10 Tips to Starting a Successful Business

These are 10 tips that will help you start a successful business. Stay on top of these and the process goes a little bit more smoothly…

1) Choose something you LOVE TO DO. Maybe this is the most important of the whole starting a business process. If you don’t choose to do what you love – you won’t put 110% effort into it. Choose something you’re passionate about.

2) Don’t quit the day job! Yet. Keep your other job funding you for as long as it makes sense. Sure one of the reasons you’re starting your own business is to get out from the thumb of someone else… but, it won’t be wise to quit your main job until the money starts rolling in at your new business. Don’t hope it will… get it rolling in first!

3) You need help. Don’t go it alone. You need feedback to help you make decisions. If I was the only one deciding what a website should look like I’d probably fail at web design everytime. I know I’m not a good designer of graphics and layout – so I enlist others to help me. You should too.

4) Find customers first – while you’re still working. Get your marketing plans going immediately becasue they’re most important.

5) Write a business plan and have someone at the Small Business Administration have a look at it. The main reason for a business plan is that you have a plan to go forward. It helps you set goals. It helps you see the realistic as well as the dreams. Most are long on dreams – the business plan shows you the reality of it.

6) Research everything! Don’t neglect any areas. You must be an expert on your chosen business topic and you must know or know someone who knows all you need to know! Joining business groups in your niche can be a big help. Online forums covering your niche is also a great place to get free information from people that want to help as they’re probably not in direct competition with you.

7) Call the Pros. Outsource if you’re not an expert on a subject. You probably don’t know everything 100% but if you know it 80% go ahead and do it. You’ll need other opinions – experts that are 100% and that will share some of that with you. Don’t do menial tasks if you can pay someone to do it. They suck up time and brain power. Outsource!

Find more money than you have.  Talk to friends, family, banks, credit unions, and the SBA. Brainstorm ways to make cash before you go live and never stop thinking about how to continue funding your startup. Startups take more cash than you probably have planned for. Know that now. Adjust now.

9) Be honest, trusthworthy, professional from the start. Your reputation in small business is everything. Word of mouth is spread more quickly for good people. Be a good people – whatever it takes. Always do the right thing.

10) Consult with an accountant and make sure you’re on top of the tax and other legal issues you need to be. Most small business owners neglect this and think they’ll get around to it. Fees and penalties can add up quickly. Stay ahead of this game or find an accountant that can nag you for forms and payments you need to make.

7 Tips for Your Business Website

These are some basic tips to help you develop your business website.

1. Use a white background, blue links, and easy to read fonts. Easy to read fonts meaning some sort of Sans font. White background is clean and nice. It contrasts with a lot of colors you can put on the page. Black does too – but black is too dark, depressing. White is upbeat and for business websites you need upbeat! Blue links because for 15 years we’ve been taught that blue means a link. Don’t try to change it now!

2. Don’t use Times New Roman font for your business website. It’s old. It’s been overused to death. Trebuchet MS, Arial, Verdana for small (10pt or less) text works well.

3. Essential pages:

• About – about the business, about the owners and staff of the business.
• Contact – Have a contact page to show how to reach you by phone, fax, email, on Twitter, through Skype, every way you want to be reached.
• Disclaimer – disclaim everything to protect you from lawsuits. Many people just copy another site’s disclaimer page and make changes to it to make it specific to their own site. Ideally a lawyer will develop one for your business site to cover all bases.
• FAQ – Answer any and all questions that aren’t already answered on the front page. Don’t assume someone will find all the answers if they’re hidden on pages – list them in the FAQ too.
• Privacy Policy – If you collect personal information of any sort – name, email, credit card info, etc – you’ll need to explain exactly what you can and can’t do with visitor’s personal information.
• Email Form – a simple form visitors can fill out and send so they don’t need to open their email program. Make it very easy to contact you.

4. Put contact information on every page of your business site – maybe in the right hand column – and in the same place on every page. Visitors to your business website should be able to see instantly how to contact you.

5. Give something away in order to collect email addresses from visitors to your site. Most visitors are there once and never return. Try to convert a percentage of them into recurring visitors by collecting their email address so you can email them later.

6. Business websites sell something. You should be selling something on your site. Make it very clear how to go about ordering something you are selling. Clear “calls to action”, and answering every question a customer of your business has before he/she orders is essential.

7. Don’t use exclamation points, huge fonts, a mix of colors that you think catches people’s eyes. Visitors can spot hype from far away. Don’t use hype on your site unless you’re selling Sea Monkeys or some other children’s products!

5 Free Ways to Promote Your Website

1. Website promotion through strong SEO.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is free as long as you know what you’re doing. You can learn basic SEO tips from a number of resources. Soon we’ll have an elearning course here to help you learn much more about it. SEO basically means optimizing the layout of your site and the off-site factors that go into helping you rank in the search engines for keywords that are important to your business. Google has sent over 1 million visitors to our sites over the years – well over. We didn’t pay Google anything for sending those visitors to our site – some of which became customers. Some of them long-time customers.

That’s VERY powerful. When done right, this promotional tool can be all you need to create a successful online business.

2. Inbound Links -

These are links pointing to the pages of your website and they are powerful for a couple reasons. Number one reason is because people will see them on the other site and follow them to see what your site is all about. You can gain business customers this way.

The other reason inbound links are important is because Google and other search engines count them as a vote for your site. Google figures that if the owner of one site is linking to another – that other site must be worthy of a vote in the Google index too. It registers those. Through Google – eventually more people will find your website because the inbound links have power.

Tip: See how many sites link to your home page by using Yahoo’s link checker – which registers more than Google’s checker. Got to search at Yahoo.com and enter  link:www.yourbusiness.com to see those pages that are linking to your home page.

3. Guest Post

Find some of the big players in your niche and offer to write an article for them – for free, just for a link back to your site. The person you’re dealing with might choose to rel=”nofollow” your link so pagerank doesn’t transfer, but usually they let it slide as they’re happy to have free content for their site – and one less post they need to write themselves.

Not only will Google notice you have a link from a major site, but the visitors to that other site will get to read a little blurb about you in a short biography – or from the link leading to your site. It’s a win-win idea that you shouldn’t pass up if you want some free promotion and you can write 1 article well enough to help your cause.

4. Web 2.0 or Social Networking

There are a few hundred social networks you could join today if you chose to. Friendster, YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, Facebook, Friendfeed, Twitter, etc. Social networks offer ways to get your name out there in places that help you become seen. Profiles you create for yourself on these networks are often times registered by Google and other search engines – leading to higher rank for websites you list yourself as owner for.

5. Blogging

Whether you have a traditional website or a blog you can blog. Creating content around the subject area of your business is a smart way to pick up long-tail search engine traffic because you have more content at your blog and people are often looking for specific bits of information. Add a blog to a subdirectory of your current site if you don’t already have one. Blogging has real benefit – not only for Google but for creating a brand for your business – you can sculpt and mold your brand more directly and also add personalization to it by showing part of your personality as you write.