May 7, 2017 By wpadmin

The Many Reasons Why Your Business Needs a Marketing Plan

When you first dive into the idea of owning your own business, you may not be fully aware of the many elements of businesses and how they can benefit your business. Unfortunately, many business owners do not understand how crucial it is to have a marketing plan and forget our goals for such. It is always a good idea to have a marketing plan and keep it up-to-date by finding the newest, freshest, avenues. Your marketing plan is much like your business plan and will guide you into success.

There are some things you must remember to do when you come up with your marketing plan. You want to keep in mind the very important message that you want to convey, because this will help you create a brand that others will come to know and love. You also want to keep your customers in mind as well as the demographic and how much your customers spend on your products. Marketing consists of many aspects and methods such as a website, online advertising, public relations, social media, and more.

Why You Should Have a Marketing Plan

When you own a business, a marketing plan is essential. You will find that having a plan will keep your goals in mind, help define your important messages, help you develop many business tactics, and define your target audience. There are many ways in which you can achieve this success within your business:

Helping you make decisions based on the facts of your business
Showing you ways to achieve less risk and room for error
Show you how to effectively research to achieve the best content for audiences
Make better decisions on how to budget within your business
Identify potential threats within your market
Help you differentiate your business from the rest

When you develop a marketing plan for your business, you should always keep your goals in mind – because goals help define your business and make it exactly what you were looking for! A helpful and well-developed marketing plan is not only a good idea for you, but also everybody else involved in your company. Consider a marketing plan as an option for your business, to help you achieve all of your goals in mind.

May 2, 2017 By wpadmin

Why Are Some States Raising Their Minimum Wage?

April 4, 2016, Californians got a surprise when their Governor Jerry Brown signed something known as Senate Bill 3 into law, which increased the minimum wage to $15 per hour by January 1, 2022. These are big steps that will have an amazing impact in the years to come for employers who have 26 or more employees. New York agreed and passed a law that would raise its wage in NYC to $15 per hour by the end of 2018. All over the country, states are seeing these changes come to light, bringing hope to all.

A Steady Incline

In many states including Alaska, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Maine, Washington, and more, wages will steadily increase every year until the $15 is met in different years. The reason? The price of virtually everything has increased, and certain jobs are not meeting these demands. People are finding that it is more expensive to live in many aspects of their lives – to eat, to rent homes, and to clothe themselves. It is perceived that this increase will make a difference in the lives of many. In 2009, the Federal Government raised the minimum wage for the first time in over seven years, and since then many great changes have been implemented.

There have been many mixed feelings about the changes. Business owners, for instance, have been reacting negatively in some ways, realizing that the increase of minimum wage could make it difficult for them to receive a profit. Restaurant owners, for instance, realize that changes must be made like reducing portion sizes to ensure that they can absorb the change in wages. Bernie Sanders, who ran for the Democratic Presidential nomination, believes that a wage increase is necessary for those who are underpaid and struggling to get by.

No matter the opinion, changes are gradually being made. In a few years, we will see this increase hit an all-time high and watch the results of such in many states across the country. Only then can we see the results that it wields in the everyday lives of many.

May 1, 2017 By wpadmin

The Importance of Why we Celebrate Small Business Week

National Small Business Week has been around since 1963, recognizing the contributions of small business owners in America. You may be surprised to find that more than half of Americans own or work for a small business, creating enormous amounts of jobs for Americans. The impact of these entrepreneurs is phenomenal, deserving recognition on a whole new level as they work on growing small businesses to create new jobs, drive innovation, and so much more. We have already started 2017 Small Business Week, which spans from April 30-May 6.

Throughout the week, many small businesses across the United States are holding events to honor businesses as a whole and their impact on our country. As it stands, there are 28 million small businesses in America. This accounts for an extraordinary 54% of all sales in the U.S. Small businesses also provide 55% of all jobs since the 1970s, highlighting their particular importance in society.

Why Small Businesses Are Important

Testing ideas on the market marks the start of a new business and the success it can bring to the community, or the country overall. They offer stability to families, owners, and more. But what else do small businesses do?

Help Further Expansion: Small businesses give consumers the option of wider expansion of where they will find the goods they are looking for. The U.S. retail market has few restrictions on growth, which means that their businesses are most likely to develop into an international operation.

Bring Productivity: Small businesses are found to be more productive than some large companies. In fact, many small businesses consist of large amounts of scientists and engineers in our country. This research leads to greater developments.

Job Growth: Small businesses added a total of 2.5 million new jobs from 2005 to 2006, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration. Small business growth will always be important in our society, in the present and future.

Because small businesses help fuel America, it is important to give them the recognition they deserve. This is why we celebrate Small Business Week in America, because without small businesses, where would we be?

September 12, 2013 By wpadmin

Google Authorship the 5 W’s

What is Google Authorship?

Google Authorship is a way to link content you create with a Google+ profile, which provides benefits such as your headshot image appearing next to your content in Google’s search results.

As Google continues to merge its new and former products, getting setup with Google Authorship should be a top priority for business owners and Webmasters.

What are the benefits of achieving authorship?

Authorship was created with the goal of allowing writers to claim their content, as well as allowing search engine users to find more content written by the same writer. It also helps establish credibility and legitimacy of content for websites as well as authors. It’s widely believed that Google Authorship is the first step toward verifying author identity, which will be used to calculate Author Rank.

Websites that have taken the steps to establish authorship tags get higher click-through rates due to authorship markup applied in search results (which looks like a headshot of the author next to the text listing, drawing the eye and attracting clicks), and greater exposure to more of their content.

The Set Up

Creating Google+ profiles for all authors on the website is the first step. First, have your authors check http://plus.google.com under their personal Gmail address (if they have one) to see if Google has already set up a preliminary Google+ profile under that email address (much like how they did with new Google+ profiles for local businesses).

Google+ will walk you through profile creation. Fill out all the fields, including a professional profile photo, as this photo is what is viewed in search results next to your content.

“Contributor to” Set-up

The next most important part of a profile is the “Contributor To” section. Here, list all the websites that you publish on. The link can be to the homepage of the website, but to be more accurate (if possible), link to the author’s page on the website, which includes a bio and list of posts. Be sure to keep this updated every time you add a new publisher for whom you write.

The rel=author Tag

After setting up your Google+ profile, incorporating a link in every piece of content with the rel=author tag that links to the author’s Google+ profile is what completes the Google Authorship set-up. This snippet can appear anywhere in the content, but most websites are including it at the bottom of their posts, so it isn’t distracting.

If your website is on WordPress, I recommend Yoast’s SEO plugin, which will allow you to easily incorporate these tags into your content.

Email Verification

Another method for authors that can’t add the rel=author tags or want another solution is to verify an email address from the website on which you’re publishing. For instance, if John Doe’s entrepreneur.com email address is johnd@entrepreneur.com, it can be verified for authorship by using the Google+ Authorship page to verify the email address.

Once you click on the verification link that was sent to your email, a link to the website verified for is automatically added to their “Contributor To” section on their Google+ profile. The title may default to just the domain, such as “website.com”, but this can be changed manually by editing it in the Edit Profile view.

February 9, 2011 By Andmorua

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