Starting a Small Business? You’ll Want The Small Business Owner’s Guide To Starting Your Business on a Shoestring Budget

Starting a business is HARD and the one common factor for most small businesses that close their doors is that they ran out of money. If you are looking to start your own business, then we strongly recommend reading “The Pocket Small Business Owner’s Guide to Starting Your Business on a Shoestring”, by Carol Tice.

Part of Allworth’s popular Pocket Small Business Owner’s Guide series, this book is designed to help you save money on every aspect of your business. From advertising to overhead, it includes valuable cost-cutting tips for every type of business including e-commerce, home-based operations, services and retail. This guide serves as a roadmap to creating an effective financial plan for your business that will allow you to thrive and survive.

Let’s face it, in today’s economy small businesses need to take advantage of every opportunity to keep costs down and add dollars to the bottom line. If you follow the steps of this guide, you’ll find yourself heading down the path to small business success.

“The Pocket Small Business Owners’s Guide to Starting Your Business on a Shoestring” is available for sale on Amazon.com.

IRS Warns Businesses and Others of Telephone Scam

No small business wants to receive a phone call from the IRS. But remember that there are those who exploit the fears small business owners and other taxpayers might harbor about having to deal with big federal agencies.

Recently, we’ve heard of an incident reported by none other than the IRS itself.

How the IRS Telephone Scam Works

Apparently, someone has been calling small business owners and others recently claiming to be from the IRS and attempting to collect taxes that are supposedly owed. The caller tells the person at the other end of the line to make a payment through a preloaded debit card or wire transfer.

Otherwise, the caller warns, there could be trouble. Loss of your business and driver’s licenses is just the beginning. The caller apparently also threatens jail time and, if the recipient of the call is a recent immigrant, deportation!

Sound suspicious? It should.

Don’t Be Fooled

First, the IRS generally contacts tax payers by mail not by phone, the agency says.

The call is likely an attempt to get a hold of your credit card information, which would be necessary to immediately make the payment.

But in an official release, IRS Acting Commissioner Danny Werfel insists:

Rest assured, we do not and will not ask for credit card numbers over the phone, nor request a pre-paid debit card or wire transfer. If someone unexpectedly calls claiming to be from the IRS and threatens police arrest, deportation or license revocation if you don’t pay immediately, that is a sign that it really isn’t the IRS calling.

So, no matter how intimidating it might be to have someone call up claiming to be from the IRS, exercise some skepticism.

Don’t give away your credit card number or any other important business or personal information. Don’t do it even if a toll free IRS number comes up on your caller ID. Don’t do it even if the caller seems to know the last four digits of your social security number.

These are just a few more of the tricks scammers will use to try to convince you, IRS officials say.

You can always call the IRS at 1-800-829-1040 to find out if there really is a problem.

If you think you’ve received one of these scam telephone calls, report it to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration at 1-800-366-4484.

If you think you may already be a victim, contact the Federal Trade Commission’s “FTC Complaint Assistant” and include  “IRS Telephone Scam” in the comment on the complaint.

Scam Photo via Shutterstock

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Starting a Small Business? You’ll Want The Small Business Owner’s Guide To Starting Your Business on a Shoestring Budget

Starting a business is HARD and the one common factor for most small businesses that close their doors is that they ran out of money. If you are looking to start your own business, then we strongly recommend reading “The Pocket Small Business Owner’s Guide to Starting Your Business on a Shoestring”, by Carol Tice.

Part of Allworth’s popular Pocket Small Business Owner’s Guide series, this book is designed to help you save money on every aspect of your business. From advertising to overhead, it includes valuable cost-cutting tips for every type of business including e-commerce, home-based operations, services and retail. This guide serves as a roadmap to creating an effective financial plan for your business that will allow you to thrive and survive.

Let’s face it, in today’s economy small businesses need to take advantage of every opportunity to keep costs down and add dollars to the bottom line. If you follow the steps of this guide, you’ll find yourself heading down the path to small business success.

“The Pocket Small Business Owners’s Guide to Starting Your Business on a Shoestring” is available for sale on Amazon.com.

5 Small Business Pay Per Click (PPC) Tips

I recently attended Pubcon Las Vegas 2013, an event that spanned 3 days and featured keynote addresses from Jason Calacanis, Matt Cutts and Scott Stratten.  While there, I made it a point to look for small business pay per click (PPC) tips to immediately improve your PPC efforts.

Below are the best small business pay per click tips I could find.

Watch Out For AdWords Default Settings

When creating a new account, follow these steps to ensure you don’t have a campaign that is “defaulted” to fail:

• Don’t choose “Standard.” Make sure to choose “All features.”
• For keyword matching, don’t include close variants. Intent changes even in close matching queries.
• Rotate ads. The speaker recommended the “rotate indefinitely” option. At the very least, choose “rotate evenly for 90 days.” By then you should have come back to make changes and reset the clock.
• Include a mobile bid modifier. Unless a phone call is your primary conversion, event mobile ads will be less valuable. If you have no idea, go with -30%.

This will help you create a campaign that’s in your control, not Google’s.

Add Negative Keywords

If you didn’t know about negative keywords, this is your lucky day. To find where you add negative keywords, find your regular keywords. Then scroll to the bottom of the page and click the small “+” sign:

You’ll see an interface like this:

Add negative keywords and prevent your ads from showing on queries you don’t want.

For example, if you’re a plumber in Denver you might have the keyword “Denver plumbing” in your account, but you don’t want to show for someone searching “Denver plumbing jobs.” Just add “jobs” as a negative keyword and you’re done.

Don’t Overdo the Keywords

Many small business accounts have far too many keywords in each ad group. Create ad groups that have a specific theme. The goal should be to have ad copy that is relevant to those keywords alone.

Mona Elesseily (@WebMona) offered the recommendation of 20-25 keywords/ad group (and keep all the match types of the keyword in the same ad group).

Set Up Remarketing

You may have noticed how ads seem to follow you around the Internet. This is done through retargeting/remarketing. You can easily do this with AdWords.

First, you need to add the remarketing tag to your site. Then you can build a display campaign and target the remarketing audience you created. This way your ads will only show to people who have been to your site previously.

Use Ad Extensions

Have you ever seen an ad that seemed larger than the usual headline, two lines of copy and a URL? Something like this:

The above ads feature several ad extensions:

1. Call Extensions:  Geico has a phone number displayed along with their ad.
2. Social Extensions:  The number of followers on Google+ is being displayed.
3. Sitelinks:  These 4 additional links go to more specific pages that might be of interest to the user.

As you can imagine, having all those extra things not only allows you to be “bigger” and occupy more of the page, but you have more ways of conveying your value to a potential customer.

Conclusion

The small business pay per click tips above will help you improve your PPC advertising. Take a few minutes today to make sure you’re using them. If you’re not, then get started - consider it a mini-audit.

PPC Photo via Shutterstock

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The 3 Keys To Keeping Your Website From Hurting Your Business

Is your website turning off your customers? Are you sure? If you don’t test your site regularly, it may be full of broken links and outdated information. You’ve designed your small business website to be clean, simple and easy to use. But your customers aren’t going to stick around if your small business website doesn’t work the way it should, and why would they? If you can’t properly maintain your own website, why would they assume that you’ll do high-quality work for them? Let’s look at how to keep your website from hurting your business.

The way to make sure your small business website is working properly is to test it yourself. Never assume that your web developers have delivered a perfectly working site. No programmer is perfect, and the littlest typo can mean that your links don’t work or that your customers will be calling the wrong phone number.

When To Test Your Website

• Before a new site goes live.
• Today - since your website is probably already live.
• Whenever you make a change, such as adding  or removing pages, or changing information.
• Monthly, to make sure that everything is still working as it should, and that you don’t need to update any information, or take down outdated coupon codes.

How To Test Your Website

This is a methodical process, so create a checklist or spreadsheet for everything you’ll need to verify. This includes every link in your website’s header and footer, and any other navigation that appears on every page. For each individual page, list every link that appears on the page. You’ll also check that everything is spelled correctly, that pictures are displayed properly and that the correct information is shown. If your customers can do anything on your website, such as fill out forms or buy products, then include those processes on your checklist.

Once your testing checklist is complete, check your website against the list. Look at every page, click on every link, and so on. Whenever you find a problem, note it so that it can be fixed. You may be able to give your marked up checklist to your web developers, or they may need you to write an explanation of the bugs for the sake of clarity. Be as specific as possible, such as “On the  home page, I clicked on the “Sale” link and it took me a page that said 404 Page Not Found.”

Once the bugs are fixed, test the specific fixes, but also test the entire site again. Sometimes new problems are created when fixing old ones, and you need to catch those too.

Where To Test Your Website

Don’t just test your site on your desktop or laptop. Your customers might visit your site from a mobile device, so you need to test on a tablet or smartphone lest you chase them away.

Testing your small business website may not be the most exciting part of your job, but it ensures that you make a great first impression with your customers. Have you tested your business website lately?

 

The 3 Keys To Keeping Your Website From Hurting Your Business

Is your website turning off your customers? Are you sure? If you don’t test your site regularly, it may be full of broken links and outdated information. You’ve designed your small business website to be clean, simple and easy to use. But your customers aren’t going to stick around if your small business website doesn’t work the way it should, and why would they? If you can’t properly maintain your own website, why would they assume that you’ll do high-quality work for them? Let’s look at how to keep your website from hurting your business.

The way to make sure your small business website is working properly is to test it yourself. Never assume that your web developers have delivered a perfectly working site. No programmer is perfect, and the littlest typo can mean that your links don’t work or that your customers will be calling the wrong phone number.

When To Test Your Website

• Before a new site goes live.
• Today - since your website is probably already live.
• Whenever you make a change, such as adding  or removing pages, or changing information.
• Monthly, to make sure that everything is still working as it should, and that you don’t need to update any information, or take down outdated coupon codes.

How To Test Your Website

This is a methodical process, so create a checklist or spreadsheet for everything you’ll need to verify. This includes every link in your website’s header and footer, and any other navigation that appears on every page. For each individual page, list every link that appears on the page. You’ll also check that everything is spelled correctly, that pictures are displayed properly and that the correct information is shown. If your customers can do anything on your website, such as fill out forms or buy products, then include those processes on your checklist.

Once your testing checklist is complete, check your website against the list. Look at every page, click on every link, and so on. Whenever you find a problem, note it so that it can be fixed. You may be able to give your marked up checklist to your web developers, or they may need you to write an explanation of the bugs for the sake of clarity. Be as specific as possible, such as “On the  home page, I clicked on the “Sale” link and it took me a page that said 404 Page Not Found.”

Once the bugs are fixed, test the specific fixes, but also test the entire site again. Sometimes new problems are created when fixing old ones, and you need to catch those too.

Where To Test Your Website

Don’t just test your site on your desktop or laptop. Your customers might visit your site from a mobile device, so you need to test on a tablet or smartphone lest you chase them away.

Testing your small business website may not be the most exciting part of your job, but it ensures that you make a great first impression with your customers. Have you tested your business website lately?

 

New MacBook Pros Feature Price Cuts But Improved Features

The new MacBook Pro with Retina display may not be the computer for every small business. But those needing high end features in the areas Apple excels, like graphics, should be ecstatic. The latest generation of the laptops announced recently offered some pleasant surprises. Most importantly, Apple has dropped the price of the new laptops […]

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The Latest Nexus Phone May Be Coming In November

For Android users, Google’s latest new Nexus smartphone may be introduced by November. That is, if well-known tech tipster @evleaks can be believed. The often-reliable Twitter channel recently posted images of what appear to be a two-tone black and white Nexus 5 (pictured below), the successor to the Nexus 4 Android phone. Previously, @evleaks had […]

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Apple’s New Operating System Is Now Available From Mac App Store

Apple announced the new OS X Mavericks last week, it’s tenth to date. The company’s review of new features include many that sound like they would be ideal for the increasingly mobile small business owner. The new system is available now as a free download through the Mac App Store for desktop and laptop users. […]

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Elaine Delos Reyes: How 4 People Engage 5 Million Chicago Bears Fans

The Chicago Bears have been sold out for almost 30 years — 29 consecutive years. The listening audience is the largest in the NFL 56% percent higher than the next closest team. There are 4.4 million Bears fans over the age of 18 in the Chicago area alone, equating to 6 out of every […]

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Starting With a Quick Err. . .Team Building Exercise

I did my time in the corporate world. Which means I’ve done my share of team building exercises. Relay races, building stuff, scavenger hunts… I can’t say any of them ever really changed how I looked at my co-workers or how they looked at me.

But they were a welcome change of pace from the standard day-to-day.

Looking at this cartoon now, I probably should have had at least one dog rolling his eyes. I know I always did.