattern in which backlinks come into your site and introduce a technique known as link-spreading, or drip-feeding.

Google has a spider that is constantly running and crawling websites looking for new backlinks. It looks at each individual link but it is also monitoring the frequency and source of those links to establish any patterns. Google prefers links that it deems are natural. What is a natural link? As an example, you may have a site about cats and write a post about how to groom your Persian cat in the winter. You might start getting backlinks from bloggers in the cat niche, people might be stumbling your page, bookmarking it at a social site or tweeting it to their followers. These are ‘natural’ links.

These kinds of links look natural to Google because they are generated over a period of time in a fairly random pattern and they are located in different places. Google does not give as much credit to backlinks that look unnatural. For example, social bookmarking is one of the tools in the IMAutomator suite. An individual may have just one favourite bookmarking site but of course there are a great many and IMAutomator allows you to submit your bookmark to all of them. 50 backlinks is better than 1!

However, when creating a large number of links, we don’t want those all to be created at once because Google can see this as an unnatural linking pattern and lower the value of the links accordingly. The answer then, is to spread out those backlinks over a period of time and this is known as backlink spreading or backlink drip feeding and this is the technique that IMAutomator uses.

Are there any downsides to this strategy?

There are pro’s and con’s to just about anything! Another benefit of link building in general is to get a new page or site indexed in the search engines which of course is particularly useful if your website is new. In this situation you may want to create a bunch of backlinks quickly to get your site in the index.

Another possible downside is that you could potentially lose out on the benefit of a hot new trend. This depends very much on the subject of your article. The cat example I used earlier is something that is timeless - there will always be Persian cats that need grooming so this is an article that can sustain the test of time. However if you are writing about something new, such as an event that has just occurred in the news, then you might want more immediate attention. If there is a flurry of links coming into sites on a specific new topic, Google can see this as a hot trend and push the relevant article further up in the rankings for a while.

So how fast should you build your links? This is one of those questions that cannot be accurately answered so with IMAutomator you have the flexibility to choose a link frequency that suits you. If you want a fast submission, you can have all of the backlinks submitted in a single day, or you can spread them out over more time if you prefer. You are in control.

The IMAutomator social bookmarking tool (and new tools will operator in the same way) allows you to pick the number of days to spread your submission when you enter your bookmark into the system. That bookmark is submitted to a number of social bookmarking sites and these will always change around a little bit. Sites come and go sometimes but the database is always updated with fresh sites.

Link Building

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