Tag: Small

All About Small Business Loans – How to Get Them

If the business employs less than a hundred, is owned and operated independently, and not the market leader in the industry where it belongs, then it is considered a small business. These are some of the criteria of the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) defining a small business.

One of the most common problems of a small business owner is the lack of funds to maintain, run and expand the business. If you have this problem, then these frequently asked questions will guide you in making your business survive through the support of a business loan.

What is a Small Business Loan?

A small business loan is the type of loan that lends money or funds to a small business owner so he or she can operate the business. It is also made available for individuals who wish to start a business.

Small business owners may use the amount borrowed for the establishment, construction or renovation of the business, acquisition of the necessary equipment, and for operational expenses such as payroll.

While a small business loan refers to a loan for the business itself, the personal credit history of the business owner will strongly determine if the bank or lender would give its approval to the application. Thus, a small business loan is also termed as a personal loan granted to small business owners.

How to apply for Small Business Loans?

When you apply for a loan, your loan provider will look into your personal credit history. You, the business owner, should also be able to project a sense of deep commitment to your small business. The lender will gauge your willingness to put a portion of your personal funds to help the business prosper. Be prepared also to present a loan security or collateral such as a house or car. What’s more, your educational background and expertise are also important factors for your business to be granted the loan.

The small business owner is also required to submit a business plan. A business plan is a written proposal which details the nature of your business, marketing strategy and contains a financial report. This document should also include how the business will generate income and support its operational expenses in the coming years. Moreover, the business plan should be able to convince your loan provider that you can pay the loan within the stated date of payment through the profit realize from the business and its expected continuous growth.

Remember that lenders need to make sure that the business can survive to pay up the loan and that its owner is credible enough to guarantee that the business is well planned to prosper.

Where to apply for Small Business Loans?

You can apply for a loan traditionally, which means going to local banks and government funded organizations. Even your local cooperatives have facilities for small business loans.

You may also apply for a loan online. Online application for a business loan is easier and convenient for a small business owner. You no longer have to waste time scouting for the best loan arrangement in the market. All you need to do is visit various websites and compare the rate and application requirements. However, make sure that your target small business loan provider is credible to avoid problems later on. A national bank with online capability is the best choice.

Small Business Email Marketing – How to Improve Your Marketing ROI

IPT Ltd recently released some survey results that proved very interesting reading. They asked the public what they considered to be the most effective marketing medium. There were no surprises to see that TV came first with 37%, but a surprising second was email, which came in at 32%! Which approach do you think will generate the best return for a small business? Yes, small business email marketing!

Obviously, you will need the contact details of your customers as well as any new prospects, for your small business email marketing plan to succeed.

There are two ways that you can get people visiting your business to give you their contact details. Get them to fill out a form on the premises for you to manually upload later or, (the best option), direct them to your website where they can fill in a opt in form.

To ensure that people actually want to give you their details, you’ll need to offer them some kind of incentive. Buy One Get One Free offers, competitions, and even valuable free information do a good job. Every person who fills in the opt in form becomes a member of your email “club”, people you’ll be able to contact time after time.

There is a well known business maxim that goes “people only do business with people they like” and if we add ‘know and trust’ then there you have the goal of online email marketing. Each email you send will build up trust and the likelihood that the email prospect will buy from you when the time is right.

Email marketing for small businesses is a really good business-building decision for all small businesses. As well as being a extremely cost effective, emails build trust, credibility and enable you to send messages to your customers or clients at a time when they are ready to purchase, whether that is the 3rd email you send, 14th or 154th!

A good small business email marketing approach to take is to describe a problem that your target market has, and suggest your product or service as a solution. As you show understanding of the problem, on a subconscious level your email recipient will know that you can solve it. Another way is to provide useful tips people can use, as this demonstrates knowledge and expertise. Also sending an email with a coupon that can be printed out and used as a discount is good business email marketing approach as well.

The same research completed by IPT also shows that most influential aspect of an email communication is discounts or money off at 27%, second comes general interest about product or service at 24% and joint third place at 20% is prize draw and brand familiarity. These statistics should help in your decisions as to what to include in your own small business email marketing campaign.

One example in the ‘real’ world small business email marketing success I can think of is a dog breeder who started a monthly newsletter with photos of the dogs they had available. This meant that if a person came by and didn’t want any of the dogs on that particular day, they could sign up for the email newsletter and get photos of new dogs sent to them each month, without having to visit the breeder’s home. Now these dogs were selling for about $1300 a pop, so this was a brilliant way to keep in touch with potential dog buyers.

You just need to look to the Fortune Global 500 corporations to see more examples of email marketing success. They recognize that staying in touch with clients and customers through email can actually cut your advertising costs and get you more sales. With small business email marketing you can easily get to the stage where an email blast is more successful than a £2,000 for a full page newspaper ad.

So, what are you waiting for? Let’s get you started then…

Start a Small Retail Business with Multiple Sales Channels

Starting a small business with several sales channels maximizes your chance of success

In those tender first few years after you start your small business every sale is significant. It’s unfortunate that many entrepreneurs attribute a small start up budget with a single outlet for sales. In the past this may have been true. Few entrepreneurs had enough capital to open even a single store. Two or three stores in different neighborhoods was well beyond most budding entrepreneurs. Today, there is no end to the different sales avenues available to imaginative start up retailers, despite limited budgets.

Channel One: Start a small retail business with a mall kiosk

Don’t let the high cost of starting a bricks and mortar store keep you from making sales to live customers. An attractive kiosk can be purchased for less than a decent used car. Utility and Maintenance costs are also inexpensive. Mobility is an added bonus. If one location fizzles out you can always pick up and move.

Internet options may be less expensive to start up but they also take much longer to be noticed. Depending on your experience, they also take a lot longer to build. A well placed kiosk can be fully operational and generating income the moment you wheel it in the door.

Channel Two: Start a small retail business with an ecommerce site

Once you have your kiosk in place, you’re going to find yourself with a lot of free time between customers. You could spend this time talking to your neighbors or reading the newspaper. You could also boost your future sales potential by starting an online store.

Ecommerce sites can be created quickly but they do take time to fine tune. Once you’ve worked out all the bugs it may still be a while before many customers start to notice your small retail business. There’s no reason you can’t handle an ecommerce site from a notebook at your kiosk.

If you merely started an ecommerce site, you would have to wait months until your site was noticed or pay for expensive advertisements. Instead of sitting in your basement, frantically checking your server log, you could be positioned at your kiosk with an opportunity to speak face to face about your products, and hopefully sell some of them.

Not only can you continue making money while you start your ecommerce site but you also get a chance to promote it at practically no extra cost. Stamp your small business website address on your kiosk, shopping bags and reciepts. Be sure to mention the site to everyone that stops by your kiosk. Even offer a chance to browse, or beta test, your ecommerce site from your notebook.

Channel Three: Start a small retail business selling products on E-bay

E-bay and Pay-Pal take a hefty chunk out of your profit margin but E-bay still has some redeeming qualities. Almost any product you put onto their website will be noticed. In addition, once you’ve completed several transactions successfully your seller profile will indicate that you can be trusted. It takes a long time to build up trust for your ecommerce site. Like your kiosk, you can advertise your ecommerce site at no charge.

Unlike your kiosk and online store, your products can be sold on eBay with practically no startup cost. Also, there are a lot of savvy internet shopers that make online transactions exclusively through auctions. By opening up this third channel your potential customer base skyrockets!

Effective Suggestions For Marketing Small Business Start Ups

If you are the owner or manager of a new business, it is important to make potential customers aware of your products or services. There are various strategies and techniques you can use for marketing small business start-ups, it is essential to analyze various factors in full before drawing up a final plan. There are two basic avenues you can go down when it comes to raising the profile of your business. There are traditional offline methods that are useful dependent upon the exact sector and location of your company, and online concepts that can reach a wider audience.

You will need to set yourself a strict budget when it comes to marketing. As a general rule, online techniques are a lot more affordable than any other methods. In many situations you can even advertise and promote your business online without spending any money.

It is of the utmost importance, that a new business has an easy to navigate and professional website. Whatever the sector or industry you are involved with, a portal can offer a platform through which the market can come to learn about your business and services. As almost every home in the country now features a PC and a broadband connection, if you did not have a website you would be leaving a huge pot of gold untapped.

Consider how most of us use the net. There are three types of websites that consistently receive the highest number of visitors. If you can place information in these portals, you can boost your profile dramatically. Social networks, video sites, and the search engines are the most popular.

To receive a high placement in all the major search engines, you will need to familiarize yourself with the concept of search engine optimization. This is a technique whereby you integrate various keywords in to the content used on your web pages, which may be queried for by visitors to a search engine.

Do not underestimate the benefits of adding information about your business to a social networking site. If you could create a fan page or group page, soon you can have interest from a wide range of geographic locations.

Many people now use the net to check out videos. If you put together a handful of interesting and informative how to guides, and then add back links from the pages they are hosted on, you can increase the traffic to your own portal dramatically.

When comparing traditional marketing strategies, it is important to think carefully about the audience. Television ads are often too costly for a new business. Newspaper and radio advertisements can be cheap, though may not be seen or heard by the right demographic.

It is of great value to constantly up date you marketing plan to be more effective. Over time you will come to understand which strategies are the most rewarding, and which are a waste of time and energy.

Small Business Owners: Your Leadership Style Can Increase ‘Profits’

Covid-19 pandemic has forced a lot of business closures. Government leaders are issuing stay-at-home orders and the government is reopening in phases, which has limited customers sizes to 25%, 50% and 75% for the health safety of our community. How can you lead in constant changing environment? How do you motivate employees and simultaneously look for the next product to keep the doors open? How do you change your management style to be an effective leader in such a uncertain future and ‘doing more with less’ employees.

Leadership

I suggest send out a survey of what qualities they want to see in a CEO (then pledge to do everything you can to live up to these expectations)

Leaders need to provide coaching, because no one ever got to be the best without the constructive feedback, probing questions and active teaching. Be honest and positive in all communication messaging.

Search for opportunities to improve

  • What’s new?
  • What’s next?
  • What’s better? And not just for yourself but also for those around you.
  • Find a significant purpose for addressing your challenging and most difficult assignments.

Who you are and what your values are (then you give voice to those values)

Leader must affirm the shared values of the group.

Inspire a shared vision

  • Envision the future by imagining, exciting and enabling possibilities
  • Enlist others in a common vision by appealing to shared aspirations
    • Imagine the possibilities
    • Find a common purpose

Leaders who focus on the future attract followers more readily

  • Read trends
  • Listening to Podcasts
  • Watching documentaries

People regard most favorably those leaders who regularly talk about the ‘why’ of work and not just the ‘what’ of work

People who are leaders want to do something significant, accomplish something that no one else has yet to achieved.

Motivating Employees

  • Cross Training Employees about each other roles/responsibilities
  • Mentoring
  • ‘how can I help you?’… walking around 30 minutes a week
  • Delegating responsibilities
  • Brown Bag lunches (training)
  • Praise and Work for work above normal day activities

Sending them to seminars

Have them to do presentations

Quarterly Corporate Town hall Meetings (teleconference)

Weekly recognition of outstanding performers

  • Email
  • Walking around
  • Must be based on ‘visible’ performance (daily if outstanding)
    • Monthly meeting (recognize your performers)

Social Media interaction with customers

  • Do you have a scalable website (WordPress)
  • Do you have LinkedIn profiles about employees and products
  • Engaging with customer markets about current happenings
    • Facebook
    • Instagram
    • Reddit
    • Twitter
    • Weibo (china)

Finally, some business owners will make the necessary changes to keep afloat and some will drown. Navigating in rough waters, takes a team effort, innovations and commitment to ride it out!!!!

Your job as a business leader is to communicate, communicate with honesty and positivity to build trust in customers, employees and shareholders.

Small Business Management and Entrepreneurship

Owning a successful business is no longer reserved for a lucky few. It is because there are some rules followed by those successful business people in making the business people to climb the richness ladder with assurance and comfort ability although any business is about risking and that the higher the risk the higher the reward or profit.

When you want to startup a business you first must have an idea, example of business ideas are like opening up a hairdresser, opens a salon, a shop and much. Generally, people do make huge mistake. Just because they are thinking about the job and not the business. Only because you are a good chef does not mean you know how to run a restaurant. More important, it does not mean a restaurant would be successful in your market. So you have to clearly assess and evaluate your business idea before implementing it.

Business wise you have to make sure that what you are going to produce Is it a product or service they have fallen in love with. Again, just because you love something does not mean a profitable business will come of it. This is especially true for first-time entrepreneurs. Learning how to run a business is hard enough; you don’t need to make it any harder by doing something you love rather than something customers love paying you a good profit for or producing what you want instead of what they want.

There are some guidelines on how you are sure that your intriguing idea is also something from which you can truly make a profit? There are three essential considerations one has to bear in mind.

Make sure the product or service has a repeat buy. This is by far the most important aspect of long-term business success. You have to have a product or service that people will keep buying. It is better and more profitable, in my opinion, to have a pool cleaning company than a pool building company. Put another way, a business owner should focus on getting a customer once, but making a profit from that person for a very long time.

Be certain you have a high profit margin.

There are very few companies that can compete long term on a “we are cheaper” marketing platform. In any new business, you need to watch your cash flow–and if you are trying to work with low profit margins and make gains in volume, you will need to have a high level of working capital to keep you running through the lean profits early on. Having a higher margin is extremely important when you are growing a business so you can self-finance your growth.

Build a strong support team because a good idea is not enough. The idea counts most, yet a quality idea must still have a great team of people behind it to give it wings. Time after time, when people bring me a business investment proposal or an idea they want to take to market, I ask them who is on their team and they respond with something crazy like, “Oh, we have not hired anyone yet.” Get a board of advisers. Get a team of professional accountants, coaches, lawyers and bankers. A great team will greatly improve the chances for success of any business.

Now if I were going into business today, to be sure of the market what would I choose? I would start with one premise and some hot industries. Here the premise is, you do not make money panning for gold, and you make money selling pans. Get in the way of a buying frenzy, and you will be a success. Therefore the fastest way to make a restaurant profitable is not by having a great chef and great decor or big buildings it is by attracting a starving crowd with money so that they can eat the food in exchange for their money.

In other words look for an idea you can take national or, even better, global at some stage. Although it might be fun and a challenge to establish yourself locally right now, but eventually you’ll want to build something much bigger for the future and also expand you business.

Small Scale Business Ideas That Work Perfectly for Affiliate Marketing

If you are running a small scale affiliate marketing promotion, you will benefit the most from small scale business ideas. When budget is one of your ultimate concerns, then you have to find as many free methods as possible to promote your affiliate products. You don’t have to worry as there are several free ways that can help you bring in more sales.

One of the small scale business ideas that doesn’t require you any cost is article writing. This is an effective marketing strategy that brings potential buyers to your promoting website. What you need to do is to write quality articles that are integrated with specific keywords or key-phrases. Keep in mind that you need to write a huge batch of articles before your website can rank well in leading search engines. Writing articles alone is not enough, and you also need to post them in article directories. The purpose of posting articles in these directories is to leave your link in their web pages. All in all, this is one of the best business ideas where you will get a chance to rank your affiliate websites in top pages of search engines.

Among the small scale business ideas, participating in online forums is one of the most popular affiliate marketing strategies. Up till now, there are varieties of forums available in the internet. Some of these forums might be related to the affiliate products that you are promoting. The best way to participate in online forums is by offering a solution to other members’ problems. You may post your answers with the inclusion of your link. Don’t ever spam these forums as you may likely be kicked out from the site, and your membership may be terminated. Take note that your main intention should be to connect with the forum members and build a good rapport with them.

From all the small scale business ideas, you might want to try using Google Plus (Google+) to promote your affiliate products. With Google Plus, you will get connected to everyone who has been included in your friends, family or acquaintance lists in Facebook, LinkedIn and you can also invite contacts from Yahoo! and Hotmail. Apart from that, you can also benefit from joining Yahoo Answers since you can browse around to look for people asking about issues related to your affiliate products. Without a doubt, this is one of the most powerful small scale business ideas by which you can get potential buyers from people who are really planning to buy your products.

3 Small Business Ideas For Women

Starting your own small business can very exciting and scary, but the risk is worth the reward. For women with children this can seem daunting because of all of the responsibilities of family and social stigmas of working mothers.

Many women do not know where to start when thinking about their own home based business, which is why having 3 practical small business ideas for women, is necessary. Anything can be a business, but you shouldn’t just do anything. You should do what matters to you, what you care about.

The 3 small business ideas for women can be broken down into continuing your career, finding a new career, and how to discover how to start a business and business ideas using the internet.

1) Continuing the Career. Some of us had former (or current) careers that we enjoyed and learned the ins and outs of. You may have been thinking about getting back into your career, but you know you don’t have the time to go to work while raising your small kids. Here is where small business ideas come into play, especially those geared towards women. The internet is a wonderful place where you can find all kinds of opportunities related to your career niche. It’s important that you fully check out all of the available options you truly have.

2) Career trailblazing. Some women want a new career, something fresh and exciting. A few may know what it is, but some do not. The great thing about the internet today is the amazing amount of information that is readily available. It’s as easy as taking a few business ideas you have and researching them online. You can find all sorts of opportunities to start your own business, as well as find others who are doing the same thing.

3) How to find what you need. The best way to find job ideas and places to get started is to search for terms related to your idea, or former career, or to working in home in general: i.e. how to start teaching swimming lessons, or small business ideas for women. You can find plenty of websites offering advice on how to get started online. You can find directory sites to get ideas flowing or to focus in on one idea. A couple of good sites for that are the site listed below, and powerhomebiz. Take full advantage of online directories and communities and blogs and you’ll see you business start to grow.

3 small business ideas for women to get started right now in turning their dream work from home idea into actual reality.

Cost-Effective Marketing Strategies of Small Business Marketing Experts

Whether your business is old or new, you marketing should be dynamic and timely. Often times marketing in small business involves sending several outgoing calls and walk-in customer service satisfaction. But are these small business marketing ideas still operational today? Or is Internet marketing becoming the next norm for small or big business.

Adding to the dilemma is that, these days, the business magazines, newspapers, Internet and even your email Inbox are filled with small business marketing ideas from just anybody. Inexperienced businessmen or women can easily feel lost in these barrages of small business marketing views, advices, strategies, etc. So let me give you more centered strategies that harness one effective small business marketing strategy: Internet marketing.

Six Top Ideas for Internet Marketing

1. Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC)

For a tech-savvy business man or woman, Pay Per Click marketing proves to be a strong business marketing method. But, entrepreneurs using Pay Per Click should know what they’re doing or their cost per conversion could rapidly break unknowingly. The key to a productive Pay Per Click marketing drive is continuous oversight.

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Unlike Pay Per Click advertising, Search Engine Optimization pays off slowly but a lasting prospect is feasible. On average, 75% of a business website’s traffic come from organic search engine queries. Remember that search engines wouldn’t mind your advertising budget. What they look into is the SEO strategies you employed on your site What are important are the SEO strategies that you have on your site.

3. Public Relations (PR)

Public relations are perhaps the parent of all small business marketing ideas since advertising campaigns was started. Nailing your offline and your online PR campaign is a very good way to build-up awareness, authority, trust, and loyalty to your business. Online public relation through PR Wire is very cost-effective small business marketing strategy, for example.

4. Twitter and Facebook Places

Adding to the micro blogging and the syndication power of Twitter and Facebook are their new free service to all business marketers: the Twitter and Facebook Places. This application allows you to integrate your Tweets and Facebook updates to display a map where your business is located.

5. Online Business Directories

Today, clients are prepared to junk yellow pages in favor of the more interactive online business directories to find local businesses. If you’re not included on several online business directories, then it means you’re losing on a lot of small business marketing ideas. You’re missing on citation burst that could have tremendous positive impact on search engines.

6. Online Word of Mouth

And the last small business marketing strategy that’s paying huge dividend is online word of mouth. This includes glowing customer reviews on online directories, blogs, and social media sites. Seventy percent of future clients trust online reviews, so it’s time to start looking into ReviewBiz, for example, and start strategizing.

I know that was a lot of online small business marketing ideas to study let alone implement. In fact, imposing and managing all these online marketing ideas can even be time consuming. Don’t worry though because there are solutions you can find on the Internet that should help you implement the marketing strategies above.

In closing, small business marketing ideas such as online directories, etc. are a potent means to reach more local clients. These tried & trusted methods are permanent, and your business will fall if you don’t have these strategies in place.

Start a Home Based Company With Small Business Grants

In this day and age as we witness the rapid advancing of technology in unison with the increasing unemployment rate, many American citizens are turning to small business grants sponsored by the US government as a means of establishing home based online businesses. This practice is becoming more and more popular each and every day as the evolution of technological business enhancements is rapidly rendering traditional methods of company operations obsolete.

There is no better time than now to begin considering telecommunication and virtual office positions as a regular work or career procedure. This is the age of computers, and web cams, and digital this, and automated that. It’s seldom that you are ever even able to reach an actual live representative when calling most customer service centers. It is pretty frightful to think that your job can actually be eliminated and replaced by an inanimate object, yet those days are growing near. It is a daily occurrence that thousands are laid off of their long time jobs while major corporations downsize employees to redirect payroll funds, in order to upgrade their automated systems. Becoming self-employed is seemingly the last chance at any type of job security for some, and small business grants are often the only chance of achieving that.

The smartest thing about using small business grants to establish an online “work from home” business is, obviously, because this is free government money. Most taxpaying American citizens are eligible to qualify for business grants, and the best part is, they never have to pay them back. There is no credit check, cosigner, interest, collateral, or anything else. This is a gift from the government awarded to you to establish your new business. By using these funds to create an online web and/or home-based business, you can virtually open up shop and see an immediate profit with absolutely no overhead whatsoever. No other type of business can achieve those highly favorable results.

You can acquire enough free government money in small business grants to start your home-based business in the utmost of professional fashions. It is entirely possible to be awarded enough funding to…

*Construct and/or set up an efficient and well equipped home office

*Purchase computers, software, telephones, copy machines, fax machines, printers, and all other essential major electronic or technical equipments to keep your company running smooth and efficiently.

*Buy all paper, pens, folders, professionally printed letterhead stationary, calendars, business cards, and all other necessary office supplies that you will need.

*Afford advertising materials and services to properly promote your business, whatever it may be.

*Obtain special training or college courses that correspond to your choice of career path to enhance and improve your business.

These are just a few of the advantages of creating your own online business. We haven’t even touched on the pleasure and freedom of not having a boss, not having to commute to work, not having to pay for gas or parking, wait for trains or buses, get stuck in rush hour traffic, be late for work, take a cut in pay, or get laid off. Sounds pretty appealing, doesn’t it. Well imagine being able to do all of that, for free.

Follow the links below to see how much free government money you qualify for in small business grants. It may not be long before you are enjoying lifetime job security in that plush corner office with a window…with a view of your patio.

Exit mobile version