Bookkeeping is an interesting subject in more ways than one because of the intricacies involved as well as the extent to which it is utilized in our personal and business lives. So what goes on in the accounting and bookkeeping departments at big and small businesses alike? And what do these people we know as bookkeepers do on a daily basis? Well, one thing they do that is terribly important to everyone working in those businesses is payroll.
All the salaries and bonuses earned, and taxes paid by every employee every pay period have to be recorded. The payroll department has to ensure that the appropriate federal, state and local taxes are being deducted; and the pay stub attached to each employee paycheck is an ongoing record of these taxes and any number of other deducted items.
Deductions
Such items usually include income taxes, social security taxes and other employment-related taxes that have to be paid to federal and state governments. Other deductions include personal items, such as retirement savings accounts like 401(k), IRA, RRB (Railroad Retirement Board Benefits, as well as vacation, sick pay and/or medical benefits. It’s a critical function, and for that reason, some companies have their own payroll departments while others outsource it to bookkeeping specialists.
The accounting department receives and records any payments or cash received from customers or clients of the business or service. The accounting department has to make sure that the money is sourced accurately and deposited in the appropriate accounts. They also manage where the money goes; how much of it is kept on-hand for purposes such as payroll, or how much of it goes out to pay what the company owes on its loans, to its vendors and other such obligations. Some may also be invested, depending on the particular business policies.
Receivables
The other side of a receivables business is the payables area, or cash disbursements. A company writes many checks during the course of a year in order to pay for purchases, supplies, salaries, taxes, loans and services. The accounting department prepares all these checks and records whom they were disbursed to, how much and for what.
Accounting departments also keep track of purchase orders placed for inventory, such as products that will be sold to customers or clients. In addition to all these responsibilities, they also keep track of assets such as a business’ property and equipment, which often includes the office building, furniture, computers, and even the smallest items such as pencils, pens, notepads and other similar paraphernalia.
Present-day American families have the same dreams shared by families a few decades ago; buy a home, provide for the health and welfare of their children, and send those children to college. But the price tag for fulfilling these dreams climbs higher and higher every day, making it much more difficult to achieve the same standard of living that families enjoyed in past decades.
It used to be that a husband went off to work in the morning and the wife stayed home doing household chores and taking care of the kids; but the days of one-income households are long gone and both parents must now go out to work – when they can find it.
However, as the old familiar adage suggests, “necessity is the mother of invention” and accordingly, many enterprising single moms & dads, and even husband & wife teams are finding ways to stay home, and still earn a living via opportunities that are springing up all over the country as a result of the tremendous growth of an industry that makes work at home possible.
The (HBB) industry has made it possible for anyone with some basic skills, a computer and Internet access to start a business at home. For example, an individual with a background in word processing can create his/her own in-home word processing business.
Getting started
Before you begin your however, it is important to do your research. Find out what kind of software program will be most suitable for the type of business you intend on doing. You will also want your computer system to be compatible with your clients and customers.
Next, look at the make-up of your industrial area. An arts community, or a thriving business area? By checking out the demographics of your area, you can make a decision regarding the type of advertising you want to use.
In the beginning, you will want to try all sorts of advertising. Neighborhood newspapers are an inexpensive way to advertise, but they usually only published on a weekly basis and that may not be enough to keep the clients rolling in. You can put your name on the bulletin board at your local supermarket and pass out flyers door-to-door in large office buildings or other business complexes.
Although it may be more expensive than neighborhood newspapers, you may want to run an ad in your local daily newspaper (in the business services section). Church bulletins and university newspapers that sell advertising may also be a relatively inexpensive way to go. You should also get your business cards printed up right away; and don’t let a client walk out the door without one or two business cards. Repeat business and word-of-mouth may well be your best advertising tool.
Get started now… Free!
Whatever methods you choose to employ in your advertising, do yourself a favor and track the responses. Put a check list next to your telephone and whenever a call comes in (whether you get hired or not) ask the prospective client where s/he found out about you. It won’t take long for you to discover where your most cost-effective advertising comes from and when you know that, you can punch it up and drop the ones that aren’t doing anything for you.
Do your homework!
One telephone call will be the only opportunity you have to sell your service. If you hesitate when asked a price for a particular project, you will probably lose the job so do your homework. Call the competition and ask what they are charging. If the competition is out of your immediate geographic area (and you are therefore not a threat to their livelihood), you may want to be straight with them and tell them you are starting a in their field and ask for their input. You may be surprised to find them willing to help out with important information.
Keep in mind that there are myriad of tasks that need to be undertaken in order to establish the fundamental operations of your new home-based business. Whether you expect to get clients from the Internet or not, it is necessary to set up your business in a manner that will accommodate local clients/customers. So business letter heads, envelopes, forms, business cards, invoices and other paraphernalia will be necessary.
It will also become necessary to establish your pricing policies and have them available upon inquiry. Depending on your business, you could set a basic rate which can be a flat rate or a percentage.
For example…
…Using the business of word processing for a pricing example, a prospective client may call asking what you charge for 4 single-spaced pages. Your answer might be $45.00 per page straight text and then when the client comes, you discover that what s/he has is 4 pages of extremely complicated tables – definitely NOT STRAIGHT TEXT.
By not making firm pricing commitments over the phone, you will have the flexibility to charge a more accurate price when a client brings you something other than what you were expecting.
Elaborating further on the word processing example, to some clients a resume may be a single spaced page, but it takes a lot longer to type than a business letter and you will want to charge more for resumes. You will want to establish an hourly rate for tables, transcription and other more time-consuming jobs.
Always keep in mind that your pricing will change as you become more familiar with what your clients demand, and you may find yourself doing a lot of list maintenance and merge letters, or you may be doing work primarily for doctors, or attorneys; so you need to have a good basis for your pricing… but be flexible.
There are several models you can choose from, each one giving you the same flexibility to create your own USP (Unique Selling Proposition), as well as your own operational balance sheet. After all, the income & expense aspect of any business is usually an excellent indicator of that business’ prospects for success or failure; and truth be told, no business – new or old – start out with failure as an aspirational milestone. Therefore, it is success to which they aspire and choosing the type of home-based business to launch could make all the difference.
Choice of business types
The two business types that came to mind – based on my own – experiences are: Promotion and Distribution. You can choose to be a promoter or a distributor in addition to all the other choices that are available; but I have provided a glimpse of each vocation with the help of two other publishers whose knowledge of the topics is unquestioned.
According to a What is Promotion? article published to the Slide Player website, “Promotion is any form of communication a business or organization uses to inform, persuade, or remind people about its products and improve its public image. Product Promotion: 1) Explains the major features and benefits of its products (especially in relation to competitors), 2) tells where the products are sold, 3) advertises sales on those products, 4) answers customer questions, and 5) introduces new products…”
…And Distribution is described in the following manner: After a product is fully developed and offered at a competitive price, it must be delivered to an identified target audience. The place element of the marketing mix is where product production and distribution channels are decided and planned. The decisions made in this step directly affect the types of communication that are used to tell the target audience about a product.” This description is provided in the article, What Is the Difference Between Place & Promotion in the Marketing Mix? Written by Tim Burris for the Chron website. And there are so many more!
From Overture, a keyword suggestion tool, you will see the millions of searches done for a certain keyword. When these keywords are typed in search boxes of search engines, indexed websites containing articles with those keywords will be displayed. And this is what leads traffic to websites with keyword-rich articles. Yes, the magic word is articles.
Content is king. You can say that again. That is why writing articles is one of the most utilized in Web marketing activity today. Web surfers just can’t get enough of information on various fields. Providing information through these articles is a surefire way to drive hot traffic to your web site.
Why is this so?
Following are few benefits that can enhance your Web business from writing articles:
1) It’s absolutely free
Too good to be true? Not really, although you do have to pay your Internet Service Provider; but that’s it. All you need is your thoughts, your computer, and your hands. If you have those, nothing will stop you from typing words that will make you complete that article for your website. So for which aspect of that process did you really shell out a red cent? Not immediately, but perhaps later when your electric bill come.
2) Your website will be noticed in a shorter period of time.
Submit that article of yours to article directories that get the most web traffic and in no time your web site will be crawled. That is if you don’t forget including your resource box or byline.
3) Obtain back links automatically.
When you submit your articles to directories, surely, other websites will make use of your article too. With the copyright terms of your articles, the URL of your website will still be in tact and will subsequently direct more traffic to your website.
4) Improve your reputation.
As an Internet marketer, if you plainly display your products on your website, you will not gain much conversion rate. Conversion is when your traffic converts to sales. You have to show that you are knowledgeable on your field. And what better way to show that than by writing articles that will allow you some bragging rights, right?
Just make your creative juices flow and jot down or key in those ideas quickly to jumpstart your article writing momentum. With those benefits listed above, a writer’s block is the last problem you will ever be able to surmount.
Keep in mind that your writing need not be restricted to articles, because there are other modes of writing that are just as attractive to search engines. Those include: ebooks, blog posts, newsletters and public announcements, among others. So write! And write some more…just make your writing interesting and compelling for both humans and the search engine bots.
Today’s post is brought to you by our esteemed friend at the Copywriter’s Rountable. So without further ado, here are the words of Copywriter, John Forde…
I guess first I should define terms…
“A swipe file is a collection of tested and proven advertising and sales letters. Keeping a swipe file (templates) is a common practice used by advertising copywriters and creative directors as a ready reference of ideas for projects.
“Copywriters are not the only ones who can benefit from having a swipe file. As book publishing coach Diane Eble points out, authors and publishers can benefit from creating a swipe file of best-selling titles to give them ideas for their own titles.
“Publicists can create a swipe file of great press release headlines. Swipe files are a great jumping-off point for anybody who needs to come up with lots of ideas. Swipe files are also commonly used by Internet Marketers who need to gather a lot of resources not only about products but also about marketing methods and strategies.”
Well, that clarifies things a little, yes? Try this, too…
“There is nothing better or more productive a copywriter can do – and this applies to experienced copywriters as well as novices – than to read (almost to the point of memorizing) the best work of their fellow writers.” The first is just from Wikipedia, and not so much swiped but copied and pasted. The second from my old friend and mentor, as well as master copywriter, Michael Masterson.
Okay, now it’s my turn to try my hand at an original thought…
A swipe file defined
A swipe file is that place where you store those dazzling promo pieces that not only worked… but that are so good they make you sick with envy. Because you wish you’d written them yourself. In other terms, it’s the stack of stuff you go through, to help jump-start your creative engine… because you know that most everything you’re looking at, in those “swiped” samples, is something that worked.
Back in my earliest days, my swipe file filled a green milk grate. And then another. And then seven or eight more, until somebody made me get a filing cabinet. And then a second filing cabinet.
These days, thank merciful God for the Internet. Because now my swipe file — and yes, I still keep one — is a folder on my desktop labeled “Promos to Study.” In it lands links to VSLs, PDFs of magalogs somebody else has generously scanned, black and white ad clips the ‘70s and ‘60s, even back to the 1920s (thanks to the excellent InfoMarketingBlog.com), covers and screen captures I’ve used in presentations, and more.
Thanks, merciful Zeus as much or more for the iPad, which I also use every morning to markup whatever promo I’ve set aside to review.
The way it goes, most mornings, is that I load up any oft-seen sales letter that comes with a transcript. Then I “print” it to a PDF that gets stored on my iCloud account. From there, I open an app called “Goodnotes” and import the file, where it gets circled, scribbled upon, and partitioned into what seem the best bits. And yes, I do try to do that daily. More so now than before. And yes, it’s eye-opening. Every time.
But the real reason I’m writing this… or rather, updating this old CR classic… is because I recently got a question from a CR reader about where and how to swipe from other sales letters. So I thought I would go ahead and provide some answers. And away we go, starting with…
Reach wide. No easy answers
1) Reach wide – Before you can “read” the secrets buried in a swipe file, you need to fill it. And when you do, naturally you’ll want to start with the kinds of ads you expect to write most yourself. But don’t stop there. Reach way back to the classics. You’ll be surprised what Claude Hopkins and John Caples ads, Ogilvy, Schwartz and others still have to teach.
If you’re lucky enough to have the courier typed sales letters of the ‘70s and ‘80s… or magalogs and bookalogs of the ‘90s… read them too. Almost everything we know works now, they knew then times ten. And then, yes, do keep it current with the working VSLs. Just make sure you click and get the “transcript” where it’s offered too. Print it to a PDF. Some of the copywriters today do some of the most enviably good stuff I’ve seen yet, anywhere.
2) Don’t expect easy answers – What’s the right question to ask for any piece of copy you’re about to study? Assuming you’re only studying stuff that worked, the right opener — obviously — is “Why?” Unfortunately, it’s also the most unanswerable question. You won’t know, for sure, why anything worked. Because it will always remain a guess.
3) Look past the copy – That is, remember that it’s not so much that the copywriter sold something well… as that there were lots of readers out there that wanted to receive the message he used to sell it. What’s the distinction?
The twist & style
When you look at swipes, especially the most current ones in your market, what you’re looking for first is every clue you can get about the prospect, not so much the product. If there’s a promise that you see working everywhere, it’s because it promises to fix a problem that’s keeping target readers everywhere up at night. Isolate the single biggest promise the copy makes and flip it — what problem is it solving?
4) Find the twist – More and more, we see copy make a promise or throw out a solution-demanding premise… and then up the ante with an extra “twist” to the message. That is, a kind of early “but it gets [an] even better” or “gets [an] even worse” turn in the message, just at the moment the reader was thinking “I’m kinda hooked already…”
Of course, this is classic storytelling. Our hero struggles. And just at the moment you thought it couldn’t get any worse… or better… the drama dial clicks up another notch. Just about any sales message could benefit from a twist, both in the lead and the close. Look to your swipes to see how it’s done.
5) Soak up the style – All writers in all genres pick up a style. Dense. Lean. Even. Excitable. Some copy drips with adjectives but works in spite of itself. Other copy undersells, yet manages — somehow — to hit hard. This is one of those things you can absorb best by just copying out a good piece of copy a few times until the secrets of style sneak into your subconscious.
Structure & closings
Even now, I keep a piece of the latest, greatest copy open on my screen or a second desktop (on the Mac, at least, you can move between multiple desktops). When I’m stuck, I swipe over to it and read for a little, then come back and try to trot out my message in the same mindset. Be careful here, because you’re not stealing words. At least, not mindlessly so. You’re trying to get a “feel” you can transfer back to your writing.
6) Study the structure – This is something else that writing out a full promo — by hand — can help you do. If not that, at least try to re-outline a finished copy control. You want to see how long they took to get through the lead, where they first started laying out the benefits or naming the offer, how they packaged up the testimonials and how long they spent on proof.
Build your own library of promo outlines and use them as templates, next time you’re getting started. This isn’t stealing. It’s just good sense.
Also, look for the segments that seem to show up across several different samples. Just about every sales piece, for instance, is going to have testimonials and a close and some freebies with the offer.
But do all promotions have “Imagine this outcome” sections, transcendent mission statements, a personal story, show-me-the-money examples, etc.? Probably.
7) Collect closes – Copywriters sure do love to talk about headlines and leads. And with good reason, of course. It’s where we put flame to powder. Still, if the lead is what sparks prospect interest, the close is where we pile up the dynamite. And you’ve got to pile it up just so if you want the right result.
Let the swiping begin!
It’s worth pulling closes from a lot of working promos and studying just those, one next to the other. A little tweak to your guarantee, your price rationalization, your push for urgency, can make a huge difference in your results.
If you ever wanted to create an online store that brings in handsfree, passive income the first thing you will need is some kind of presence online; and in order to establish an online presence there are a couple of different methods you can utilize to accomplish such a goal. The first method you can employ is installing your own blog.
The installation (or creation) of your own blog option can work for you if you don’t mind putting in more work and are familiar with registering domains, buying hosting and installing WordPress. WordPress is quick to install, but if you are short on time you can quickly get lost in all the options available for appearance, security, functionality, and other such tasks that are normally associated with creating, managing and maintaining a WordPress blog.
I’m not going to give you a step-by-step guide to building a blog-site with WordPress, because there are thousands of those online already which can be found with a simple search on Google or YouTube if you need a tutorial on how to build a site with WordPress. It’s a lot easier than you probably think! However, if you want to use this option you’ll need the following:
Domain name, purchased through NameCheap or other registrar
Hosting, purchased through NameCheap, HostGator, or other Web hosting company
WordPress, free and easy installation often included by most hosting providers
A WordPress theme, free or paid.
Once you have a basic website built, next up, you need to start adding content. You can create this content yourself, or hire someone to do it for you – or use the trick we’ll explain in the next chapter to have it done fro you. Just make sure the content is well-written, grammatically correct, and interesting, because Google has become a lot more strict about the quality of any content it indexes.
Get a closer look at the ShopABot model for delivering viral traffic!
The second method you can use to create your blog-site and simultaneously set yourself up to establish that needed online presence is to use a software program known as ShopABot. The creators of ShopABot wanted to make it as simple as it has ever been to blog online. They give you a website and will even host it for you if you want. All you need to do is just tell them the niche you want to use and then add your Amazon affiliate details, and in about 30 seconds it’s built for you. When you create your ShopABot account, you’ll also get the option to ‘go pro’ which gives you a blog connected to your done for you store so you can make the most of traffic from Google too.
Just so you know, I’ve been blogging for over 10 years on three different platforms. The first site-building platform I was introduced to during my early years on the Web was Blogger (Blogspot) which was a Google-owned blogging platform that permitted me to add content, but limited my control of functionality, although it is described as “…a blog-publishing service that allows multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries […], developed by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003 […] and allow blogs to be served from a custom domain owned by the user (like www.example.com) by using DNS facilities to direct a domain to Google’s servers.” You can learn more about Blogger on its Wikipedia page.
Several of the first websites I used to publish content to the Web during my early years were created on Weebly, the second platform I used and learned many of the things I know today about website creation, blogging, content creation, coding and other needed skills required to do many of the self-expression, promotional or marketing tasks on the Web. Then I found the WordPress-hosted version of their blogging platform before moving on to the self-hosted version where more work was involved, but almost full control of the blog software was at my disposal. I controlled the look and feel, functionality and styling (among many other features), which was always something that was important to me.
However, all that having been said, I must be totally honest with you and poinjt out that if I had the opportunity back then to grab something as powerful and simple to use as ShopABot, I would have jumped on it without hesitation. Of course the technology was not yet available… didn’t even exist. I believe the time it took me to learn the techniques necessary to get domain names, find good Web hosting, create websites & blogs, get traffic and maintain the blogs & sites would have been cut in half had the opportunity existed for me to utilize the ShopABot system for site/store creation, blogging, viral traffic and, ultimately establishing an online pressence. Bad timing for me, but maybe not for you. Learn more about ShopABot here and you can have your own store live and ready for sales just minutes from now. Good luck!
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Sometimes the benefits of email marketing are quite different than anticipated. Most Web marketers understand the basic concept of email marketing which is to email promotional materials to a large group of Internet users in an effort to promote interest in particular products or services. This concept is easy for many to understand, but we will attempt to describe and, perhaps, elaborate on a few of the more beneficial aspects of email marketing.
In the following paragraphs we discuss the basics of email marketing, but we will also explain how – sometimes – email marketing can encompass much more than originally planned. This additional reach can be either a positive or negative influence depending on the quality of original emails and the reactions of subscriber list recipients.
Simple & cost effective
Email marketing is a very simple concept which can also be extremely cost effective; but the general idea behind email marketing can be narrowed down to this simple characterization: An email is sent to an email subscription (or distribution) list with the single purpose of creating an interest in the products or services being offered by the originator of that email. In theory this concept could not be simpler but email marketing can get significantly more complicated when being implemented.
One of the biggest complicating factors is the potential for emails used in a marketing campaign occur when one or more of those emails are misinterpreted as spam, either recipient of such emails or a spam filter provided by the Internet service provider. This potential alone creates a major complication because Web marketers have to make a significant effort to ensure that their messages are not trapped by a spam filter or immediately deleted by the recipients for appearing to be spam.
After clearing initial hurdle
Once the misinterpretation hurdle is cleared and email messages get through to recipients, they have a small window of opportunity to make a positive impression on those recipients and influence them to make a purchase or at least visit the business owner’s website. One effective method of getting such a result is to provide quality content while keeping advertising subtle and at a minimum while making sure to feature a clear call to action. These are all factors which have been proven to help get the message across and entice potential customers to make a purchase or at least visit a website to get a closer look at those products and services.
As previously stated the goal of an email marketing campaign is to subtlely persuade email recipients to either make a purchase or visit a particular website for more detailed information; and when an email recipient performs either of these actions, it is considered a huge success. However, thanks to the power of a forward button, email marketing can actually be much more successful than even the business owner intended.
Better than word-of-mouth
One of the great aspects of email marketing becomes evident when email recipients receive an email that they think is worthwhile and are likely to make a purchase, but may also forward the same information on to a friend or family member they believe may also be interested in learning more about the particular product or service. This ability to forward email messages can be compared to satisfied customers in the offline world using word of mouth to tout the quality of products or services they have bought and like.
However, the ability to forward a worthwhile email message is exponentially more effective than using word of mouth to spread the word; because with just a few clicks of the mouse the original email recipient can forward any message to several of his/her friends simultaneously. This can result in significantly better results than the business owner had originally expected with no additional effort and time being exerted or money being spent.
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