10 Steps To Creating Your Smalll Business Disaster Plan

Writen by Donna Gunter

I'm a recent Hurricane Rita evacuee and survived the evacuation and the ensuing hurricane. Running from a hurricane isn't something I've ever had to do before, nor is it something I'd ever like to do again. However, as a solo business owner, I'm quite thankful that I have a virtual business. The fact that I'm virtual and can operate from anywhere that there's electricity and phone service was of great help to me in this disaster and helped me reopen my business a scant 4 days after the landfall of Hurricane Rita.

As a solopreneur, what can you do to make your business disaster-proof? It seems that we have an increasing number of hurricanes making landfall in the coastal states, and add to that an increased number of other types of natural disasters like tornadoes, earthquakes, wildfires, mud slides, ice storms, blizzards, etc. makes me think that there is no ideal location in which to operate a business. Now accepting that natural disasters are here to stay, here's what I learned from my hurricane evacuation that helped me get my business back up and running quickly:

1. Know the location of your vital papers. You should be able to quickly put into a folder the following for you and your family: your marriage license, birth certificate, social security card, driver's license or state ID card, car title/mortgage info and insurance contact info, house deed/mortgage info and insurance contact info, employee ID card, and apartment lease or copy of a utility bill. In a disaster, you'll be asked to prove where you live and that you are who you claim you are, especially when applying for disaster assistance.

2. Have an online backup of all of your computer data. I back up my computer in two ways--to an external portable hard drive as well as to an online backup service. I use both because my files are my livelihood -- I would be dead in the water without them -- so I want to leave absolutely no room to lose my data. For my external backup, I use a 30 GB portable drive made by Iomega, www.iomega.com, and for my online backup, I have 10 GB of space that I pay for at XDrive, www.xdrive.com.

3. Create an file with vital contact information. I copied a file with all of my usernames and passcodes for websites, bank accounts, etc. to my USB flash drive (a key chain-like device with 512 MB or 1 GB of memory -- I use one from Lexar, www.lexar.com) as well as the physical and email addresses and all phone numbers of friends, clients and family members -- anyone I needed to contact during the evacuation period. You'll also want to take along your children's school contact info to be able to check on the current operating status of your child's school, as well as local media website info. My lifeline in getting current information about my home city was through the websites of Beaumont's newspapers and television and radio stations. If you keep your contact info in Outlook and have a Yahoo account, Yahoo offers a synchronization feature in which you can synchronize all of your info in Outlook to your Yahoo account. Find out more here: http://help.yahoo.com/help/intsync. All you need to access your info in Yahoo is a computer and to know your username and password.

4. Know the primary office/computer equipment that will be required to get your business up and running. I had operated with a minimal amount of my office equipment recently due to my being a house sitter for a friend for 2 months. So, upon receiving the mandatory evacuation order, I knew in relatively short order that to run my business, I needed my desktop PC, flat panel monitor, wireless mouse and keyboard, speakers, modem and associated cords, backup portable external hard drive, office telephone and associated cords, laptop computer, printer, box of software, and scanner. It sounds like a great deal of equipment, but I packed it all into 2 boxes from UHaul (1 small and 1 medium box). I knew I could work for at least 2 months comfortably with just this equipment.

5. Primary paper files for your clients/business. I have 2 sets of files -- ones for the immediate short-term that I use frequently and my lateral file drawer files that are primarily reference files. I grabbed the contents of the two drawers of my 2-drawer file cabinet (which hold my immediate short-term files), all of which fit into one small UHaul box.

6. A backup telephone plan. I wasn't sure what I was going to do for phone service for my business, as all of my clients are scattered across the US and in Canada. Just to be safe, I upgraded my cell phone plan, and had a prepaid calling card (purchased an AT&T calling card at Sam's, www.samsclub.com) at my disposal if I needed it. As luck would have it, my hotel offered an unlimited Internet access/long distance plan for an additional $1.88 per day, so I happily signed up for that, saving myself a fortune in phone calls and Internet service fees.

7. A backup Internet access plan. Since power restoration to my home was estimated at 2-8 weeks, I had to find temporary lodgings. I looked for a hotel that offered high speed Internet access and was able to use their system for my Internet access. However, once I found the hotel, I also called the tech support of my DSL ISP and found the local dial-up numbers for the area in which the hotel is located. I never had to use the dial-up service, but it was good info to have. If you have cable or DSL Internet service, now is the time to discover alternate Internet access plans to be able to get online should your DSL or cable access be out-of-service. You should also know how to access your email online through your ISP if you don't have access to your computer. If your ISP doesn't offer a version of webmail, you can use this service free-of-charge, www.mail2web.com.

8. Adequate office supplies for a month. I threw in pens, pencils, post-it notes, a calculator, stamps, envelopes, tape, stapler, paper clips, note pads, etc. that would last me at least a month while I was out of my office. I used a portable plastic file case in which to carry these items.

9. Outline of your office procedures to help you operate independently or be able to delegate tasks. I carry much of my info in my head to run my office, or have what I need stored in various files across my computer. What makes more sense for the future is to document all of my office procedures, as well as computer and client info, so that everything I need is in one document. I can then upload this doc to my Yahoo account, my backup files, or carry it with my on my USB flash drive. My colleague, Jean Hanson, has designed a great template that asks you to note and record everything someone would need to know to get your business back up and running. It's the Home Office Procedures Manual, available for purchase here: http://tinyurl.com/bagxs

10. Digital camera to record the event and/or record damages to personal property. I wish I'd had a digital camera to record all that I witnessed during my evacuation from Hurricane Rita. My sister took tons of pics, but I would've loved to have had the same opportunity. More importantly, however, is the need for a digital camera to record damage to your home and property. In a wide-spread disaster, it can be at least a month before your insurance adjuster will be able to assess damages to your property. In the meantime, however, you need to start repairs, like placing a tarp on your roof, boarding up broken windows, removing downed trees from your house or yard, or cleaning your refrigerator of spoiled food. In many cases, your insurance will cover the repairs or food replacement, but you need to carefully document the "before" scenario in order to receive compensation for your loss.

Don't let a natural disaster destroy your business. Take some time now to prepare your disaster-readiness plan, and get back into business as soon as you can!

Copyright 2005 Donna Gunter

Online Business Coach Donna Gunter helps self-employed professionals make more profit in less time online. To sign up for more FREE tips like these and claim your FREE ebook, TurboCharge Your Productivity: 50 + Tools To Help You Automate Your Business and Make More Profit in Less Time Online!, visit her site at http://www.OnlineBizCoachingCompany.com.

7 Most Important Things To Sell Your Services Online

Writen by Harjeet Singh

Top 7 important things for people who want to sell their services online, successfully!

1. Website: Any outsourcing firm needs a nice website which clearly outlines its services. It does not need to be a graphically rich site but an impressive and fast to load site with quality contents. Professional copy writing and designing is considerable. Specify the technologies, tools and skill sets your business consists. An introduction to your talent/employees can also help.

2. Marketing: A great website is useless if nobody knows about it. Google adwords is best source of relevant traffic to your website. It is a Cost-per-click ad program serving text and graphic ads on its search engine and publisher network. Adwords provide great features like language and region specific ad distribution, budget constrains and many more.

3. Communication: English speaking staff is a must if you are targeting the EU/US markets. Make sure that your marketing team is proficient with language issues. Language should not be a barrier. Follow up all the correspondence in timely manner.

4. Sample Work: Nicely done sample projects are required to display your expertise, capabilities and experience in the field. Make fast loading content available in your online profile. You may provide links on website for visitors "to request demo cd" etc for content which can not be put on the website for it large filesize. A anonymous ftp folder can also be of great help.

5. Schedule: A perfectly executed assignment within the deadline is the single most important factor to satisfy your client and convert them to future business. To be on the safer side, always add marginal extended time to your schedules to tackle any unforeseen issues that may occur while finishing the project.

6. Payments: Use a safe and trusted method for transaction. Paypal is the a well known money transfer system which is easy to implement. It offers you standard carts, credit card payments and even invoicing via email. Charge backs may be an issue as paypal takes the customer first. Bank transfers, also known as Wire transfers, are another safe method and includes some transfer charges. WesternUnion and Moneygram are also used widely.

7. Competitiveness: Quality will get you more business. A high priced, high quality job would be more profitable and will get more business than a low-priced, low quality job. Furthermore if you start charging less, after some time, you are valued less. But at the same time your prices must not be astronomically high than the competition. Be clear about your prices. Any red tape or hidden cost can affect your returning customers. Mention hourly or package prices, taxes, shipping and other possible expanses in the quote or pricing section and while initial communication.

About the author: Harjeet Singh is the CEO of Architectural Rendering firm called http://www.virses.com which provides outsource architectural renderings and walkthrough animations to real estate, visualization, media, and architectural firms.

This article can be used freely as long as it is not modified and includes the author information.

How To Move Your Business Online In 7 Steps

Writen by Brad Bagherian

So you have set up your company, fairly established and generating some sort of revenue. Why should you take the most important step of starting online?

The online audience is massive – it's an information resource used by millions worldwide and continues to grow. Having your company information online can be a whole new way of attracting potential customers.

Step One: Choose a domain name

It is important to choose a domain name which is suitable for your business. If you want to be able to say your domain name over the phone, then it should be easy to spell and short to make it easier for your customers.

Usually, it's best to have the name of your website as your domain name, for example; www.yourcompany.co.uk. If your company name has already been taken there are several ways around this, here are some examples:

www.your-company.co.uk

www.yourcompanyltd.co.uk

www.company.co.uk

You could also choose from .com or .co.uk which are the most common and popular, however there are different domains for organisations (.org.uk) or new ones such as .com.uk

Whichever you choose you must check the availability on www.123reg.co.uk

Step Two: Host your Website

What does this mean? Basically, you need to find a space where your website can be built on the Internet. A good metaphor for this, is finding land to build your house on, where the house is your website.

There are 3 main things you need to be aware of when choosing a company to host your site.

How large your site is i.e. total sizes of all pages which make up your site How much bandwidth it requires i.e. how many visitors want to access it How your website is built – if your site uses PHP, ASP, other languages or database driven this may increase the cost. Step Three: Set Up your Email Accounts Setting up your email accounts can be an easy stress free experience. There are 4 main components to each account, these are :

Username

Password

Pop account

SMTP account

These will be provided by your hosting company and all you need to do is add an email account with the above settings. Your hosting company will help you through this.

Step Four: Develop a Website

Either design the site yourself (see article called 'Can I design a website myself?') or hire a professional to design it for you. Ensure you capture all information you want to present to your visitors in an easy to navigate website - where information can be found easily.

There are many aspects to consider when developing a website. The content of your site is incredibly important, you may want to hire a copywriter or someone who is skilled in this area. Another aspect is the overall design and look of the site, depending on what kind of image you want to portray, a good eye for design would really help.

If you want to optimise your website, this is the time to be thinking about it. By optimisation we mean creating developing a website which can be easily read by search engines so that for certain keywords you can be listed at the top of a results page.

The last thing to consider is how you are going to maintain the content of your website. There are 3 basic options to this:

1. Website Maintenance - most web design companies will also offer to keep your website maintained for an hourly fee. So whenever you want to change bits and pieces you would get in touch with the designers who would up date it for you. This is best used for companies who may only want to change small amounts of their site from time to time.

2. Content Managed Systems (CMS) - if you feel that you want to up date your site more often, you can add a CMS. This is basically an easy to use, user friendly module where you can update, add, remove and edit your content and images.

3. DIY - of course you can Do-It-Yourself if you have some HTML knowledge (if your site is HTML) or are willing to put some of your time aside to learn. However, if your site is designed using Flash this may get a lot more technical.

Step Five: SEO Submission

Once your website is completed, you want to attract visitors to your site. The first step to allowing people to find you is to submit your website to search engines. The most important reason for this is so that search engines know you are out there, and if you get nothing else from it - at least when a user types in your company name, you should appear at the top of the search engines results. This is beneficial for anyone who may have heard from company name and wants to find your website on the Web.

Another important step is to add your web address to as many free directories as possible as this increases your page rank with search engines.

Step Six: Internet Marketing

There are millions of sites out there trying to get that number 1 position on search engines by optimisation, and unfortunately not everyone can have it! The more common keywords are exceptionally difficult and with search engines continually changing their method for ranking websites this has become a less effective way of Internet Marketing.

A much more proven Internet Marketing technique is Pay Per Click. The majority of search engines have premium listings where they sell the top positions on their results pages. The way they work is explained in more detail in the article 'How does Pay Per Click work'. However in a nutshell, the general idea is as follows:

You enter a price for every keyword you think a potential customer of your company would enter into a search engine, on average it is around 30p. Every time a visitor clicks on that link they will be taken to your site. You only pay when someone actually clicks on your link. If more than one company put a price on a certain keyword, the company who has put the highest price gets the top position.

Other ways to attract visitors to your site is to place banners on other related websites which have a larger number of visitors. The banner would then have a link to your website. Step Seven: Include your website on any stationery and promotional material Now that you are set up, you can start publishing your website on any printed material so that your customers and clients are aware of it.

And that's it! Of course, this is just a summary, but in essence its the basic steps in having a presence online and getting the most out of it.

Elaborations Ltd is a Design company with offices in West London. It was founded in 2003 by Brad Bagherian. Elaborations specialises in helping small to medium businesses create an image with an impact. A company's image is just as important as its products and services, so we produce designs and create an image to give potential customers that crucial first impression and reflect what their company is all about. The main area which we concentrate on is presenting that image on the web, website design and development, as well as graphic design, internet marketing and multimedia.

10 Marketing Tips For Your Business

Writen by Julia McDaid

Here are a few ideas to get you started, all with low or no cost, which should especially help you in the early days of your business.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but is just a few ideas to start you off.

1. Get a domain name in the name of your business or of what you do. Marketing is all about building others' perception of you and using hotmail, aol, blueyonder etc just screams "I'm a one man band working at home" – even if you're not!

2. Have some business cards printed. Keep them clear and concise – and don't forget the back.

3. Think about a logo and branding. This may just be a colour scheme to start with, but keep it consistent in everything. From business cards, to headed paper to your website.

4. Ask people you know to introduce you to others who might benefit form your service or products.

5. Collect testimonials and case studies from happy customers. Use them to provide evidence of how good you are.

6. Run seminars and workshops for your target audience.

7. Find out more about Public Relations. PR is free, and you get more exposure than if you advertise.

8. Use good quality paper for your business stationery – back to perceptions again.

9. Write an executive summary about your business. Use it as the basis for leaflets, an email attachment, an appendix to letters or anywhere else where you need to define what you do as part of your marketing activity.

10. Get out and network. Go to networking events and free seminars to meet others who might be able to help your business. You can also network on line through various discussion groups and networking sites. Don't forget to see how you can help others, don't just be a taker.

Julia McDaid is a business coach and author, specialising in helping business start ups. . For more information on these issues or on coaching for new business owners, see http://www.startupright.co.uk or enrol on Julia's unique Start Up 101 ecourse, where you can go into each subject in a lot more depth.

Julia also publishes a free ezine 'Secrets of the Successful Entrepreneur' – to sign up just send an email to ezine@startupright.co.uk

7 Ways To Profit From Other Peoples Products

Writen by Stuart Reid

If you don't possess the time, money or inclination to create your own hot selling product there is plenty of scope for profit by using other people's.

In this quick article I'll detail the best ways to take a third-party product and use it to fill your own bank account.

1. Resell Rights

Resell Rights let you sell a product and keep all of the money. It's an ideal way to start. Usually you'll need your own payment system to accept the money and your own webspace to sell it - but that's very cheap to do these days.

Resell Rights can be free, or cost anywhere up to $1000 and beyond. The free Resell Rights are usually not worth bothering with. You want to sell items that have LIMITED distribution - quite simply because you'll have less competition!

2. Master Resell Rights

Unfortunately these are bad news. With the Master Rights you can pass on Resell Rights yourself. This means one thing - thousands of competitors in a very short time.

3. Reprint Rights

These are sometimes confused with Resell Rights but they are usually used to describe hard-copy material. For example, printed books, tape sets, CD's or Videos.

You usually have to handle the duplication yourself but sometimes the company will provide copies, and even ship them for you, for a small fee.

These products usually cost more to acquire the rights but can be very profitable. As the old saying goes, it's easier to sell 10 copies at $1000 each than it is to sell 1000 at $10.

4. Affiliate Programs

When you enter into an affiliate agreement you are sharing the cost and effort of promoting a product. You will take a percentage of the sales in exchange, so you want at least 50% for it to be worth your while.

With an affiliate program you can usually join at no cost, but will make less money - and have more competitors!

One other advantage, the company provides the site and the collection of payments. All you do is promote and cash your check.

5. Drop Shipping

This makes the traditional form of selling easier for the information age. Profit = Cost - Selling Price , and with a Drop Shipper you merely take the money from your customer and tell the shipper to send them the product. You then pay the shipper their price. For example, you can buy a Widescreen TV for $1299 but you are selling it for $1499. You make $200 per sale but never get involved in the distribution at all.

This method is used extensively on eBay and in online shopping malls.

6. Joint Ventures

These blur the line between the other processors. Basically, you connect those who make products with those who sell and promote them. You can acquire resell rights, or create your own product, or be part of an affiliate network. You then contact possible sellers, for example Ezine Owners, who may be interested in selling the product for a cut of the profit.

This way you can connect BIG sellers with BIG products and slice of some of the profit for yourself!

7. Branding Rights

These can be combined with Resell Rights but sometimes are offered as an extra. With Branding Rights you can make some or all of the links within a product possible money-spinners for yourself.

For example, you can take a book on copywriting and give it away, or sell it. But within this book are other links to further services, all that could make extra back-end sales for you.

As you can see there are plenty of ways to make money WITHOUT the expense of time of building your own product!

by Stuart Reid

http://www.netpreneurnow.com

About The Author

Stuart Reid is an ezine publisher and webmaster. Try the new "Any Brander" Software and brand ANY product, old or new, with your own link - even if you didn't create it!

http://v3k.net/anybrander

webmaster@netpreneurnow.com