Bizness Inc. --
Business Start Up Consulting: Save Business
Costs - See Below
REVIEW THE 10 POINTS BELOW-
CRITICAL TO YOUR SUCCESS.
Learning about these topics
could save you a lot of time and money. These areas are a must for
new business start ups. Look at the costs savings below of
the systems most business need to be successful!
|
Bizness Inc. consults on the following
topics. Give us a call at the 800 number above to set up a 1/2 day,
1 day, or 1 week consulting session as our rates are very
affordable. We also do end to end installations of
systems. Call us for a
free 10 minute
consultation
after reading below:
1. Marketing and advertising is essential for success! Choosing a company name and matching it to a new web site
name is very beneficial. Don't make the mistake of choosing keywords for your web site that
will be difficult to find in the major search engines like
Google. Call us for help in setting up more domains for as inexpensive as $10 - 12 per year. We can help you
set up a blog site also to educate people on your products and services and let them comment on them as you respond to their
comments in your blog. Standard Industry blogging software is free and we can show you how to set that up and what platform you need. We can also
help you set up a FaceBook (http://www.facebook.com) account for your business and a
Twitter (http://www.twitter.com) account for your business. We then advise
setting up free auto posting so that posts
from your Blog site automatically show up on your FaceBook and Twitter accounts with hyperlinks back to the blog post so that people that find you on
FaceBook and Twitter can link back to your Blog site.
Call us for our consulting services in this area.
2. Designing your web site(s) for SEO.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization which is critical if you are
going to be easily found on the web. Choosing a cheap free web site
template is not a good idea unless it is programmed for SEO. Search
Engine Optimization is understand how the major search engines like
Google, Yahoo, Bing work and programming your web site so that you
get higher rankings in these search engines.
You could have the best artistic web site in the
world but never get found in the search engines since people
dont know you yet. Today most people do not search more
than the first or second page in Google. If you are on page 5000 in Google
or even page 20 on the other search engines, you likely wont be
found by a web surfer. The other part of designing a web site is
designing a good Landing Page. A Landing Page is where all the Google,
Bing, Yahoo, Search engine surfers land on when they click on
the link found in these search engines. If you have a poor
landing site, the Google surfers will land on your site and not buy since
they are confused with your services or see no specials on sale or see
nothing that interests them.
There are about 30-50 SEO tips we can give
you like creating an html Site Map for your web site as well as generating a
sitemap.xml file to be submitted directly to Google. You also need to
know how Google, Bing and Yahoo can penalize you for key word stuffing, link
stuffing and web site mirroring. Call us for our consulting services in
this area.
3. Choosing emails
ids. Google Mail, Yahoo Mail, HotMail might be good for your personal
email ids but they are not professional in the business world. You want
to have email ids that have your web site domain in them. For example if
your web site is www.SomeWebSiteName.com
then you would want your employees (say John Doe and Sally Doe) to have email
ids such as john.doe@somewebsitename.com
and sally.doe@somewebsitename.com
respectively. You would want to set up some general web site email ids
for your web site to automatically forward to your emal id. For example,
you should add these new emails ids:
sales@somewebsitename.com, support@somewebsitename.com,
and info@somewebsitename.com and
have these email ids added to your web site and automatically forwarded to
either or both john.doe@somewebsitename.com
and sally.doe@somewebsitename.com.
We can help you set up many free email ids with a web hosting
plan. Call us for our consulting services in this area.
4. Choosing a
web hosting provider for you web site. There are hundreds to choose
from. Look for ones that allow E-Commerce, will give you lots of
free email ids, free databases, as well as free web advertising to
get on 20+ business directory web sites, blogs as well as free Full Page Web
ads. You want to get a full page Ad that you can edit as often as you like for a flat fee of less than $20/month with no pay per click charges. We recommend a service that not only gives you this great rate but sets up your keywords in the URL which helps in SEO. The full page ad is also a separate html page
with links to it found on over 20 business web sites and blog sites which the
major search engines can find. You can also put your logo and product images in
the full page ad for web surfers to click on taking them to the landing page you want for them to sign up on.
As mentioned in the sections above, you have to market your web
site to be found in the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and
Bing. We can help you get some free web advertising, submit
your sites to Google, Yahoo and Bing and help set up your full page web ad mentioned in this
section. Call us for our consulting services in this
area.
5. Choosing
an E-Commerce (to sell products on the web) or a Web
Recurring Payment
System (to collect money on the web through customers credit cards or PayPal
accounts) can be confusing if you don't know exactly what you need. Watch
out for companies that want to take additional commissions from you
on each sale as E-Commerce systems are not all alike. Ones we recommend are ones that grow with you as you grow. You may want to set up an office in another country in the future and even sell from more than 1 country so you want to choose an E-Commerce system that can start small and grow with you internationally. International E-Commerce means collecting sales tax by country, doing inventory control by country, having reports by country, having shipping costs automatically calculated, having coupons and even supporting walk in sales where you sell out of your store or garage zeroing out the shipping costs automatically since they walk out with the goods after paying you. The main thing is to collect money immediately on the
web and pay as little credit card fees as possible. These
type of systems should integrate with your web site so that web surfers
can enter something in a search box off your home page and be launched
into an E-Commerce System(home systems or international sized systems) to let them buy the products and services you are
offering on the web. You should also look to
an E-Commerce systems that integrates with an accounting system like QuickBooks.
Web
recurring billing systems
let you collect money automatically into your bank
every period whether you set up a service with a weekly, bi-weekly,
monthly, quarterly, semi-annual or yearly period. With a web recurring
billing system you can eliminate paper billing, paper
mail out postage fees and NSF checks. You could
provide a Login button off your home page also for clients to view
their own private web account and to pay any one-time or recurring service
charges. Transactional reports and Yearly Summary reports show customers their payments in html reports that can be printed off on a local printer no matter where they are in the world.
Look
to systems that give a PayPal interface since some clients like to pay by
credit card and some like to pay with their PayPal account.
A Business Premium Standard Paypal account is free. We
are experts in setting up eMerchant PayPal accounts as we have been using
them ourselves for years. Paypal does not charge you any setup fees or monthly
fees for their Standard eMerchant PayPal Business premium accounts at the time we wrote this. Paypal
only charges on a transaction and their rates range from 1.9 to 2.9 %
per transcaction plus a flat fee of 25 cents in the US or 30 cents
in Canada. You can check their current rates on www.paypal.com.
This
means client payments for your products or services can go right into
your paypal bank account which you can transfer at any time into your real
bank account. Look to systems that integrate with QuickBooks
accounting systems which you can see in section 10.
If you do not want Paypal as the only EMerchant Gateway you could choose
Authorize.Net which means the user never leaves your web site and the payment of
goods and services is done quicker using their stored credit card number in the
encrypted database. Authorize.Net though costs around $50/month even if
you do not have any sales so best to start off with PayPal and then add
Authorize.Net when you get bigger when you feel you have to add another
EMerchant Gateway other than PayPal based on many of your clients that say that do not like PayPal for some reason. Call us for our
consulting services in this area.
6. Choosing Security: Security for PC at
home and at the office, security for client web payments by choosing the right
SSL certiicate with 2048 bit encryption, security in the web applications to
stop hackers, stop SQL injections, stop Phishing and othe fradulent
activities. Only do business (payments) on web sites that
have https:// as the start of the web address as the s after the http should
also show a lock icon on your web browser to show the transactions are being
encrypted with an SSL Certificate. Similarily your clients will
only do financial transactions on your web site if you have an SSL Certificate.
An SSL Certificate scrambles the transmission from your computer to the servers
computer through a unique key that no one else in the world has. Each SSL
certificate is unique based on the domain it is installed in. There are so
many types of SSL Certificates to choose from and we can help you save lots of
money. You can get SSL Certificates with domain validation and gurantees
for less than $90 for 1 year and less than $190 for 3 years. Call us for
our consulting services in this area.
7. Training or Presenting worldwide.
Skype is good for people to people conversations and it has some screen
sharing options with people you grant access to but it is not flexible enough
for showing
screens on your computer to your web audiences when you dont know all
the people who will be jumping in on the web conference. We recommend using
a special type of
web conferencing service that makes it easy
for anyone to join your presentation without cost on their part
. With this service, you could have powerpoint
presentations, spreadsheets or web site presentations you want to show to your
own firm or to potential clients to see. Rather than flying people in for the
presentation (or you flying all over the place), they now can view it on the
web having interactive video and audio as you hear their questions and answer
their questions on the screens you are presenting. You can have
open webinars to give a presentation to an audience that you did a mass mail out
on or just webinars and invite people to ask their friends to join in on the web
link.
You could get this for under $50/month with up
to 15 concurrent people(in any location in the world) on the presentation at the same time or up to
$100/month with up to 100 concurrent people (in any location in the world) at the same time. If you had
need for thousands of viewers then the cost would be over $100/month. If
you compare this to an 800 conference call system at 4.9 cents per minute per
user, then you do the math and see how much you can save. Even more
savings if you have people on your web presentation that are outside of
North America. (Note: these costs are 3rd party costs and could change based on vendors rates.) Call us for our consulting services in this area.
8. Choosing
an 800 number or (877, 866 toll free number). Place your
800 toll free number in big letters at the top of your web site and
add it to your business cards. Do you know you can get base 800
number service costs at only $13/month for US and Canadian
calls. This is wise if you want to make your firm look like a
corporation. You can get 6 free extensions with this 800
service. (Note: these costs are 3rd party costs and could change based on vendors rates.)
Give
an advertising message to your callers when they first call in to the
800 number and then have them push 1 for Sales, 2 for Existing
Client Orders, 3 For Tech Support, 4 for Billing, 5
for other general questions or 0 for the operator and have these 6 selections
forward to 6 different phone or cell numbers or have them all forwarded
to your number. Call us for our consulting services in this area.
9. Choosing
a free web file sharing and version control system.
If you are a 1 person company you dont need this. However when you get to
the stage of having more than 1 person working on 1 document, you often run into
the trouble of who has the latest edited document. If the document or
files are important you will want to have version control on the file to know
what changes were made last and by who. The free web file sharing and
version control system is for: 1)
companies that have several people that are all working on the same files,
2)
firms that have a need to review and comment on the files without
changing them or 3) organizations that have a need to know what is the latest or
previous version of a file. You could set this up for internal
files, (confidential just to your firm) or you could set it up as training
files that are applicable to your clients. Each person is given their own
web user id and password to view the published files from anywhere in the
world. Call us for our consulting services in this area.
10. Choosing an accounting package. If you are a large international
corporation you will already have some accounting system in place. For small or
new start up firms, we recommend QuickBooks as it as been around for close to 2
decades and continues to be a leader in small business accounting. You may need
help setting up your accounts so that you can print off Income Statements and
Balance Sheets to save mega accounting fees. QuickBooks also integrates with the International E-Commerce and Web Web Recurring Billing mentioned above. You
can post from the International E-Commerce
or the Web Web Invoicing and Recurring Payments Billing System as often as you like.
Both these 2 systems have a cross reference screen to match up your account
numbers with the accounts you set up in QuickBooks. Call us for our consulting services in this
area.
Call us more more consulting services. For small business there is so much
more to learn such as firms that do all your employee tax govement submissions
for you for a flat monthly fee so you never worry about what is the right net
amount to write out an employee salary check for.
We even can advise you on different web sites to look for people you need to
hire on a short or long term basis. The big corporations use the big firms
where people are looking for full time jobs but the small start up firms often
need a different resource pool for temporary people that they can hire to
quickly upsize or downsize to meet the changes in their business requirements.
BUSINESS SUCCESS FACTORS. SEE BELOW AND SAVE MEGA
BUSINESS COSTS!
1)
Set up your domains, web site and blog site for maximum
web exposure
Let us help you
with domain names, proper web sites, Blogs, auto posting to FaceBook, Twitter
accounts and a whole marketing and advertising plan!
2) Design
your web sites for Search Engine Optimization -
SEO)
SEO is understanding how Google, Bing Yahoo and
other major search engines do their rankings. By understanding what
they are looking for as well as understand what words and phrases are
mostly used on a monthly basis you can add the right key words and links
to your site that will increase your search engine rankings especially if you
do some brand management also.
3)
Add a ContactUs, Support, and Corporate Info Page To your site
Add info@yourwbesitename.com,
support@yourwebsitename.com,
and sales@yourwebsitename.com
email ids to your web
site pages and automatically forward those emails to your employees (or forward them
all to you) who have professional email ids which have your domain name
in the email
address.
4)
Get a full page web Ad and your Ad caption on 20+ business directories and over 30
blogs sites for less than $160/year flat rate
Learn
the different hosting choices out there and get free internet advertising
to increase your search engine rankings as well as advertise your
logo, products, services and specials/promotions.
5a) Choosing the right eCommerce System to increase your sales
If you sell items, you should look at letting the world
see your products and give them an easy shopping cart solution on the web for
them to purchase your goods with their credit card or PayPal account. We
can help you plan for an eCommerce System (taking pictures, picture
sizes, jpg files etc) as well as show you the right eCommerce Solution for your
company. Some eCommerce solutions have an in-store selling feature which lets
you sell to customers directly in your store (or in your garage).
This in-store feature zeros out shipping and captures the credit card or PayPal
funds immediately into your
account.
5b) Choosing
the right Web Recurring Billing system for
services
If you do not sell items but sell services then you
likely need a Web Billing System. We recommend you look at a web
recurring billing system which can automatically collect money for you each
billing period. This way you can collect money faster, let the
computer do the automated billing for you and save money in time and mail
out fees.
Client can pay you through the PayPal interface or you can add the Authorize.Net
interface for faster checkouts and handling large quantities or recurring
payments. Clients are happy also since they get email receipts of all
their payments to you as well as detail html reports and yearly summary html
reports that they can print off the web from anywhere in the world on their own
private internet account.
6) Tight Security in all business transactions
In today's world of
fake emails phishing for information, to hackers, to computer viruses, you need
to learn how to protect your assets as well as you and your
customers web transactions. We can educate on virus protection for your PCs as
well as web solutions that stop hackers and phishing. You also should
know about 2048 bit SSL certificates which are needed for web
solutions to not only encrypt login passwords but credit card and PayPal
transactions also. People will not do financial web transactions(purchases
or payments) to you if your do not have an SSL certificate on your web site as they want to
be sure their credit card number and information is encrypted during their time
on your web
site.
7) Cut
the cost of your travel budget giving audio and visual presentations from your
home or office to the world
Why spend $3000 in travel expenses to show a presentation that you can make
from your home or office. We can show you a web solution that will
show anything on your computer screen to the list of web attendees
you want to show your presentation to with audio for you to answer
their live questions. Even if you do not have any screens to
present, you can use this solution for just conference calls and not only save
you long distance fees in Canada and US but big time
fees if you have an audience outside of North America.
8) Set up an 800 (toll free) number
If you want to get into the big leagues
you need a toll free number. We can advise you on different firms
that offer this service.
9) Share Files For People across the
Web
This only applies when you have several employees
working on the same documents that all work from home or are located in
different parts of the country. Share documents and implement
version control to look back at prior versions of a document or to see the
latest copy. Each user has to login with their username &
password!
10) Set Up An Accounting
System
The right accounting system depends on the size of
your firm. You want something that is easy to learn yet covers all
your needs. Something like QuickBooks is a good choice and we can help
you set that up and get started.
Remember in everything you do, think of integration. Think of how
information from one system can integrate into another.
Need More consulting? Do you know there are firms offering to do all your
employee tax government submissions automatically for a flat fee each month?
Do you know firms that you can hire people on for short terms or a certain
hourly rates?