photo credit: benstein

Everyone is jumping on the Facebook train including businesses, at least if they are smart they are. There are tens of thousands of users on Facebook, that is a lot of contacts that you could be targeting for your company and bringing yourself a ton of traffic. However, when setting up your Facebook page there are a few factors that you should keep in mind, as recently posted in an article on Virtually Ready.

1. All of your events can be posted to where the public can see them. So even the people who are not added to your Facebook list can still view your event when it comes up in their search.
2. There are all kinds of applications you can use to create several different boxes on your page to customize it to your specific taste and needs.
3. You have complete control over how much your fans can contribute as well as the content that is posted for the public to see.

You can incorporate an Facebook Ad Campaign via your Page with the option to target a specific market and send those who click on your ad to either your Fan Page, an Event created via your Page, or to your website.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

photo credit: massless

When starting a web business it is important to have all the resources you can get, it is important that you use these resources to their fullest, it will make your job a lot easier. Even if you already have an existing web business you should take a look at this list of Google tools located on Startup Nation that could greatly benefit your company.

• Google Channel on You Tube. This tools covers thousands and thousands of videos on everything that is related to google itself.
• Google Webmaster Tools Checklist. For those of you who work better and faster when you have a list to guide you, this is the tool for you. You can create a list catered to your needs that will help you get off your feet.
• Google Local Business Center. This is one of the greatest tools for web businesses on Google. This helps you get set up so that your properly listed on Google as well as on Google Maps.

Google Analytics. Web analytics solution providing you with insights into your website traffic.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

photo credit: swanksalot

Being a business owner you probably have a ton of different insurance policies such as disability, medical, dental, equipment protection and all of your own personal policies such as your homeowners, vehicle coverage and more. None of these policies however actually secure the life of your business. Below are a couple types of policies that help protect the actual life of your business, recently found on OpenForum.

Say you have a multi-owner company and an agreement stating that when one or more owners dies the remaining owners buy their shares of the company. This transaction of course requires that the remaining share holders have cash in order to buy out the shares, and most of us don’t have that kind of money just lying around.

Enter in life insurance to the rescue. There are many ways to structure life insurance to fund buy-sell agreement terms, depending on the nature of the business and ownership structure. One of the more effective methods is for every owner to be insured for the approximate value of their shares.

Your company I’m sure has a few or more “key employees”, the kind that you rely on for just about everything important related to your company. You don’t know what you would do without these key employees, so what if something happens to one of them? You can obtain a type of policy that insures the loss of your key employees, it helps you get by until a replacement for that employee is found. You hold the policy, pay the premiums and are the sole beneficiary to the policy.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

photo credit: Nico Kaiser

In our world of rapid growing technology and the fact that a large number of business owners do business outside of their office on all sorts of devices, I feel the need to post an article regarding mobile marketing and it’s benefits. We all know that marketing in general is important and vital to our business, so lets look at mobile marketing.

With mobile marketing, not only are the marketing messages easy to create but they are sent to the recipients within a few seconds, instant marketing. The response rate of mobile marketing has been proven to be higher than that of other marketing methods. Mobile marketing has a response and effective rate of 15% where as others are only 2-3%.

Messages reach recipients wherever they are. No need to be by a TV, radio, computer, or mailbox; phones are within our reach 80% of every day.

Given the fact that mobile marketing is still relatively new, there are many people who haven’t even seen it yet, so when you send out your mobile marketing campaign, this immediately self creates the WOW factor for the person receiving it.

Visit Strategic Growth Concepts for the complete list of reasons as to why you will benefit from mobile marketing.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

photo credit: Andre Charland

If you have a financial advisors, then you should already be listening to their advice, taking it into consideration, if you aren’t then you need to start. After all what else did you hire this person for if not to take advice from them on your businesses financial matters?

Entrepreneur.com suggests that many people end up making a rather large and wrong decision without sufficient advice from a financial advisor. This proves to be quite detrimental to the companies finances and well being.

Learn to recognize when you are facing a decision that you feel insufficiently informed to make, then find and contact advisors. There are experts in practically every field. Make your decision only after you feel confident in your grasp of the information.

Taking advice from more than one financial advisor can prove to be confusing when they may differ on their opinions, the thing to remember here is they all have certain limitations, certain areas of expertise. So remember to take all of that into account when making your final decision.

Listen to what each advisor is telling you, listen to their reasoning behind their advice, maybe even take notes so you can look back later and re-read what was suggested. Decide for yourself which advice from whomever makes more sense for your company.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

photo credit: eyesplash Mikul

Some small business owners, especially those that live in relatively small towns as well wonder if they would even benefit at all from using Twitter. Given it is such a huge and well known program on the Internet today, they wonder if their small business would even pick up on its radar.

Businesses of all sizes are sharing impressive results. Dell announced it has made $3 million worth of sales through its Twitter efforts. Even small businesses in big cities have started benefiting. Small bakeries can now buy an oven-gadget that automatically announces when fresh baked goods are available.

Even in small towns, people do have Internet or access somewhere to the Internet, and with the Internet becoming bigger everyday they all are beginning to use it for searching, shopping and more. You already have some fans for your business in your town, make your business more available to them in more ways by signing up with Twitter.

Also, don’t forget about the people who may live just outside of your town but still within a reasonable driving distance and may not realize you exist until they see you on the Internet. And don’t forget about the out of towners that travel all over and usually do research on the town they will be staying in, recently stated in a post on Small Biz Survival.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

photo credit: annnna.

Many business owners wonder if their business truly needs a blog or if it is just a waste of their time. Below are some reasons stated recently on Startup Nation that pinpoint why you should have a blog for your business today.

• With a blog you can listen and learn. Remember when you were younger and your parents and teachers always said “you can never have too much knowledge”, it’s the same in business, you can never have too much.
• This is a great way to test some of your ideas that you are not quite sure about. If they do well on your blog, then you can pretty much assume they will do well in other areas.

Uncover New Opportunities. The more you blog, the more opportunities will present themselves to you. For example, I was contacted by a PR firm earlier this year to create a series of blog posts for the launch of a new website.

• If your blogs that you post do well, it is possible for them to rank very high in most search engines that people use everyday, which ultimately means a lot more traffic to your website and thus, more business for you.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.