Funding Your SME from the Start: Here’s How

Starting an SME is both exciting and challenging, and careful thought and consideration is essential if you wish to be successful. It is no wonder that many businesses go bust before they have even got started, with some figures suggesting that 40% of SMEs do not last more than five years. Here is a short guide on how to properly funding your SME.

Business funding

Plan/Budget

Any business owner must have a business plan which they can follow, which will set out their long and short term business objectives. This will provide a structure for your budget, and detail exactly how much funding you need to successfully run the business.…

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9 SEO Strategies for Ecommerce Marketers

The relevance of SEO to businesses is a topic of constant debate but statistics show that 30 percent of traffic comes from organic searches. 30% is a significant amount and should not be taken for granted by business owners, no matter how big or small.

SEO strategy

Understanding SEO better will show how important it is. It should be part of any ecommerce business’ marketing strategy. SEO should be given importance because:

  1. It is an investment with high ROI
  2. It impacts how buyers research products, and how they mature through the sales cycle
  3. It multiplies the impact of other marketing efforts
  4. It builds trust and credibility among customers
  5. It allows a brand to stay ubiquitous
  6. It provides opportunities to compound traffic while improving overall SEO profile

It is sad that some people cannot see it but SEO is really important.…

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5 Data Management Issues Small Businesses Have to Deal With

Data management is a problem for every business, but big businesses have more solutions for their problems because of the range of tools aimed at them and their larger checkbooks. Here are five data management issues small businesses have to deal with, as well as explaining the impact these problems have.

Data management

Volume

Big Data is a problem, not a solution. That’s why we pay people who can wade through the data and find exactly the information we need. You can try to collect less information, stop backing up information that isn’t important, and avoid backups of backups except where redundancy is essential to keeping your business alive.…

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5 Tips About Budgeting For Freelancers You Can’t Afford To Miss

The rewards offered through contracting are both personal as well as financial. Despite this, challenges arise; a crucial one being working without a guaranteed income. Below are some simple budgeting tips to help your cash flow.

Freelancing

1. Predict your earnings and set your rate

By already having a contract for the coming six months to a year secured, you should find it far easier to figure out what you will be earning taking into account savings, bills and living expenses. Nonetheless, if you are working on shorter contracts during the year or in between roles, a strategy for you to take is to evaluate what you need to earn to live comfortably.…

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Feature: NJ SEO’s Matt Anton on Keeping Up with SEO Trends

SEO or “Search Engine Optimization” has never been so difficult a puzzle to figure out as it is today. There are so many ranking factors to take into consideration (it’s said to be 200, but Moz debunked it.) If the figure itself isn’t overwhelming, try this: None of those factors are publicly announced, for some obvious reasons.

SEO trends

The ranking based on the importance of those factors are largely unknown – only a few experts attempt to decipher the ranking factors by observing the available analytics data and the impact on SEO tweaks made. Those are some of the things that make SEO challenging today more than ever before.…

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3 Alternatives to Bankruptcy for Small Businesses

Small businesses go bankrupt. The Small Business Administration states that 50% of businesses survive past the five-year mark. This means half of the entrepreneurs that follow their dreams and start their own businesses will see their dreams go up in flames.

Bankruptcy

Business is a risk, and one late shipment or one lost contract can mean the difference between a business thriving or boarding up their windows.

There are options outside of bankruptcy that can stop a business from dissolving.

1. Direct Negotiating Outside of Court

Lenders will negotiate with a business outside of court. When negotiations take place away from the stringent requirements of the court, there are a plethora of benefits, such as:

  • Avoiding court proceedings, which allows a business to save money
  • Direct negotiations take far less time to complete
  • A plan to get back on a financial track will be drafted, and will work for all involved parties.
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The Importance of Measuring Your Average Customer Lifetime Value

Customer retention has the greatest effect on the amount of revenue a company receives. This means that the most pressing challenge for any subscription-based business is keeping their customers subscribed to their services. If you’re running an enterprise that follows the subscription business model, you should be aware of the best practices for keeping your customers.

Customer retention

There are several metrics that can be used for measuring customer retention. For a subscription-based business, the average customer lifetime value or ACLV is one of the most important metrics. What constitutes this metric, and how exactly is it calculated?

The ACLV

The average customer lifetime value is the average amount of revenue a company can get from each customer.…

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7 Money Saving Tips for the Small Business Owner

If you’re a small business owner, you already know how important it is to save some money however you can – and the best answer isn’t cutting your employees’ healthcare plans because that’s bad for everyone involved and makes you seem more miserly than thrifty.

Save money

That aside, there are definitely a number of effective ways to reduce your expenses and save you a bit of money when you own a small business without forcing you to cut costs where it truly hurts. Saving money where you can is an important factor that can make or break a small business, so here are some tips and pointers.…

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6 Steps Before Launching Your Plumbing Business

Launching a plumbing business is not something you can do simply because you like doing it or because you have some knowhow and experience about it. There are important steps you have to undertake to make sure that the endeavor will be successful.

Plumber

Before you launch your plumbing business, use the steps below as a guide.

1. Planning

Of course, no business should ever launch without planning. This planning step, however, is not about the writing of a business plan, making a feasibility study, and other steps that should have already been conducted before you reach the point when you are about to launch the business.…

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Can Text mining Help Small Businesses?

Text mining is a valuable process developed in the 1980s, and helps companies to find solutions for specific and single/multiple business/strategy-oriented goals. It is used in A.I. technology to sift through all written language/text data across the entire world wide web, and also to collect and deliver pertinent information at a high processing speed and as close as possible to real-time.

Text mining

In conjunction with other A.I. applications such as Semantics technology and through Knowledge Management systems/applications, A.I. optimizes the text mining process thanks to its capability to recognize human language, speech and behaviour, and structure ‘unstructured’ data; it works in many ways by simulating the neural pathways of the human brain to make important connections and make sense of things.…

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