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.…

Continue reading →

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.…

Continue reading →

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.
…Continue reading →

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.…

Continue reading →

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.…

Continue reading →

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.…

Continue reading →

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.…

Continue reading →

What’s Fact & Fiction About the 10th Anniversary iPhone

We’re fast approaching the 10th anniversary of the iPhone, and Apple plans to celebrate their achievement with the iPhone 8. Slated for a release this fall, it has all the features of a truly innovative and impressive smartphone that’s worthy of the date. But can we trust the leaks and rumors surrounding its release to give us an accurate idea of the 8? Let’s dive into what we know about the new model and see if we can pin down any solid facts.

10th Anniversary iPhone

Possible Release Date Pinned Down

Experts are pretty confident that Apple will reveal the 10th anniversary edition on either the 12th or 13th of September, but they won’t officially launch it until a week later on the 22nd or 23rd.…

Continue reading →

Why Credit Cards Should Be Your First Choice of Payment When Running a Business

Once a business is up and running, it is much easier for it to be approved for a business line of credit, compared to the process of getting a personal line of credit. According to reports, approximately 65% of SMBs utilize credit cards, and this number is increasing all the time. By using business credit facilities, a small business owner can preserve cash reserves, while acquiring the necessary supplies, equipment, office space and other assets to run the business optimally.

Business credit card

A caveat is in order: personal credit cards and business credit cards should be separated at all times. The difference between personal and business credit cards is stark.…

Continue reading →

Invoicing Is Your Worst Enemy: 7 Ways To Defeat It

We know—invoicing can be quite a pain, especially when your clients are late or unwilling to pay their invoices.

One of the most important things for businesses to take care of is to make sure they have positive cash flow on a consistent basis.

This cash flow can help keep them afloat by allowing them to meet their financial obligations, including rent, utilities, salaries, and other crucial aspects of their business.

However, if this cash flow is not flowing in, it can lead to lots of problems, including certain business failure.

In order to get this cash flow, then, small business owners need to make sure their invoicing is top-notch.…

Continue reading →