Author: Pamela Swift

Categories
Success Attitude

9 Tips for Managing and Running Your Business Effectively

Article Contributed by Henny Kel 

It is not unknown that most of the highly successful people have shared their traits which include tenacity, vision, luck, hard work and being business savvy. It is often heard that people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Cuban, have “Midas touch” as they seem to be able to turn the majority of their business into successes.

No one can deny that these successful entrepreneurs are now masters in managing their finances and their business to a certain degree because of their virtue of enormous success.

It is observed that when it comes to managing the fund, most entrepreneurs don’t understand the tax and accounting elements that well. In fact, most entrepreneurs don’t enjoy this side of the business, and they rather want to spend their time and energy to find solutions, new product or services, they want to grow their businesses. This, therefore, results in neglecting the financial side of the business which creates government compliant risk, unneeded legal tax, and undermining their business success.

To become a master of finances of your business, you have two options:

  1. To become a learner for lifetime
  2. Surround yourself with a good team
  • Become a Lifetime Learner

For becoming a successful entrepreneur one of the most important traits is to be a learner. People who keep absorbing new information, broaden their knowledge by attending seminars and reading. And well, those who seek consistent advice. Those who don’t can usually be found scratching their heads when the real problem comes. The latter kind of people then hopes that the stars will align magically for them.

Having vast knowledge in your field will always set you apart from your competition.

  • Surround Yourself with a Good Team

It is commonly observed in small business entrepreneurs that they tend to be smart and have a tendency to handle a lot of things by themselves. They can have “do it yourself” attitude, which is okay in the beginning stages in a small business venture, as they have more time than money.

However, when the business grows they need to have a quick transition as now this stage of their business won’t need the same attitude.

It is essential to surround yourself with a team of intelligent and honest people, who would give you ideas and stick by your side. For a large business, it is not possible for you to handle everything on your own.

  • Have a Proper Business Structure

It is tempting to be a lone wolf when we imagine about planning a business structure, but it’s important to resist this temptation and seek proper advice regarding accounting and legal things. There are many instances with clients where they make improper assumptions or when they incorporate for invalid reasons.

The most common mistake that is seen is when the entrepreneurs attempt to look out for the out-of-state entity and not in their home state (where they live), just to avoid state tax. It’s only when they already made the mistake they realize that they will have to register as a foreign entity in their home state and pay double or they have to scratch of their previous entity which was out-of-state and form a new one where they live.

It is possible to save state tax if you get organize in different states provided the nature of their organization and business structure.

  • Never Delay Tax Planning

It is another area where people often don’t understand it well, as most of them are new entrepreneurs. Proper tax planning and strategies to reduce tax in various cases can save a large amount for you, and thus can be a significant amount of potential savings in the long run.

It is crucial not to delay this tax planning because it is often seen that in many cases, as the year ends, there are very few options available to you. So, you should know your business entity structure, your compensation, retirement, and your fringe benefits when you’ll devise a tax strategy. You should also consider your anticipated brackets and tax bracket so that you can come up with a time plan for years that you want to maximize deduction v/s when you want to take greater income.

  • Set an Accounting System

For having a great firm on your business finances it essential that you should have a good accounting system. Thus, it should be on top of your list. You can find a broad range of software and accounting system on the market. Now, the nature and size of your business will be a factor in deciding what kind of system is required by you. Here are the three types of an accounting system that is commonly used by small business entrepreneurs:

  1. Manual Paper-Based
  2. Manual Spreadsheet
  3. Software or Cloud-Based
  • Build Trust and Add Value

For a moment don’t go after people’s wallet, now consider winning their hearts. For earning bucks, not just business strategies but trust also is needed which can be obtained by adding value to your relationship, with potential customers and existing ones as well. For this, you can start by providing them transparency, information, knowledge, treating them right, by being a good advisor, both before and after selling them your product. You should focus on creating a reputation in the market.

  • Keep an Eye on Reviews

The way internet is playing a significant role in deciding your reputation cannot be ignored. It is recorded in online surveys that more than 90 percent of your potential customers are reading a review about your product or service online. And as much as 80 percent even trust it.

You should keep an eye on the reviews about your business, as it will be a factor whether you will gain a customer or not. If any customer is facing the problem and they put it on your website or the online e-mart, you should actively solve the problem (or get it solved). Your company should never at any cost ignore these reviews.

  • Sharpen Your Skills in Business Development

You should as an entrepreneur hone your skills in this field. There are many convenient options available in the market today for new entrepreneurs to develop their abilities. For example, you can join online classes.

Remember, you have got a real competition in the market. That’s why you should start making yourself better at this every day.

  • Don’t Procrastinate

This is one of the biggest issues that entrepreneurs face. Set a time to address the issues on the specified day of the week or a particular time. You should not let laziness win over you. It’s a myth that procrastinators are smart-ass because procrastination is just a demon that will eat your time and your money.

As an entrepreneur, you should be active, and able to take all of the responsibilities.

After reading this, I hope you understand what it is needed for running a business efficiently. As an entrepreneur grasp the knowledge and go ahead with your team. Don’t be scared to use new technology and have a good relationship with your customer.  Designhill is an amazing place to learn new things.

We wish you all the best!

Categories
Starting Up

Savvy Start-up: 4 Important Features Many Small Business Owners Overlook

For many people, their dream is to become a successful entrepreneur. Being a business owner can allow you to be your own boss and pursue your real passions by developing products and services to offer to the public. Being a small business owner, however, isn’t easy by any stretch of the imagination. Many end up failing. If you want to succeed with your small business, below are four important features many small business owners overlook.

Legal Compliance

While you may not necessarily think of it as a feature of your company, legal compliance is vitally important to your small business’s survival. If you fail to conform to the rules and regulations put in place by the city, state and federal government, you could be shut down entirely. You could also face costly lawsuits. Up to 53 percent of small businesses are sued during the year.

HVAC

Another thing you may not think about often is your heating, ventilation and cool system. Also known as HVAC for short, such a system is extremely important for your office. Without properly functioning HVAC, you may not even have a safe work environment for your employees. The winter cold and the summer heat can both be extremely dangerous. You also risk other catastrophes like your pipes and expensive computer systems being damaged.

Security

Security is also extremely important to your small business’s survival. While you may want to give people the benefit of the doubt, small businesses are routinely targeted by criminals. Some of these criminals may even work for you. Statistics show that employees steal $50 billion from their employers every year. Security cameras are a very sound investment for nearly any company. Thanks to wireless internet, they are also cheaper than ever to install.

A Long Term Plan

Most small businesses are very stuck in the short term as far as their planning goes. This is understandable. Running a small business day to day can be taxing. With the challenges small businesses encounter every week, it can be difficult to think much further ahead. However, if you want your company to be successful several years or even multiple decades into the future, you need to start developing long term plans immediately.

Being an entrepreneur is not easy. In fact, it can be one of the most difficult things a person can undertake. It’s a juggling act. That means making sure you cover all possible bases in regards to every aspect of your company. Certainly don’t forget the four listed above.

About the Author

Kara Masterson is a freelance writer from West Jordan, Utah. She graduated from the University of Utah and enjoys writing and spending time with her dog, Max. Kara recommends working with a contractor like HELP Plumbing, Heating, Cooling and Electric to keep your business property safe and sound.

Categories
Online Business

How to Make Your Small Business eCommerce Store Appeal to New Customers

Article Contributed By Alex Schnee

As businesses turn to more and more people online, being able to find your own niche and appealing to customers is an important part of succeeding on the internet. Having a small business makes it all the more imperative that you can reach customers online and that you know how to promote your product and your brand properly.

When you want to market correctly, the first thing you’ll want to do is figure out how your brand comes across online.

Think about who you are marketing to

While the term “buyer persona” gets thrown around a lot, many don’t realize what exactly it means and how important it is to making sure your brand hits the mark. You need to think about how your potential customers think and what makes them different from those who wouldn’t be interested in your products. Come up with a profile of an individual who will make the commitment to buy and that you can count on coming back again.

Come up with a strategy

Whether you have been in business for a while or you are planning on launching soon, you’ll need to take some time and develop a strategy that not only fits in with your buyer persona, but that also works with how you want to present your product and what will work with your budget. How do you see your store being viewed by customers in the future? How could you develop a strategy that works for your overall goal in the long run? These are questions you will definitely want to ask before you jump in.

Stay on brand

It might be tempting to deviate from your strategy at some points, but choose to forgo any organized plan that you might have can actually have adverse effects and can end up costing your company more money than you want it to. Try to make it through your campaign by being consistent. If you find yourself wishing that you had tried something else and that you would make changes, then you will want to wait until your next campaign to try things out.

Be available to clients

One of the biggest problems small businesses face is remaining available to their cliental. Social media and digital marketing has made it imperative that you keep in touch with your customers and that you answer any questions that they might have. Try to respond to any messages you might receive and make sure your customer service representatives know how to respond to questions that they receive. Good customer service can go a long way in helping you develop a name for your ecommerce site.

Track the success of the campaign

Social media also makes it easier to see what you are doing right in your marketing campaigns and what you can improve on. You’ll want to check to see how many people follow through and what tweaks you should make to your next campaign to make it even more successful. Knowing what you did right as well as what can be altered for the future can greatly make a difference for your company.

Taking some time to find ways to market your business means that you have to constantly be learning. However, this knowledge can your company to the next level and create some repeat clients devoted to your products.

Categories
Operations

Why Security Should Be One of Your Main Concerns as a Company (and How You Might Want to Go About It)

Article Contributed By Alex Schnee

Knowing how to protect customers’ security is one of the biggest challenges that many companies face. When you want to build trust and you want to make clients feel as though you have their best interests at heart, taking care of their security concerns should be one of the main things you consider as a business. Building customer trust isn’t easy, but it’s essential to the success of your company and crucial decisions you choose to make moving forward.

Here are some things you might want to keep in mind as you look to improve security.

Customer information is hard-won

It takes time to build a relationship with customers and to discuss how best to keep the information that they have entrusted you with safe. It can sometimes take months or years for customers to feel like they want to give you some of their personal details. In order to earn that trust, you might have to market yourself correctly, be able to cite positive experiences with former customers, and show that you have some sort of security measure in place in order to win hesitant, potential customers over.

Keeping it safe

Once you have taken the time to build a relationship with clients, you want to make sure that you are planning on upholding that promise of keeping their valuable info stowed away. Fortunately, companies are now more aware than ever of hackers and have put together systems that can protect clients’ (and your) information. Virtual data rooms, complicated passwords, and multi-tiered security entry makes it much easier to feel comfortable about promising customers safety for their data.

Once it’s lost, it’s hard to get back

Several companies over the years have had issues with information hacking and trying to win back customer loyalty. While it is completely possible, it does take time and massive amounts of effort on the part of the company in order to restore previous feelings of trust. The best way to keep this from happening is to have advanced security measures in place in the beginning, but it’s never too late to make sure these extra measures are available later on, as well.

It’s cheaper to keep it safe

Compensation to customers for the loss of their information is often necessary when systems are hacked. This can often be incredibly expensive and can cost a company much more than it might have figured to begin with. Along with this, it is common to have lawsuits, little business coming in, and a more difficult time marketing to repeat clients. All this can end up costing a business a lot of money—and it might sometimes be impossible to recover if the information lost was invaluable to customers. Overall, the preventative measures tend to cost much less than if something goes wrong and data is hacked or lost.

Running a business is never easy, but it can be easier knowing you have some security measures in place and that your customers can rely on you to take care of them and their information. You’re more likely to build a business that clients can count on—and that you can feel comfortable promising their security.

Categories
Sales & Marketing

How to Improve Content Marketing Using Email Marketing?

Article Contributed by Anurag Gupta

If you’ve valuable, relevant and rewarding content on your website, it must reach the targeted beneficiaries. And what better than email as a channel to draw in the audience and subtly drop them to the doorsteps of what piques their interest. These days, the email marketing rules are fast adapting to complement content marketing campaigns and trends.

Traditional email marketing, which focused heavily on sales pitch, has evolved to a subtler variant that pays greater attention towards engaging the audience and building a relationship by taking them to value added content. It is a permission-based communication with subscribers that have already shown interest in what you offer.

Here’s a rundown of actionable tips on how you can use email campaigns to improve your content marketing.

Choose Relevant Content to Promote

Here’s a path – your subscriber opens the email, gives a cursory look to your message and then decides whether to pull back or head to the content you are offering. All this happens virtually in a flash, so you have just a second or two to give a compelling, direct reason why they should go to the content. If you handpick and promote valuable, relevant and rewarding content in your email, chances are strong you would be helping your content marketing immensely.

Engage in Dialogue with Email Campaigns

Bombarding the audience with a batch of emails, an approach widely adopted by marketers, is flawed. Although, your email lands the inbox it barely initiates a dialogue. Design your email campaigns to launch a conversation and draw in the prospects to “talk it out” with you. Encourage them to participate and include social share tabs in your emails, prompting the audience to build up the dialogue on social networks.

Plant Crisp & Inviting Call to Actions in Email Newsletters

Once you have figured out the content to be promoted and the manner in which it will be done, you need to find inviting ways of including links to pages on your site. This can be achieved by planting crisp, appealing and strategic calls to action. Keep the language simple and straightforward with an aesthetically appealing design to draw in the audience to the target page.  For example, a clearly identifiable “Read More” call to action, directing subscribers to a weekly roundup of popular articles, could be a good way to drive traffic to content.

Let Stats Tailor Your Email

As part of your content marketing strategy, you might be creating dozens of articles, blog updates, social media feeds and other sharable content. But not all of it fits the bill for your subscriber list. Instead of serving whatever you create, focus on key statistics such as where on website prospects spent most of their time, how many visits a particular genre of content received, degree of engagement, etc. This insight is vital for subscriber segmentation and eventually tailoring of emails to propel them towards the content.

Segment Your Audience

If you combine the prospects’ behavioral data with traditional segmentation, you can customize the emails and offers to fit their needs. For example, knowledge of who opened the email, what they downloaded on the site, etc. provides you with a clear line about what kind of content you should drive them to. This specificity boosts your content marketing efforts.

Employ “Mix & Match” Strategy

If you have a high frequency of email campaigns, you run the risk of getting monotonous in styles and methods. To avoid putting off the prospects with recurrent patterns, maintain a big basket of email components such as content angles, surveys, offers, delivery days and others, and mix and match them as need be. The novelty factor makes it easier to keep your audience engaged.

Tap the Potential of Automated Emails                  

Automated emails such as welcome messages, invoice, notifications and receipts often go without any glimpse to your content. Sticking to the context of the communication, you can slip in links to your best posts or other useful content in these emails. It will be a handy addition particularly for new subscribers while you can expect higher traffic.

Set Up an RSS Email Feed

By setting up an RSS email feed, you can send automated updates to blog visitors whenever a new piece of content is published. This is no-effort method to drive traffic to your latest content. To the advantage of your prospects, they only need to check their inbox to stay abreast with your content offerings.

The above-mentioned steps lay down a roadmap for integrating your email and content marketing efforts. When someone is signing up for your email, make sure you reach out to them from time to time, informing them how your new content could be a good read. If you stick to the tips discussed here, you can expect more visitors, more leads and more new customers.

Author Bio

Anurag Gupta is a budding entrepreneur with stakes in WeblinkIndia.net an acclaimed Web Designing & Development Company, headquartered in India. He also happens to be a keen writer, sharing insights, tips, and tutorials on subjects related to the ever evolving landscape of Web Designing and Development.