Casual Articles - Internet and Businesses Online

The Purpose of Background Checks
The purpose of carrying out background investigations is to verify that applicants for employment in sensitive positions do not have a history of activity that would make them unsuitable for the position for which they are being considered. Failure or slack in performing pre-employment background checks could destroy everything a business owner or manager has worked hard to build. Background checks and employee screenings are a must in today's business and domestic climate. It is seen that companies and families often do not adequately screen their new applicants. This can prove to be a big mistake as hiring crooks and cons can prove to be extremely costly and is liable to cause immense mental trauma.Background checks serve many purposes. They tend to leave a person with the peace of mind in knowing that they have made the right decision in the hiring process. Business owners often feel they are entitled to know details of their workforce and what their background is. Employers should also include notification of the types of background checks carried out, in their pre-employment literature. Often employers do not have the time, resources or authority to complete

nt some solid competition.

Visit your competitor’s web sites and see what they are selling. Check for site quality, organization, ease of use and amount of products sold. Perhaps they sell your product, but it is lost in a vast sea of other related merchandise. That means better chances for your niche store. Maybe their site is ugly or hard to navigate. These are points at which you could gain an advantage over your rivals. Checking other sites will also give you ideas about how to run your own store.

The third step in this process is to check out Yahoo! Shopping. Yahoo! hosts what is known as an online mall. That is, retailers setup stores with Yahoo!’s services and are then included in Yahoo! Shopping’s listings. This can be a good way to get fast traffic. For market research, it means easy access to competitor sites. On the Yahoo! Shopping main page, do a search for your product (Braun blenders for example). The results will show sponsored ads and normal listings. The sponsored ads come from Overture, so you should already be familiar with those.

The normal listings come from a combination of Yahoo! Product Submit results and Yahoo!’s web-crawler search database. What is important in this list is actually displayed just below the top sponsor listings and just above the normal listings. There should be two numbers: the number of products found and the number of stores they were found in. For ‘Braun blenders’ there were 989 matches from 76 stores (at time of writing). Those numbers give you an indication of

Why People Use Long Sales Copy
Have you ever wondered why some people use long sales letter? Here is the answer: These people newer bothered to find out what the potential customer wants. If you know exactly what your potential customer wants, you can be short and to the point. So, Mr. Marketing Genius comes along and wants to sell something.Instead of finding out what the target audience wants, that "genius"just tries to offer everything. Then some people actually buy what was offered and the "genius"thinks he has found the solution: Long sales Copy. But unfortunately, or luckily, that is the wrong reason. If you haveto offer something that even vaguely represents what your customerwants, you will make sales. But if you find out what is exactly wanted and offer that you willcreate a boom. So, go ahead and do some surveys to find out what your target audiencereally wants. If you use that in your sales copy, you will wind up withvery short sales copy and lots of sales. ---------------------------------

I recently made a critical mistake in my progression towards business success: I forgot about market research. I had decided that I was going to make some money with an online store. I thought to myself, where should I start? What can I sell? After a bit of brainstorming, I picked a few things that I thought might be good to sell online. I then proceeded to start looking for suppliers. This may seem like a reasonable course of action, but it is not. It is missing a key component of any business plan.

A basic assumption for the purpose of this article is that there is competition involved with any business. Even if you make your own, unique product, similar products will compete against yours. However, the existence of competition is not necessarily bad. The fact that online retailers are selling items similar or identical to your own means that there is demand for your product. Competition is only bad for you, as a retailer, when the market is becoming saturated (or is already at that point).

Check the electronics market for a good example of this principle. Electronics go for rock-bottom prices online because there are so many different stores that sell them. The difference in prices between stores usually comes down to the cost of shipping. The competition in this area is extreme. If retailers cut their prices any lower they won’t make enough to survive.

The first person who had the idea to sell VCRs online probably made a killing. Nowadays, nobody makes anything more than a buck or two per unit. For a home-based business, that’s not good enough. Today’s electronics dealers depend on volume, and very good supply sources, in order to make their money. Generally speaking, small retailers cannot sell at those prices and turn a profit.

In order to be successful it is essential that you know what you’re up against, and that means market research.

If you are selecting your products, then you need to know which stores already sell those products. You also need to know how many stores there are, how much they are charging and, if you can find out, how well they are doing. Could you sell for less (if only a little)? What are other ways you could differentiate your store from the rest?

If you already have your product, then you need to know where and how your competitors are advertising. Are they concentrated in one location? Are there good places that they have overlooked? How much is it going to cost to compete with them for prime ad space?

So, you may ask, where do I begin? The answer is Overture. Owned by Yahoo, Overture is one of the largest and most reliable pay-per-click advertising services. Their program can be an extremely effective, but that is something for another day.

What you need for research requires no sign-up and belongs to no program. There are two web tools in the Overture Advertiser Center that can be amazingly useful. The first is the Search Term Suggestion Tool. This tool allows you to look up a keyword, like “digital camera”, and find out how many people searched for that term last month. Not only that, but the tool will suggest a list of related terms, like “digital camera review”, for your consideration.

The number of searches per term comes from Overture’s partners like Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista, CNN, etc. This is critical information because it tells you whether or not people are looking for your product online and, at the same time, shows you how they are searching for it. This indicates a certain demand for your product.

You may be able to judge the size of the demand, to a certain degree, by the number of searches for your terms. For example (numbers taken at time of writing and may not reflect current rates):

Digital Camera – 1,337,422 (high interest)

Used Car – 890,346

Mountain Bike – 133,553

Blender – 26,648

Bubble Gum Machine – 1,502

Chapstick Raspberry Vanilla – 25 (very low interest)

Keep in mind that users searching for ‘digital camera’ are not necessarily shopping for one. They may just want information such as reviews or feature lists. It is also good to remember that if people are searching on Yahoo and MSN, as in the case of digital cameras, then you can safely assume that even more people are searching for the same things on Google.

The second tool Overture provides is the View Bids Tool. This tool allows you to take the keywords that you found with the term suggestion tool and see how many ads there are for each term and how high the bids are (in order to be listed on top of your competition you must place a higher bid for the term you want). This tool can help you judge your competition.

For example, at the time of this writing there are 131 ads associated with the term digital camera. The top bid is 79 cents per click. Bubble gum machine has 13 ads with a top bid of 49 cents. Chapstick Raspberry Vanilla, not surprisingly, has no bids on the term which means that the top spot could be purchased for the minimum price of 10 cents per click.

After you have your information from Overture, Google is your likely next step. To my knowledge, Google does not provide any analysis tools to the general public, though information is available to registered advertisers. Despite this limitation, it is easy to find your competition on Google. Simply enter your search term and check the right side of the results screen. The first page should show the top advertisers. Checking subsequent pages will reveal the entire list of advertisers for that term.

Tip: Sometimes advertisers may be targeting your term, but not selling your product. Read through the ads and visit the sites to get a more accurate idea of your direct competitors.

The natural results (the normal, non-ad results) of your search are important as well. Check those to see the top ranked sites in your market. Those sites are probably there because they employ search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. Users are much more likely to click on the natural results than they are the ads. The stores at the top of the list are likely to be well established and may represent some solid competition.

Counteract the Top 10 Pitfalls of New Business Ventures
One component in building a successful coaching business it effectively identifying the factors that impede the success of small business operations. Acknowledging the common pitfalls before they become issues will assist you to securely establish your business and achieve greater outcomes...1. Lack of Management ExpertiseA successful life coaching business can not rely solely on technical coaching expertise. To operate any successful business you need to develop business acumen as well as technical competence. If you cannot set goals, organise, market, administrate, plan, budget or manage time and people you need to acquire these skills to help you cope with the demands of a small business.2. Lack of PlanningWithout a well thought out plan your business will have no direction. Having a plan written down and conveyed to all staff is vital to ensure judgements about financial decisions, marketing strategies, and related issues are consistent with your plan. If you and all your stakeholders are able to visualise your strategic goals, you are far more likely to succeed.3. Lack of CapitalIt is important to keep i

-based business, that’s not good enough. Today’s electronics dealers depend on volume, and very good supply sources, in order to make their money. Generally speaking, small retailers cannot sell at those prices and turn a profit.

In order to be successful it is essential that you know what you’re up against, and that means market research.

You may be able to judge the size of the demand, to a certain degree, by the number of searches for your terms. For example (numbers taken at time of writing and may not reflect current rates):

Digital Camera – 1,337,422 (high interest)

Used Car – 890,346

Mountain Bike – 133,553

Blender – 26,648

Bubble Gum Machine – 1,502

Chapstick Raspberry Vanilla – 25 (very low interest)

Tip: Sometimes advertisers may be targeting your term, but not selling your product. Read through the ads and visit the sites to get a more accurate idea of your direct competitors.

3 Reasons To Hire From Outside Your Industry
While at times it may prove comfortable and convenient to hire from within your current industry, often the best candidate for the job comes from outside your “comfort zone”. How can that be? As a recruiter focused on a highly regulated and competitive industry experiencing significant growth nationwide, here are 3 reasons to hire from outside your industry:1. Deeper Talent Pools:We function inside a very narrow industry segment yet the companies serve a broad and diverse customer base. The technology used in our industry is not state of the art. Very few companies, from either the manufacturer or the operators’ side are using technology to its fullest extent. Last year we completed a search assignment for a publicly held manufacturer who sought technology skills not readily available in local talent pools. Local candidates were 5-7 years behind the times in terms of having the skill sets necessary for the client’s impending development project . The client was enlightened enough to realize this and commissioned us to find the best and brightest. The client understood that they had to seek deeper waters to fish in. This helped to find the quality ca

nth. Not only that, but the tool will suggest a list of related terms, like “digital camera review”, for your consideration.

You may be able to judge the size of the demand, to a certain degree, by the number of searches for your terms. For example (numbers taken at time of writing and may not reflect current rates):

Digital Camera – 1,337,422 (high interest)

Used Car – 890,346

Mountain Bike – 133,553

Blender – 26,648

Bubble Gum Machine – 1,502

Chapstick Raspberry Vanilla – 25 (very low interest)

Tip: Sometimes advertisers may be targeting your term, but not selling your product. Read through the ads and visit the sites to get a more accurate idea of your direct competitors.

Autoresponders - One Simple Trick That Will Improve Your Results
Autoresponders, or responders, are simply programs that allow you to send out pre-written emails which have been pre-loaded into the responder. Prospective customers or recruits either input their email addresses into a signup form on a website or send a blank email to a trigger address. They are then entered into a database and receive your emails at the intervals you specify when you set up the responder.This is an extremely powerful marketing techinque as it allows you to send repeated messages to people who have positively displayed their interest in whatever you're promoting.Numerous studies have shown that the majority of consumers will not buy, or signup to something, at the first exposure. Prospects typically need to have somewhere between 5 and 12 exposures to the product or service before they feel comfortable enough to commit. The ideal number of follow up contacts is often said to be 7, but this will vary depending upon the individual consumer and the product on offer.Since the recipient of your emails has given you permission to contact them, you won't be accused of "spamming". You may need to provide full contact details in your

her bid for the term you want). This tool can help you judge your competition.

Tip: Sometimes advertisers may be targeting your term, but not selling your product. Read through the ads and visit the sites to get a more accurate idea of your direct competitors.

Never Make Another Cold Call Again
If you’re new at building sales through business referrals or would like to transition from making cold calls (or other sales methods), then read on. The whole mentality of a referral based business is totally different from any other way of selling. It breaks down most barriers of the selling process, in fact, it changes from you selling to your customers to them wanting to buy from you. A whole different level arises, loyalty is now present, it becomes more of a “business friendship” rather than a long distance non-relationship. It’s not fun or productive contacting someone that you don’t know, trying to get to the decision maker, leaving voice messages, sending an email that may be picked up by a spam filter, etc, etc. A sales person’s biggest asset is time. Not to sound like a nagging sales manager, but how are you spending your time?If you are going to build long term relationships, a long term career, and my favorite, having fun (well OK making money too), you have to think of your time as a long term, day by day investment of time. OK how do I build a referral based business you ask? Well, there several ways to approach it. We need to adjust our way of thin

nt some solid competition.

Note: If there are too many matches, the number of stores will not be displayed (ex. ‘sony dvd player’ yields 3,660 matches). Of course, numbers that high shout, “big competition,” even without store numbers.

Here again you have the opportunity to scope out competing stores. The thorough researcher would get their names and site locations. This may seem time consuming, and it is, but it will help with future research.

Our final recommendation is to visit eBay. Once there, find the eBay Stores area (located in the Specialty Sites box on the homepage at time of writing). Enter your search term to see how many eBay stores are selling your product. ‘Braun blenders’ shows ten items in eBay stores (not bad compared to Yahoo!). In addition, the search may show regular listings below the store results. These results should give you some idea of the popularity of your product as well as the feasibility of selling it on eBay.

Quick Recap:

Overture (free analysis tools)

Google (ads and natural results)

Yahoo! Shopping (number of stores)

eBay Stores (same deal)

Remember, some competition is good because it shows that there is an interest in your product. Too much competition is bad because it means low profitability. The spot where you can make good money is somewhere in between (most likely on the low end of the competition scale). Unfortunately, I know of no exact way to calculate your chances of success. For those who can afford it, hiring a market research professional might help considerably with that calculation. In any case, a solid business plan built on thorough market research will certainly boost your chances significantly.

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