In today's economy every business is trying to cut back on overhead without jeopardizing potential revenue. It’s a tricky situation because normally lowering overhead means laying off employees who have a direct impact on the total business production. Managers are faced with trying to constantly measure the "value" of every cost for their company and the return they can create with it.
For all businesses at the end of the day, it all boils down to making sales. Whether you are selling services or products there always has to be some way for a company to “communicate” itself to the public. The Internet has revolutionized the ability for businesses to not only communicate with the world but to do so within an impossible budget. Creating a website has become standard practice for most businesses, but there are typical misunderstandings among most people new to doing business effectively online.
There are two main factors when looking to expand your business successfully online. The first is driving the best quality traffic to your website. This means finding places to put (link) your website online to attract the most people who are interested in your services. As a practical example, if you had a store that sold ice cream but everyone that walked by was looking for coffee, then there wouldn’t be a good chance of making money from that "traffic". The second main factor is having the best possible conversion-landing page for the visiting traffic. What this means is designing your website in a way that makes the customer feel comfortable and secure inquiring about your service or product Using the same example, lets say customers who are looking for ice cream finally come to your store, the appearance of your store and how you display the ice cream will have a direct impact on the spending habits of your customers.
A properly planned and executed online presence can have a great impact on helping your company increase revenue and lower overhead at the same time, additionally creating a situation of not being so dependent on a large sales team or marketing budget. There are billions of people online everyday and I’m sure some of them are looking for your business, you just have to help them find you!
POSTED BY Naveen Aggarwal
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Thursday 23, October 2008
The financial markets are in a mess. The government keeps talking about “Wall Street versus Main Street”. Big banks are having difficulty paying their own bills and are not particularly interested in lending much of anything to anyone.
So you are a merchant looking to expand your business. You want to build that extension on to your restaurant, update your diagnostic equipment, make that “once in a season” special inventory purchase, or just have enough in reserve to cover payroll for the next few months. What do you do?
Even business owners with outstanding credit scores and solid business models are having a tough time getting banks to lend them money. Other options might include finding an investor but that means giving up part of your hard-earned business. You could borrow against your house, but in today’s market there might not be as much equity (or any) to borrow against. A nice rich uncle might be good, but borrowing from family has it’s own set of challenges to deal with.
One other option is leveraging your future credit card sales. Otherwise know as a “Cash Advance”. You have a pretty good idea of how much business you do each month in credit card processing (just look at those statements you get every month) and you know how much cash you deposit. There are companies out there that will advance you money based upon what they see as a good return on investment. Advances normally take six to eight months to pay back but the repayment come right out from your daily credit card receivables. In other words, if you had $1000.00 in daily credit card sales, you’d pay back about $200.00 per day towards the advance.
To be sure, there’s a cost of doing business this way, you’ll pay back a decent sum but the money is in your bank account in about five business days, can be used immediately, doesn’t show up on your credit report and can be paid back over a few months in a very manageable way.
It’s certainly worth taking a look at and, in these economic times, it may just be the best way for you to get the capital you need to grow your business where others can’t.
In today’s market consumers and merchants are embracing electronic payments more and more. This means other non-cash payments such as checks are quickly being replaced by plastic. It’s safe to assume that check cards will eventually replace the paper check but that is going to take a long time to come to fruition.
The common opinion on check acceptance is that it’s a risky thing to do. If you have ever accepted checks in your business you probably have encountered a bad one at some point. In some cases many of you were forced to stop accepting checks. Eliminating check sales in your business does not eliminate your exposure to fraud. In fact, it forces the folks who would like to pay with checks to frequent establishments that embrace all forms of payment. You may think that most people carry a credit card or if they have a check they also carry a check card with a Visa or MasterCard logo on it. In most cases this is true. What you may fail to realize is that if you take a credit card over a check you are exposing yourself to risk. Accepting a credit card is essentially like taking a six month unsecured loan. If there is a dispute you have little or no recourse.
For business owners there are other avenues to take than to exile check writers. Advances in electronic payment technologies have produced check guarantee systems that automate the check acceptance process and virtually eliminate all risk in taking checks at the point of sale or in your accounts receivable department. Electronic Check Conversion and Back Office Check Conversion convert paper checks to electronic deposits and cover any losses.
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