Internet Home Business: 5 Tips To Make Your Web Site Grow Your Business

Your website can help you succeed with your internet home business, or it can cause you to fail if it is not optimally set up. In order for your internet home business to be successful, your website must well set up so that it attracts the traffic you need, and so that the visitors who will come to your website will make you some money. What hints must you heed in order to make sure that your website will effectively promote your products or services and encourage visitors to actually buy from you?

A tidy and professional looking website is very important if you want your internet home business to succeed. Your website is your store front, and you need to create very good first impressions, otherwise you lose potential customers.

Whatever your internet home business, you have a lot of competitors; there are thousands of other businesses and websites from which customers can choose from. Website surfers and customers expect an efficient and easy to navigate website where they can easily get what they are looking for. It is therefore important that you have a website which is easy navigate. This means that your website must clearly show what you are selling; information and images of the products you are offering must be easy to find in your shopping section of your website; and they must be very clear to view. It is also important that your pages load quickly. Various customers prefer various options for completing an order form and paying for the products or services; so it is important that you offer these options of your website for your customers, otherwise you will lose customers and potential sales.

Your website is there to make you money, so use various techniques that encourage visitors to buy. It is therefore important that you present your website in such a way that every visitor or customer is presented with an opportunity to browse your site and to buy more. More sales means your internet home business will succeed.

One way to entice visitors to buy is to include product reviews or satisfied customers’ feedback on your products, which tends to encourage visitors to buy. It is also important that you draw attention to the products’ key benefits. If you sell a wide range of products, next to any main product, include some other complementary products which the buyer may need. This will encourage your visitors to buy more that one product from your website, which means your internet home business will make your more money.

Customers need to feel secure while they do online business transactions or purchases. It is therefore important to have your contact details on your website if you want your internet home business to succeed. After-purchase service is very important, especially for online transactions. It is therefore critical that customers know who you are and how to contact you after they've made a purchase, or if they need further information about your product or service before they decide to purchase. Your contact information should be clearly visible on your site. The success of your internet home business depends on your credibility – and the first step in building your credibility is to be easily available for your customers.

It is also critical that you check your website’s emails regularly in case there is a customer needing some help. You will need to be available as needed so that you keep your business running smoothly and your customers satisfied, which potentially creates repeat business for you.

For your internet home business to be successful, it is important that you constantly improve your website or products/services, and you can achieve this by having a feedback form on your website. For your internet home business to succeed in the long term, you must be constantly improving your service and products, and stay in tune with your customers’ needs. By making sure that your website has the 5 features outlined above, your internet home business will be successful and profitable.

Transforms Dream Of Owning A Business Into Reality

Nobody loves being ruled by someone else. Each one of us wishes to rule others and become a boss. But, it is not easy. Entrepreneurial skills matched with adequate capital works towards the success of the business.
Lack of adequate capital is what stops most of us from realizing our dreams. There is good news for all those who want to start up their own business; now they can borrow small business start up loans to meet their funds need.

Desire to win is what makes the difference. Opportunities are unlimited; what you need is to find one. There is never lack of opportunity, but lack of information about the opportunities available is what becomes a hurdle in the path of success. Small business start up loan opens up opportunities for the UK residents to translate dreams into actuality.

Starting a business even at small scale requires huge sum of money. Usually, a person relies on his savings to meet cash requirements, which is not advisable. Savings should not be put at stake. One can use them to meet some future contingency. Some people prefer to borrow money from friends or family members, which may be an embarrassing phase for them. Small business start up loan can give you the funds you need and that too at low cost.

Amount you can borrow through small business loan will depend on the lender you decide to borrow from and your credit rating. Usually, small business startup loan provider offers loan for any amount ranging from £10,000 to £500,000. Small business startup loans are offered for 1 to 25 years. The loans are available in two forms - secured and unsecured small business start loan. To borrow a secured business loan a borrower has to put his collateral as a security against the loan. While, opposite is the case for unsecured loans, a borrower is not required to put any security against the loan and thus carry a higher rate of interest.

There are various lenders who can offer small business start up loan. Traditional lenders can offer you this loan, but it involves a lengthy process. A borrower has to personally approach these lenders and submit their loan application form by standing in the long queues. The whole loan process involves a lot of paper work and stress. However, there is one alternative option available to borrow money which makes the whole loan borrowing process fast and simple. Yes, I am talking about online lenders. Now, you can apply for an online loan which just involves filling up of online application form and that’s it. It gives you freedom from all the paper work and tensions involved in borrowing from traditional lenders. Collect loan quotes from all the lenders and compare them on the basis of loan term and fees charged by the lender. It will help you find the best and cheap small business startup loan.

Lenders while lending small business startup loan keep few points in consideration. Foremost thing, they check the credit rating of the borrower. In case, you don’t know what your credit score is, you can get it evaluated by any of the recognized credit rating agencies. If your credit score is above 650, then relax, you will get over flooded by best loan offers from several lenders. But, if your credit score is below 620 then there can be trouble for you, you may have problem in borrowing the small business loan. The best way is to work on your credit score, try to improve it by paying the old debts and due payments. Better the credit score higher is the possibility of getting a small business start up loan at cheap rates and that too very quickly.

One more aspect lenders keep into consideration is a borrower’s business plan and its feasibility. A business plan must be formed by doing thorough market research, ensure that all the key areas are covered in the business plan, focus on the opportunity and make sure to give description about the risk involved in the business such as competitors. A comprehensive business plan made with thorough research will make it easier for you to borrow a small business startup loan at better rates.

Starting up a new business is not an easy task. An individual needs to have the passion to achieve success, dedication and adequate finance to prove his capability. Small business start up loan can work as an important source of finance for people who desire to win and want to make a mark in the world of business.

10 Great iPhone Apps For Your Business

Many business professionals who use Apple iPhones would love to use them like company-issued BlackBerrys or laptops so they could tap into such things as their corporate e-mail systems, customer contact lists, and accounting systems.

While options remain limited for using the iPhone like a networked computing client, they are expanding. Consider that when Apple's App Store went online in July, Oracle and Salesforce.com were the only enterprise software vendors with offerings at the site. Within the past few months, however, at least a dozen additional offerings have come online at the App Store that were designed to give iPhone owners a mobile channel into employers' computer systems.

What follows is a look at 10 enterprise-software oriented iPhone applications new to the App Store. In many cases, getting these applications to work may require the involvement of a company's IT department or the presence of specific software applications on company servers.

1. Oracle recently posted Oracle Business Approvals for Sales Managers and Oracle Business Approvals for Managers on the App Store. With the first app, sales managers can use their iPhones to review sales quotes and approve or reject them, and chart sales forecasts, quotas, and actual numbers. The second application, designed more for a general management job, lets an iPhone user review expense reports, job postings, and purchase orders, for example. The free apps are designed for iPhone users whose companies have installed Oracle software connectors that provide the links back into corporate data systems.

2. For business analysts who use ActiveStrategy's enterprise performance-management software, there is now ActiveStrategy Mobile at the App Store. Users can access balanced scorecards and other performance management tools from their iPhones. It's free, but requires company installation of ActiveStrategy Enterprise Server 7.1 and Mobile Synchronization Server 1.0.

3. Omniture, the maker of software for monitoring Web site traffic and online marketing campaigns, is offering Omniture SiteCatalyst for the iPhone. Marketing employees and others who track Web site traffic can now view reports from their iPhones. Current Omniture customers can download the app for free and use the same user name and logon information they would use on a PC or laptop.

4. Salesforce.com recently posted an updated version of Salesforce Mobile for the iPhone, first made available in July at the App Store, to give salespeople access to contact and account information in Salesforce.com. The new version has a feature designed to appease corporate data-security watchdogs and keep sensitive customer data from landing in the wrong hands: if iPhone users go more than 10 minutes without using Salesforce Mobile, they're locked out and have to log back on with a five-digit password. It's free to Salesforce.com customers.

Open Source And SaaS Shake Up ECM

Collaboration and interoperability are shaking up enterprise content management from the outside, but forces are also emerging from within that have the potential to reshape the market. Two companies in particular, Alfresco and SpringCM, challenge the dominant deployment model of proprietary, premises-based software.

Alfresco and SpringCM attack the two major weaknesses of ECM vendors: cost and time. It's not unusual for a company to drop $1 million on ECM software and services, and Gartner says it can take six to 18 months to deploy.

With its open source ECM platform, Alfresco offers key ECM functions, including document management, Web content management, and collaboration. It borrows from the Red Hat model by distributing its software free under a GPL license and selling a subscription for support, service-level agreements, and access to a community knowledge base. That usually means a much lower cost--assuming the company has sufficient in-house knowledge, so the savings aren't eaten up hiring consultants to implement and integrate with applications.

But Alfresco touts advantages beyond the bottom line. First is the community, which Alfresco and its customers can draw on for innovation and continued development of the software. Alfresco says it has about 74,000 registered community members, though the number of active members is about 3,500. Another advantage is that companies can run Alfresco on the software and hardware platforms of their choice.

FLEXIBILITY IN THE CLOUD
SpringCM taps into a different trend reshaping the IT landscape: software as a service. SpringCM sells document and records management, paper and electronic documents capture, and application workflows as online services.

Look at what companies are doing with proprietary ECM deployments, and it suggests a lot of companies don't want an enterprise-wide system, contends SpringCM CEO Dan Carmel. "They're often process-specific, departmental deployments," he says. SaaS makes sense for departments that have a handful of applications that require ECM workflows and capabilities, Carmel says. Rather than deploy an on-premises platform and force it to fit different needs, departments can turn to the cloud and configure the application to their needs. One customer, Cox Communications, runs 13 different applications using SpringCM.

More important, SaaS gets a tool into end users' hands faster than with an on-premises deployment. "The demo is the product," says Carmel, meaning what you see online is what you get when you sign up. Carmel says the average consulting contract to configure the application and get it on people's desktops takes from eight to 40 hours. SaaS also means less up-front capital cost, though the trade-off is a monthly per-user fee.

These upstarts are both run by industry insiders. Alfresco co-founder and CTO John Newton was a Documentum founder. SpringCM CEO Carmel was a VP at Interwoven. Phil Beckman, SpringCM's VP of research and development, was a director at Open Text.

Photo illustration by Sek Leung