Today's Entrepreneur - First Steps to Starting Your BusinessWritten by ReGina Crawford-Martin
Today’s Entrepreneur By ReGina Crawford-Martin President of G Styl Productions Incorporated, Cleveland, OH Independent Writer First Steps to Starting Your Own Business Before business cards, flyers, and postcards, there are several steps you need to take when starting your own business. First Step. Securing your chosen company name. There are two parts to this step; registering your company name with state in which company is located, and registering you company name as a domain name on internet. The process for registering with any state is fairly simple, and is handled by Secretary of State for that state. You will have to fill out a Name Registration form, and pay a filling fee which differs from state-to-state. You don’t have to decide if and how to incorporate at this point, you are just reserving your company name for future incorporation. Keep in mind that all businesses do not need to be incorporated. For instance if you never plan on expanding business and hiring employees, you don’t need to incorporate. Registering a domain name on internet is also a simple process. There are a number of websites that allow checking for name availability, as well as registering your name if it is available for purchase. The cost for this is relatively inexpensive, ranging from $8.00 per year to $15.00 per year. Why is this step so important? It prevents anyone else from doing business under that name, and it protects you against a law suit if you operate a business under a company name registered by someone else prior to your use of name. As for internet, you don’t want to have to purchase your domain name from another person once your business takes off. Believe me, they will charge you a premium price if they sense how much you want name. Keep in mind that even though you have registered a domain name, you don’t have to create a website right away. The company you register with will automatically display a page when domain name is typed in, thus you don’t have to worry about web site design or hosting services. Second Step. Register Business with government and Dun and Bradstreet. You can register with IRS online at http://www.irs.gov by selecting Businesses, then Employer ID Numbers, Apply Online, and Apply Online Now. Your number is returned on screen in under five minutes, and there is no fee. You can register with Dun and Bradstreet online at http://smallbusiness.dnb.com by selecting Manage Your Business Credit, then D-U-N-S Number. Your Duns Number will be e-mailed to you within a few days, and there is also no fee. After receiving your Duns Number, go back to Duns website and register for eUpdate. This will allow you to update your company information as necessary. When your Dun’s number is received you can register your business with Central Contractor Registration (CCR) system. This is done online at http://www/ccr/gov, and Start New Registration. This system is accessed by all levels, Federal to all 50 states, of government for all government contracts regardless of amount of contract.
| | Achieving financial freedom with Network Marketing on The Internet - Part 5Written by Tasos Vasilopoulos
Achieving financial freedom with Network Marketing on The Internet By Tasos Vasilopoulos Part 5 - Link Popularity - How to build it Introduction This article makes part of a series of 20 articles. The subject of this series is creation and promotion of a website as a cost-effective method to establish a profitable home based business on Internet. In my previous article, “Achieving financial freedom with Network Marketing on The Internet – Part 4 - Pagerank - What is it - How it can affect success of your business”, I have explained to you what Pagerank is and reason you have to obtain and keep a high Pagerank for your web pages, especially your home page. In this article I will explain to you what “Link Popularity” is and why it is vital for your home business to work hard to build it. Link Popularity – how to build it Building link popularity (LP) of your website is method you have to implement in order to start receiving well-targeted visitors without investing any money at all, but your personal time and effort. The more time you invest, more quickly you will receive results of your work. Link popularity of a web page is sum of all incoming links to this web page. Incoming link for a web page is a link from another web page to this web page. Outgoing link for a web page is a link from this web page to another web page. A strong link is a link from an important web page, with theme similar to theme of your web page and with right linking text, which must include keyword of your web page. Let us assume that theme of your website is “home based business” and keyword of your home page is “home based business opportunity”. There are some rules that you have to take in consideration while building your LP: · Never try to fool Search Engines by inserting links to FFA pages. Free For All (FFA) web pages are web pages where you can post a link to your web page, giving your email address in exchange. Theoretically owner of FFA page builds a nice list of email address to use in his email campaign of selling his product and you get more exposure for your website and another link to add to your LP. But, truth is that few people give their working email address to such pages. Instead they keep a “trash” email address they use in such circumstances. Also, these FFA pages include a links management system that takes out old links to make space for new links. This way your link may disappear in a few hours. Plus, there are so many links in an FFA page that their strength is virtually insignificant. And finally, Search Engines keep a note for websites that receive links from FFAs. If percentage of your incoming links from FFA pages becomes a significant part of your LP, then they may “ban” you, they may take you out of their listings. And here ends your online business adventure for this website of yours and domain name you use. · Never try to fool Search Engines by inserting links to Guestbooks for same reasons as above. You will get some links irrelevant to your theme and mostly you will risk to get “banned” from listings of Search Engines. · Never try to fool Search Engines by inserting links to Link Farms. These web pages are worst danger of all. Link farms are web pages composed only from links. There are websites with web pages only of this kind. They have a good “page rank”, but they represent biggest danger for your website. Keep away from them. · Never try to build your link popularity by purchasing links from companies that “sell” them to “help” you increase it. There are companies that offer links to you in exchange of money. You pay $100 and get 50 “good” links. Do not trust them. Even if links are “clear” (no FFA, no Guestbooks, no Link Farms) there are good chances that they come from irrelevant websites and that they come from pages with hundreds of other links also, so their importance to your LP is questionable. · Keep your LP focused. Try to get reciprocal links from websites of similar themes. Do not spread your links to many categories. Getting 100 links from websites about traveling won’t be as effective as getting 15 links from websites about “home based business”. Plus they will cost you in time. Take in consideration that process of requesting one reciprocal link may need half an hour to completed. Just to request link. Which means find a website of similar theme, exam its links exchange procedure if any, create link in your pages and upload them and finally, communicating with webmaster of other website to request link. I know of websites that have a Pagerank of 4 and 50 incoming links, yet they have a better position in listings than websites with similar keyword, a pagerank of 6 and 200 incoming links.
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