Cash Flow: The Life And Death of Small Businesses

Product quality, marketing and customer service all play into the success of your business. Yet nothing matters more than ensuring you have the cash you need to pay your employees, vendors, rent and general expenses.

How Credit History Can Affect Your Cash Flow

Building your business’s credit history will have a significant impact on cash flow because it determines the cost of many of your actions. It can directly affect:

• Bank financing costs
• Credit card rates
• Insurance premiums
• Rental terms and conditions
• Car and truck lease rates
• Terms and conditions from your suppliers

Strengthen Your Cash Flow: Take Charge Of Your Credit History

Here are some best practices which can benefit you today:

• Check with D&B to see if you have a credit file. If not, establish a credit report with D&B because so many lenders, suppliers, insurers and other potential business partners check your D&B credit report before doing business with you.
• If you have a D&B credit file, review it. Although D&B has rigorous quality assurance processes in place, you should also check to make sure that D&B has the correct, accurate and up-to-date identifying information about your company.
• Establish and maintain a commercial credit history. Use a commercial bank account and a commercial credit card for your business expenses.
• Use credit wisely. Pay your bills on time. Use lines of credit and credit cards judiciously and then pay them back on time.
• Monitor your business’s credit file regularly. Ensure that your business information remains accurate on a regular basis.

Remember: When you take charge of your business credit history, you’re on your way to improving your cash flow.

Learn more about how you can monitor or establish your D&B credit report.

To your continual success!

Andy

Check out the Google AdWords Learning Center for free access to a variety of text-based and multimedia “how-to” lessons to help you with your campaigns.

Whether you’re optimizing a campaign to appeal to online shoppers or looking for better and easier ways to track your campaign’s performance this fall, the Google Adword Learning Center now offers all the information you need to improve your ads and empower you with the lastest resource on your AdWords knowledge.

Andy

Your Ad Here

Myths concerning affiliate marketing are appealing and attractive. People who do not know the entire system the wrong way round are prone to believing that it is something capable of giving them great fortune overnight. Stories concerning affiliates who earn tremendous amounts of money swim in their heads, and while these stories are as true as they can be, there are those who believe that they are going to have the same fortune once they indulge in this particular business.

It is true enough that affiliate marketing is financially rewarding. People who have gone through everything to be able to succeed in this business are reaping the seeds that they untiringly sowed. Many of them enjoy the kind of existence that was not possible for them to have had under ordinary circumstances. Having gone through the A-Z of affiliate marketing, however, these people are the ones who know that while such business is lucrative, there is absolutely no easy money in it.

Ignorance of this fact is one of the main reasons why there are people who fail miserably in the internet business. There are those who believe in myths concerning the easy money involved in systems such as affiliate marketing. They do not know that there are those who have wasted time, effort and too many resources in trying to pursue the life of ease that they believe this business will give them. And so they go into affiliate marketing armed with nothing but myths and fantastical notions of wealth swimming in their consciousness, never realizing that they bound to make mistakes that would prove to be their downfall.

What may be the reason why in businesses such as affiliate marketing, many are called but few are chosen? Perhaps the answer lies on the fact that many affiliates make mistakes that result from their ignorance of facts concerning how the entire business runs. Affiliate marketing is not as simple as an affiliate promoting a merchant’s wares through his website and getting paid for it. It is also about knowing the market and the customers at hand.

Discovering what the most common mistakes affiliates make can perhaps dispel the gloom about myths surrounding affiliate marketing by correcting some wrong notions about it. It might also be able to make those concerned understand that like any other business, there are dos and donts involved in this one if they want to make each of their steps count. The first common mistake affiliates make is their lack of knowledge concerning principles involved in their business. This refers to the affiliate’s knowledge of search engines in particular.

Affiliate marketing involves advertising, and advertising through the internet could not have been better without the existence of search engines. What every affiliate has to do is to make these search engines his best friend through studying search engine optimization closely. This way, he is able to know what to do in connection with building a better website to ultimately use for his business.

The second is that affiliates make the mistake of stuffing their sites with banners that do not provide enough information about the product at hand. The best way to battle this mistake is to provide good content hand-in-hand with such banners. It is important for customers to know and understand the features of a product, and good content will be able to help them realize this goal.

The third is that there are affiliates who make the mistake of promoting only one product. Consequently, customers are not given enough options to choose from. There is also the risk of generating fewer sales as compared to having more options for customers ponder about. It is always better to give them a few better alternatives than to give them only one.

The fourth is that there are affiliates who make the mistake of promoting too many products. As a result, customers are confused and end up beyond making a choice. It is perhaps good to give them only the best choices. This is because it is ultimately up to them to judge which one is the best for them to patronize.

All in all, affiliates that are doomed to fail in this business are those who do not exert enough effort to understand everything involved in the industry that they are in. Knowing their path step by careful step will prove to be beneficial to them, as there is no other way to succeed than to go through any path slowly but surely.

Andy

I often get a lot of questions from my students on where to go for resources that they can use to find good keywords.  If you are doing any type of PPC advertising. Here are 2 links that will come in handy to built your keyword mining list.

Link to the external Google free keyword tool

Link to the free Wordtracker keyword tool

To your success!

Andy

TechCrunch:

Business.com has closed another chapter in its long journey from a $7.5 million million domain name bought on a hope and a prayer, selling to RH Donnelley for $350 million.

RH Donnelley beat out Dow Jones and the New York Times during the bidding. The site had been on the block since late June and drew a lot of attention for outlandish valuations that turned out to be closer to the truth.

The buyer, RH Donnelley, is a directory and online local commercial search company. They are responsible for several white and yellow pages directories across the country.

Business.com has turned into a business search directory, so the synergy between the two directory sites seems straightforward. The site also received a huge bump in traffic starting back in February according to ComScore.

Photo by Business.com.

If you are new to the wordpress and is looking for the best Adsense ready themes, then here is a must read article by Don who runs the blog AffiliateWatcher.Com.

Don explains some of the most important criteria for a WordPress Adsense Theme that he looks for as followed.

Easy to use – I don’t want to spend hours upon hours modifying a theme. I don’t know PHP or CSS so I need a simple plug-n-play theme.

Easy on the eyes – You don’t want an ugly WordPress Theme! I know, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but an ugly theme will cost you money!

Widget Compatible – A WordPress Theme for Adsense should be widget compatable, although some in the list are not. Not that I will use them, but I prefer to have that option if I find myself wanting to use a widget.

Optimized Adsense Placement – Preferably the WordPress Theme you choose will already have the Adsense blocks placed in the theme and all you have to do is ad your Adsense Publisher ID code. Not all the themes that are listed are like that. The ones that aren’t designed that way are still easy to set up by adding your code to the PHP files. All you have to do is replace the developers Adsense Code with yours. It’s easier than it sounds.

SEO Friendly – I want organic traffic! The WordPress Themes in the Ultimate List are SEO Optimized and Friendly or they are darn near close!

Customizable – You don’t want your blog to look like everyone’s else. While not all of the WordPress Themes listed are easily customized, many are and that goes a long way in my book (remember when I said that I didn’t know PHP or CSS?)

Visit his site for a complete resource & guide to the Adsense Ready WordPress themes.

Enjoy!

Andy