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Best Sangeeta

The current recession is still raging despite claims of recovery. President Obama recently spoke at the White House and quoted the Department of Labor which estimated that US citizens have lost 3.6 million jobs since recession began.

For most losing a job is a calamity and yet there are some who handle this setback more effectively. The great American spirit of survival seems to exist in them. They look for alternatives to make a livelihood and to live well. They may not have opted out of their jobs, but they certainly can deal with it.

How do they manage it? Are their prepared for it? What’s their gameplan?

Forty eight year old Bob Carlos was expecting a promotion as the Vice President of his company. He was unprepared for the recession and it hit him below the belt. Carlos reeled but rallied back to life. It was then that he decided to do what he enjoyed most in life: sail.  Soon he started using his knowledge to train others and eventually, lead small excursions. Bob Carlos now leads a full life enjoying his job. He is making money in a way he never dreamt of. He now has plans to expand online and increase the scope of his customers.

Bob relied on his talent and expertise to pull his new found business through. Through a well planned strategy he started organizing camps and workshops and hired more people.
 
Bob Carlos was not an entrepreneur by choice. He was a forced entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurship is the ONLY way you can beat the current situation. No one’s hiring, no one’s extending much credit, no one cares; and you need the money and occupation to keep you going.

More and more Americans are resorting to forced entrepreneurship. The number of non-employer firms has risen steadily in this decade, from 16.5 million in 2000 to an estimated 21.1 million in 2007. Now is the time to go back to your core competency, by improving hidden skills that have been neglected for years. You may steer away from the specific job or branch that you were previously interested in, but with this newly honed skill set, you can help yourself and others in a way you never thought possible.

Many people are making the recession a blessing in disguise to hone their talent and skills, to spend time with family and community, and to get connected with themselves all over again!

All you need is

1. An exemplary skill set
2. An eye for detail
3. An ability to plan
4. Lot’s of enthusiasm.

BUT before you throw your job out the window and set out to challenge your skills, be aware of the following:

According to the SBA – an estimated 637,100 new employer firms began operations in 2007 and 560,300 firms closed that year.

“Two-thirds of new employer establishments survive at least two years, 44 percent survive at least four years, and 31 percent survive at least seven years, according to a recent study."
These results were constant for different industries. Firms that began in the second quarter of 1998 were tracked for the next 28 quarters to determine their survival rate. Of special interest, the research found that businesses that survive four years have a better chance of surviving long term. After the fourth year, the rate of firm closings declines considerably.

Earlier research has found that the major factors in a firm’s survivability include an ample supply of capital, being large enough to have employees  the owner’s education level, and the owner’s reason for starting the firm.

So where do you begin. Start with your heart and move on to brains.

I. Take a mental printout of these five attitude steps

• Start small if you want to but start today.
• Do not be afraid to fail.
• Everything in life is a learning experience to make a better you
• Enjoy what you do
• Find opportunities on the way.

II. Next start with your entrepreneurship plans. Ask yourself the following questions and write them down

• Your best skills
• Your strengths
• What you enjoy most
• Five years on what you would like to be
• The objective of your business

III. Next jot down opportunities associated with each skill

• Start with broad, then go specific
• Use the internet to search for opportunities. You’ll be amazed at what you’ll find
• Try to identify at least three opportunities

Now you should have a better understanding of what your goals of your business are.

IV. Time to put your ideas to work: brain work

• Begin to plan how you will start your business
• Take into account the cost, time, demographic structure and ROI period
• Think of the area of your business
• Try to find a niche

If you follow this step you’ll identify the most suitable business to start with.

V. Time for research

The strategy for research will depend on your skill set and the opportunity for Get an expert’s advice if you feel a little uncomfortable with where you’re headed. You can either hire an expert to do it or do it yourself. Be thorough and explore all possibilities and start building a complete strategy.

VI. Strategy Time

If you are starting for the first time ask an expert; there are lots of experts online who are willing to give a few minutes of free consultation. Make the most of it.

Opportunities

The opportunities for online entrepreneurship are galore; everyone seems to be moving online and finding their niche.

You can become an infopreneur by packaging your knowledge and selling it. The methodology may vary, but the objective will be to sell.

You have to simply decide a topic. It can be anything: knowledge from your previous work/business experience, a hobby, a passion or anything that interests you; even your grandma’s recipe!

Success stories need

1. Diligent Planning
2. Strategic Information
3. Goal Setting
4. Innovation
5. Contemporary Methods
6. Visibility
7. Good Customer Relationship
8. Identification of Opportunities
9. Sheer Hard Work

If you are one of those who think you don’t have a special set of skills to utilize, all you need to is a website. From that website you can find affiliate opportunities, make ad money, manage content or sell products by partnering with drop shippers.

If in doubt ask the expert.

OnlineBizHq.org is offering 15 minutes of free consultation on online business opportunities. They have also published a book “Plant Your Online Biz Money Tree”. This Money Tree Book is available in a pre- release e-book version for a limited time only. Click for sneak-peek buy for only $10!

Although starting an online business does not guarantee a steady income, it does allow you to do what you enjoy doing, or what you are interested in. Plus, running your own online business allows for more flexibility in terms of times and working hours as compared to the strict, rigid work hours employees must abide by. But because of the modern-era internet boom, starting an online business has never been more lucrative.

Ever since the advent of the internet, it has been evolving at an exponential pace and has attracted more and more people every year. As of March 31, 2009, approximately 6,710,029,070 users access the internet on a regular basis – over 99% of the world’s population. This drastic figure only emphasizes the innumerable opportunities that have emerged for starting an online business since the dawn of the internet, and marks a time of a more technological and computer savvy world that relies on the computer more than ever before. But before you click your mouse and begin building your online business, you should know that researching is vital and essential to having a successful business; you must become intimately familiar with whatever facet of business you envision. This requires dedication, commitment, and passion on your part. Books, e-books, magazine articles, and online articles are among the plethora of resources that can and will help jump start your business and allow it to compete in the real world. On the other hand, self-employment offers you more chances to explore and challenge your limits, without having to deal with the pressures of running your own business.

In a way, to become self-employed successfully you must adopt a system, a sort of scientific approach to your job: hypothesizing, researching, testing, re-testing, analyzing, drawing a conclusion, and finally and most importantly, communicating that conclusion with the rest of the world. To become self-employed successfully, you must learn the advantages of becoming self-employed, and weigh that with the other options you have and choose which is best for you. Only then will you be on your way to becoming a successful individual.

What most people fail to recognize is that you can be self-employed and own your own business, simultaneously. Owning your own business while at the same time working for someone is a beneficial way to gain valuable experience that will assist you in establishing your business. There are several tools that you can utilize to help automate your online business, thus taking a major workload off you so you can manage your own business as well as be self-employed satisfactorily. The first is the auto-responder. This nifty program will automatically reply to en e-mail that is sent to a certain e-mail address. It can be programmed in such a way that it sends one e-mail the first day, a different e-mail a second day, and so on. This resourceful program will allow you, the owner, to salvage valuable time spent on responding to the same e-mails that would normally fritter away hours of precious time.

Another handy way of taking a workload off of you is by hiring drop-shippers. In a nut shell, drop-shippers hold products that are being sold through your website in a warehouse and when purchased, ship it directly to the customer. This way, your company does not have to be the retailer and the manufacturer, thus reducing expenses and increases profits. Your only job is to pay the drop-shipper for the shipping costs and they will do the dirty work for you. In addition to auto-responders and drop-shippers, if properly executed, search engine optimization (SEO) will attract customers to your site, without you having to go to them. Ideally, you want your company’s web page to appear in the first page of a search engine’s page when a certain term(s) (the broader the better) is entered into the search engine. These simple tools will drastically improve the amount of clients you have, while still allowing you to focus on something more important than responding to e-mails, shipping to clients, and having to physically go to a potential client to get them to commit.

The world has never been the same since. We pay our tributes to this astronomer who changed the way we see the world. Though it’s been a long journey from Galileo’s Telescope to the Hubble…pioneers will always be remembered. Thank you Google for this wonderful logo.

Sangeeta Kumar

Online business is both, very easy and very difficult to manage at the same time. Though this is a contradictory statement, it is a reality. You can easily set up an online business to sell a product but bringing customers to your site is a big task and difficult one too!! So instead of gaining money, you are actually losing money because of the monthly rent that you’re paying to have your website hosted in cyberspace. The best way of getting the attention of people is through advertising. There are various methods to market your product online or generate traffic. Some of them are CPA(Cost Per Action) campaigns, PPC(pay per click) campaigns, Private Ads, CPM Ads, Article Marketing, Viral Marketing, Marketing on forums, Word of mouth Advertising, Social Media Marketing or Media Marketing and Referral traffic and SEO. Put together all this refers to website marketing.

Now let us discuss some of them. One of the most easy and effective way to get noticed is Pay per Click campaign or PPC. This is based on keywords or phrases related to the online business and whenever a person types this and searches the net he gets a listing by the search engines which lead to your site. These search engine listings generally appear in a box above the natural listings. Whenever a person clicks on this listing the company or organization pays a certain amount to the search engines. In fact you have to purchase these ‘keywords’ making monthly payments to the search engines. The less known phrases cost less and the more popular keywords are expensive. The trick is to purchase less expensive keywords and use them judiciously and at the same time, smartly.

But the flip side of PPC is that it sends both non-business and business traffic to your website and you end up paying for non-business traffic too. It is also expensive as your competitor may outbid you. So monitoring the PPC listing daily is an important daily schedule. Professionals are hired to take care of PPC campaigns who keep in mind the goals, asset and objectives of the online business in mind while designing such campaigns.

In contrast another website marketing strategy  tries to divert traffic to your website through natural high rankings in search engines. This method is called or Search Engine Optimization and the traffic sent through this method is called organic traffic. It is not free but relatively cheaper than PPC. SEO does not aim at clicking the site link. It is a simpler technique which aims at getting a higher rank in the listing of search engines(Yahoo,MSN,etc.) whenever a person types in a keyword to search his desired result. The experts make sure that your site is compliant with Search Engine Algorithms and no spamming or “black hat techniques” are used to rank your site.

Certain tools are used for SEO such as article posting, forum posting, press releases and blog postings. These send referral traffic to your website. Additionally, search engines help you divert the online traffic to your site. It also helps to establish goodwill for your site and build visibility with other webmasters which helps the sustainability in the long run. You can take it from there and build website strategies such as pay-per-impression or pay-per-action or blogging to monetize the traffic diverted by search engines.

B2B referral traffic consists of the incoming links from businesses which are related to your kind of business. You place their link on your website and they place yours on their site. These businesses are then visited by online surfers or visitors. That brings traffic to your site and vice a versa. So in a way incoming and reciprocal links are form of advertisement of your business on the basis of mutual understanding of businesses.
According to a recent online study, over 50% of Internet users have visited websites through referral traffic. These can be bogs, directories, forums and search engines.

Blogs and forums are compared to communities. You must then invest the time and effort into getting your target audience opt-in to receiving future specials and updates – Newsletters, enzines, new product reviews or free offer etc.-Something for them to come visit your website over and over again. According to one survey 43.2% of online traffic is Direct traffic, 36.1% is through Search engines and 20.7% is through referring sites. Referral traffic is more interactive way to generate traffic to your bog or website.

It pays to apply different strategies and not just simply cost cutting when business hits ‘bad weather’. While SEO may be economical in the long run, PPC generates instant traffic. For a new website referral traffic is hard to come by. Online or offline what is most important in a business is to build a relationship with the people and make them trust you. Once they start trusting you, they will become your loyal customers and talk about you and your service getting you more traffic.

Outsourcing has a new impetus in the current financial recession when companies are facing all round pressure to cut costs. They need to be leaner and smarter to emerge unscathed from this storm. The ones are able to leverage outsourcing competently will have a better chance of survival.

Outsourcing, which started with doubts of incomplete tasks, quality, quantity and turn around time issues and with a great risk to confidentiality, has proved successful in the past decade. Outsourcing has a secure future and will remain essential for businesses all around the world.

Mark

True, SEO is no science, but it can have a scientific approach.  The results are not instantaneous like PPC but results should be visible after 3 months onto a program. Okay… give and take a few months for the vagaries of Search Engines who like to alter their algorithms just when your site is all set to take off!

The problem with SEO is that it is too vague a field. We can only guess what works and what does not. Broadly there are five factors that are said to do 70% of the work.

1. A well optimized code
2. Well Optimized Metatags
3. Header Tags, Alt tags
4. Keywords in the URL
5. Backlinks to the site

 If your SEO company is smart enough to integrate all these together chances are that by the fourth month your SERPs should be somewhere around rank 10-12 for moderately competitive keywords. Competitive keywords take much longer and the effort for increasing the positions in page 1 increases proportionally with every position.

There are two ways in which you can check if your company is really working on your website.

1. Set up Google Alert on your company’s name. Once an alert is set up, every time a directory picks up your link or a blog picks up your article or the company does a press release Google will pick it up and deliver it into your mailbox. The larger the number of alerts the more your SEO company is working.
2. Use a tracking account. Google Analytics is free and is improving with feedback. Ask you SEO company to set up a tracking in analytics and get your account id and password so that you can check occasionally.

SEO is unfortunately a long drawn process. How long should one wait before deciding that the SEO company is taking you for a ride? When you are six months into an SEO program and you face any of the following scenarios it’s time to fire your SEO company.

Scenario #1: Six months into the campaign there is no increase in search traffic

Scenario #2: Your traffic has increased but you are not getting any conversions.

Scenario #3: You have not even made it to page 2 for your targeted keyword.

Scenario #4: The company’s report shows a lot of increased links but there is hardly any increase in ranks.

Scenario #5: Your keywords are stagnated where they were.  

Scenario #1: Six months into the campaign there is no increase in search traffic
Why is it so?
Maybe they are not working at all
OR
Maybe they are targeting all the wrong keywords. Very competitive keywords may bring in more traffic volume but they take longer (read upto 12-24 months) to optimize. To maximize your ROI professional SEO companies choose a mix and match of low competition, moderate competition and high competition keywords. If your SEO company did not take this approach it’s time to fire them.

How to Check: Insist upon adding Google Analytics (a free tool) to your site and visit it regularly.

Scenario #2: Your traffic has increased but you are not getting conversions
Maybe it’s a genuine mistake which can be rectified
OR
Maybe you are getting a lot of spam traffic because the company has posted the site at improper places just to show stats of increase in traffic. Believe me this happens quite a lot with unprofessional companies who want to gain SEO credibility. The unknowledgeable client gets taken in.

How to Check: Visit analytics. Click on traffic sources. Check all the traffic types- Referral, search engine and direct. Check the type of sites the referral traffic is sending, check the type of keywords. If all of these are okay, then you need some serious website marketing not just SEO

Scenario #3: You have not even made it to page 2 for your targeted keyword
Maybe the targeted keywords are too competitive
OR
Maybe all the aspects of SEO are not being covered by your company. This is a tricky issue. If you are satisfied with your keyword movement over the months maybe just a push is needed. Otherwise you need to check what the company is doing. You can read more about it here- http://www.gmrwebteam.com/blog/index.php/website-design/trust-your-seo-company-with-open-eyes/

How to Check: Simply type your keyword in the search bar. Check page #1 for your URL. If it’s not on page #1 it should be on page #2 after 6 months of campaign for at least some of the keywords. It should show up. If it isn’t there call up the SEO
company and demand an explanation.

Scenario #4: The company’s report shows a lot of increased links but there is hardly any increase in ranks.
Maybe the ranking will improve gradually
OR
Maybe the company is trying to impress upon you that it has increased your links. This is false reporting and not genuine SEO. In the long run these links will harm your site. Keep away from the company.

How to Check: Occasionally, in the Google toolbar type the following to see the number of links to your website-
links:www.domainname.com
Analyze the relevancy of the site linking back to your website. If the links are from spam sites fire the company.

Scenario #5: Your keywords are stagnated where they were.
Suppose you were already on page #3 or page #2 for the keywords and approached a company to take you to page #1. But you haven’t moved.
Maybe the company’s taking you for a ride
OR
There is no other reason. Just fire the company. They are showing no results

There may be other scenarios which have not been covered in this article. It’s very difficult to know if the company is working hard enough to get you on page #1. Keeping constant contact with the company is a good idea. Ask for a monthly comparative report and track the increase in links, traffic and keyword positions. Get an action plan of the month by the company. Track the action plan. You will see results soon enough!

Ask them for a keyword list and make sure that they get them right.
This is important. Take time off for it or you’ll spend five times over trying to rectify the error. You may not know what words your potential customers are using in search engines to try and find a business like yours. That’s why you’ve hired a SEO company in the first place. But instead of appearing stupid

1. Ask them for examples of your competitor’s sites
2. Ask them for a keyword list.
3. Select a mixture of keywords. Remember that the single word keyword will be the toughest to optimize for and they may not be the most suitable. Though there may be 5040 searches for ‘insurance’ per day there is no point in spending money optimizing for it. ‘Auto Insurance’, or ‘health insurance’ may be more suitable. Some thing like ‘dental insurance’ may be more specific. However, “call center” (treated as one word) can result in huge business.
4. Ask them the difficultly level of keywords. 45% or less are relatively easy to optimize for and higher the difficulty, the toughness of optimization increases.
5. Ask your SEO company to prepare a list of existing web pages on your website which target suitable keywords. That way you will know which page targets what keywords and how many more pages of content will be needed on the website.

So you get to control the costs.

Your chance of appearing at the top of search engine results is greatly enhanced if you focus your website optimization efforts on two/three word phrases instead of single words.

Check your webpage title
Now that you know what phrases which webpage is targeting check the title of the l page. You can view it in the top browser bar when you open your website. Your page title on your home page is the biggest indicator to search engines of what your website is all about. The page title originates in the Meta Tags, which are not displayed in the normal view of your website.

1. A page title should be between 10 to 60 characters long including spaces.
2. It should preferably be in the format <main keyword>, <sub keyword>, <brand name>

Remember that the company should optimize each page title on each page to get the best result. A random check is sufficient.

Get the Description Right
 The description that appears below your URL in Google search engine is the metatag description that was included in the source code of your page. The  Description should contain an enticing and informative snapshot of what the website is about and it should appeal to all search engines to appear. While Google takes a page description of 150 characters, MSN often takes the initial 100 characters from the Meta Description. The description should make sense, convey all relevant information about the web page and entice the reader to read the page. It is also worthwhile placing one related keyword phrase within the Meta Description.  If possible add a phone number in the description metatag

Web Page Names
If your SEO company is a genuine company, they will most probably get it right. But step in here to ensure that the most important pages of your website can be told over the phone. After all it’s you and your team who will conduct the business. It should not be too long to fit in the business card. There are times when it is technically not possible. Ask them for a redirect.

Let People Find You
Add your contact number and office address prominently. Let people know that you have an office space. Give visitors a number to enquire for business.

Consideration for the Media
You may not be a big company right now, but as your business grows and your brand becomes recognizable the press may decide to follow you. Create a media corner. Put all your press releases, speeches and videos over there all at one place. Keep adding the latest press release to the site. Post your press release on the site a day or two earlier that the official press release.

Some Questions To Ask Your SEO Company To Keep Them On Their Toes

What ‘H’ Tags are you using?  H Tags or ‘Heading Size’ were originally introduced to aid the formatting of HTML documents. Because their presence indicates  page heading with larger text, many search engines have decided to count this as a significant part of their ranking. Websites should not be designed just for their look and feel. Equally they should not be designed only for search engines. However, with a bit of thought and creativity, web pages can be built with both visitors and search engines in mind.

Are you using the keyword in Alt Tags?  Alt tags short form for Alternative Tags were originally designed to contain the text to be displayed on web pages instead of images if a user’s computer did not have the capacity to be able to display images. Alt Tags on images provide a great way of getting your keywords near the top of your pages without reducing your website readability. Alt Tags can also positively impact your internal website keyword linking. For a website to be successful, you have to create a new site entrance by adding Alt Tags to each image to appeal to search engines more effectively. With this, not only you are appealing to more users by using Alt Tags to your images, you will also be complying with website design standards for disabled users of your site.

Is the site navigation in text? As said earlier if your SEO company is genuine they will insist on text navigation and even navigation without menu. Generally, websites have their navigation links on the top or side of each web page. Unfortunately, many website navigation menus are image based. This means that search engines often won’t spider the linked pages as they do with text-based menu links.

 Are you using the keywords to link to webpages? In technical parlance the phrases used to link to a particular webpage is called anchor text. They are given a lot of importance by search engines

Are all pages on the website linked by some page? Is the internal linking 100%? Well, we do not like loose ends, neither do search engine because they have been made by human. Make sure all the pages on your website can be reached by some page.

Work In Tandem
No SEO company can work effectively in isolation. They need your feedback, your suggestions (off and on). Ask for a monthly report to check your website’s keyword progress. Remember SEO is a long drawn process. Competitive keywords may be harder to optimize for. Once you reach page 1, the progress becomes slower. If you have found a good company all you have to do off and on is an occasional nip in the toes to ensure there is no scope for complacency.