Organize and Streamline Your Home-Based Business

When you are working for yourself, the responsibility for staying on top of projects, communicating with clients, and collecting money you're owed falls completely to you. There's no boss checking in to make sure you are meeting deadlines, no team to keep you on track.

It helps to be naturally organized. If you're not, you can learn to be. "Most people aren't naturally good golfers, but they can be taught how to do it," says Lisa Kanarek, founder of WorkingNaked.com in Dallas.

If you don't put in some effort, you'll have a tough time being successfully self-employed. Mark Miller, a self-employed marketing specialist who founded High Impact Marketing in Los Angeles, says he learned this the hard way. "I have never been a particularly organized or neat person in terms of keeping my things in order. Unfortunately, those traits did not translate well into the business world," he says.

After spending hours each week digging through "50 archeological layers" of paperwork on his desk and missing a couple of crucial project follow-ups, Miller says, he realized he needed help: "I got a couple of books and took a couple courses on getting rid of clutter." He learned to use a hard-copy planner, backed up by electronic Outlook task and appointment reminders. He combined that with a filing system that turned his horizontal layers into labeled, vertical files and has been more successful ever since, he says.

You don't need to spend a fortune or invest a lot of time implementing a complicated system, Kanarek says. "It's okay if you're not completely organized. Don't beat yourself up. Just find something that works for you and fits into your work style." She recommends a few basics: Designate a specific workspace in your home, set up a regular work schedule, and establish a filing system for your paperwork.

 

An Office Space Helps You Focus

With today's technology, it's easy to carry your computer and phone around and work in your kitchen, living room, or at your local coffeehouse. But if you don't have an office space with a desk and a comfortable chair, you will never feel serious about working at home, Kanarek says. "Having a home base, where your printer and your files are going to be, mentally gets you focused."

The same goes for having a regular schedule, whether you work days, evenings, or from midnight to 6 a.m. "Get up at roughly the same time every day and work out a routine. It can be flexible, but if you wait until 11 a.m. or noon to get to your desk, it's going to be hard to get any momentum going," she says.

Frequently, self-employed individuals have so much work to do that setting priorities becomes a challenge. Andrew Hindes, president of the In-House Writer, a copywriting business based out of his Los Angeles home, says he updates his to-do list weekly, dividing the tasks into four categories: urgent and important; important but not urgent; urgent but not important; and neither urgent nor important.

"What I find is that the third category—urgent but not important—steals a lot of time from things that are essential to my business but don't have a deadline, like marketing and touching base with clients," he says. "I find that I accomplish a lot more by having that list and making sure I accomplish some things in each quadrant every week.“Outsource Tasks You Hate Doing

Hindes also outsources tasks that he is not good at and does not enjoy—something he has found crucial to successful self-employment. "I have a bookkeeper who comes in every two weeks and pays the bills, deposits the checks, and uses QuickBooks to track my expenses. It saves me so much time and so many headaches; it's the best $200 a month I could ever spend," he says.

Automating tasks and streamlining e-mail are additional techniques that may help you. Karl Goldfield, who worked as an independent sales consultant for four years, says he increased his efficiency by keeping his e-mail communications to three sentences maximum and establishing two blocks of time per day to read and respond to messages, unless they were urgent.

"Studies have shown that people spend 25 percent of their day stopping work to check and respond to e-mail. I had a virtual assistant who did nothing but go through my e-mail and manage my task list," he says. "I was paying her for 30 or 40 hours a week. It was a nightmare." After he began using Teambox, online collaboration software that streamlines and organizes e-mail, Goldfield liked the product so much he became the company's vice-president of sales and marketing 14 months ago. That free tool and similar products allow users to scroll through e-mails and convert them into tasks or delegate them to others. "It organized how I work. Having a centralized hub for communication makes it easier to see what's going on and find what I need, when I need it," he says.

Five Ways Business Owners Cope With Rising Costs

If you build it, cook it, sew it, ship it, or import it, chances are your cost of business has spiked over the past two years. Even Internet entrepreneurs are feeling the sting of a weak dollar. "As we expand our coverage of hotels in Europe, we pay people in euros and pounds, but we make money and raise money in dollars," says Elie Seidman, chief executive of Oyster.com, a hotel research and booking website in New York with 40 employees. As commodity prices rise by double-digits and the greenback falls, business owners across industries are struggling.

Passing on higher costs to customers chastened by the Great Recession is getting tougher. With gas prices around $4 per gallon, up about 25 percent from 2010, the more consumers spend at the pump the less they have left for discretionary spending. "Consumers are sensitive to prices because the past few years have trained them to be this way," says Lisa Mayock, co-founder of eight-year-old women's fashion brand Vena Cava in New York. "We can't raise prices and expect the customer to just deal with it.“

Searching for ideas to protect profit margins in your own business? Five strategies from entrepreneurs across the country follow.

1.Introduce entry prices. If raising prices is unavoidable, soften the blow for existing customers by introducing new, lower-priced items. In July 2009, Mayock and her co-founder Sophie Buhai introduced Viva Vena Cava, a new dress line featuring lower-cost fabrics, including jersey, which they fashioned into less-expensive dress styles. "Keeping a range of prices ensures we won't exclude customers," says Mayock. Sales have climbed 10 percent at the four-person company since the line's introduction.

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2.Shift production location. Reduce the bite of rising transportation costs by moving production closer to customers. SOL, a Palm City (Fla.) solar lighting manufacturer, imports components from China to build solar lights in Florida—only to ship half of them to customers abroad. To offset the impact of rising copper prices and fuel surcharges, the 45-employee company is in the process of setting up production in Africa and China. "It will be far more efficient to ship components from all over the world to a factory closer to our customers in Africa and the Middle East," says CEO Michael Sonnenfeldt.

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3.Alter products. In industries where there is little forgiveness for price increases, modifying your offerings can help build customers' loyalty. Although its food costs are up 20 percent, Kiran's, an upscale Houston restaurant that employs 42, has reduced the cost of its prix-fixe lunch without shrinking its Texas-size portions. "Seasonal changes in the menu allow the flexibility to weed out ingredients that rocket in cost, while the cross-training of employees has [cut] payroll expenses," says Kiran Verma, owner and chef of the five-year-old restaurant.

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4.Ensure that your product stands out. By offering uniqueness, business owners can rise above price pressures. The dark chocolates and fruit treats marketed by 10-person Kopali Organics in Miami are sourced from independent farmers in Central America. Touting the sustainable farming methods their farmers use differentiates Kopali and insulates the business. Revenue is up 50 percent over last year, says President Jacqueline Holmes.  Similarly, Capital Builders & Designers is reacting to a 10 percent rise in steel and cement prices by selling homes equipped with so-called smart technologies. Nina Magon, president of the six-person construction company in Houston, says she ignored the gizmos in better times but is now betting they'll set her homes apart.

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5.Sell abroad. A declining dollar makes U.S. goods more attractive overseas. Hedge your currency risk by seeking more customers in foreign markets. With broadcast industry budgets notoriously tight in the U.S. over the past 24 months, Weather Central, a 178-employee provider of professional television weather graphics and forecasts, made significant headway selling abroad—particularly in China, where weather technology budgets are increasing, says Bill Baker, president of the Madison (Wis.) company.

Double Digit Growth on Online Ad Spending

Analyst firm eMarketer is predicting double-digit growth on online ads through 2015. Spending on online ads will hit $50 billion that year — that’s almost double last year’s spending figure. Video will continue to be the fastest-growing format in online advertising, according to eMarketer. Spending for video ads hit $1.42 billion in 2010, but will reach $7.11 billion in 2015. Another factor in the rise: a shift in local advertising from newspapers and Yellow Pages to online ads. eMarketer’s figures are by no means the only ones. The IAB reported a 23% jump in online advertising revenues in the first quarter of this year. The IDC also estimated that global online ad spending grew 14.3% in Q1. Online spending is far outpacing increases in traditional advertising. Nielsen estimates global ad spending rose 8.8% in the first quarter, and TV advertising was up 11.9%. U.S. advertising was up 5.9% in the first quarter, according to Nielsen, which didn’t include online ad spending in the report.

5 Suggestions for Naming Your Store

An online store’s name is one of its most important assets and a potent part of its brand. In some sense the business name can define its identity. Since business naming is so important, you don’t want to simply draw a name out of a hat or let your eight-year-old choose. Rather what follows are five suggestions for naming your online store.

These suggestions do not constitute everything there is not know about naming, but they should help an entrepreneur start well.

1. Decide What You Want to Communicate

The first step toward a great business name is to decide what you want that name to say to prospective customers about your business. Once you have a general idea of what you want to communicate, try writing your message out in a single sentence. Then make that sentence shorter and shorter until you have just one or two words.

2. Make it Easy to Pronounce

In many cases, online startups will have one or two major geographic regions or cultures in mind when they market, so it makes sense to choose a business name that customers from those cultures or regions can easily pronounce. For specific, albeit negative, examples, you probably would not want to name your online store Tadhg, Galifianakis, Miele, or Keneuoe — which are all real names of businesses or people — if you were trying to sell to English speakers.

3. Try a Name Strategy

You may want to consider one of several naming strategies or techniques that have been popular of late.

•       Using real words that have a meaning you want to communicate.

•       Reasonable misspellings, like "Flickr."

•       Make up words that sound real like "Zappos," which is similar to the Spanish word for shoes, zapatos.

•       Make up a completely whimsical name.

•       Blend real words with prefixes and suffixes.

•       Use a personal or family name.

4. Check for Competition

You should also consider what your competitors are named. For example, Motorola and Microsoft produce the "Xoom" (pronounced zoom) and "Zune" MP3 players respectively. These names do sound similar, perhaps even too similar. The goal here is to have a name that is on par with the competition or better, but it should also be differentiated so that there is no way customers can confuse your business with its competitors.

5. Test Your Name

When you have narrowed a list of prospective names to five or less, consider running some tests. Show the list to a group that is representative of your target customer. This group might be folks you can find in your community, or you may need to use an online survey.  As an example, if you are trying to sell to teens that ride skateboards, make sure that you test names with folks from that group. Never assume you know how customers will react to a particular name. Likewise, if your store will aim at brides, ask brides or newlyweds about the names.

Majority of Web Users Want More Fraud Protection from Retailers

There was a time when online crime and click fraud seemed to exist outside the consciousness of most online shoppers. Those days appear to be long gone. A new survey released by privacy research firm the Ponemon Institute and fraud prevention services provider ThreatMetrix says as much, with a whopping 85% of respondents indicating that they worry about becoming a fraud victim as a result of their online usage. By comparison, 80% of those polled expressed similar concerns the last time the two entities ran a similar study. Ponemon and ThreatMetrix polled 607 regular internet users for the latest survey, and included a wide range of activities under its definition of “online fraud”, including credit card scams,identity theft, phishing, and spam as well as attacks that target personal information and account details under false pretenses. “A lot of fraudulent activity goes unreported today, making it difficult for online businesses to fully understand the prominence and seriousness of the problem,” says Reed Taussig, ThreatMetrix CEO. “With a rise in online transactions and activities across devices, more needs to be done to educate online merchants, banks, social outlets and other businesses on how to decrease fraudulent activity.” With that increased awareness of the threat of online fraud comes a desire on the part of most web users to see more protections from e-tailers, even if that means giving up some of the privacy they enjoy while shopping online: almost three-quarters of those polled in the survey said they’d be okay with trusted online businesses placing cookies on their computers in order to authenticate them; 82% said they expect businesses to offer alternative authentication measures if cookies proved ineffective. “Consumers expressed much more willingness to share data like Internet Service Providers, computer serial number, type and make, rather than information like date of birth and telephone number,” says Larry Ponemon, chairman of the Ponemon Institute. The pool of respondents used in the survey was certainly a good one to speak on the issue of online fraud in general: 42 percent of those questioned said they have already been the victim of fraud before. Unfortunately, their responses also make clear that most fraud victims don’t do much in response to being duped. Only 19% of those who had suffered from fraudulent activities actually notified the involved online business directly of it, while the rest didn’t report the crimes at all.

Local.com extended their distribution agreement with AT&T Interactive

Local.com extended their distribution agreement with AT&T Interactive today. Under the arrangement, AT&T Interactive’s YP.com ad listings will be given premier placement on Local.com search results.

“As a part of the YP Local Ad Network made up of over 300 publishers, Local.com supports our focus of helping advertisers grow their business. By extending our agreement, we are providing them access to one of the industry’s most comprehensive databases of local ads and localized content,” said Todd Rose, vice president of business development at AT&T Interactive.

“Combined with AT&T Interactive's reach across other popular media channels such as mobile and iPTV, we are giving advertisers the opportunity to increase their reach and drive leads to their business.”

Gas Pump Prices Give E-tailers Another Solid Month of Sales

Paying a ton of money to put gas in your car is no fun, make no mistake about it. But there does seem to be one positive side-effect of rising fuel prices lately: they’re boosting online sales substantially.

Online spending increased 19.2 percent year over year in April according to the latest MasterCard Advisors SpendingPulse report, marking a sixth consecutive month of double-digit e-commerce growth

The strong April showing follows up March’s 16.1 percent year over year increase in e-commerce spending, which was also widely believed to be high due to the increased costs of gas that are forcing many Americans to curtail trips to the mall and shop from home instead. It’s a trend that MasterCard expects to continue in the near future.

“We can expect consumers to make fewer shopping trips, especially on weekends, and this may contribute to an ever stronger growth for e-commerce,” says Michael McNamara, vice president, research and analysis for SpendingPulse.

Quite a few individual sectors saw solid increases during the month of April:

Online shoe sales were up 20 percent year over year;

Online sales of women’s apparel increased by 15 percent, making it two straight months that saw jumps of at least 15 percent in that particular category. Total apparel sales, including those in brick and mortar stores, was up 10.4 percent;

Consumer electronics bought online also grew 9.1 percent, for an eighth consecutive month of growth. Overall electronics and appliance sales, including brick and mortar purchases, actually declined 1.8 percent in April;

Overall luxury sales had a seventh consecutive month of growth, up 9.6% year over year.

As always, MasterCard bases its SpendingPulse reports on retail sales using all payment forms, including credit and debit cards of all brands, cash and checks, in its network.

Email Plus Social via Incredimail

Consumer application company Incredimail has integrated Facebook into its popular email product offering, giving users access to the popular social network from their desktop. You may be asking yourself who uses desktop mail anymore. The answer apparently is quite a few: Incredimail.com receives well over 3 million unique visitors per month (according to Compete), has amassed a 600,000 strong fan base on Facebook, and has sold more than two million of its product. Incredimail hopes this feature will eventually lead it towards becoming a full-fledged, multi-purpose communication product - likely now a key to survival with the increased use of cloud-based email. Users of the platform's new feature will be able to read and post comments or updates to and from Facebook, automatically synchronize their address book with their Facebook friends, upload photos to Facebook with one click, and download and search photo albums. “This is the first step in evolving IncrediMail into a multi-purpose communications product. Based on our consumer research we identified a need from our users, primarily consumers over the age of 40, who said they wanted help making social networking easier to use,” said Josef Mandelbaum, IncrediMail’s CEO. “We are proud to be one of the first email products to integrate Facebook in such a manner and provide our users a simple, safe and fun Facebook interaction right from the desktop.”

Facebook’s ‘Like’ button becomes force in e-commerce

Whether you just bought an airline ticket or a pair of jeans online, chances are an Internet search preceded the transaction. Now Facebook hopes to make its vast web of online social connections another central ingredient in the complicated dance between retailer and consumer. One year after Facebook began distributing its "Like" button to millions of websites - an average of 10,000 websites a day connect with Facebook - the Palo Alto social network says it is becoming a force in online commerce. Facebook points to partnerships with companies like Levi’s, which has a Facebook Like button positioned next to every article of clothing on Levi.com, and Ticketmaster, whose website includes a Facebook app that lets people see whether their friends have already bought a ticket to concerts they are interested in attending. Just as people have always talked to their friends before making a significant purchase, "your mode of discovery online is starting to look more like your mode of discovery offline," said Dan Rose, a former Amazon.com executive who is vice president of partnerships and platform marketing at Facebook. Facebook and Ticketmaster say that when the ticket retailers’ customers post a specific event they are attending or might attend to their friends’ Facebook News Feed, it generates $5.30 of direct ticket sales.

Meanwhile, a report from Harris Interactive and CityGrid Media said that the Like button is already trumping reviews onwebsites such as Yelp as the primary way that people show support for businesses online. Facebook took another major e-commerce step last week when it rolled out a trial "Deals" service in the San Francisco Bay Area and four other U.S. cities to compete with Groupon and other online discount deal websites. The Like button is a prominent feature. Still, some skeptics say the Like button won’t ever become the mainstay of e-commerce that search is. A recent survey of online retailers by the market research firm Forrester found that 59 percent said the returns from social marketing remain unclear, while just 28 percent said social marketing strategies had helped their business grow. "The problem is the fundamental flaw of this whole expectation. People think that shopping is social, because teenagers go to the mall in groups," said Sucharita Mulpuru, the Forrester analyst who wrote the recent skeptical report about Facebook’s future in e-commerce. "But most shopping is not social. People don’t go to Walmart in groups. They don’t go to the grocery store in groups.“ While Mulpuru says there are niches where Facebook can become a major force in e-commerce - ticketing for example, because concerts, baseball games and other events are inherently social - those successes will be the exception rather than the rule.

Ten Great Ecommerce Ideas for June 2011

Ten Great Ecommerce Ideas for June 2011

Practical eCommerce asks industry insiders each month to share a great, innovative idea that could help an ecommerce company. Here’s what ten of them had to say for the June 2011 installment of "Ten Great Ecommerce Ideas."

Offer Guest Checkout Option

“Many consumers will not purchase through a website if it requires them to register first. Be sure to offer the option to check out as a guest. Customers will utilize the guest checkout feature so they don't have to set up an account. And, by not requiring a login to place an order, you will almost certainly improve your conversion rate. Also, websites that don’t require a login to comment will see a dramatic increase in comments.”

Profit Sense Innovations