Business Matters Articles

Confidence Matters

woman celebrating a successful deal or purchase

In business, as with any area of life that requires communication, being confident is crucial for one’s success. People can sense, smell, hear and read your confidence level. You need to believe in yourself so that you can ensure that others will want to believe in you and your abilities.

The way you stand or sit or position or hands during conversation are all telltale signs of your self confidence. Also, the words you say, the pace and rhythm of your speech and the words you use to communicate your message are all relevant factors for you presentation to the world and to potential clients / customers.

You need portray an image of confidence and passionate belief in your capabilities to cause others to want to employ your skills. Even in securing business partner you need to prove your self-worth.

Based on your belief in your skill-set, a possible partner will determine whether or not you are worthy of their time and effort and skills. If you do not firmly believe in your abilities or skills, it is not likely that through sympathy or empathy a possible business partner or client will want to enter into a working relationship with you.

To present yourself a competent business person you need to dress to impress and wear your clothes with great poise. You need to speak with confidence, always sounding sure of what you a saying. Avoid relying on quotes, common phrases, and colloquial terms. Above all do not ramble on and on about anything and do not go on a tangent in your discussion. The ability to stay focused on the specific topic of consideration demonstrates linear thinking. By keeping the conversation brief you show others that you complete set tasks quickly. All these noted attributes demonstrate professionalism.

People want to work with someone who is professional and who is more about getting things done than just theorizing on what one might want to do at some point in the future. Discuss the project overall, set clear goals to complete the work and outlines timelines to achieve benchmarks for work completion. Budgeting and total cost for work is important. But be sure you have sold the potential client on your value and worth before quoting a fee.

If you are not sure of your abilities to accomplish work, then why should or would anyone else be certain of your relevance to their goals.

April 22, 2015/by Zack Steel

Business Matters Articles

Cash in a Flash

Cash in a Flash

What is this phenomenon known as Crowd Funding? One might mistakenly believe it means that one can fund a crowd. It is actually the reverse option. You can get a crowd to fund you.

How does Crowd Funding work and who will give you money? What do these people want or expect from you?

Crowd Funding was initialized into society as a result of the global community mindset that has become commonly shared by Internet users locally and internationally. This option for fundraising is available for individuals, businesses and would-be start up companies, among other entities.

You tell your story by way of a profile and provide a short personal or professional video that explains your reason for wanting so-called community assistance to help you advance in your life situation. Then various people who peruse these websites, at their leisure can choose to contribute money to your campaign. When you reach your funding goal you get paid by the Crowd Funding hosting website, less their commission for permitting your campaign on their platform.

There are popular Crowd Funding websites for individuals such as GoFundMe.com or Rally.org. Options for Crowd Funding include, but are not limited to: Equitynet.com, Indiegogo.com, Kickstarter.com. If you need assistance to design and manage your Crowd Funding campaign then there is professional management and representation available from: CrowdFundInc.net. There is a even a membership association known as the National Crowd Funding Association of Canada that host events and offers useful resources to be successful in Crowd Funding (Ncfacanada.org).

Speaking of events, is anyone getting married soon? Want your gifts to be in the form of cash rather than items that you will never use? If so, then you should register with CrowdGifts.com today. Let your invitees / guests know that you have register and advise them that they are encouraged to donate generously to your wedding fund. Certainly you will use the money raised for something relevant to your new start in life with your spouse, such as a house.

This website lists the seemingly top ten Crowd Funding websites on the World Wide Web: CrowdFunding.com. If you are a Crowd Funding website that may need help in dispensing money from raised from Crowd Funding campaigns then there is help from this website: Tipalti.com, which offers payment options, such as pre-paid debit cards, e-cheques and much more.

Why wait? Set your goal, get funded and spend the money to make your dream a reality!

April 16, 2015/by Zack Steel

Business Matters Articles

Optimized Madness

Are you on the front page of Google? Is your website on Google? Is it searchable? Can you find it? Do you need to search by using as an exact phrase the domain name in full?

I create SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Campaigns for clients. I also design websites. Whenever I need assistance with my SEO campaign strategy I hire a top SEO specialist who has proven to be extremely successful on prior projects. At all costs, I avoid optimized madness.

Whenever I hire the SEO specialist for a new SEO project he submits my website to major directories, search engines and more. The first batch of people to inquire about my listings, however, are other SEO companies who want to pitch me on their services and sell me the option of a top spot on the front page of Google.

I wondered how could a company that is not directly affiliated with the noted juggernaut Search Engine be able to guarantee me a prime spot on the seemingly most popular Search Engine on the Internet. Recently, a week ago I hire the SEO specialist to create a SEO campaign for my property research website: HomeIsReal.com. The specialist I hired made no warranties as to my potential ranking on Google or any other Search Engine. Rather he emphasized that SEO is a six-month process, at the minimum level. A website will need to be regularly submitted to various Search Engines and keywords will need to be changed / updated and descriptions will need to be optimized.

Today I received a notification from a website directory service that indicated my website had been submitted and request confirmation of the listings details. I confirmed the details as being accurate. Within minutes I received a barrage of telephone calls from SEO companies offering to top-rank my website. Some SEO businesses that contacted me actually did know my domain name. Others asked me if I was the owner of a business, not really knowing which company they might be contacting. I was nonetheless polite to each sales representative.

A few of the calls were weird, however, since some of the sales people did not seem to know anything about SEO. One representative asked me to type in keywords to the search bar, which I did without any hesitation. Initially it seemed that the keywords were correctly heard and corresponding rightly input. I even confirmed the search results with the representative. When the supposed client’s website did not appear in the top ten results the representative asked me to confirm the search term again. I relayed the term searched and was told that I had misheard the keywords and commanded to re-enter the search phrase once again. Finally I was able to find the supposed clients’ website among the top six results, even though the sales representative told me with a tone of certainty that their clients’ website would be among the top two results.

After all of the sales pitches that are filled with a ‘smoke and mirrors’ strategy, eventually comes the hard fact that no one can guarantee the top spot on Google or anything other Search Engine. Even an expensive Ad Words campaign cannot ensure the absolute top position on Google. One could hope to be on the first / front page, but not command / demand it.

These SEO companies, which seem to exist in an endless supply, usually have two sales representatives. The soft sales pitch comes first, with the initial sales person, thereafter a referral is made to a so-called SEO Expert or Social Media Manager who comes on very strong for the hard sell. Sometimes the sales pitch is so harsh that one can feel the words jumping through the phone. Today the second tier sales person criticized my knowledge of SEO, even though I have two websites that are the front page of the top Search Engine for their respective keywords. I was told that I don’t have strong knowledge of back-links and that I don’t know enough about SEO, by the Sales Manager who was trying to sell me his companies’ services. After he berated me for a minute or so, where after he heard me giggle about his condemnation of my skills, he was infuriated and he hung up the phone.

What a relief – no more being insulted by a sales representative that I don’t know and who I did not ask to call me in the first place. I wonder: could there be a DO NOT CALL LIST specifically for SEO companies? One could submit numbers that should be added to the list. While I do not mind being called for a service that I could use, I certainly do not want to be ridiculed or insulted during the sales pitch. Surely I should be the one to end the phone call. The most important request I have is that if a sales person is going to call me, then this person should have already done their research on my website and be able to intelligently explain to me what unique service they can provide to improve the ranking of my website. If an SEO company is requesting many hundreds or thousands of dollars, then they should be able to guarantee that my website will be number one on all major Search Engines, or at least on one. Otherwise, I might as well create and manage my own SEO campaign.

March 25, 2015/by Zack Steel

Business Matters Articles

Partnerships Ego Trips

men shake on a closed land property deal

Partnerships and Ego Trips

Let go of ego or ‘let go of my ego’. Is this correct? Do egos enter into partnership agreements? They certainly do form the nature of the business relationship. We will examine partnerships and ego trips.

You may be an entrepreneur or a sole proprietor or howsoever you choose to phrase your obscure business entity. You get many business leads, but you are not a sales person. You have highly specialized skills in your area of work. Therefore, you are confident in your abilities to achieve greatness and generate revenue. It seems, though that you may need to form a business alliance; a so-called partnership. Now enters the scenario of ‘partnerships and ego trips’.

If you are requesting the assistance of a business partner to share part of the work process for your company you can bank on personalities participating in a realm where you had formerly thought only ‘common sense’ or smarts prevailed. You were mistaken if you thought you could be cold and unfeeling and all about the money. Once you acquire a partner you join forces with another personality in a battle of sensibilities.

Before you agree to any terms verbally, jot down notes on all discussions that occur during your partnership interviews. Then send an e-mail containing the notes to your potential partner and ask this person to sign off or agree to the points noted. It is very important that you also create a detailed partnership agreement or contract for service prior to assigning any leads and / or work.

Where money is involved greed is sure to show its face. Even if the leads seem to have no realizable value, once you have assigned prospective clients to you new business partner, surely the partner will determine their own value of the potential deal. Certainly any proposal will be one-sided in one’s own favour when possible money is to be gained.

Be sure that you have properly positioned yourself in the business relationship. You should appear and sound confident in your own abilities, at all times. Any sense of a lack of confidence is a certain weakness in business matters. When you submit the proposed agreed or partnership contract be sure to emphasize simplicity in the terms used and in the overall contents of the document. Less complications means less discussions on fine points and more clarity.

It is essential that you are clear about the money that you are expecting for each realized or closed deal. Once there is money at issue egos will surface and disagreements will certainly erupt. When this happens all you can do is draft a new agreement. But is it going to be more difficult to obtain agreement for your benefit once potential money is at play.

March 23, 2015/by Zack Steel

Business Matters Articles

Whose Possessions Are Yours?

objects arranged representing people items

Whose Possessions Are Yours?

When you buy something on credit or only pay an initial deposit are you agreeing to be totally occupied with paying for an item that you will not certainly own? When you do make a big ticket purchase are obligating yourself to an expenditure that you cannot handle?

If you buy a product that you cannot afford, then you are going to have to make regular minimum payments, for which you may not have the money to cover such costs. You will be working to pay for that which you seemingly bought, but which is not fully or really yours – that is until you pay for it completely. If you buy an expensive item and do pay it off, then you will likely also correspondingly purchase insurance coverage for it. Either way, when you buy something is seemingly beyond your means, you will have to continue to make payments beyond your so-called purchase of the product.

When can you own something and not be obligated to it? If you buy a product for which you have the correct amount of money in what is known a liquid capital or cash, then you can know with certainty that you have actually bought something that immediately becomes yours. Otherwise, the madness of credit can almost seem to cause you to become possessed by your possessions.

Alternative payment plans for purchases beyond your immediate means are available. Lay-a-away for example allows you to ensure that you will be the owner of an item that you want to buy, while permitting you to save up for it and make regular or even sporadic payments to pay down the total price. But how many companies actually offer lay-a-way? You should choose to shop at such a store, even as a matter of principal, if for no other reason than that they offer lay-a-way plans. This entire methodology demonstrates that the company cares about the consumer. The novel approach of lay-a-way is in drastic opposition to stores that instead prefer to offer high-interest credit cards to customers, usually at the cash register or checkout points. These juggernauts warehouse stores usually have no available staff members that you can ask questions to inquire about products and / or prices. There sole concern is cash; getting more of yours and spending less or none of their own. Do you want to shop at such a store to endorse this system of shopping?

March 17, 2015/by Zack Steel

Business Matters Articles

Content That Rocks

Content That Rocks

You have a Blog or a Website – what’s next? You will need to compose content that rocks. You need to create quality content to populate it. To maintain a regular readership base you will need to constantly compose fresh new copy. Do you have what it takes to write articles that readers want to read? Are you in tune with current news and trends in popular culture? To compose posts that will be shared on social media you compositions need to be intriguing.

The text for your website should be professionally written and reflect a quality business image to your intended demographic. You will want to demonstrate that your company can complete the work it purports to achieve at a high level of quality. The content should be detailed but not boring or overly technical. Be certain to review the composed content for grammar, punctuation, stylistics, syntax and spelling. Nothing is more important than well written content that is free or errors in language. Your readers may be potential customers and a lack of care to specific details, even in the usage of words, displays a disinterest in quality standards, which may cover over to products or the delivery of services. In the realm of the ‘business world’ perception is reality.

Having a blog is not enough. Is the central theme of the Blog known? Are the topics to be written about readily understood? These are important questions. Also, are the postings easily found? Can the postings be quickly searched, by month or by topic? Original ideas are the most marketable and favorable. This initiative can be difficult to achieve and maintain regularly. One may not be as creative as one had first thought. Inviting guest contributors / writers to submit content is an excellent way to ensure variety among your Blog’s posts.

Knowing something about the online reputation of contributors is worthy of note. The reputation of guest writers will carry over into your blog. Requesting applications and samples of potential contributors’ compositions is a valuable option for ensuring the continued quality of the content on your blog. Sharing of your posts on social media is certainly important. Creating options for ‘social shares’ of your articles is a necessary component of building, maintaining and sustaining a loyal readership constituency. The more options a blog has for sharing the better for shares to be made by readers. But one does not want to litter one’s blog with share buttons. A dropdown or expanding sharing field that contains / lists social media outlets is optimal for preserving the design quality of your blog, while allowing for your content to be circulated online. It is reasonable to have no more than five major social share buttons atop the main page or alongside the internal pages of blog.

Managing social shares of your posts is integral to maintaining a readership constituency. A service such as Hootsuite.com offers the option to manage multiple social media accounts through one access point and by way of one control panel. If you have a WordPress Blog there are likely some great plugins that allow for social shares and social media management.

March 13, 2015/by Zack Steel

Business Matters Articles

Found Online

To be Found Online

This article will aim to explain the online game. It is a game, like no other. Domain names are the closest thing to real estate in the electronic word of ‘cyberspace’. One could rightly say that the domain name market is a stock market, yet to be so termed and not established as such properly. There are many domain name auction websites, domain name brokers, and escrow services to process financial deals for domain name transfers, even an option to set a parameter to acquire a domain immediately upon it not being renewed. What does this have to do with being found online?

To understand cyberspace one must know how real space functions – that is how the real world operates, in terms of its agreed upon social and business constructs. In the real practical world where you are is where you appear to be others. You have an address with distinguishes factors that seem to be unique and which set you apart from other people who have a similar presence in society. The same could be properly claimed about cyberspace.

To be found online one needs to have an online address, this is initially a numbered URL, which is issued by a registrar through the hosting process. One connects the domain name to the hosting space. This is similar to one’s house being located in a subdivision. One will likely build a website to appear at the online address that will be found using the domain name. One can also forward other domains to the main domain with or without masking. Masking means that the domain name typed in the URL bar will not change upon the redirect process from the domain name typed to the one arrived at when one visits the website to which the main domain is connected.

The preliminaries aside, let us discuss how one can be found online. If one wants people to visit one’s house, then one will invite them, either directly by calling them or by asking them in-person to kindly visit, or one can send out invitations. In the realm of cyberspace one can also invite visitors by sending them e-mails asking them to visit or one can create keywords that describe one’s website. If done properly a Search Engine will direct searchers to one’s website when matching keywords are entered. One will of course need to known by the Search Engine for the Search Engine to potentially refer visitors. To make oneself known, similar in principle to hosting a housewarming party, one will submit one’s website to Search Engines for consideration to be added to the searchable database.

Next a Search Engine will ‘crawl’ one’s website to review its content. If the Search Engine finds one’s websites to be fitting it will catalogue it for search-ability by searchers who browse the Internet and specifically the listing Search Engine. This process could be equated with requesting a listing with a chamber of commerce or business bureau so that potential customers could find a set company according to their requirements. The chamber of commerce will review the application and evaluate the business to determine if it should be indexed with their list of reputable businesses for search-ability by prospective consumers. A business bureau will likely assign a letter ‘A’ or grade to the business listed to let prospective clients know how it ranks in terms of providing excellence to customers.

To be found online one needs create an identity, just like in a person or a business in the real world. One will need to list one’s business with Search Engines, online business directories, phone directories, create a business Facebook page / group, create a business profile on LinkedIN; have a Twitter account for sharing of articles / blog posts that one will publish. Also, one will want to have an account on Tumblr and a Yelp business listing, among other social media outlets. Needless to say, if one does not have a presence then one cannot be said to exist, at least to others. It is in one’s recognizable and known presence and interconnectedness with others that one has an identity. Likewise, online one wants to exist. To do so one must have an online address, business listings and definitely many ads on various directories / ‘pennysaver’ websites and be liked on social media. Similar to being liked in the real world and having a good reputation, one will want to build a reputation online.

All of the aforesaid discussion about being found online has not fully ventured into the more technical aspects of having one’s website fully indexed. In addition to the simplified explanation provided there more highly technical requirements, such as: meta tags, tracking by Google Analytics and registering one’s website with Webmaster Tools. There is also fetching and rendering a website in Analytics, request for crawling and permitting robots to scan one’s website, to name a few of the many other options for increasing one’s ability to be found online.

March 13, 2015/by Zack Steel

Business Matters Articles

Business Date

calendar displaying the months and days above work desk

Business Date

Did you ever have a business date? If you are in any type of business, then every initial communication with a prospective client / customer should be treated as a date. Your correspondence should not be composed to oversell your image. Instead, you will fair best if you humbly present a confident yet modest business presence.

Those professionals who are surely capable do not even need to sell themselves. Usually their reputation in their industry is well known and leads are sent to them from colleagues. Likewise, potential clients / customers will likely know about the industry leaders from highly acclaimed work / projects.

Pricing one’s product / service is a bit of a conundrum. One does not want to price oneself to low, so as to seem incompetent of completing the work for which one is advertising one’s services. Conversely, one does not want to overprice oneself and be underbid by competitors. How can one function in this type of situation? Perhaps one should inquire with one’s competitors to determine the set market-price for the same service. But certainly, during an initial business communication, whether by e-mail or by phone, one should be sure to not state a set price for one’s work. Rather the initial focus should be on one’s abilities and capabilities to offer the highest quality of work for the project sought.

When a potential client / customer requests prices for services one can professionally reply by sending forward a document known as Fee Schedule. This document will contain a price list for many services, including the specific one inquired about by the potential client / customer. This back and forth communicative process establishes a relationship between oneself and the potential client / customer through a seeming dialogue.

One will need to decide if one should follow-up and also when to do so for an effective result. Not every inquiry is necessarily worth pursuing. One should evaluate the value of the project and by due diligence determine if the potential client / customer can pay one’s fee. Otherwise, one may end up spending valuable time trying to sell a prospective client that will not be able to pay the value of one’s time, even if the said client does pay the set costs of one’s services. One should take stock and consider that even the time spent in communication and following-up with a prospective client is taking away from time that one could actually be working.

If one is able to determine that a prospective client presents as worthy of one’s efforts, then one should be professional in one’s approach. One should let the potential client know of one’s intentions to follow-up on a set day, and at a set time, and request confirmation / permission for so doing. One must be meticulous to do just as one says throughout the sales cycle process. One must call exactly at the time one has promised and one must be sure to have a note pad or computer device handy for taking scrupulous notes of the clients’ requirements for the work to be completed. One should talk less and listen more. This is utmost importance. It is best to let prospective clients sell themselves on one’s services.

I once read article that offered the following advice, which I believe should be applied to most business matters: “Instead of walking into the meeting demanding a higher salary, ask how you can contribute more to the company”. Perhaps this advice applies across the board for all situations. One should be sure that one can do the best job possible and complete the assigned project / work at the highest professional standard – and market oneself as being capable of doing – thereafter one can set one’s fee for service.

Feed Shark

March 8, 2015/by Zack Steel

Business Matters Articles

Input of Output

Input of Output

Do you need input to produce output? If so, what input is best?

Perhaps in order to be creative and in order to create just about anything you need constant stimulus. This inspiration can be from reading, whether regular books that one chooses to read or from audio books. The main important factor is that information is constantly being funneled through one’s brain and filtered, processed and allocated to the right memory bank for later spending.

It is likely best to diversify one’s reading supply. Some reviews of a daily newspaper, popular technology or popular culture magazine and also reading of online posts. But just how much reading from internet sources is acceptable, useful and credible?

Is the information in a post usually verifiable? Can the content be relied upon for a major decision or for a purchase of a product or service? Are there noteworthy online journalists as one might find in the newspaper or magazine industry?

One can certainly read one’s fill of copy online and generate ideas from quality content. There are also mainly entertaining articles online. An expert may be required for know to surely know which copy is credible and which is just junk. Now for a segue: A slight diversion from the current topic to a new one, without a pause or connecting sentence.

Copywriting, which usually consists of marketing copy or promotional content, is used to script or pen words in a useful way to properly advertise a product or service. This type of text is regularly input into oneself every time one watches television, listening to the radio or reads a newspaper, which is usually littered with ads.

Online, in the Internet world, there is ample supply of copywriting. In nearly every search on a major Search Engine one is likely to draw out many pages that contain no content that is even remotely related or similar to one’s search. This is because Search Engines, for now anyway, are housed with information that has been input almost solely for the purpose of producing massive amounts of output.

The important question of consideration is whether or not there is an adequate – if any- filter on Search Engines, right now. With the advent of new gTLDs (Generic Top-Level Domains) information will be more accurately catalogued and filtered to ensure that searches will accurately produce results that are reflective of the information requested.

March 2, 2015/by Zack Steel

Business Matters Articles

Fresh-Pressed Plugins

How can one stay current with all of the cool fresh-pressed plugins available from WordPress? To be in the loop, of the newly knitted options for WordPress, one can subscribe to WPBeginner.com, which offers useful articles, with great tips for the novice Web Designer.

Can I actually ask this question correctly? WordPress is an association or online medium for Web Developers to contribute plugins and other software, which are crucial components for building a website. Novice Web Designers would no to be able create website without WordPress and its contributors. There are other free resources such as Joomla and Drupal (mainly for CMS: Content / Customer Management System). But these competitors don’t measure-up for ease of use or usability. Weebly and Wix are comparable seemingly free platforms for building a website, which is optimal for small business owners and those on a tight budget. Weebly offers a drap and drop structure, which is striving toward but not matching Godaddy’s Website Builder. Wix has great professionally looking templates designed using HTML 5, which are complimentary. They also “offer a number of premium plans for a small fee, which enables our users to get more storage and bandwidth, remove the Wix ads, and the connect their Wix site to their own domain name.”

Among the most useful plugin for customer engagement are the Live Chat Pop-up Button offered by WP-Live Chat , Pop-Up Contact Button from VCita and Online Voicemail from SpeakPipe. Casengo seems to offer an initially free trial period for their state-of-the-art technology for onsite Live Chat, with instant bell sounding notifications. This platform is top-notch and seems to be accompanied by regular follow up e-mail from the customer support department. I have noted the following cutting-edge plugins because I am currently utilizing them and find them to be very effective in connecting with potential clients.

Being accessible to prospective customers is the most important function of a company. The Google Translator WordPress Plugin is very useful in ensuring your website can be reviewed in nearly every language. There are other options for website translators that I have found to be less easy to manage. Options that were initially offered such as country flags were not displayed as they should have been.

Whatever plugins you choose to use to increase the functionality of your website, be sure to test out many comparable options. With plugins there are some that seem user-friendly, but are actually quite complex and others that claim to be complimentary / free, which really have a paid membership requirement, possibly after an initial trial period.

Please let me know which plug-ins you consider worthy of special mention.

February 23, 2015/by Zack Steel

Any more questions for Aaron? Feel free to get in touch!