When purchasing office equipment, you’ll often have the option of purchasing a service contract on the new equipment. In fact, sellers will often go out of their way to try to get you to purchase a service contract. The main reason for this is that the profit margin on the service contract is often greater than the profit margin on the piece of equipment you’re purchasing.

A typical service contract will cover the cost of repairing and maintaining a piece of equipment over a certain period of time. Some service contracts can be renewed, while others automatically renew when the contract expires.

If you’re like most consumers, you’ve probably purchased a service contract simply because it made you feel safe and secure knowing that your new office equipment will be fixed at no cost if it should ever break down. After all, you’ve just spent a considerable amount of money on a new piece of equipment — a few extra dollars for a service contract can’t hurt. Wrong! In most cases, the extra money you spent for the service contract is wasted money.

Before purchasing or renewing a service contract, consider the following suggestions to help minimize your expenses. You may be able to eliminate the service contract all together, or at least reduce the cost if you do decide to purchase one.

Avoid contracts or agreements on highly reliable equipment. Purchasing a service contract on a piece equipment that is highly reliable is an unnecessary expenditure. Personal computers, fax machines, telephones and laser printers are examples of equipment generally regarded as highly reliable. In some cases, the cost of the service contract is actually more than it would cost to simply have the equipment repaired at your own expense. Keep in mind that the cost of new technology often drops dramatically in the year after you purchase it, and by the time it breaks, you may be able to purchase a new one for half the price of the original.

Purchase or renew contracts or agreements for less reliable equipment. In some cases it makes sense to purchase a service contract. This is true for the types of equipment you consider to be less reliable — those pieces of equipment you use more frequently, and that tend to be more susceptible to breakdowns. A copier is just one example of the type of equipment falling into this category (although they have improved a great deal over the years). The cost of a service contract can be very reasonable if you compare the cost of routine maintenance and repairs with the actual cost of the service contract.

Don’t pay for “house calls.” If you do purchase a service contract, make sure you know what kind of service you’re actually paying for. Sometimes you will actually be paying for more service than you really need. For example, some service contracts will cover the costs of house calls — where the service representative or repair technician actually comes to your place of business to service or repair the equipment. This feature may be necessary if the covered equipment cannot be moved or easily disassembled and carried to the nearest repair shop. But for those pieces of equipment you are able to move and carry to the nearest shop, you may be able to reduce the cost of the service contract by as much as 30 percent to 50 percent by opting out of the house call feature in your contract.

Avoid long-term service contracts. Before purchasing a service contract, determine if the price is refundable in case you should happen to sell or replace the equipment covered by the contact. Chances are the amount you will pay for the service contract is not refundable. So before purchasing a four-year service contract on machine you only plan to keep two years, do your homework. Purchasing a long-term service contract is cheaper than a short-term contract when you consider the cost of the coverage on a yearly basis. If you plan to keep the covered equipment for the full term of the contract, then you’ll benefit more from the long-term contract and its yearly lower coverage cost. If you cannot safely assume you’ll keep the equipment for the contract’s full term, then it may end up costing you more than a short-term renewable contract.

Also remember to check the warranty on the equipment before purchasing a long-term service contract. The warranty may actually cover the costs of any repairs also covered by a service contract. In this case, purchasing the service contract is completely unnecessary.

About the Author

Winmark Business Solutions (WBS) is a free Web site for small businesses and entrepreneurs containing over 6,000 pages of business-critical information and downloadable tools at www.WBSonline.com. WBS is a division of Winmark Corporation, a multi-brand franchisor with nearly 900 franchise locations in North America. With over 25 years working with small businesses, WBS draws upon years of experience to bring important small business articles, information, tools, forms, checklists, calculators and downloadable forms to the small business owner to help their business grow. WBS contains over 6000 pages of business-critical information all available at www.WBSonline.com.

A pay per click (PPC) campaign can help drive traffic to your Web site, especially if you don’t have top organic search engine rankings. Pay per click is a business model that requires advertisers to choose keywords, create ads to display on the search engine results pages and pay a set amount every time someone clicks on their ads.

Here’s a checklist to help you launch and manage your PPC campaign.

Start Your PPC Campaign

• Determine your daily, weekly and monthly budgets.
• Choose your keywords. Most search engines use a bidding process to determine the cost per click for a specific keyword, so the words you choose will depend not only on your business, but also on your budget.
• Determine which PPC program you’ll use. Some popular options are GoogleAdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, Ask Sponsored Listings and Bing.
• Sign up for your account(s).

Write Your Ads

• Write at least two ads for each keyword so you can test which one is most effective.
• Create an attention-getting headline that relates to your product.
• Include your keyword in the ads so viewers will know it relates to the search they performed.

Monitor Your Performance

• Do a daily check to make sure you haven’t hit your budget limit prematurely.
• Look at your keywords and calculate your return on investment.
• Adjust your spend to put your money on keywords that are generating the best return.
• Look at which ads are performing the best. Eliminate the ones that aren’t doing well.
• Write new ads to test their effectiveness against your top performers.

Running a PPC campaign is an ongoing process. It’s easy to do yourself if you have time to launch and maintain your campaign. Or you can hire someone to manage the entire process for you for a monthly fee.

Social bookmarking sites offer a free way to drive traffic to and raise awareness of your Web site. Social bookmarking is a way for people to save links to Web pages they like in the cloud and access them from any Internet connection. It also allows users to share bookmarked pages with each other, increasing its value to users and making it more attractive to marketers looking to gain traction with a viral marketing campaign.

Free Doesn’t Mean Easy

Just because most social bookmarking Web sites are free to join doesn’t mean you can rise to the top of the rankings with little effort. People join to find useful or interesting Web sites and to interact with like-minded individuals. They’re not there to learn about products and services. If you’re selling something, you’ll have to build relationships before you launch your marketing efforts.

Most social bookmarking sites generally work like this: A user submits a Web page containing a news story, a video, unique content or something interesting or unbelievable. The user community votes on the Web pages. The pages with the most votes rise to the top on the Web sites, gaining even more visibility while the sites with the least votes remain buried.

Here’s how to get started:

• Sign up to create an account with the Web sites listed below.
• Find your friends and connect to them.
• Encourage any of your friends who haven’t already joined the Web sites to join.
• Start submitting and voting for Web pages you like.
• Submit your own site.
• Send your friends a link to your site and ask them to vote for it if they like it.
• Make it easy for other people to submit your content by including icons for each bookmarking site right on your page.

People who sign up for an account and use the Web site solely for marketing often get little to no new traffic to their Web sites.

Most Popular Web Sites

Here’s a list of links to the most popular bookmarking Web sites:

StumbleUpon
Digg
Reddit
Delicious
Yahoo Bookmarks
Google Bookmarks
Mr. Wong

If you have the time to commit to social bookmarking, it’s a great way to share your Web site with others, gain valuable inbound links and drive traffic.

Everyday it seems, people are asking me about the optimum number of inbound links they need to acquire for their Web site in order to rank well in Google.

My answer is going to seem a little flip, but it is the honest, best answer.

Answer: You need more inbound links—of equal or higher quality—than what your competitors have.

Albert Einstein argued that any mathematical formula that required pages of calculations did not contain within it “the mind of God.”

So when Albert Einstein developed E=mc2, then Einstein had fulfilled the promise of a simple formula that could encompass the brilliance of God.

When people wonder how many inbound links they need to acquire to rank in the top 4 of Google’s search results or even the top 10 of Google’s [search engine results pages] SERPs, they are generally hoping that someone will be able to give them a numeric answer, so that they know whether they can afford to undertake the process or not.

I understand the WHY of the question, but there is no canned answer that will work for everyone. Remember, your competitor may be asking the same question and undertaking the same processes as you are, trying to accomplish the same goal.

You can’t truly begin to understand the answer to this question until you have taken the time to do an inbound link comparison analysis of all of your competitors in the top 10 spots of Google’s SERPs.

• You need to look at the top 10 listings in Google for a particular keyword.
• You need to do backlink checks for all ten URLs in Google’s search listings, and you need to check those numbers across a variety of sources, including Google, Yahoo and any other tool you can find to do a check. (Google and Yahoo both tend to understate the actual link counts. While Yahoo will show you more than Google does, it also shows a number of “no consequence” links in its results.)
• You need to look at the quality of a few of the pages that provide links to the URLs in the search results.
  This is not an easy process to undertake. I have done it before, but the best you can hope for is a “snapshot” of what is out there, and therefore, what you need to accomplish.

Note: If Wikipedia turns up in your search query, few people with small budgets will ever be able to dislodge Wikipedia in the search results. What it has in a small number of inbound links, it more than make up for with links from dozens or hundreds of PR4, PR5 and PR6 pages. Wikipedia is the king of internal linking, and it uses that to a great degree to rank extraordinarily high in Google’s search listings.

Your analysis should seek to uncover how many links a page has to it.

As a general rule of thumb, Google will show you less than one percent of the existing number of links for a Web page. Yahoo will sometimes show closer to five percent of the existing number of links for a Web page, but they will not show you the highest quality of those links.

So, as you strive to gain a “snapshot” picture of the playing field, you want to take Google’s inbound links number and multiply that by at least 100. Then you want to take Yahoo’s inbound links number and multiply that by at least 20, then cut the number in half to acknowledge the number of worthless crap links they have in their database. Once you have achieved these two numbers, then I tend to call the truth “somewhere in the middle.”

With your “somewhere in the middle” number in hand, you then need to look at the quality of links to a few of those search listings, to get an idea of whether those links exist on higher quality pages or simply junk pages.

If those links are on junk pages, then the goal could be achieved by just working the numbers. But if there are a lot of high PageRank pages in the mix, then whatever number is in your hand, should be multiplied, perhaps 100-fold, to overcome the quality of pages that link to your competitors.

If you get the idea that my simple formula leads to a complicated answer, then you are right.

All of the numbers that I have included in my sample formula are based on rough speculation, as the “snapshot” offers you your best hope of understanding the challenge in front of you.

While the number of inbound links may be relatively easy to determine, the link quality is a factor that is really hard to pin down.

• If you determine that you only need 300 inbound links to rank with the big boys, you may be right.
• Your 300 inbound links number should also be quantified against the number of links that Google will count worthy, so you may need 1,200 links to get 300 links that Google will deem worthy. This calculation depends more on the “quality of your content,” rather than the “quantity of your content.”
• When all is said and done and your 300 Google-worthy links have not yet put you on page one, then you know that the quality of the links pointing at your competitors is greater than the quality of the links pointing to you.

If you were hoping for an easy answer, I am sorry that I could not help you with that. But with this explanation of the challenge, you may be better prepared to answer the big question, the question that is really on your mind: “Are my hopes of achieving good rankings in Google within my reach?”

I tend to throw “worry” to the wind and just start working. I don’t worry if I can afford to do it or not. I simply start doing, and I know that in one month, one year or five, I will have built enough value in my Web site that my competitors are going to be the ones who are trying to figure out if they can unseat me!

About the Author

Bill Platt has provided SEO services since 2004. In 2009, he transformed his SEO service, into one that helps people defeat negative search results in Google. By improving the rank of positive Web site reviews in the search results, negative search listings begin to disappear from the public eye. If you would like to learn more about how Bill’s Reputation Management SEO service can help your business, visit: 911reputation.com. Bill has also owned thePhantomWriters.com since 2001.

Your business may have already been impacted by the spring and summer outbreaks of 2009 H1N1 influenza. The CDC anticipates more communities may be affected and/or more severely affected this fall and winter than were in the spring and summer of 2009. The health of employees during an outbreak such as H1N1 influenza plays a critical role in the continued operations of your business. It is vital you keep yourself and your employees healthy in order to maintain business operations.

The best ways to do this are through education, proper personal hygiene and appropriate medical care. There are several things that can be done to protect yourself and your employees, and to prevent the flu from spreading.

Wash:

Wash your hands frequently, and always after coughing or sneezing. The correct way to wash hands is to use warm water and soap liberally, rubbing the front and back of hands, wrists and between your fingers for at lest 20 to 30 seconds (long enough to sing “Happy Birthday” twice). After rinsing and drying your hands, use the paper towel to turn off the water and to open the door when leaving to avoid contaminating your hands again. In between washings or in the event soap and water is unavailable, use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer.

Prevent:

Get vaccinated for the seasonal flu. If you are at a higher risk for flu complications, you should also get vaccinated for the 2009 H1N1 flu. Vaccination is the best protection against contracting the flu. Cover your nose and mouth when you cough or sneeze with a tissue or your arm. Do not touch your mouth, nose or eyes. Avoid close contact with those who are ill, and if possible, stay away from crowded places and large gatherings.
Provide hand sanitizer and post flu prevention reminders for your employees. When cleaning your place of business, pay particular attention to common areas and keep frequently touched surfaces, like telephones, keyboards and doorknobs clean.

Get Well:

If you are coughing or sneezing or have flu-like symptoms, stay home and limit contact with others. Get plenty of rest, and drink clear fluids. Stay home at least 24 hours after you are free of fever without medication.

Stay Informed:

Monitor recommendations from U.S. Centers for Disease Control and media coverage about flu cases. Check information sources frequently, both local news and government Web sites, in order to stay current and best protect your employees and your business. You can keep track of updates and valuable prevention tips at www.flu.gov, the U.S. government’s site.

If you become sick, in order to ensure proper medical care for your illness, it is important to know the differences between common cold and H1N1 flu symptoms. Below are some guidelines to help you:

Symptom	Cold	H1N1 Flu
Fever	Fever is rare.	Fever is present in up to 80% of all flu cases. A temperature of 100°F or higher for 3 to 4 days is associated with the flu.
Coughing	A hacking, productive (mucus-producing) cough is often present.	A non-productive (non-mucus producing) cough is usually present (sometimes referred to as dry cough).
Aches	Body aches and pains are slight.	Severe aches and pains are common.
Stuffy Nose	Stuffy nose is commonly present.	Stuffy nose is not commonly present.
Chills	Chills are uncommon.	60% of people who have the flu experience chills.
Tiredness	Tiredness is fairly mild.	Tiredness is moderate to severe.
Sneezing	Sneezing is commonly present.	Sneezing is not common.
Headache	A headache is fairly uncommon.	A headache is very common, present in 80% of flu cases.
Sore Throat	Sore throat is commonly present with a cold.	Sore throat is not commonly present with the flu.
Chest  Discomfort	Chest discomfort is mild to moderate.	Chest discomfort is often severe with the flu.

Additionally, be familiar the following emergency warning signs. Seek urgent medical attention should you have these symptoms.

• Difficulty breathing or shortness of breath
• Pain or pressure in the chest or abdomen
• Sudden dizziness
• Confusion
• Severe or persistent vomiting
• Flu-like symptoms improve but then return with fever and worse cough

Following the precautions and guidelines in this article will help ensure your health, the health of your employees and ultimately the successful operation of your business. Also crucial to protecting your health and that of your employees is having sufficient healthcare coverage.

The BST Insurance Program gives you access to affordable individual health insurance. The program makes competitive health insurance options available to full-time and part-time employees. If you are interested in making an employer-sponsored group plan available to your employees, please contact their health insurance agents who will work with you to develop a customized plan best suited for your business.

Visitwww.locktonrisk.com/BST/Benefits to learn more and receive quotes for coverage specific to your needs. If you’d like to speak with a health insurance agent, please call 1-866-535-6480.

* Sources: www.cdc.gov, www.flu.gov

About the Author

Winmark Business Solutions (WBS) is a free Web site for small businesses and entrepreneurs containing over 6,000 pages of business-critical information and downloadable tools at www.WBSonline.com. WBS is a division of Winmark Corporation, a multi-brand franchisor with nearly 900 franchise locations in North America. With over 25 years working with small businesses, WBS draws upon years of experience to bring important small business articles, information, tools, forms, checklists, calculators and downloadable forms to the small business owner to help their business grow. WBS contains over 6000 pages of business-critical information all available at www.WBSonline.com.

Looking for ways to increase your sales while the economy plods along the path to recovery? Why not expand your target market by opening your business to the world?

Reaching foreign markets is easier than you might think. If you sell online, you can reap the profits of international business without leaving your country. Here’s what you need:

An ecommerce Web hosting plan

If you’re not already selling online, you’re missing the opportunity to reach international online shoppers. The first step in selling online is switching to a Web hosting plan that includes ecommerce features such as a shopping cart and secure sockets layer (SSL) certificate.

An ecommerce plan allows you to post your products with images, descriptions and specs, and it gives customers the ability to securely order your products online, no matter where they are.

A merchant account that accepts foreign currency

To accept credit card and debit card payments through your ecommerce Web site, you’ll need to open a merchant account. To sell to international markets, your account must accept and convert foreign currency.

PayPal merchant accounts can accept foreign currencies at competitive exchange rates. The company offers transactions in 16 different currencies covering countries in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. Look into your other options as well.

Translations of your Web site

If you’re expanding into a country whose native language is different from your own, you’ll need someone to translate your Web site. Do not attempt to use free online translation services. They’re sure to mistranslate some of the idioms and slang that are a part of every language. Hire someone fluent in the culture and language to translate your Web site to make sure it sounds natural to a native speaker.

A marketing plan for gaining business in your target countries

When your Web site is ready, you’ll need a plan for attracting customers. You can use many of the same strategies you use at home to reach an international market. Google AdWords, for instance, offers ads in up to 40 different languages.

If your domestic profits have been hit by the slowing US economy, you can make more money in the short-term by reaching out to international markets. But it’s also a great long-term strategy to diversify your customer base and help you weather future business cycles.

You’ve penned the perfect headline. Your keywords are strategically scattered throughout pages of copy you refined for hours. You’re ready to grab your visitors’ attention and hold it all the way through to your sales pitch. But how much thought have you given to your final appeal—your call to action?

Isn’t it Obvious?

You might think the boilerplate Buy Now button makes it obvious to the reader what the next action is. But this is not true for two reasons.

First, it’s clear to you what the next step is. You know your product backward and forward. You’ve been working on your Web site for ages and probably even designed the order path yourself. And, you’ve just spent hours working on the copy. You’re too close to the project to look at it from an outside perspective. What may be obvious to you is not obvious to someone completely unfamiliar with your business, product or Web site.

Second, people are busy. They’re not really reading your Web page. They’re skimming paragraphs, headlines and images and maybe stopping to read a few sentences that seem interesting. At the same time, they’re answering emails, instant messaging people and thinking about what’s for dinner. You only have part of their attention, so you need to make the next step simple and clear.

Be Specific

The best calls to action tell readers exactly what you want them to do. For instance, a link that says click to continue tested better in a Marketing Sherpa study than links saying continue to article or read more.

In terms of converting visitors on your Web site, you may want to try start your 30-day free trial today instead of Order Now. When being specific, it can be helpful to restate your offer, even if that makes your button larger. In fact, a larger button might be useful in gaining that distracted reader’s attention anyway.

If your business Web site doesn’t have a blog, get one. A blog, if done right, can act as a direct and indirect mechanism that brings large amounts of qualified visitors to your site, many of whom may become customers.

This is mostly related to the way blogs interact with search engines, and the traffic I am speaking of will come from search engines, mostly Google.

Before I explain how you can do this to help your Web site, let me give some background on how search engines work.

When it comes to optimizing your Web site (or blog for that matter) for search engines, you must always keep in mind two things: on-page optimization and off-page optimization.

On-page optimization is the elements of a Web page that better optimize it to be found and ranked well in the search engines. These elements can include on-page content such as the actual sentences and paragraphs on the page, the headlines (or headers or Hx tags), the links, the links’ text, the title tag and much more.

Off-page optimization means the things that are done on sites besides your site, namely link-building. Off-page optimization is the process of creating links (or causing others to create links) on other Web sites that point to your site. Inbound links, as these are often called, have a major impact on how well you rank in search engines. Generally speaking, the more inbound links, the better. But the quality of the sites with these inbound links, or the way the search engines perceive the sites, is even more important.

To rank on the first couple of pages on the search engines requires work on both on-page and off-page optimization.

Two additional and important pieces of information that you’ll need to understand are related to site content and internal links.

Search engines love to see your Web site regularly add new, original, quality content. You don’t need to add pages every day, just add pages at the same rate over time. So, if you add a page a week to your site, keep it at around that same pace, or increase or decrease gradually.

A Web site can be considered a living entity in a sense. It certainly shouldn’t be static. It should grow over time. And the fantastic thing about content is that the more of it there is on your site, the more chances you have of getting found in the search engines.

The idea that inbound links help your search engine rankings that I explained above can be extended to your internal pages as well. In other words, the more links to a particular page coming from other pages within the same site will boost that page’s rank as well.

Think of it this way. If you had a 10-page site including a product page, every page on the site contained a link to your product page and all other things were equal, your product page would rank higher than the rest of your site’s pages (besides the home page which is given a little extra weíght).

Now let’s consider what would happen if there were only you and your competitor in your industry (if only that could be true!), and your site still had those 10 pages while your competitor’s site contained 100 pages. Furthermore, your competitor set it up the same way as you where he added a link to every page on his site that pointed to his product page. All other things were equal, his product page would outrank your product page every time. Why? Because he had 100 internal links pointing to his product page and you only had 10.

If you put all these pieces together now, on-page optimization, off-page optimization or link building, content creation and internal linking, can you begin to see why a blog may be a good thing? A blog helps with all of these.

A regularly updated blog provides a mechanism for adding fresh content on a regular basis. Plus, it’s so easy to use a blog that anyone can use them. So even if you or your employees don’t know a thing about Web pages and HTML, you’ll still be able to add new content to your site.

Consider this: If you add fresh, quality content to your blog on a regular basis by writing posts, something the search engines love, and within each post you link to an important page within your site, let’s say your product page for instance, you’re now building links to help your rankings using your blog. With this additional link your product page gets that much more boost in the search engines.

Remember how I explained that links from within your site help your rankings? Adding links within your blog posts pointing back to your other important pages that you want to rank well is a great way to help your rankings.

And every time you publish a new post, you’re giving the search engines one more entry point into your site. Your site will quickly get bigger, and with each new page your site gets more visible.

Keep in mind that the links you make within your blog posts should be relevant. Only link to your product page from a post that has to do with your products. And blog posts ought to be useful to your site visitors. The less you talk about your products and instead offer useful, free information that people can use, the more traffíc and repeat visitors you’ll get.

Remember that people really don’t care about you, your Web site or your products; they only care about how you can help them. If you sell furniture, a blog post about how to find the best deals on furniture would be far better than a post about how your chairs are the best in the world.

One important thing to remember is that if you plan on creating a new blog for your business as a way to augment your Web site, be sure you put the blog on your actual domain. This means that you would not use a remote service like Blogger.com. Instead, you must have the blog on your business Web site’s address (or domain). For example, if your Web site address is http://www.yoursite.com/ then your blog should be located at http://www.yoursite.com/blog or http://blog.yoursite.com/.

By adding a blog to your business Web site, you are creating a way to get additional traffic. You’ll get direct traffic from your posts, which get indexed by the search engines and drive traffic to your site from searches. And, you’ll get indirect traffic from your other site’s pages ranking well in the search engines because they have links pointing to them from your blog posts.

You’ll be regularly adding fresh content to your site, which search engines love, thereby creating more ways to be found in the search engines at the same time. And each post provides a new chance to create a link or two to other pages and blog posts on your site, thereby boosting those pages’ rankings.

Like I suggested at the beginning, if your business Web site doesn’t have a blog, go get one.

About the Author

Jason O’Connor is a Web business and marketing professional who produces The Net Gazette, a free online Web business and marketing periodical. The Net Gazette covers topics that range from blogging for business to Twitter. Read the September edition or visit the main Web site at: www.thenetgazette.net.

Hiring someone is hard work — especially the first time. You’ll make mistakes. After you’ve made the hire and the employee has been oriented, it might be time to sit down and make some notes about what went right with your strategy and what went wrong.

Some considerations in evaluating your success are:

• Did you get too many applicants? Too few? Maybe you need to think about tailoring your advertisement and recruiting to get the result you wanted.
• Were the applicants too qualified? Not qualified enough? Try rewording your advertising to attract more appropriate candidates. Using a job description can help.
• How cost-effective was your advertising? A simple way to measure is to divide the cost (not only in dollars but in your time) by either the number of total applicants or the number of applicants that you considered seriously.
• Were there questions you wanted to ask but didn’t? Provided the questions are job-related and not in violation of antidiscrimination laws you are subject to, make a note and ask them next time.
• How did you do as an interviewer? Maybe you can ask your new employee to critique you. Give him or her a chance to get to know you and feel comfortable around you first, or you won’t get any valuable information.
• Did your testing support or help you in your hiring decision? If not, maybe you should reconsider the kinds of tests you’re administering, if you can do so legally. If so, make sure the cost and time involved in the testing is worth it. Would you have come to the same conclusion without testing?

Ensure that your selection procedures are in compliance with the law. Your hiring must be based on the actual requirements of the job. The ability of an applicant to perform a job is the major factor in supporting a hiring decision. Are you hiring without reference to a person’s race, sex, religion, national origin, disability or age? Can you prove it? Be sure to keep records showing why applicants were rejected for employment. Reasons should be objective, spell out the factual basis for not hiring and be clearly written in order to avoid possible misinterpretation.

About the Author

Winmark Business Solutions (WBS) is a free Web site for small businesses and entrepreneurs containing over 6,000 pages of business-critical information and downloadable tools at www.WBSonline.com. WBS is a division of Winmark Corporation, a multi-brand franchisor with nearly 900 franchise locations in North America. With over 25 years working with small businesses, WBS draws upon years of experience to bring important small business articles, information, tools, forms, checklists, calculators and downloadable forms to the small business owner to help their business grow. WBS contains over 6000 pages of business-critical information all available at www.WBSonline.com.

Online sales continue to grow despite the economy’s overall sluggishness. And with the holidays just around the corner, there’s no better time to start selling your products online. We’ve created a list to help you get started and organize your project along the way.

Lay the Groundwork

• Determine the geographic limits you’ll place on sales and learn your tax obligations to the area(s).
• Choose a shipping company and get information on their rates.
• Determine how many products you will sell.
• Take high-quality digital photos of your products (from every angle if possible).
• Come up with a list of keywords related to your product and store.
• Write detailed descriptions of your products incorporating your keywords.
• Plan your Web site. Determine how many pages it will have, what the order path will be and what information you need to collect to complete the order.

Getting Started

• Decide whether you’re going to design your ecommerce store yourself or hire a designer.
• Choose a Web hosting plan for your Web site.
• Select shopping cart software.
• Prepare to accept payments: create your merchant account and purchase an SSL certificate.
• Once your Web hosting plan is set up, create an email account for customer service, sales, billing and any other departments customers may need to contact.
• Consider adding customer reviews to your site.
• When the design is complete, do some test orders to make sure everything is working properly.

Launching

• Create an email marketing plan for your launch.
• Devise an advertising strategy.
• Create social media accounts and add their icons to your Web site.
• Set up your Web analytics to measure your results.
• Do a final test by asking family and friends to place an order. Make sure everything is easily understandable and in working order.