Resources to get from Idea to In Business

So you have this great business idea rolling around in your head. How do you get it into the real world?

Online Resource Sites

From idea to a real business is the big jump. Luckily, we are internet age entrepreneurs. Even if you are in a rural area or small town, you can use online tools. Here are five no-cost sites from my favorites list.

• Entrepreneur.com: Starting a Business. This is a huge resource site. The best tools are Countdown to Startup, Stop Procrastinating!, and 75 Secrets to Startup.

• SBA: Small Business Planner: Get Ready. The interactive Checklist and the Starting a Business FAQs are the best. The Startup Guide opens a huge new list of resources by topic.
• JumpUp: Steps to Start a Business. Each step includes a How and Why, plus Tools and Services. I especially recommend Business Planning, because they pared a business plan down to five questions for business and four questions for finance.
• Startup Nation: 10 Steps to Open for Business. Articles, audio intros, templates, and resource links. The first step here is to create your life plan, then build the business to fit within it. That’s better than trying to force your life around the business.

  Continue reading Startup: Resources to get from Idea to In Business

Small Business Owners and Blogging

Why do small business owners write on blogs?

With millions of people worldwide doing it, blogging has become a major phenomenon of our time. (If you arrived here through a search engine and do not know what a blog is, well, you are reading one right now.)

I’ve been tagged by Troy White and Edita Kaye of the Rich Writers blog, to give five reasons that I write a blog. So here goes. Blogging is:

A low-cost way for a small business owner to market online. You can spend a little or a lot marketing your business online. I choose to spend a little. A blog gives a small business a fighting chance to get found in the search engines, alongside the sites of big companies that have more money to spend. I learned that after I set up this site. One day, someone pointed out to me that when my name was searched online, my blog showed up higher in the search results than my traditional business website. That’s when I decided to focus my efforts on this blog instead of the traditional website.

Continue reading Five Reasons For Small Business Owners To Blog

10 Ways To Attract People To Your Business Web Site

Copyright © Glen Walls
http://glenwalls.payitforward4profits.com

1. Give people a free subscription to your e-zine.
Almost everyone is publishing a e-zine nowadays
so it’s important to give something extra with the
free subscription. You could offer a free gift or
advertising when people subscribe.

2. Provide your visitors with free content. Your
content will be more attractive to your visitors if
it’s up-to-date or original. You could also offer
people the option to reprint the content in their
e-zine or web site.

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Ten Ways to Instantly Improve Your Usability

Whether it’s an e-commerce site, an online tool, or just your company’s corporate sites–smart marketers know that web site usability is key to the success of any online presence. What a lot of marketers don’t know is the basic principles of web usability and how to apply those rules to their own online presence. Here are ten very easy ways to make an immediate impact on the usability of your site:

1. Home – Users want a home and they expect to see a link to home in the same place: the top left-hand part of your site. Don’t try to be creative and place your link on the right hand side, or at the bottom of a left navigation, or even worse, leave it off your navigation completely. You’ll just end up frustrating your users.

2. Links – Make links look like links. Designers hate the ugly blue, underlined text that indicates a hyperlink, but users love it. The standard blue, underlined text shows users implicitly that the content is a link. Now you don’t have to use that blue, underlined text, but do make sure your links look like links. You’ll want to also make sure that a visited link changes color.

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Use YouTube to Showcase Products

This is a great marketing tool

“Yugster, recently started to utilize video to showcase their products. According to a press release, since December 2006, when the company began to create videos which help customers to understand what they are buying, there was significant improvement for the website’s success.

Company is planing to create VideoYugs for over 90% of the products available on their website. Yugster produces their videos in house utilizing YouTube, which in turn may drive additional visits and sales when videos are viewed by YouTube members.”

read more at Yugster Uses YouTube To Showcase Their Products