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Posts Tagged ‘business marketing’

In a far too harried world, we’re often searching how to have timely information; just in front of us for when we need it. Need was in search of a solution….

The information providers required their message in client’s faces and clients hoped for easy access to a fast fix for their problems – information offering up those solutions.

The perfect integration of problem and solution was in none other than the fridge magnet. Discovered in the 1970’s the fridge magnet has grown ever more to occupy the space on the home’s fridge. Plumbers, electricians, real estate salesman, vets, doctors, local politicians and many more besides now rely on the efficacy of the fridge magnets ability to deliver it’s message.

The power of a insignificant fridge magnet rests in the reality that an average fridge is opened – read viewed – around 17 times each day. That’s a lot of exposure. 

A fridge magnet marketing card uses the same raison d’etre, but with a larger imprint area. This invention uses a small magnet at the head of a full color printed card. The substaintial benefits of the magnetic marketing card are its lower cost, size on size to a fridge magnet and its lighter weight and hence lower distribution cost. 

For many small businesses needing to have a larger than average message on the family fridge, they are a fantastic choice.

A further extension of the fridge magnet has been the development of a thicker material suitable for car magnets with the same ease of movement and positioning wherever you want on a car.  So these car magnets offer never seen before flexibility, to business owners, to utilize their vehicles as moving billboard. 

A recent marketing innovation is to get passers-by a parked company car, take a fridge magnet off the car; combining the promotion of the company’s message and products with their means of contacting the company. This is a novel use of fridge and car magnet to the benefit of company and consumer.  

Website Video Ad

The Internet has developed no end in the last ten years where seeing more and more video presenters on websites today. The internet has evolved into a sophisticated world of niche services, portals and products. This growth in Internet use and the advances in technology have begun to challenge the media industry, TV can now be viewed anytime, and any place online, the same with films and music. This has obviously added to piracy download challenges, this has since developed a whole new global advertsing businesses.

Online marketing is worth big money, for a few key reasons:

TV adverts are only shown between programmes, whereas Internet adverts and banners are on screen nearly all the time. Giving websites much more coverage.

*The amount of people that can be reached is incredible. For example last year google had 1,118,000,000 view their advert that’s over 18 times the population of the UK.

*Targeting the right market is fairly easy, working out the markets interests and then placing adverts on the main sites of these interests can quickly aim the information straight into the segment the advertiser wants to reach.

Some sites such as myspace and facbook know that their users visit the site almost everyday to check their messages or comments and they know this regular traffic is worth a lot of money. Linking between sites is a technique less well known websites can use to gain traffic, by making a post on for example myspace which includes the web address to their site, owners can guide a section of myspace’s users towards their website and therefore boost their own traffic.

Some website owners have even used internet user’s mistakes to gain traffic. Every place has its own resistered web addresses, such as the United Kingdom has .co.uk, America .com and France .fr. Cameroon in Africa has .cm and one entrepreneur came across a brilliant and highly profitable idea. He bought up hundreds of domains ending in .cm that sounded similar to their .com equivalents. By using user mistakes to gain traffic Kevin Ham made well over 2 million dollars!

Company owners are also starting to realise that text based websites don’t hold their audience interests for as long as needed. Website creators are attempting to combine website video production and website to create new, more interesting sites that not only entertain but more importantly sell. These website tour guides can greet site guests, show them round and help a company communicate their brand image and intentions. Not only this, but tests have proved that people stay longer on sites that feature a video tour guide rather than just text and user retention is highly important to potential advertisers.

As you can see the world of online sales and advertising is fast moving and constantly changing. The question is where will it go next and if you know then it’s definitely time to invest.

Virtual Presenters

The use of video on websites has many positive effects on people who become interactive with the website. Websites that use website video production include, YouTube, Face Book, MySpace, E4, 4od etc. the way in which the video’s connect with the audiences are on many levels as the viewers can have a visual on things that they properly wouldn’t bother to read about.

The internet communicates on several levels which are audio and visual.

With the internet becoming very popular and people relying on information on the internet, audiences will look for a specific type of information that they will be able to understand and connect with, the most popular source of information is video based.

When people are given the chance to either read or watch something giving out information on the internet, people are more likely to prefer to watch a video presenters. A video helps browsers understand what the product or service does faster.

To advertise products to the correct audiences, institutions will place their product on specific websites such as, Face book, as Face book allows advertising at the side of the welcome home page to every individual member.

Another very successful way to advertise a product is to use a presenter to encourage people, this can be evidenced on websites such as homepages to internet services i.e. SKY, MSN etc. on these particular pages I found a detailed advertisement advertising “weight loss products” within this advertisement a woman is shown before and after in a bikini, with her discussing how the product worked for her and giving people details of how to use the product. By being able to see and hear positive feedback about a certain product convinces people to believe in the product.

Audiences need information to be laid out for them in the ways that they will want to watch it, if the information they are looking for is not set out in a specific way (Text, Video’s etc) they will immediately leave the website and look else where.

Certain websites only give out specific ways of presenting information, some are completely text based, video based or they could be a mixture of both.

Keeping your website interesting with video content will ensure visitors are kept more interested and stay on the site longer.

YouTube is a website that offers millions of video’s that can be easily found in the search engine, when logging into You tube it immediately gives you things that you may like to watch on the basis of videos you have already viewed. Sites like Revver make it easier to find content by suggesting other similiar video to view. You tube is a very reliable website to find information by video.

The internet overall generates information in many ways. As people rely on the internet for information, it is very important that the popular and not so popular websites keep up to date with how information should be presented to audiences as this will have a huge impact on the views that the website receive.

Virtual Presenter

Having video content on websites is much more effective then standard text because it creates a visual interaction with the audience so there for the audience will receive instant information about the web video production or services available. Also it keeps browsers interested with the information that is given, as there is direct interaction with the browser.

There are various online presenters out there one example is Marino Olova who hosts a web show on youtube called too hot for words where people will ask her random questions and she will give them an answer however her unique selling point is her breast as you may see in her videos and this has attracted viewers to watch her productions as sex sells, because she has a mass audience who watch her productions she now receives funding form marketing sources such as google where they will post a links on her pages and will get a certain amount of money every time her videos have been viewed.

In the year 2008 it came to knowledge that internet marketing has surpassed television hence why itv had a loss of 600 jobs because they where not turning in enough revenue from advertisement to keep staff on. The google advertising network and others like yahoo allow companies to directly target related keyword searches. Hence they can place their products on a specific website either 1 of two things that there product suits the target audience which visit that site or website that is popular and has an large audience which visit the website, hence why youtube has taken the nation and advertisement world by storm as they have a mass audience going into millions. Video channels are really growing in numbers because producers can make good money through advertising.

The popularity with video based content such as you tube, facebook and myspace, is growing as people are interested in watching other peoples productions and load up their own productions for the public to watch, same with face book which is a social network site and myspace where you can upload your own videos for your friends and family to watch and also add comments expressing their opinions on what they think of the production.       

online presenter

Websites use active animation on there homepages to simply keep people interested, this can prove very positive and will hold the attention of the viewer through interactivity. Most sites now days use some kind of interactivity. The internet was created to house all the information in the world and with more being added every day searching for one thing among this massive library can be a very boring and long process so things like banners and hosts are used.

If a site was to have huge blocks of text you would quickly loose interest, but if say a virtual presenter pops up when you log on you are more in cline to pay attention, especially if online presenters is representing the site; for example a cosmetic company could use a ‘perfect’ woman to lure viewers in to thinking they could also look like this, this could count as a demonstration. Internet based companies like ‘Skype’ and ‘MSN’ use virtual presenters, they accompany you through installing there software on to your system.  

It doesn’t have to be as sophisticated as a web presenters it can be banners at the sides, above or below. These while better can be just as simple if used in the right place; for example on ‘Gametrailers.com’ they use banners to advertise online games or up and coming releases. If you were to use the banner on say a sport website.com’ they wouldn’t be reaching the target audience making them useless.

 Social networking sites like Face book and MySpace use both use banners and presenters to target their audience. On Face Book there are usually ads all over the page, advertising things like online games or ‘Trace your family tree’. The growing popularity in interactivity among online companies is leading to more advertises using the wed instead of TV, this is increasing the audience for the net thus increasing revenue, while decreasing the audience for TV.          

online presenter

Our modern society has been gradually gaining technological advances since the inspiration behind a powerful network was put into working practice. As a result of this, the internet has become somewhat of a powerful tool for ‘accurate’ data that many have now become fully dependant on as a main source.

The internet has improved dramatically over the last decade and is beginning to gather more audience attention than the once popular programming broadcasts from television networks The internet has attracted more audience recognition through the use of a larger variety of entertaining mediums concerning computer graphics and video.

Video usage is one of the latest phenomenon’s, with hosting slowly becoming an essential feature for most websites in recent times. This has increased with the rise in popularity of such video hosts as YouTube.

Many find web video to be a type of visual aid, which proves beneficial more so for the current generations of pre-teens and young adults who, as a result of certain technological distractions, have less of an appreciation for the written word and a low maintenance of a decent attention span for long periods of time.

Companies are using video presenters in different ways depending on the target market and product or service being advertised/offered. Those offering advice on things such an editing techniques in programmes like Final Cut Pro often use videos to directly show users which buttons to press/tools to use, and how certain methods should be carried out. Audience members who may learn in this way find this beneficial as it allows them to use practical information rather than just written paragraphs.

Video hosting websites like YouTube serve as a good communication method, and can also give rise to fame for those who get noticed by well-known production companies; for example, web presenters Brooke Brodack posted comedic music videos as a hobby, only to be seen by Carson Daly of MTV. She now generates cash for her unique online video stylings.

With the advances, videos have now begun to become interactive, allowing viewers to select links and find yet more information than just what the video itself aims to supply.

Banners on web pages frequently use this method for advertising, allowing users to scroll over the area to reveal a larger section containing either an interactive feature or video corresponding to the small amount of information given on the banner initially.

This rise in video hosting has taken attention away from television, which was once the only technological deviation to supply videos of a high quality to a variety of audiences on a large scale.

Many terrestrial channels have already begun seeking opportunities to move their programming online, and resources such as BBC iPlayer and 4oD have now increased in content capacity.

Inevitably as technology increases, so too will the amount of new features on the World Wide Web, including the advance of video formulation, offering possibilities for more creative and inventive idea yet to be approved.

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For aspirants to developing an online business, the variety and extent of Internet marketing tools is baffling and almost impossible to understand. The thing about an Internet business is that people often lack the knowledge necessary to deal with the technical details of web support, and therefore they have to invest in tools, strategies and consultancy in order to achieve a good return on investment, well-targeted visitors and quality traffic. In order to understand the way Internet marketing tools work, a plan of the online marketing campaigns is a basic necessity. The aim of the campaigns consists in the attraction of more customers, but they do take time and effort for implementation.

Some Internet marketing tools are available free of charge, while others can be downloaded after paying a fee. Consider for instance the Google Website Optimizer, a software that improves the search engine performance and the ranking of the pages. Such a tool goes hand in hand with programs that provide analytical data about the visitors that access the websites, allowing for the creation of statistical results to reveal how many of the visits have resulted in transactions. This kind of Internet marketing tools come in a variety of more or less cost-effective formats, but they all require a fee.

Other Internet marketing tools allow better management and higher optimization possibilities for the promotion campaigns launched on the search engines. Without such analytic items, the covering of all the data related to the market response to one action or another could not be possible given the huge amount of information. Priorities will be spotted out much more easily not to mention that the creation of new plans of actions is seriously enhanced by the smart Internet marketing tools applications. Whether it’s about advanced searches or the determination of the most suitable keywords, web site maintenance and promotion are more complex than you’ve ever imagined.

When choosing Internet marketing tools it is often advisable to have professional assistance, as one tool may be offered for free by some providers and charged by others. Therefore, hiring a consultancy agency to cover all aspects is a very smart move for the security and success of your business. Unfortunately, people who imagine that they can learn about the Internet marketing tools along the way are more likely to fail than those who acknowledge their limitations and go for professional business help from the very beginning.

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At some point in every small contracting business, a decision has to be made on how to structure the business for growth. Staying small is not the goal of most contractors. Research into the tax and legal considerations should be thoroughly considered.

Taking a Contractor Business for Small to Large

Business structure has a lot to do with why some businesses grow and others don’t.

There are three types of legal business entities that should be considered:

1. Sole Proprietorship

2. Limited Liability Corporation (LLC)

3. S Corporation

Which of these you choose depends on what fits the best with your existing business. This is a discussion that should occur between you and a qualified attorney. We can only tell you how you shold think about the process.

As any good lawyer will tell you there will be certain trade-offs made on each of the three options. Consideration should be given to set-up costs, liability and investments. We will go into a summary of these trade-offs later in this article. Set-up, liability, and investments are few of the main consideration. There will be certain trade-offs made depending on which way you go. For extensive information on taxes and filing for different business structure, go to the IRS website at http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small. If you’re business is at the point where structuring decisions have to made, you should be looking into retaining the services of a lawyer, who can best explain the liability issues faced with each business structure, particularly as the pertain to your state. In short: starting a business? Get a lawyer.

Sole Proprietorship

From a set-up standpoint, establishing as a sole proprietor is the easiest way to go. If your choice is to become a sole proprietor, you own all the assets and profit generated by your contracting business. This also means you assume all the debt and liability. In a sole proprietorship you and the business are one and the same! This is an extremely important detail, as it means were the business to get sued for any reason, both the business and your personal assets are at risk. Think about the nature of your business and the services you provide. What are the chances of being sued? Although the question may appear frightening, it should be a serious consideration.

In terms of tax preparation, the sole proprietorship is the easiest. You’ll be filing using the individual 1040, Schedule C (or C-EZ), and Schedule SE for self-employment tax. The full list of forms needed can be found through the IRS link above.

Partnership

It is understandable why some contractors would want to go into a partnership. Sharing the work-load, decision-making, and other responsibilities can make the task of getting a business off the ground seem much more bearable. But some planning needs to go into a partnership, specifically when it comes to laying down ground-rules for making decisions, establishing and defining roles and commitments, and how profits will be split. A beer and a handshake shouldn’t cut it. Because partnerships and sole proprietorships are viewed the same by the legal system, both business structures see no difference between the business and its owners. Before establishing as a partnership, take the time to write up an agreement.

There is more than one type of partnership, too. There are general partnerships, limited partnerships, and joint ventures. Most contractors will find that joint ventures don’t apply as they are intended for one-off situations. In a limited partnership one or more of the partners assumes limited liability and limited input and decision-making ability. These are common in situations when attracting investors, and might not suit the contractor business scenario.

When filing as a partnership, Schedule K-1 (Form 1065) may have to be filed, as well as any employment tax forms. The 1040, self-employment, and estimated tax forms for individual returns are a requirement of partnerships. W-2s are not issued to partners as they are not employees of the business. A partnership structure is a “pass-through entity” allowing profits to go directly to owners.

Corporation

Corporations are entities considered separate from those who own and/or run it. Shareholders or owners must assume limited liability. Corporations have an elected board of directors who must meet regularly and determine and oversee policy-making and enforcing. Initial paperwork and tax filing takes more work and more accounting than other types of business structures as well as being more work to set up. Although the advantage of limited liability is important, another plus for establishing a corporation is the easy transfer of ownership through the sale of stock. To incorporate, the business must be granted a charter by the state in which the business is based, and an assortment of expenses incurred for incorporation fees, legal matters, and purchasing of stock certificates can set the business back as much as $1500 or more. One downside to corporations is the tax consequence of being taxed on both the corporate income and salaried income.

A subset of the corporation business structure is the S Corporation, or Subchapter S Corporation. Earnings and profits are passed through to owners and their individual tax returns in this structure. In this way the double taxation scenario is avoided. An S Corporation make the tax process easier and for this reason some small business owners find the limitations worth it.

Limited Liability Company (LLC)

Although neither a partnership nor a corporation an LLC combines a few features from both of those structures. Unlike a corporation or a general partnership, owners of an LLC are considered members of the entity and recieve the same liability protection as a corporation but have the flexible profit distribution of a general partnership. Setting up an LLC is easier than a corporation, although there is still more filing to be done than in a sole proprietorship. Paperwork and fees will apply, and specific state regulation may mandate written operating agreements that determine many of the same guidelines needed in a successful partnership, such as profit distribution, responsibilities, and rules to determine ownership changes.

Personal Experience

Josh Macmichael is the sole proprietor of a successful seamless gutter business based in New Hampshire, called New London Seamless Gutters http://www.nlseamlessgutters.com/title=”nlseamlessgutters”/>nlseamlessgutters. For Macmichael, business structure was a fairly simple decision. “The easiest solution is a sole proprietorship,” says Macmichael. “It’s easier to set up, easier to deal with payments, and doesn’t cost the money that incorporating costs.Accidents can happen to anyone, but to Josh Macmichaels, the conveniences of a sole proprietorship ourweigh the risks of full liability. “From a liability standpoint, sure, I should probably be an LLC, but you can be looking at $3,000 or more to get a lawyer to go to work on all the filing and paperwork. Obviously remaining a small business is not the goal of most contractors.”

What Should You Do?

Contractors, like any small business, are often caught between where they are today and where they want to be in five or ten years. A small contracting business owner should understand that his business growth may depend on how he structures his business. The legal structure of a business can be changed at a later date if it becomes necessary. If changing the businesss structure becomes a necessary, good accounting practices are crucial.

An attorney can help you think through the pros and cons of each business structure in terms of record-keeping and liability protection.

Another option you might want to check out is the ContractorBlab