Your Questions About How To Do Share Business Online
Donald asks…
What is the best solution for receipts & business card entry for someone doing remote work?
I am trying to find a better way to organize receipts and business cards. My boss lives 50 miles away so we are trying to reduce the need for travel.
Is there hardware & software that will allow you to scan the receipts and send them to another person for data entry? The goal is to have the information organized in Excel on an expense report format.
For the business cards, I am looking for something similar. ACT! is the contact management database that is used and it would be great if something exported to ACT directly, or at least to Excel for revision and importing.
Any suggestions, tips, advice, experience, or guidance would be appreciated!
Jere answers:
Google doc is the best way of share your data. Simple online share documents..
Lisa asks…
How can i increase my sales for my startup business?
I have a small startup online business eith newly launched website. My products are related to home accessories. I am looking to get maximum sales from my newly launched website. How can i increase my sales. Suggest me?
Jere answers:
There are many paths you can take online. The first place to look to get your name “out there” is a technique, or process, called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This is a marketing strategy that many site owners fail to undertake. It starts with developing key words to reside within the code of your home page (meta tags) and progresses through the submission of your site to search engines. It is a process and there are many steps. I would suggest researching SEO online (or even buying a book). There are even companies that you can hire to do this for you. Properly executed SEO combined with banners and link sharing can really help increase site traffic as well. Have you ever considered blogging? That is another potential source of traffic.
John asks…
What is the cheapest way my new business can accept credit cards?
I am starting a new parts business and I want to be able to accept credit cards (we already accept PayPal), but it seems so expensive for a business just starting out! How can I do this?
Jere answers:
Accepting credit cards won’t ever be cheap. Visa, Mastercard, and the rest all want their money, and so do the companies that process the cards.
Everyone’s hand is out and getting their share before you see your funds. It’s terrible but a fact of business life.
The alternative I find to be quite useful is ProPay, which is owned by Wells Fargo. Check out what they offer and their prices.
With ProPay, you’re able to process credit cards online, by telephone, and through a card reader if the customer’s credit card is handed to you. There’s much more to consider, and ProPay’s site features an FAQ and price list for each level of service.
What I like about them is that there’s one yearly cost – no monthly fees such as $25 or more per month charged by merchant account firms. Those fees eat away at your profits.
I was glad to get away from the constant money takers and opt for ProPay and PayPal. Every credit card processor has fee structures, but some are manageable while others are astronomical.
Good luck to you.
Shirley George Frazier
Author and Small Business Expert
Michael asks…
I currently own an online business which is becoming very popular?
I’m 18 years old and run an online business which has recently started making fairly good profits for a firm in its first year. As I’m primarily an entrepreneur, not a techie, I asked two of my friends to code the website for me (which was a fairly big job, taking them around 6 months). I now need to know about legal issues. Which taxes do I need to start paying and how do I have my name as the legal owner of the business?
Thank you.
Jere answers:
As soon as you start doing anything towards running a business you are self-employed, and you should inform HMRC of this. They will then arrange for you to pay Class 2 national insurance contributions (about £2.50 per week) and to send you a self-assessment form for income tax at the appropriate time.
In order to make sure you pay the right tax you need to keep accurate records. For this you need to keep receipts and/or invoices for all the money you pay out. And you need to keep copies of the receipts and/or invoices that you issue to your customers to record the money coming in. Ideally you will also keep a set of business accounts that records all these transactions as you go.
If you were operating on your own then ownership of the business would be obvious. Essentially you *are* the business, so there is no argument. And ownership of any assets used (eg computers, offices, etc) will be obvious as well.
The problem you have is the involvement of your two friends. If you paid them to produce the software then they are merely suppliers of your business. However, if they did it for nothing then it could be that they are actually partners, and so are entitled to a share of the profits.
If you paid them for the software, then they will actually own the copyright to it, unless your agreement explicity provided that all rights would be transferred to you. This does not necessarily allow them to prevent you from using it, but it might, and it almost certainly prevents you from improving it, and it almost certainly allows them to use it for themselves as well.
If they are partners then the software will probably be owned by the partnership, so you all have equal rights to it, and so none of you can then use it outside of the partnership for other purposes.
The problem you have if you don’t sort this out, is that if you suddenly make a fortune these guys could decide that they want their cut. You don’t necessarily need to involve a solicitor, but a written contract in which they confirm they acted as software suppliers only, and they agree to transfer all rights to you in return for a final payment would be useful.
Linda asks…
Is there a way to advertise my home based online business on the internet and actually get results?
I have an excellent opportunity to share with people. It’s absolutely free! But I don’t know how to advertise and get results.
Jere answers:
Wow, the kind of question you are asking here makes you really vulnerable because people who are hungry for your money will be here presenting to you with many solutions which some could be scam.
Make sure you research for whatever opportunity that is presented to you before you decide to head on for it or even pay for a scam like me a couple of months ago. Just go to google and type in the “opportunity” followed by the word “scam”.
If things shows, it could be ugly…stay away from them…
Alright, I can only speak from my 5 year experience marketing online.
If you want to advertise, you’ve gotta take risk. Try Miva Ads, Yahoo Overture & Msn Ad centre Pay per click because they are cheaper than google.
You can test water first before you even go full out to promote any opportunity and waste hours of effort online. I remember when I first started, I was excited about an MLM company and it’s potential only to realized that it’s all hype.
Anyway, if you want immediate results and not waste any time or money. Go advertise your opportunity using pay per click.
You will instantly get targeted qualified traffic to your opportunity.
Within 24hrs, you could spend $20 but You would know if your opportunity could sell or cannot sell. Instantly you can know if you were being hyped up.
Just imagine, it takes you no more than 10mins to setup the pay per click advertisement and you just sit back and wait for the results.
Sure, there might be some risk that you could lose your $20-$50 but think about it. If you did not try, you would not know…and if you do not know..you would spend more hours or even months trying to make it work…how much more hours $$$$ would you be losing.
Sometimes people are so concerning with losing that $50 that they keep finding ways to do it with lesser risk and end up spending more time…and the time spend is definitely more than the $50 plus they would never know if the program they bought into works…
I hope this helps you out…
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