When starting a business you have so many different things to consider, from finding suppliers, financing, managing customers and maybe even staff. Whatever your business though one thing is for sure; you will need to find customers & the obvious place to start is online.

Unfortunately, there are so many ways to market yourself online, you might not know where to start. So here is a simple guide to help you figure it out and plan a simple SEO strategy to get free traffic – because let’s face it, paying for traffic is expensive.

Step 1: Pick Keywords

If you know anything about your business (and I hope you do) you should be able to pick some obvious keywords pretty easily. Use the Google keyword tool to make sure you target keywords which actually get volume and use common sense to make sure you pick keywords which imply the intent to buy.

For instance, if you target phrases like “buy widgets online” you will attract people looking to buy. If you target phrases like “repairing a widget” you won’t; simple.

As a small business I would also recommend you pick just a handful of phrases to work on, don’t bury yourself. Be quite specific too – unless you have budget to spend on SEO you are better off focussing on low volume easy to rank for phrases.

Step 2: Do On Page Stuff

There are dozens of articles online that tell you how to optimize meta tags and stuff – just stick to the basics and don’t get bogged down, avoiding doing anything dodgy and use your time elsewhere. My only really tip here is to use common sense – if you want to rank for “blue widgets” use that phrase in your page – but not in every sentence.

Step 3: To Be Social?

Many businesses feel like they should be using social media at the moment, but most don’t really know what to do with it to actually make money. So here are some suggestions:

If your customers aren’t using it, you shouldn’t:
Social media is a great sharing tool, so if you are a dynamic new tech start up you need to be on it. If on the other hand you specialise in soil sampling I would venture to suggest that your efforts might be better spent elsewhere.

Do it well or don’t do it:
If you don’t have the time to invest, it’s not worth doing it by halves. Social media is a whole other strategy on its own and it is better to do one thing well than 2 things badly.

Don’t worry about it:
Social media is notoriously hard to monetize and right now the evidence suggests that it is at best a very small factor in SEO terms even though this might change with the introduction of Search Plus Your World of Google; so unless your business is a good fit, don’t force it.

Step 4: Outrun Your Competition

If you want to rank for “buy widgets online” try Googling that phrase and see what comes up. Those top 10 results have done what you want to do, so try to emulate them. If their sites look better than yours, have features you are missing or have better content then you need to work on your own site.

You can also look at who is linking to them (use SEOMoz’s Open Site Explorer), get a feel for which sorts of links are helping them and to give you ideas for your own link building.

Don’t be put off if your competitors are miles ahead, Google takes into account currentness of content and if a new start up is showing a lot of ‘buzz’ they can often outrank older more established sites – it’s not easy, but it’s doable.

Step 5: Build Links

There’s no way round it, building links is the trump card of SEO, you have to get everything else right too, but without a consistent income of new links you won’t rank. Don’t try to find shortcuts, they don’t work – if you don’t have the time to invest into doing it the right way find a good SEO agency who do.

Summary

The tips above are an outline – SEO is a speciality in it’s own right, but if you are starting a business you need to stick to the basics and do what you can, so hopefully this has given you an idea and what you need to do, or at the very least an idea of what to look for when hiring someone to do it for you.

Related Articles:

• 10 Tips for Small Business SEO
• Why Keyword Research is NOT Market Research For Online Businesses?
• Google+ Causing The Death Of Search Engine Optimization?
• SEO and SMO: How the Blend Ensures Success of Your Site?
• Google Analytics: Updated and Up to Date

Working as a freelancer gives you the opportunity to make your own schedule and control your level of income. When working in this capacity, it is sometimes difficult to stay organised and on top of the projects you have going on. Because of this, there are a number of essential tools that most freelancers could benefit from using. These five tools are generally considered to be some of the most important for freelancers.

5 Tools That Will Revolutionise Your Productivity

1. Freshbooks

One of the most important needs for freelancers is keeping track of work and invoicing customers. If you don’t successfully invoice your customers, you will not be able to get paid and make enough money to stay in business. Freshbooks helps you deal with this issue head-on. Freshbooks is a software that allows you to track working time and bill your customers. It gives you a professional look even if you are a one-man business.

Freshbooks offers a number of different packages, depending on how big your operation is. If you only service three customers or less, you can use Freshbooks for free. If you have somewhere between three and 25 customers, Freshbooks will cost you $19.95 per month. This software is convenient because it allows you to bill your customers via email and it allows customers to pay you as soon as they are invoiced. By including a “Pay Now” button on your invoices, customers can pay you via PayPal and you’ll be more likely to get the money you need.

2. Basecamp

Basecamp is a web app that is perfect for many freelancers because it allows them to collaborate with others on projects and ensure that they get done. With Basecamp, you get an easy way to communicate with multiple team members. Instead of sending emails back and forth, you create a message board for each project.

When you’re working on a project, you can easily collaborate on word processing files, spreadsheets and presentations. It’s easy to send files back and forth to other members of your team. You can setup templates and assign due dates for certain aspects of a project. Basecamp is available at several price points, depending on your needs. They have a free package that allows you to work on one project per month. Getting 15 projects will cost you $24 per month and a package with 100 projects will cost $99 per month.

3. Gmail

Gmail is an email client that is available from Google. Gmail is widely considered to be a favourite among email users and the best part is, it’s available for free. All you need to do to use Gmail is to sign up for a free Google account. If you use other Google services, you already have one. You can choose your own email address and start sending and receiving emails within a few minutes of getting started.

4. Twitter

Twitter is an invaluable tool when it comes to working as a freelancer. Twitter allows you to see what’s going on in the world and contact other individuals who might be in need of your services. By following people on Twitter and getting followers, you can develop relationships with other individuals. Once you develop relationships with the right people, it could potentially provide you with a way to get more work in the future. Twitter is a powerful networking tool that can also be pretty entertaining.

5. WordPress

WordPress is one of the most popular content management platforms in the world. If you’re working as a freelancer, you definitely need your own website or blog to help promote your business. With WordPress, anyone can build a website or a blog even if you don’t have any experience with HTML or other languages. You can use the software for free and even download thousands of different plugins for your site for free.

Using WordPress to create your own website makes it possible for you to show off your work to others. You can create a portfolio on your site that lets others see exactly what you are capable of. Without this, it may be difficult for you to get customers, regardless of what type of freelance work you do.

When working as a freelancer, it is important to always stay on the lookout for the latest tools and resources that you can use to improve your business. Many of the best products are available for free if you know where to look.

Related Articles:

• How to get your hands on good freelance projects
• 5 Tips For Freelancers On How Best To Land And Keep Clients
• Managing your freelance workers

Moving away from marketing

The arrival of social media as a communications channel for brands has generally been dominated as a way to publish marketing messages. While using social networks as a way to engage in conversations with customers has been a very successful approach, the truth is that social media can be used in many ways that go beyond external communications, and this is an area where a social media strategy can pay off.

The term “social business” can be a bit confusing, especially as it can also apply to businesses that operate ethically or with social responsibility. In a social media context, though, it refers to a business that has evolved its use of social media channels to become integral to how the business operates. Here are three areas of business that can be used to illustrate this:

1. Customer service

Best Buy is a great example of this, with their Twelpforce that empowers employees to assist with customer service issues or queries.

Being able to respond and react to customer issues quickly through social media can turn perceptions around – even if a customer service representative is unable to resolve an issue immediately, a customer feeling that their issue is being acknowledged and responded to in a timely way can prevent further upset.

2. Internal communication and collaboration

Social media used internally can offer a variety of benefits. Even in a small organisation, sharing documents and being able to edit them collaboratively can save the hassle and confusion of tracking various changes in email threads.

In larger organisations the potential to share can allow employees who may never deal with each other day to day, to understand their projects and areas of expertise. Sharing knowledge and skills in this way can amplify the talent available and allow for improved productivity.

Enterprise social networks will become increasingly normal, and emulate existing social networks in their look and feel – many existing recruits, and almost certainly the majority of future ones, will be familiar in how these systems work and how to interact on them, but in a secure environment.

3. Recruitment and employee retention

As I touched above, the workers of tomorrow and beyond will not only be familiar with how to use internal social networks, but be deciding where they want to work as a result of it. Sourcing talent through social channels already exists through networks such as LinkedIn, of course.

Businesses can go beyond this though, and use social channels like blogs to really show how their culture is. If a business is truly social, it should have employees that are proud to share and represent the company on social channels. Increased transparency may worry some, but ultimately this should encourage companies to listen to the concerns and suggestions of their employees. A responsive company will be able to save recruitment costs in two ways, and increased employee satisfaction can’t hurt productivity.

What this means for the future

As companies gain confidence in social media for marketing, it will be clear that they can use it for other communications. The ones that are already starting this transformation tend to be technologically based, with in-house expertise, but the trend is definitely there for the future and it’s never too soon to start thinking about how it can be integrated in your business.

Related Articles:

• The New ‘P.C.’ of Social Media
• Managing Multiple Social Media Accounts
• Google+ Causing The Death Of Search Engine Optimization?
• A Fresh Look at Email Marketing for Business: The Influence of Social Networking
• What You Don’t Know about Google Plus

Blogs are becoming an increasingly relevant part of the media landscape, and an important source of income for many otherwise traditional businesses. When it comes to blogging, few platforms are more popular than WordPress, a free resource you can use to distribute your content. This chain of events has made WordPress an important source of profit in many different ways. Here are a few ways to capitalize on the software.

Start a Blog

This is the most obvious way to earn money using WordPress, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s obvious how to go about accomplishing this. Making money blogging requires a source of traffic, and a way to monetize that traffic. While all the steps necessary to accomplish this won’t fit into a single article, here are a few basic principles you should adhere to:

Develop a social network
The network should consist not only of audience members, but other bloggers who have some influence in the community. You should stay active in this network and treat these people like your friends. This results in a loyal audience and powerful allies.

Research
Learn how to perform serious, quantitative research. Research your market, research your competition, and above all else, research your subject matter. Become an expert in all aspects of your business and show your readers that you get it.

Optimize
Make your site easy to find by including popular keywords in your titles and encouraging your allies to link to your site. Interlink your internal pages in a way that spells out which pages are most important and what each page is about.

Produce staggering content
Every page on your site should offer something that people want and that they can’t easily find elsewhere. Be entertaining, informative, and unique.

Stick to these basic principles and blogging should come easily to you. Remember to be a part of the web, rather than just a source of content. Many of these principles apply to any form of online business you intend to start, including the following alternatives to blogging.

WordPress Customization

Bloggers and businesses who want to stand out from the competition want a site that looks different and fits their business model better than a template. If you learn to develop customized themes for your clients, you can provide them with an advantage that they would be unable to achieve on their own.

Design is an incredibly important part of a business’s online presence. You can use it to send a clear message to their customers and improve the user experience. First impressions can be all it takes to keep a visitor from leaving right off the bat, and this is an important selling point that you can capitalize on.

Selling Themes as Products

Rather than customizing themes for clients, you can also sell premium themes as products. This is a great way to capitalize on the growing relevance of WordPress and the desire for sites to stand out.

Why would anybody pay for a WordPress theme when there are many of them available for free? Premium themes give you a professional edge that most free themes don’t offer. While anybody with some programming knowledge can potentially design their own theme, most people simply don’t have this knowledge.

It’s possible to design WordPress themes that can be easily customized by anybody with some knowledge of computers, and this is a product that is worth paying for.

You don’t necessarily need to set up your own eCommerce site to sell your themes either. There are WordPress marketplaces to sell your themes.

Alternatively, giving away great themes for free to the WordPress community can be a great way to grab attention and promote your brand’s visibility.

Related Articles:

• Why Bloggers Need a Google+ Page Now!
• How to Get the Most Out of Your Guest Blogging Efforts
• 5 Social Media Pitfalls Stopping Bloggers From Achieving Success
• Why Your Blog is (or should be) more Relevant
• The 3 Easiest Ways to Get Started Guest Blogging

In the online business world more and more people are running entirely virtual offices comprised of freelancers and employees around the world. More than globalization the internet has revolutionized the ways in which we can and do conduct business.

The rise of the internet and the increasing utility of the telecommunications industry have helped create this new business space. However running a virtual office can put additional strains on a business and creates a number of problems to overcome. In this article we’re going to look at some of the techniques you can employ whilst creating virtual offices for your business.

Setting Up a Virtual Office

With small scale online businesses many people imply use instant messaging and email to co-ordinate their “employees”. However, on a long time scale and with more complex business models this type of co-ordination has proved ineffective as it does not minimize the need for 121 interactions and monitoring of employee work. Many businesses have consequently found that setting up a virtual office helps to maximize operating efficiency. However, you may be at a loss as to what we mean by a virtual office in this context. There are a number of different models of virtual office and we will briefly outline them:

Website Portal office

These three “types” of virtual offices produce different results and allow you to create different organizational structures so they are worth examining in turn.

Website portal offices use a website you own and operate to co-ordinate all your freelancers and outsource in one place. Users are given login details and work can be assigned on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. When an outsourcer completes a piece of work they can submit it directly to your site meaning it is instantly accessible to you.

Whilst this type of virtual office is the most difficult to set up it is the most time effective solution to managing employees from around the world.It allows you to have a hands off approach to issuing work and collecting work – allowing you more time to focus on running the business itself rather than managing the employees. In addition it allows you to create pages of guidelines, training materials and contracts for your employees so you can maintain work standards with less instruction and monitoring.

Third  party virtual offices

Third party virtual offices utilize many of the features above but are managed by a third party. On the higher end of the scale these virtual offices can offer cloud hosting, multi-user logins and a variety of other office assets to help run your business.

On the lower end of the scale job-board styled site exist where you can set tasks, chose employees and then monitor the progress of the work. This lets you have increased levels of control over your employees but may not be a time efficient to maintain work standards with less instruction and monitoring.

Network offices

Thirdly network offices work slightly differently to the above as they create an office space where some or all of your employees can interact with each other. At its simplest level this would simply be using a chat room to allow your employees to communicate with you and each other. On a more complex level a network office space will be an extension of a portal to include networking alongside document hosting, training, webinars etc.

Creating Your Virtual Office

The types of office we have examined provide a detailed look at the features you may want to include. Your business model and employee roles within you organization will largely determine what you need from a virtual office. Using virtual offices can be incredibly time efficient and cost effective but you need to clearly identify your needs and future needs before you undertake the expense of creating a virtual office.

Related Articles:

• 5 Tools You Shouldn’t Live Without as an Online Business
• The Benefits of Hiring a Virtual Assistant
• Building Your Site’s Credibility and Trust in Five Simple Steps
• The Best Marketing Strategies for Your Wholesale Business
• The Fun of Coaching Frustrated Entrepreneurs

1. Keep Content Fresh and Always Unique

The master of all search engines (Google) appreciates high quality, relevant and regularly updated content as Google must act as the librarian of the internet. Google will promote your position in the SERPs (search engine results pages) if it has sufficient evidence that your website is of a good standard and is likely to provide for visitors what they are searching for. Google remembers all search terms entered into the search box and constantly scans pages on the internet looking for content that will provide the best answers to search queries. Regularly updated content that is full of relevant keywords and information gives the impression of a well-run and busy website that keeps visitors updated.

2. Never Cut and Paste Content

Cutting and pasting content at every opportunity just to fill your site with content is not a good idea at all. Search engines already know where the original content lives and unless you are using the appropriate method of quoting another website you add no value to your own site. If you want to refer your readers to high quality relevant content that you really believe will help them then place a link to the content and give the author the credits. That is good SEO etiquette.

3. Always Build Dynamic Websites

Try to avoid building a rigid static website using a free website design software. The chances are that no professional web designer will ever want to touch it in future if you want it to be professionally updated and often they could not even if they wanted to. They would normally suggest that it should be pulled down and built from scratch using a content management system or CMS.

Static websites have pages that are built offline and uploaded as a complete page or website where as a dynamic site is updated dynamically or on-the-fly. You can literally replace single words and press save. All changes are saved immediately and are time and date stamped. Popular CMS web design platforms include Joomla, Drupal and WordPress (blogging software). All of these design platforms are open source and are totally free so consider on embarking on a small learning curve to start small business website properly. Google loves dynamic websites.

4. Chose Domain Names Carefully

Domain names should also be relevant to your sector and the actual products and services that you want to promote. Find a search term that a lot of people use to find your specific products or services but one for which there is not too much competition. Take some time to look at the Google keyword tool for help.

As a rough rule of thumb, if there are more than 1500 exact searches for a search term every month and less than 3 million search results in Google, then it is worth considering as a domain name. Now you need to go and see if it is available. You will find that lots of other SEO savvy business people have got most of the best names but you just need to find a term that has been over looked, and they are there.

5. Title Tags and Meta-Descriptions

These two elements are important and if the way you are building you site does not allow you to create them then you are already losing in terms of SEO. Each page should have a unique title and meta-description which is the short excerpt that you see in the search engines, just below the title. When writing the content make sure you have the ability to add titles for each paragraph of information and use a <h2>Your Paragraph Title</h2> title tag which is picked up by the search engine robots that are used as slaves that scan all pages on the internet.

6. High Quality and Relevant Backlinks

Spend some time searching the internet for other related websites, blogs, message boards and forums that allow you to post links and start creating posts or comments with links back to your own website. Links should be in the form of “anchor text” where the keywords are clickable links to your site. Please, do not write rubbish just to get the link. You will probably not get the comment approved and if it is approved you are probably on a website that will do more harm to your online reputation than good.

Get in the habit of becoming a valuable part of the online community in your field and help others understand your business or anything that you can help them with. Many forums will allow you to add your signature once you have contributed quality posts. You will be allowed to place you anchor text there for added link juice.

7. SEO is a Constant Effort

SEO for your small business should be seen as a long term and consistent effort for you to achieve the best results. Look at SEO as online housekeeping.

8. Get your Own Backlinks

Don’t pay lots of money for other people to give you hundreds of backlinks that are possibly useless. You are new in the game and may not be able to tell the difference between a good link and a car battery. Take the time to get your own links and learn as you go.

9. Link Farms are Bad News

Never use link farms (often referred to as FFA or Free for All sites) they will not help you. Do not be tempted.

10. Article Spinning Software

Stay clear of article spinning software or services for content, you’re not ready for that yet and so many article spinning software just generate humanly eligible garbage.

Related Articles:

• Start Up Businesses: How To Plan Your SEO Strategy
• Why Keyword Research is NOT Market Research For Online Businesses?
• Google+ Causing The Death Of Search Engine Optimization?
• SEO and SMO: How the Blend Ensures Success of Your Site?
• Google Analytics: Updated and Up to Date

The web has blurred lines of geography and concepts. Blogs are often termed as articles and keyword research is akin to market research. Ask any SEO expert, and it causes a splitting headache when they need to explain to a client that there is a thin line dividing keyword search and market research.

Of course, clients are not the experts, but given the attitude of know it all that they carry; one would expect them to at least get their research right! (No offense meant).

In this blog (yes this is not an article!) let’s focus on the thin line that divides market research from keyword research, in context with online businesses.

Get the Basics Right:

A Market Research is carried out with the aim to find out the type of market that exists for a specific product/service. It is a systematic method of gathering information about people and companies and then interpreting it, using analytical and statistical techniques/methods to gain insight about the individual/companies or to support a decision making process. The same is true for online market research except the methods and tools used for research will be adapted to suit the format of the media (read internet).

Keyword Research is carried out by SEO’s with the aim to find out the actual search terms web users enter while searching via a search engine in order to optimize their online presence on the search engine pages or SERPs as they are popularly termed.

Market Research is concerned with the human aspect of the research that provides a definite picture of peoples or companies habits, behaviour, preferences etc. It can be a part of social science. Keyword Research, though dealing with the human aspect of words, cannot be exact as the research work is restricted to the algorithm patterns that the search engines detects in the written vocabulary of the online users.

The major difference lies in the way people behave in the real world and virtual world. Conversational words differ a lot from the words that are used while searching. Obviously one does not converse the way one writes! Users tend to use precise terminologies while conducting research and hence their search words might throw up trends that may not reflect in the market scene.

The Story is in the Tools:

Keyword Research is a part of an Online Market Research exercise. Of course it does contribute to the online market research, but it is not THE contributor to its kitty as there are other aspects involved. For instance tools for research differ in both: market research uses tools like online surveys, interviews, emails, questionnaires, while for keyword research the tools could be Google Adwords keyword tool, Adsense, WordTracker etc.

Size Matters:

While conducting a research, researchers determine the size or number of respondents. It is easier to determine a reliable sample size for market research as sources to gather information are many. However, keyword research has a restricted sample size and that to a very volatile one, as the sources of information are very few i.e. only a couple of search engines.

So here’s the deal:

Keyword research can be a part of online market research, but it is not the sole indicator of the trends that exist. They simply reflect what people are SEARCHING for and not what people are actually BUYING.

Related Articles:

• The Relevance of Long Tail Keywords for Search Engine Optimization
• SEM: What Works
• Start Up Businesses: How To Plan Your SEO Strategy
• 10 Tips for Small Business SEO
• Google+ Causing The Death Of Search Engine Optimization?

When it comes right down to it, it doesn’t matter whether something is right or wrong.  Once it is, then it is, and that’s it.

For a long time Microsoft’s hold on the PC market gave IE a decided advantage and thus all of my clients had IE optimized websites.

Today we’re seeing another company, Google, being looked at for anti-trust issues and Google+ is a big part of that.

Whether or not Google is ultimately “punished” for its actions is to me irrelevant.  What matters to me right now is knowing and understanding the situation and dealing with that situation as it exists.

Folks, right now the situation is simple.  Traditional search engine optimization may not be quite dead yet … but it’s going to die pretty fast.  At this point, search is social and social is search.  The death of traditional “seo”, or search engine optimization is upon us.

What matters now to getting good search rankings is “social involvement” and “social sharing” most of all.

Now let me be clear about something, I am not saying that it’s important for you to be sharing socially (though that would help).  What matters is that you and your company are engaged socially AND that the content you produce is being shared socially.

At this point, sites that get lots of +1s to their content will trounce their competition … and the number of links won’t really matter.  Websites that are getting tweeted and liked are going to murder everyone else in the market place and the mountains of money spent on “seo experts” won’t matter one bit.

In fact, Google is really throwing down the gauntlet.  People and companies that actually go out and make themselves market experts through information sharing are going to be gaining search and social popularity while those that just want to sit back with relatively static ecommerce websites are going to be crushed.

All Businesses Are In The Information Business

The plain and simple fact of the matter is that no matter what you sell, you’re actually in the information/education business.  Your job is to educate and inform your customers why they should do business with you.  More to the point, people and companies that are viewed as experts in the market can actually charge more than their competition, and therefore enjoy better profit margins, simply because people will pay a premium to work with the best.

This means that despite the advent of Facebook and Google+, blogging is here to stay.

It is from your blog that you can post great content of interest to your market.  From there, you can use Facebook, Google+, and Twitter to share that content out.

Understand something, with +1s being considered more important in many ways by Google than inbound links, that means you can provide actual incentives for people giving you that +1 vote and thereby catapult past your competition in the search engines.

Not only that, but at the end of the day Google is not really that good of a source of traffic.

Traffic from Google+, Facebook, and Twitter on the other hand are GREAT sources of traffic.  Traffic from those places are much more likely to buy from you without price shopping.

Not only that, but once you are creating great content that is being widely shared socially, you are no longer subject to the vagaries of Google updates which as we all know can sometimes cause massive reordering of the search results.  That means you won’t have to wake up one morning and find that your once great search positions have vanished and now you suddenly have zero traffic.

Instead, by creating content and getting it to be shared out, you’re obtaining traffic from a growing number of sources and in ways that the Google search engine couldn’t stop if it tried.

That is why I’m calling the end to traditional search engine optimization.

Yeah, Great, But How Do You Actually Do It?

The process is actually fairly easy.

1) Find out what problems, difficulties, wants, and desires that your market has

2) Create some great content that explains how to solve the problem, overcome the difficulty, or fulfill the wants and desires.

3) Put that content on your blog and link to it from Facebook and Google+

4) Go to fiverr.com and for only $5 buy some +1s and some Facebook likes

5) Get your friends to +1 and like your content.  ALSO get them to add your Facebook Page and your Google+ Page to their circles

6) Ask every customer to +1 AND add you to their circles (or like your Facebook Page) … give them a discount as an incentive.  This way as you create information it get automatically spread out.  A quick  word of advice, give a much bigger discount for adding your page to their Google+ circles than for doing the Facebook like.  The reason is that the G+ will also give you search benefits.

7) Take every piece of content and create a video of you just talking it out and post to YouTube.  In the very beginning of the description, link to your G+ Page (more help with the search engines) and tell people in every video about the incentive that you give if people add you to their G+ circles.

8 ) Periodically run some kind of sale or special promotion open ONLY to G+ people.  Now notice how heavily I’m favoring Google+ here.  Like I said, the situation is such that the more you can get people to use that, the more likely you are to also be heavily favored/ranked in Google searches as well.

9) After a while you will create a pretty significant body of content that you will have produced.  Take that, give it to a virtual assistant (Pam Drayton has a great article on Virtual Assistants here on opportunities planet), and have your “VA” turn it into a book and place that on Amazon in both print and kindle formats.  Now that you’ve “written the book” this will expand your authority presence in your market and likely cause a dramatic increase in the amount of sharing that you see of your other content, thus helping you even more.  I do have a special report on how to partner with Amazon on my blog, click here now to get it.

Only Two Kinds Of Businesses

The changes with Google and making G+ an integral part of search is quickly going to cause business to be split into two categories.  There will be those businesses that have made themselves experts in the market by creating content that is heavily shared; and because of that they are succeeding wildly.

Then there will be the businesses that struggle.

Which kind of business do you want to have?

To learn more about how you can get more traffic by having more people in your Google plus circles read this article written by Kostas Chiotis about the new Search plus Your World of google…

Related Articles:

• Fine Tuning Your Social Media Marketing Efforts
• How to Respond when Your Site’s Rankings Drop
• Beyond Facebook and Twitter: Three Online Communities Worth Getting Excited About
• The Relevance of Long Tail Keywords for Search Engine Optimization
• Top 10 SEO Practices

Do you often feel as though there are simply not enough hours in the day to accomplish everything that you want to do?  Don’t stress about this fact too much, as you are far from being alone.  So many of the breakthroughs and advancements that were theoretically designed to liberate us have failed to accomplish just that.  Instead, many of us feel that we have less time to clear our schedule for the day.  One excellent way of addressing this problem is to consider hiring a virtual assistant.

What’s a virtual assistant anyway?

A virtual assistant, as the name obviously indicates, could be anywhere in the world.  Hiring digital assistants have become increasingly popular and for a surprisingly diverse range of reasons.  People, businesses and entrepreneurs are hiring people for everything from handling their social networking profiles to helping answer their emails with clients.  Virtual assistants have even been hired to handle dating profiles and set up dates as well!

Using a virtual assistant is “catching on,” as it can give individuals in need a way of allocating tasks and jobs that are viewed as being anything from vital to trivial.  The main point is that through a virtual assistant it is possible to greatly decrease your workload and, in the process, have an extra pair of hands to increase your productivity.

Why do I need one?

If you hire a skilled virtual assistant, you may also benefit from whatever skill sets and experience that your virtual assistant brings to the table.  Entrepreneurs and businesspeople looking to increase their profile and reach more prospective clients might wish to consider finding a virtual assistant who has worked in social media and promotions in the past.  After all, do you really want to pay for someone to learn how to effectively use Facebook or Twitter?  This isn’t the best allocation of your funds.

How can I benefit?

The issue of flexibility is at the top of the list of reasons that you should consider hiring a virtual assistant.  A virtual assistant does not have to be a full time or even part time employee.  This translates into cost savings, as you only need to pay a virtual assistant for the hours worked and the tasks performed.

Starting out slow with a virtual assistant in order to learn what he or she is capable of doing is a good idea and could lead to considerable rewards.  In time, you may discover that the virtual assistant that you hired is very competent, motivated and capable.  This could open up new options for you as well, as you may feel comfortable allocating more and more responsibility towards your virtual assistant.

If you are finding out that you are spending too much time managing and directing a virtual assistant, you have a problem.  At this point, you should act fast and terminate the working relationship and look for a different individual.  Remember, the reason that you hired a virtual assistant in the first place was to help you maximize your time, improve your business and your life.

Related Articles:

• Creating Collective Virtual Offices
• Building Your Site’s Credibility and Trust in Five Simple Steps
• The Best Marketing Strategies for Your Wholesale Business
• The Fun of Coaching Frustrated Entrepreneurs
• The Potential Risks Faced by Online Businesses

In order to run a successful online business, you need to put as much effort as you can into every possible detail. The simple act of creating a website does not guarantee that you will actually make any money. There’s a lot of advice out there about improving websites and increasing conversions. To get off to the best start possible, you should check out the following five tips. They have been handpicked for their ability to produce the best results.

Poorly Written Content Scares Customers Away

The quality of the content on your site communicates a lot about the overall quality of your company. Customers are understandably suspicious of sites that include content that is riddled with misspellings and glaring grammatical errors.

In addition to being free of such errors, the content on your site needs to be engaging, convincing, informative and entertaining. It is well worth it to pay someone else to write exceptional content for your site if you are unable to produce it yourself.

Highlight Licenses and Bonds

If your business is licensed, bonded or insured, you should make that obvious on the main page of your website. People who are searching around for specific services are often aware of these types of things. To get licensed or bonded, a company has to undergo a rigorous screening or certification process.

After investing so much time in becoming licensed, bonded or insured, you should advertise that fact with pride. Whether you own a plumbing business or a lending company, highlighting your license or bond status is a smart thing to do.

Allow Customers to Create Accounts

Although it requires a little more work and maintenance on your end, it’s well worth it to allow customers to create accounts on your site. They’re more likely to return to make additional purchases if they know they won’t have to input all of the same information again.

Take advantage of easy account creation options that allow people to import information directly from services like Facebook and Google.

Be Transparent about the Checkout Process

It sometimes isn’t possible to offer a truly quick and easy checkout process. If that’s true about your online business, don’t mislead your customers.

You don’t have to scare them away by warning them about the long, involved checkout process, but you shouldn’t brag about how easy it is and trick them. Doing that is sure to backfire, and many customers will leave without completing their purchases.

Add Security and Trust Badges to Your Site

Online shoppers are savvier than ever. Many of them immediately look for common trust and security badges to determine whether or not they should do business with a company. For example, a prominent Better Business Bureau badge that advertises an A+ rating inspires a great deal of confidence. A badge that confirms your identity is useful too, and a Verisign badge is a prime example. It shows customers that you are not an impostor and that they can trust you with their sensitive financial information.

As you can see, it isn’t necessarily complicated to improve customer trust and increase conversions. The best rule of thumb is to always put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Would you feel comfortable doing business with your own site? The answer to that question will reveal a lot about the overall quality of your online business.

Related Articles:

• Top 10 Free Tools for Monitoring Your Online Reputation
• 10 Reasons why your Online Business Identity is important!
• Creating Collective Virtual Offices
• The Benefits of Hiring a Virtual Assistant
• The Best Marketing Strategies for Your Wholesale Business