Twitter has become one of the most popular social websites! People absolutely love it. It’s fast past and, due to message length restrictions, people can’t post their life story. Twitter is the social place-to-be!

Twitter is also the business place-to-be! Businesses have discovered that Twitter will get you clicks on your links and much better conversions, compared to other social websites!

For business owners and entrepreneurs, Twitter is a marketing tool that you don’t want to ignore. Your links are much more likely to get clicked on Twitter and the short messages make it easy to post multiple “ads” for your products and services. In addition, people look at various times during the day so you can reach a ‘unique audience with each Tweet! The great thing about Twitter, is due to the way it functions, your business Tweets are seen by a different subset of your Followers each time you post, which makes it difficult to saturate and annoy your Followers.

Marketing on Twitter does require that you post regularly. I am not saying spam your Followers, but ideally, you want to have posts going up, periodically, all day. Just imagine if you could make regular posts to multiple accounts, all day, without you being bound to the computer…. you would get great conversions and more sales!

TwitterBot will make regular posts to multiple Twitter accounts, automatically follow other Tweeter (which is still the best way to get people to follow you). This software will save you a ton of time and hopefully make you some more money…I love it! Automate your Twitter accounts with TwitterBot!

If you’re involved in any type of business where you sell products or
services, you should know that you need to sell more than one product to
be successful.  Of course, there have been exceptions, like the Pet Rock,
but those are few and far between.  You see, if you only sell one product / service, you need to find those prospective customers that want that one product. Add a second product, and you’ve opened the door to customers who want it, but not your first product.  Add a third, and you have more prospects, and so on.

You can present your products or services through separate ads or fliers,
but it’s really more efficient and professional to have a CATALOG.

Catalogs on CD are very easy to distribute, relatively inexpensive and an interesting novelty to many people (they will look at your catalog just because the presentation is different). You can use standard CD-r or a nice touch is mini CD-r.

Having a catalog will increase the orders you receive, since your customers
have more choices and you can show them everything in one mailing.

If you’re thinking of putting together even an eight page catalog, call your
local printer and ask for a price.  Get a quote on 1,000, since you’ll want
to have enough.  My best printer would charge $150, which would be 15 cents per catalog.  Then, you have the mailing cost, which would be 52 cents.
You’re now up to 67 cents per catalog.  Add in the cost of getting the name
to send the catalog to, and you could be over a dollar per catalog.  That
means over $1,000 to print and send out all your catalogs!

Worse news to come…  you won’t get rich from an eight page catalog.  If you
really intend on making it in your own business, you’d better offer at least
20 related products or services (or a combination).  That way, you can hit a
specific group of people and have a good chance of getting a decent return.
But if an eight page catalog would cost over $1,000 to print and mail, think
about a 20 page catalog!  Printing alone would be $375 or more!

You can reduce your printing and postage costs significantly by having your
catalog printed on a web press on newsprint.  The only problem with that is,
you need to print a higher quantity to make it worthwhile.  Figure on at
least 10,000. There’s an easier, less expensive way to do this…

PUT YOUR CATALOG ON A CD-ROM

See the advantages?

You can sell your products just as well with a disk catalog as with a printed one.  In fact, people will keep your catalog around longer, due to it’s uniqueness (disk catalogs are just starting to be used). So, how can you get your own high-powered order-pulling disk catalog?
Well, two ways…  you can make one yourself, or you can have an expert
put one together for you, saving you the time and effort.  I’ll explain how it’s done, and then you can make the choice.

How to Put you catolog CD-ROM

There are a multitude of ways to get, basically, the same end result. The method I will describe was chosen because it only requires tools that are free or already installed on the average PC.

What you need:

- Microsoft PowerPoint – Standard in MS Office Suite

- Auto-run software – Freeware (limited)

Retail (What you really want)

- CD Burner – Standard on most computers since the 90′s

The Steps:

1. Gather all your product / services information and your thinking cap.
2. Brain storm on the way you want your product / services catalog to look. Think of colors, fonts and backgrounds. You want to be sure your catalog reflects your products/ services, your industry and your target audience. Search the internet for PowerPoint templates (many are free!).
3. Once you decided on your template or your lay out, create a master lay slide so you don’t have to make a new lay out for each slide.
4. Create a new slide. The first slide will be your catalog cover or intro.
5. Create a new slide for each of your products. Remember to insert pictures where needed and insert the proper text.                                 Steps 4 and 5 are the most time consuming!
6. After all of your slides are completed and in order, save your presentation as a slide show executable.                                                         *At this point, the methods of making your presentation autorun are many, some more difficult than others. As entrepreneurs and business owners your time is limited and your tasks are many!!!
7. Now, close PowerPoint and open your autorun software. Take this time to put a blank CD in your CD drive. Follow your particular software’s instructions.  Most prompt you to point it to the file(s) that you want to autorun. In our case it would be the PowerPoint executable you just saved.
8. Let your software and CD burner do the rest…. You are the boss right!! :->

Finally, consider this…  you have 10,000 of your fantastic catalog printed.
You start mailing them.  All of a sudden, you discover you have to change the price of one of your products.  Or, the source for a product dries up.
Or, you want to add a new product or service.  TOO BAD!  You’re stuck with
the catalogs the way they are.  With a cd catalog, NO PROBLEM!  You make
the change on your master copy, and all subsequent catalogs are instantly
up-to-date.

Again, you will find other methods to achieve the same outcome, but this lets the software do the work for you. Design your product / services pages and let ‘er rip.

If this is still a bit beyond your comfort level, pay a couple of dollars and get a professional to do the job for you. Visions Business Services can create custom catalogs, slide shows and presentations.

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by Kevin Potts

If you’re like thousands of other designers, programmers and other creative professionals out there, at one point in time you’ve considered starting your own business. Unlike most, you’ve gone against common sense and decided to open shop for yourself. And not just freelance full-time, mind you, but file for the company name, get some stationery, and wade through the legal mumbo-jumbo. Maybe even get a real office with a water cooler.

This article offers real-world advice from the trenches of a small start-up, and is applicable to designers, web developers, copywriters, usability experts and all manner of service providers. Freelancers take heed: there are several items that are just as pertinent to your profession.

Write a Business Plan

The most important thing you can do to prepare for starting and operating your own business. Developing a business plan requires a lot of time and energy, but it’s invaluable for one primary reason — it forces you to come to terms with your business idea. You must decide how you will generate income, what your expenses will be, who your competitors are, and most important, WHAT YOUR BUSINESS DOES. This may seem obvious to you now, but write it down. Think about it. What sets your business apart? What service do you offer that is superior or unique? What’s going to put you ahead of the competition?

Beyond the mental exercises, a good business plan will give you a much better chance of getting a small business loan from a bank than walking in and saying, “I like Photoshop and maybe a can do some websites or something. Gimme money.”

A few years ago, new age business rhetoric said forget the business plan and just run with it. Obviously, that didn’t work out so well, so if you go that route, God bless you. The business plan exists for a reason. There are libraries of books written on them and huge websites devoted to developing good ones. Some resources:

• SBA
• Scott Kramer’s articles on A List Apart
• Businessplans.org
• Business Plan Archive

Take a few weeks and develop a strong and thought-out plan. Give it to friends, co-workers, even family to read. Your business will be immeasurably stronger because you took the time for this step.

File for a Fictitious Name

A fictitious name (called a doing-business-as or DBA in some states) is the government’s term for your company name. If you choose HyperGlobalMegaSoft as the start-up’s name, it has to be registered with the state to ensure no one else is using it. This will cost about $100, but prevents you from accidentally using someone else’s registered name, or from someone else using YOUR name. Also note that two companies can usually register the same name for different industries. For instance, Luigi’s (design studio) and Luigi’s (pizza joint).

Note the fictitious name is not the same thing as a registered trademark. A trademark involves a whole separate process, more paperwork and additional fees. Unlike a fictitious name, however, a trademark is not required.

Funding

This is a pretty involved topic, and enough books and articles have been written about it to make for years of boring bathroom reading. Advice in a nutshell: start the business with your own savings or borrow from a bank. I highly recommend the former or a combination that includes it, since it makes you pinch your pennies a little more. If you go the bank route, make sure the business plan is polished to a high shine. This may be a good time to hire a professional business plan writer/editor.

There is one Golden Rule: Don’t borrow money from family or friends. 99% of the time, you won’t be able to pay them back, and on the off-chance you are, it won’t be for months or years. The amount is irrelevant; $1,000 or $100,000 can quickly create bad blood.

Get an Accountant

In starting your business and maintaining its future financial health, there is no greater ally than an accountant. He or she (or they if you go with a firm) will be able to give advice on innumerable aspects of your new venture. They can advise on what type of business entity to start with, setting up bank accounts, a means of invoicing and collecting, and more. Most importantly, they also guide you on paying taxes properly and punctually.

Brief advice on accountants:

• Go with an accountant or a firm in your state. Each state has different laws.
• Make sure the accountant knows business taxes. Do not hire a family-oriented accountant.
• Unless, you are really, really strapped for cash, hire an accountant who is not a family member. While it may be tempting to get a family discount, it is better to have an unbiased viewpoint about your finances, and also better to keep your family’s nose out of your funds in general.
• Try to trade services! Maybe your accountant wants a new logo, website, or brochure.

Start with a Partner

If you can, start the business with a partner. This person should be another designer or programmer with a level of experience equal to or greater than your own, but with a different skill set. If you’re the God of Annual Reports, your partner can be the Overlord of Identity Design. Having two Annual Report Gods will make for some lacking identity work when the client requests it. And for the record, once again, it will be better if this person isn’t family.

“But why a partner?” you ask. “I’m a darn good designer, and I’m really really gonna do this right.”

A partner will keep you on your toes. When you want to buy that $2,000 scanner, he or she should question why. If you want to design a promotional piece, it should be a group effort to get the best results. If you start to slack off, he or she will be there to remind you of business priorities. No one can do everything, and two complementary skill sets create an asset that cannot be reproduced when flying solo.

About Your New Office

When you start a business, the option of setting up an office outside your home has dramatic pros and cons that must be weighed carefully.

Good:

• You have a place for clients to visit if they are local.
• Reinforces good image (see below). Proper presentation goes a long way, and making your office appear as if you’ve been in business for years (you didn’t tell them you were a start-up, did you?) helps build client trust.
• You can write off all office expenses (rent, repairs, phone, etc). This will affect your bottom line drastically.
• Gets you out of the house. Having a real place to go to work makes the business more real, and forces you to take it that more seriously.

Not-So-Good:

• Money out the window. Renting an office costs $250-$10,000 a month, not including the initial deposit. This is a lot of money if you have a thin or inconsistent client base.
• Requires additional expense. You will need to get a fire inspection and a certificate of occupancy, not to mention additional phone lines, Internet connection, furniture, etc.

Setting up an outside office for a new business is a case-by-case situation, and depends almost entirely on start-up money and cash flow. Some businesses truly require a place to host clients (ad agencies),and for others it’s not as important (web development). Weigh the advantages carefully against capital, because being locked into a lease without a means to pay is no fun.

Retain a Good Paper Trail

Make sure to keep a solid paper trail with clients, and that means a real, physical file with hardcopies of proposals, contracts, invoices, time sheets and anything else you can think of that relates to the project. This also includes all financial records, bank statements, receipts, deposit slips, etc.

Before beginning your business, establish several important things. First, design a consistent and scalable filing system for all the forms. Whether you organize by client or project is irrelevant, but make sure you can find the information when you need it. Second, make sure to have airtight contracts. I advise against writing them yourself. There are many places on the net where you can get generic forms, such as www.creativepro.com. You will also need to look for NDAs (non-disclosure agreements, for contracting work out to other freelancers), RFP (request for proposal) templates for clients to fill out, expense reports, invoices, and time sheets. Every project is different, so be prepared to make changes on these forms.

And please, when you sign a contract with a client, make sure you have a copy with BOTH signatures. Seems like an obvious thing, but you’d be surprised. Don’t do any work without one, because legally, you will have a very hard time forcing a delinquent client to pay without one.

Part of maintaining a solid paper trail is having a good invoice system ready to launch at a moment’s notice. Make sure your invoices arrive in the client’s mailbox while the project is still fresh. Every invoice should clearly mark the amount to be paid and terms of payment (30 days, etc.), and clearly indicate any additional fees resulting from delinquent recompense.

If payment is late, don’t be afraid to call the client. Sometimes they just misplaced the invoice. Other times they don’t have the money and are trying to slink away. Sometimes, “the check is in the mail.” Regardless, the business that does not call to get paid won’t get paid!

Start Small, Conserve Loot

Consider working from your house/apartment to start, especially if you have clients that will never visit you, or if you live in an expensive metropolis (NYC, LA, Chicago, San Francisco, etc). Keep your expenses down! Don’t buy a new quad Xeon workstation if your current machine can cut it, or a truckload of networking equipment for two computers. Be cheap! Look for sales at OfficeMax, clip coupons, and just shop smart. You’re going to need the start-up capital down the road, so don’t drain it on frivolous expenditures. (And yes, the folded die-cut business card with the metallic ink counts as a frivolous expenditure.)

Don’t Undercharge, but Be Flexible

If there’s one thing to remember from this article, it should be this point. Proper pricing is the one thing that keeps the business alive, on multiple levels. When you charge appropriate amounts for the work, the client will feel like they hired the right people; when you undercharge, the client will know this and take advantage of you by demanding similar rates in the future.

If you give every client a discount just to get the job (and this will be tempting, especially in the beginning), you’ll find yourself working twelve-hour days and not being able to pay the bills. Undercharging hurts the industry in general as well; undercharged clients come to expect and request absurdly low prices.

Legal Software

Make sure all the copies of your software are retail versions. Do not use “educational” or pirated software. This is very important, and should be part of the start-up budget.

Separate Personal and Business Finances

Nothing much else to say about this. It will save you innumerable headaches come tax season.

Marketing

Even the most reliable clients have dry spells, so make sure you are constantly putting your company’s name in the marketplace. Word of mouth is the best, but getting truly fresh work usually requires spending money.

The Importance of Image

The importance of maintaining a positive image in the eyes of your clients and potential clients cannot be overstated. Know your firm’s identity so you can project that identity to the customer.

The visual identity is critical. Get business cards, letterhead, and envelopes. Design a good logo or pay someone to do it if you’re not a design firm.

Dress the part. When meeting with a client, look like someone who’s come to do business, not some clichéd black-turtleneck half-shaven graphic designer who’s gracing them with your presence half an hour late. It sounds exaggerated, but it happens all too often.

Make the office welcoming. If you entertain clients, keep the office clean, organized and hospitable. Make good coffee. Purchase comfortable chairs. Make sure they have a place to park.

Use Outside Resources

Running a business takes long hours and a willingness to learn. However, there are many services that exist to help businesses succeed and get work. For instance:

• Your local Chamber of Commerce
• SCORE
• Attend business seminars. You can learn a lot and do some powerful networking. Many are free.
• Creativepro.com. Full of valuable resources like stock photos, business contracts, freebies and more. $29.99 / year.
• Elance.com. A cause of dissention among many designers for the ridiculously low rates you have to work for, but a good place to find work when the rest of the world has shut its doors.

If you still decide to start a business, there’s nothing more I can say except good luck.

You’ve got to have the “fire in your belly,” or you will fail. There are long hours, hard work, and incredibly frustrating and stressful times ahead. But the rewards — being your own boss, being able to work on a variety of projects, feeling that proverbial sense of accomplishment — these are all very real results.

Kevin Potts is the creator and author of graphicPUSH, a resource site for web and print designers.

I believe in well designed free software. I will always preach about the wealth of free software available that small businesses can use to perform the operations of the business. Small business budgets are usually limited,  so free is always a welcome site to a small business. Free software will usually lack some of the bells and whistles that you find on retail software and there is usually a little less support for the product (although that is not always the case !), but with a little time and tweaking you can often achieve the same results with freeware as you would with retail software.

Continue to learn more about and/or download this freeware.

This is one of the most user-friendly and effective bookkeeping package currently on the market, free or otherwise.

Click Here to download or click the software title links.

* No need to learn a complicated accounting software such as SAGE.
* No need to have prior bookkeeping knowledge.
* Instantly produces the accounting records and financial information that your small business needs.

The Small Business Accounting Package is an interlinked series of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets designed for the bookkeeping of small businesses.

It is designed to be easy to use regardless of your level of business and accounting knowledge. Using this package you will be able to produce:

* Cash and bank weekly reports and bank reconciliations
* A fixed asset register
* Yearly summaries of sales
* Yearly summaries of purchases
* Yearly summaries of proprietor drawings
* Sales against purchases graphs
* The Profit and Loss Account
* The Balance Sheet
* Weekly and yearly cash flow statements

The Small Business Accounting Package is designed to be user-friendly. You do not need to have strong Excel skills. It gives exact instructions where and how you need to enter the necessary information. Your main input is to simply enter your results on a daily or weekly basis. The Small Business Accounting Package will instantly produce all the calculations and analysis for you!

This product is a must for all small businesses!

In today’s business climate, technology plays a significant role in just about every company. To efficiently operate a company good computer software is essential. Some companies can operate with minimal software needs, but all companies can benefit from a good collection of software that can reliably perform the required tasks. Small and start up companies can benefit from solid software, but many can’t afford the extreme prices of some of the business class software. This fact does not mean that they can’t get the software needed to increase productivity, produce professional results and ultimately increase profits; but it will require a bit of research and a degree of creativity. Please understand, business class software is generally, more robust and can often perform multiple tasks, but in spite of this fact, there is a universe of totally free software that is more than sufficient to handle the needs of small business, home-based and start-up enterprises. I will attempt to highlight some of these FREE applications in this post and will continue to highlight FREE software in weekly posts.
To download, click the software title, click a link within the description or the ‘DOWNLOAD’ at the end of each description. All downloads are guaranteed virus, trojan and adware free!!!

Free software this week:

Delta60 Accounting Software 6.0

Delta60 Accounting Software has a new World Version and a new graphical user interface that is easier and quicker to use. This free copy of Delta60 Accounting Software now features built-in email support and includes: A/R, A/P, Invoicing, Inventory, Payroll and General Ledger. Delta60 emphasizes strong sales reporting and is useful for wholesaling, as you can set an individual price for each item for each customer. Suggested Selling Price (SSP) for each item can be printed on the invoice along with the its SKU. This is a free, fully functional version with no time locks or trial period. DOWNLOAD / MORE INFO

Zotero 1.0+

Zotero is an easy-to-use yet powerful research tool that helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources (citations, full texts, web pages, images, and other objects), and lets you share the results of your research in a variety of ways. Zotero integrates tightly with online resources; it can sense when users are viewing a book, article, or other object on the web, and—on many major research and library sites—find and automatically save the full reference information for the item in the correct fields. Since it lives in the web browser, it can effortlessly transmit information to, and receive information from, other web services and applications; since it runs on one’s personal computer, it can also communicate with software running there.DOWNLOAD / MOREINFO

Comodo BackUp 1.0+

Comodo BackUp is a free, simple to use program that allows you to create, schedule and run your own backups 5 minutes after you’ve downloaded it. Just pick your source and destination folders, pick the times you want it to run and you’re set. From now on, if your data gets lost, damaged or deleted you can quickly recover it at the touch of a button. Losing your valuable files through accidental deletion, hard drive crashes or virus attacks can be devastating. Whether it’s the priceless collection of family photographs; the college thesis you’ve been slaving over or the entire accounts database – data loss always carries a disastrously high cost in time, money and stress. Comodo BackUp is suitable for both beginners and experienced users alike and is completely free of charge.DOWNLOAD / MORE INFO