Posted by hecto on March 9, 2009 under Business Ideas, Marketing, The Internet, Tips | 
Ok I am not how many of you have thought about this but video advertising is something many large businesses pay a lot of money for. As a small business owner you probably never thought about it because of its high costs. However the internet has broken these barriers and has enabled everyone and this includes Small Businesses to advertise through a video to their customers.
The great thing about this advertising method is that it’s free, as you probably guessed it I mean uploading a video of your business on video websites like youtube.com. Making a video and uploading is pretty easy and fast. Some videos on youtube.com get millions of views from people world wide and a lot of them are nothing special if you watch them.
Ok to put this into prospective youtube.com gets over 100 000 million hits a day and getting some of those visitors to view your business video will only do your business good. Upload your video on other video websites like Metacafe as well, don´t just limit yourself to youtube.com. So go ahead and give it a try.
I liked the video below from youtube, try and spend a few minutes viewing it because it is pretty informative.
Posted by hecto on under Finance, Management, Starting your business, Tips |
You have a great idea and want to start a new business or you may just want to expand your small business and take it to the next level. One of the major obstacles to this is not having the finance to do so. Therefore I will give you some tips on how to raise finance.
1. When negotiating for money make sure you take is serious and think about everything carefully. The same planning and thought as making a sale should go into it.
2. Make sure you know how much you want to raise as it can be very difficult to go and ask for more and that is not advised.
3. Think of overdrafts for the short term because usually you need to pay it back usually 12 months. If you want to raise long term finance you may have to sell shares, that’s if you have a company. You could also ask for long-term loan from the bank.
4. Usually you are expected to invest as much as an outside investor or maybe half. You may find that if an outside investor invests a lot more then you in the business you will end up losing control.
5. Talk and plan with your family before you go and secure loans on your house or give personal guarantees; while the reward may be great you do not want to put your family’s main assets at risk.
6. While you can use banks to raise money there are a number of other ways you could use to raise money, such as; private individuals and companies, fiends and family, local authorities and venture capitalists.
Posted by hecto on March 6, 2009 under General Management, Tips |
As it is important for a person to present the right kind of image to people, it is even more important for a small business to present a professional image that will tell customers and clients that your business is the kind of business they want to do business with. For the time being I will touch on only one aspect of image and that is “projecting a trustworthy business image”. Business in general is based on marketing and this is no different for a small business.
An experienced business person puts in a lot of hard work on making sure they look professional. However your business is not defined by just a few people in the organisation but many more so you need to make sure all your employees look polished and professional at their job. As a whole you need to make your premises internally and externally look presentable and professional. At the end of the day you want your customers to take you and your business serious. By doing this you will be showing potential customers that you are worthy of their trust and eventually business.
A good example of image would be an investment banker, they are always seen wearing a suit and looking serious and this shows that they mean business even though that may not be the case all the time. You do not have to build and investment banking image but you could build a very professional image. At the end of the day a successful image leads to increased sales because people think that what they see is what they will get.
If a decorator with ripped up trousers and a worn out shirt came to your house to give you a price estimate for a job, even though he might give you a reasonable price for the service the likely chances are that you will not pick him for the job because you probably will not take him serious. On the other hand his service may be the best ever but he was not able to sell himself so you did not pick him and the reason for that is that there is a lot of competition and you can pick someone else for the job who looks more trustworthy.
Posted by hecto on February 27, 2009 under Tips |
When presenting your work before, team member or costumer your communication and your presentation skill are the two most important aspects of your presentation. It is crucial that you know what you are going to present and make sure you are prepared.
How to improve your presentations…..
Be prepared
The most important point when presenting is to be prepared. Preparation helps you to feel confident because you will know what you are talking about and are aware of the reason why you are making some key points. For many people the presentation part may not be so difficult because they know what they are going to say and have practiced this, however they don’t prepare themselves when it comes to answering tough questions and therefore they hesitate to find suitable answers. Therefore when you are preparing make sure you have a basic outline of what you may say to people when they ask you questions.
Know what you are presenting
When preparing the firstly ask yourself: What are you going to say and why do you want the audience attention? Firstly you need to be clear of what exactly you are presenting and then make the message clear to your audience and find possible ways to make your message memorable.
Know your audience
You need to know who will be listening to you and how much knowledge they would have about what you are presenting. More importantly it would be a good idea if you knew what their interest and concerns are, otherwise it is nothing but a waste of time when presenting your work to someone that may not even be interested. By gaining good knowledge about your audience then you should also know what kind of presentation they would like, whether it should be quick to the point, well detailed or even precise.
Practice
Many individuals make the mistake of nt practicing what they are going to present. It must be noted this is a mistake that many people make at first. By practicing your presentation you become more comfortable with what you are going to say, therefore when you are actually presenting you work you are able to focus on the audience and understand their response, rather than concentrating what you are going to say next. Remember when you present don’t talk as if you have memorized all your words because then you will just sound as if your are reading a book to your audience, you want to sound natural.
Present
Make sure you are prepared and arrive early to make sure that everything is set up, as you wanted it to and if it is not you have enough time to make these changes. Before you presentation if possible talk to people that will be in your audience, this will help you to feel more confident around them. When you are presenting don’t forget to make eye contact, this is allows the audience to know that it is them you are talking to and not yourself.
Posted by hecto on under Business Plan, General Management, Tips |
Once you have a business idea and you want to go ahead with it, a business plan is the next step before you do anything else. It is the business plan that will lead you to the next steps.
The general idea about a business plan is that it’s something the bank forces you to do if you are requesting a loan or on the other hand you are trying to persuade investors to invest in your business. However if you do think like that then you should probably stop because a business plan is actually necessary for you no matter how you plan to finance your business.
The main reason of writing a business plan when you have a business idea is to test if that actual idea is viable in the first place. Writing a business plan will essentially also help you to work out if your business idea has a chance of becoming into a successful and profitable business.
By writing a business plan you are required to research about your idea to get all the necessary information that will turn your idea into a successful enterprise. If after the research and after you finish your business plan it turns out that your idea doesn’t work then dump the idea and think of something else. All that has happened is that you have lost time but also learned from it.
On the other hand if you decide to go ahead without a plan and your business fails then you would have lost a lot of valuable resources because you may have failed due to the fact that there could have been thing you didn’t know but could have known.
You probably want to get on with your idea straight away and think you know everything but it always helps to be patient and invest some time and energy into writing a good business plan that will help you avoid failure. Remember “failure to plan is planning to fail”.
Posted by hecto on February 25, 2009 under The Internet, Tips, Training |
E-Learning is probably a term that you have heard before or may even have participated in it as in today’s modern world this is widely used in organisations and households. Also known as Electronic learning (or e-Learning or eLearning) this is a kind of education the instructions come from a computer and not a human. Usually there is no interaction with a person during E-Learning. Many government and commercial organisations worldwide make use of E-Learning to train their employees about a specific application that the organisation may have developed or even educate their employees on topics such as the environment. E-Learning has spread at such a great speed that Universities offer courses to enable those who are unable to attend lectures in a physical locations to still graduate, via this method of teaching, most student who take these courses rarely or never see their lectures.
The E-Learning industry is estimated to be worth over 38 billion Euros worldwide; in the European Union (EU) for example over 80% of the e-learning products are produced abroad. To help you understand just how big E-Learning is and at what a rate it is growing then it may help knowing that in 2006 nearly 3.5 million students in USA were taking part in online learning institutions. Universities in United States view this as a method of increasing their revenue as E-Learning can be applicable for a wide variety of people. For some people E-learning has given them the opportunity to get a degree due to the fact that E-Learning also offers a great deal of flexibility. On the other hand E-learning requires highly trained employees to work with students on-line. Not only must these employees know their subject area well but they now must also be trained to use the computer and internet will.
