Over the last twenty years, the economy has created a stress on pricing and profits. To build a strong company, you need excellent people. Defining your values, purpose, and what you stand for, as well as remaining true to them, will inspire trust and respect from your audience. Various theories …

Unsuccessful people are usually too busy to hold meetings. Better to keep it to a couple dozen pages and stick to the truly important material. It can also give up-and-comers the idea that you offer training and advancement. John Jacob Astor knew the minutest point about every part of his …

It is a fallacy that he has no claim on you when off duty. This will give both parties an opportunity to correct any misunderstandings before they impair performance. Use outside instructors when introducing new or technical subjects. These companies are market leaders and don't try to be all things …

Others may show how seemingly minor tweaks can produce outsized improvements in sales or profitability. You may get along for a time on 'shady' lines, but such success is only gained at the expense of ultimate loss. Business interaction is based on the physical resources and activities of interacting companies …

Fixed and variable costs both vary over longer periods of time. Even if you have assembled a brilliant managerial team, or have strong financial underpinnings, unless you have something to sell or at least plans to develop something new, you don t really have a business at all. But without …

Once upon a time suppliers were often happy to extend credit to new businesses; in other words supply them with the product they needed to buy and then invoice them for payment thirty days later. Most bank loans are short to intermediate term, meaning they are due in anywhere from …

The shoe giant Zappos has built its reputation by providing excellent customer service. There are incentives in place for employees to recruit others to your company and encourage their friends to apply for jobs. It may be that there s no money to give out at the moment. This will …

Do not give him the idea that you have no interest in the business except to get your salary, and no time to spare him except what you are paid for. Finding a mentor or another entrepreneur who has built a business of his or her own can give you …

It s hard to become the best player in a given field, because the title of best is subjective and difficult to evaluate. Changing conditions are the order of the day, for enlightenment has worked wonders. Let s face it, every new and successful enterprise is the result of someone …

How much do you want to have saved to pay for your children's educational costs? For example, the cost of a material purchased at retail has embedded in it the costs of all previous labor, profit, licenses, transportation, tariffs, etc., that helped bring it to the point of sale. Customers …

Most small companies hire people with potential and then let them learn on their own by watching others. Use your profitable business as a stepping stone into other businesses, strategic alliances, joint ventures, and investments, such as real estate, exclusive distribution agreements, rental companies, or any additional services that complement …

But there s no reason that only serial entrepreneurs should get the benefit of regular business-planning sessions. The same might go for a software startup that comes out with a new program just before Microsoft unveils a top-secret, long-term development effort to create something that does the same job for …

Is your 'loyal customer' strategy working? Unless you are focused on making money, know what it takes to make a profit, and have systems in place to track and monitor your progress, it won't happen. If you have identified a pain in your niche that hasn t been tackled, or …

So it's your job to let go and get them doing what you pay them to do. Or worse, that they will tell you and the rest of the world how they feel? Partners are like any other investor, and it would be a rare one who would come on …

The third theory says that wages are a result of bargaining, of competition in the labor market, a question of supply and demand. The systemized company produces the same consistent results every time. Sound management and operations begin with a clear set of company guidelines specifying how you want to …

Remember, time is of the essence to venture capitalists and other investors. A financial statement for one period is useful, but static. Experience has taught them that entrepreneurs who have their own assets at risk are more likely to stick to a business than those who have none of their …

And then, back at work the next day, they continue to do their job exactly as they did before. About 80 percent of business owners do not know what their employees really cost per hour. Which, of course, is fantastic news for you and your minimalist pared-down start-up. For example …

This is what I call profit-driven. Instead of spending all your time with weak people, spend time with your best team players who make you the most money. If you have ample experience, make it part of your selling proposition. And the kinds of people who discover the right business …

You can use a password-protected website to post your plan and then simply give people the web address and the password. They act and think like leaders. The approach selected may be affected by the downstream market strategy. It provides proof that the high and mighty can be humbled and …

Shaping what we learn turns us into the people we are today, and focused learning trains us to cope with situations and events and allows us to do things better, faster, and with more success.Training people at work is all about teaching, coaching, facilitating, and sharing the best ways …

The time is not long past when, because of prejudice, perversity or ignorance, many men believed that opportunity knocked only once at any man's door. Most of your competitors won't invest enough, if anything, on this important part of their business. The lingo of the business world ' cash flow, profit …

The economic theory of profit-sharing is that by inducing greater care and diligence on the part of the employe he will himself create the fund from which he is paid. So your problems pile up and multiply. No doubt you will look to choose a name that is attractive and …

Attempts by a single company to exercise control over wide areas of interaction risks generating antagonisms in particular relationships and may lead to inefficiencies in resource exploitation. But once paid for, geothermal energy is effectively free. In five years? When production systems are installed and used effectively, monthly evaluation meetings …

Writing solid website content is challenging, but not impossible. With planning, focus, and proper resource allocation you can create excellent content that entices readers and engages website visitors. We all started out as novices at one point; if you encounter one, be encouraging! Think like a customer, not the business …

301 links are permanent and tell Google that page B has replaced page A. 302 redirects are temporary. Even if you never change them, you're telling Google that you intend to change them. For example, on a Windows-based system you cannot have the files a.html and A.html residing …

You can use off-page optimization to improve your website's reputation and authority. This depends mainly on inbound links. Off-page optimization involves measures which ensure that good-quality, relevant backlinks are created in the long term. This is also referred to as "link building." Because of this change users are discovering that …

What other tips for evergreen content have been helpful for you? Make it easier for search engines to index your website. Start by getting into the mindset of a casual browser. Videos don't work for everyone, and some marketers argue that they do very little to help SEO. Yet, they …

Be Yourself. Write about what you know and make it a conversation with your readers. Keep it natural. People will find your content because they speak the same language and seek your advice. Those new to SEO will pour a lot of time and money into it and are often …

Now, this is an important issue to be addressed. High-quality thought leadership content is good for winning, keeping, and growing business. The technology used on your website can sometimes prevent Google from being able to find your content. Rich media (Flash, JavaScript, etc.) can lead to Google not being able …

SEO guidelines have been changing over the years. Since Google only wants to deliver the best possible results to its users, it will push sites with strong engagement up in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Here's the thing - people tend to mistake content marketing with publishing a few blog …

SEO is not rocket science (or anywhere close to it). If your content offers relatively little value - and it's generally easy to tell when it does - there's a possibility that you could be penalised or receive a thin content warning from Google, indicating that your site is at risk of …

Thin content is essentially too short and too easily duplicated, and when this occurs too often, you start to drop in rankings. Your best bet is to choose keywords most closely aligned to your website with the least amount of SEO competition. How do you convince consumers that the same …

It is all about your site's visibility. When the company successfully achieves such a position, it can gain a strong competitive advantage. The prospect of Google penalties strikes fear into the hearts of most webmasters -- or at least the ones who don't fully understand them. The biggest difference between traditional …

Now, with SEOs focusing on more in depth content, having a piece of content stand out organically is becoming increasingly more difficult. When you're ready to scale your strategy, consider hiring a professional SEO agency or a highly skilled independent contractor. First, stop assuming SEO is dead because the rules …

The basic premise is that a page will show up in search engine results because the website had mentioned the terms that were being searched for on the website page. Of course, many websites use the same keywords on the same page. Search engines constantly scan and index millions of …

A Dofollow is any link that hasn't been coded as a Nofollow, this code is a sign for search engines not to count the link. The absence of a Nofollow code automatically makes the link a Dofollow which is great for SEO. Google won't penalise sites that it can trust …

On-page SEO best practices allow us to communicate with search engines in a language that they can understand. Fortunately, search engines and researchers have compiled checklists based on common markup and important ranking factors. Smartphones, tablets, and text-messaging systems have created a new landscape and nearly a new language. As …

Once the major SEO work is done in the implementation phase, the focus will be on website maintenance. If you are ranked anywhere below that, the amount of eyes on your search result goes exponentially down. Funds devoted to search engines constitute nearly 50 percent of online advertising expenditures. Measuring …

Leave room for eventual hosting upgrades should your site make significant gains in popularity. It is vital for you to understand-even if at only a basic level-how search engines work, as they are not all created equal, nor do they produce identical search engine results pages (SERPs). To reach consumers …

By creating great relevant content with the right keywords? and having a few decent backlinks built to those content pages, you can easily rank in Google depending on the competition for that particular search. Competition with a comparable piece of content will beat you in the rankings if they have …

The reason SEO caught my interest so many years ago is that, fundamentally speaking, search is a garden that's always growing. You may not want certain pages of your site crawled because they might not be useful to users if found in a search engine's search results. If you do …

On top of that, their major updates, like Panda and Penguin, previously only rollout around once a year, if you're lucky. SEO gives an opportunity for a great deal of free advertising. Generally speaking you want to use your keyword as the anchor text for your internal linking whenever possible …

But it's not all about rankings and traffic. Writing search engine optimized content is also about engaging readers, building authority, and selling products. You need to look at your website's analytics to see what actually happens there. But how do you get strangers to visit your site before they know …

A product or brand that provides benefits consumers consider important and of higher quality than other brands enjoys salience. Ask any SEO experts, he or she will tell you off-page SEO is one of the key elements to a good Google rankings. Now, when you have a shop with a …

Sometimes Google throws little wrenches into the machine. Unique content signifies quality. By limiting your SEO efforts to Google, you might be missing out on some great opportunities for small business growth. Research proves the importance of gaining a presence on the first three pages returned by the search engines …

The marketing mix - price, product, distribution, and promotions -represents the starting point. Search engine optimisation is always evolving. cross-selling possibilities. Starting with relevancy between meta tags, content and going as far as using text modifiers to 'emphasize' certain keywords or content.

Top trends in organic links to watch

Keyword research is the basis of all search marketing. It is the art of explaining what you do in the language that people use, and thus it should probably be the basis of all your marketing activities, both on and off the web. An alternate name for the process in …

Many firms set behavioral goals for advertising programs. Beyond search-triggered alerts, there are also social alerts and automated recipe alerts. Short domain names are easier to remember. An increase in visitor traffic is always good news (unless your site is having performance problems).

The latest trends in link bait

Winning today is more and more about identifying a great niche and then ruthlessly pursuing a dominance in that niche. Getting to the top of search engine results often requires multiple factors to work in your favor. Mobile content should be short, useful, interesting, and easy to navigate. There's never …

Many chat rooms and boards have rules about what you can post. Thin content on category pages can also arise when drilling down into faceted category navigation until a page is reached with no products. Never underestimate the power and growing importance of Social Media channels. The shares you get …