Getentrepreneurial.com: Resources for Small Business Entrepreneurs in 2024 – Page 616 – Small business resources and advice about entrepreneurial info, home based business, business franchises and startup opportunities for entrepreneurs.

Up Your Website Traffic

Post author By Pamela Swift
Post date August 6, 2007

StartupJournal: Start by figuring out what phrases people are typing into search engines when looking for your type of products online. Once you know that, you can buy paid search ads, such as pay-per-click ads, using those phrases and pepper your site with them to boost its search-engine rankings.
Showing up high in search-engine rankings is very important since most people use search engines to shop for products online.
There are some key-word suggestion tools that help identify popular search phrases, usually available free. For instance, Google Inc.’s AdWords Keyword Tool and Wordtracker.com let you type in words and see which related phrases get searched most often. Type “Made in America” into the AdWords Keyword Tool, for instance, and you see phrases like “clothing made in America” and “toys made in the USA” have been searched fairly often recently. But “toys made in America” was searched hardly at all.
You also can experiment with various search phrases by signing up for an advertising program, like Google AdWords. The programs let you bid on various phrases. The price you bid is what you pay the search-engine provider each time someone clicks on your ad. The more you bid, the higher an ad for your site appears on the right-hand side of a search-results page. These programs have monitoring programs that let you see what phrases are most effective in generating traffic and customers on your site.
Increasing Traffic To Your Web Site [StartupJournal]

Entrepreneurs

Teenage Moguls’ Startups

Post author By Ethan Theo
Post date August 6, 2007

Teentrepreneur: Typical teenage entrepreneurs are not hard to come by. Indeed you may have inadvertently been one in your life already. In fact when you were between 13 and 18 there’s a 99% chance that you tried to make money in one form or another. I’ll give a run-down of the typical types of businesses that teenage moguls start up to make their first bit of cash, so maybe you can replicate the successes of the many!
1. Lemonade Stall – Its true, everyone loves lemonade, especially in the summer when you’ve been on a run or out at a stressful day at work, a nice cool lemonade increases the blood sugar and puts you in a feel-good mood!
2. Lawn-mowing – Again another highly popular business for young people with a love for nature (or for money for that matter). Here in the UK in the summer, the grass grows like crazy and I myself have to cut the grass once per fortnight.
3. Gaming Cards – When you were a young teenager, I bet you played with gaming cards at some point of your life. For me, just as I was approaching 12/13, Pokemon cards were in fashion. Some of the holographic cards could be found in normal packs and sold online for as much as £10 a card!
4. Sell Food At School – Unfortunately I never got a chance to try this one out as the schools I’ve been to have charged lunch meals to the end of term bill. But, if your school lunches are payable with cash, try going into class with some fizzy drinks or sweets.
5. Newspaper Delivery – This one is another teenager’s bread and butter of pocket money and income. Head down to your local Post Office or Depot and ask if they have any Newspaper or Magazine Delivery positions.

5 Businesses For A Typical Teenage Entrepreneur [Teentrepreneur]

How-To Guides

How To Increase Profits

Post author By Ethan Theo
Post date August 5, 2007

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Businessknowhow: Over the years, we have helped many companies grow profitably, using simple, common-sense tactics for cost savings that go directly to your bottom line! And it’s the little things that count – a ten percent increase in profit is more likely to come from twenty things that contribute one-half percent each than from one thing that gives you the full 10 percent.
1. Improve Collections. Rather than wait for a bill to be past due, call the customer the day before the payment is due.
2. International Payments. Payment is slower in other countries. So, if you do business there, you better adjust your prices to reflect these slow collections.
3. Accounts Payable. With each vendor, work out an agreement to delay payments or spread them out.
4. Improve Cash Flow. By improving cash collections and delaying cash payouts you have improved cash collections.
5. Save Pennies. Reduce costs wherever you can.
6. Reduce Cost Of Your Office Supplies. Go through your past invoices and highlight the office supplies that make up 80% of total dollars spent.
7. Telephone Control. Make sure you are getting six-second increment billing with no minimum per call.
8. Your 800 Number. Consider a toll-free telephone number for customer service or to tie locations together seamlessly.
9. E-Mail Rather Than Telephone. Use e-mail rather than playing telephone tag and incurring unnecessary long-distance telephone charges.
10. Do Your Own.
Improving the Bottom Line [Businessknowhow]

Entrepreneurship

Survival Instincts

Post author By Pamela Swift
Post date August 4, 2007

YoungEntrepreneur.com: Most entrepreneurs who start a business will fail. The statistics vary but as many as 80% of people who start a business today will no longer have their company in 5 years. That is a pretty big failure rate.
According to the Body Shop founder, Anita Roddick:

“I started The Body Shop in 1976 simply to create a livelihood for myself and my two daughters, while my husband, Gordon, was trekking across the Americas. I had no training or experience and my only business acumen was Gordon’s advice to take sales of £300 a week. Nobody talks of entrepreneurship as survival, but that’s exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking.”

What many new business owners fail to recognize is that entrepreneurship is first about survival, then about building a company. I have seen too many entrepreneurs to count who have grand visions of where they want to go but never even get to first base. They close down shop before they can execute any of their big plans because they run out of money.
If you cannot make enough to pay your basic bills then you will not be around in the long run to fulfill your dream. It takes a lot longer to get a company off the ground that most people think and in the beginning it is all about survival – do whatever you need to do to keep yourself, and your company, going.
Entrepreneurship Is About Survival [YoungEntrepreneur.com]