As most (if not all) small business owners know, you can’t do or manage everything. And some tasks (HR and accounting spring to mind) are often better left to the experts.

Of course, not every small or midsized business can afford to outsource functions, though in many cases the benefits outweigh the upfront cost. But whether you are planning to outsource or are just thinking about it, it pays to do your homework and due diligence before giving over part of your business to a third-party. Here are six things to consider before you choose a business right partner.

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1. Contribute to your community.
For Chiodo, offering his time and resources to the community is not a chore so much as it is part of his commitment to doing the right thing.

Last summer, for example, Chiodo and his team installed four new air conditioning units at a local animal shelter where the cooling system was on its last legs. Instead of handing the shelter a hefty bill, Chiodo worked with his distributor to have the equipment donated. He handled the labor for free.

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How to Cope with Brexit
For small businesses owners, especially ecommerce merchants already selling (or thinking about selling) to UK consumers, the anxiety lies with unknown costs: what happens when Brexit takes effect? What new regulations or tariffs will be imposed on trade? How will that affect landed costs (taxes + import tariffs + shipping charges) to UK consumers? Will that change a seller's supply chain, and if so, how?

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Is your business protected from a data breach? The largest data theft in history:

1.2 billion internet user names and passwords compromised
420,000 websites impacted
Well-known national brands and small companies affected.
Here are ten things you can do to protect your business.

1. Secure sensitive customer, employee or patient data.

Store paper files and removable storage devices (such as thumb drives and CDs) containing sensitive information in a locked drawer, cabinet, safe or other secure container when not in use.
Restrict access to sensitive data to those who have a need to know. Give employees access to only the information they need to do their jobs - whether it's online or in paper form.

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Perhaps it is time to embrace some new first principles.

Making a first impression is not easy. People are just so sensitive these days. Sensitive about themselves, that is.

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It is common knowledge that targeting customers will result in a higher sales conversion than non-targeted, random traffic that just happens upon your website. In order to effectively target your customers, you need to know who and where they are. Customers come in all shapes and sizes, so how do you discern which customers are the best to target?

The following are tips to identify your best customers...

Tips to Identify Your Customers

Look the part You may be trembling inside, but you want to appear strong and in control. How can you communicate confidence that you may or may not be feeling? Try following these simple tips.

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Despite the potential for physical, emotional, and mental stress, you can learn to lead a sustainable and healthy lifestyle as an entrepreneur.

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To make lives easier, Moore offers the following legal tips to help small and medium-sized business owners.

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Being a business owner is a dream of many; but a reality of only a few. Especially when it comes to actually making it in the small business space. It requires persistence, preparation and dedication.

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For tips on keeping your business customer focused and more, check out this recent content from members of the online small business community.

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Experts from the nations 63 Small Business Development Centers (SBDCs) are more than happy to share their advice for starting and growing a business successfully. They work with entrepreneurs every day, providing free and low-cost consulting. Collectively, SBDCs help a new business launch every 31 minutes, and provide more than 1.3 million hours of consulting services to entrepreneurs annually.

To get you started, we’ve asked some of these advisors to share their best tips for new businesses.

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Every business needs well managed capital to scale. If you’re able to budget properly, then there will always be enough capital for you to grow your business. Every business operates differently which means there is no universal formula to creating a viable budget for your company.

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Recently, American Management Services started working with the owner of a restaurant chain, made up of six locations spread across the Northeast. Since the first day they opened their doors, they approached paying vendors with a sense of loyalty by cutting checks the day the invoice was received. While being loved by their vendors, our client was receiving no discounts, and put themselves financially at risk by not safe-guarding their cash!

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Are you looking for ways to use email marketing to grow your business? Then you will want to take a look at these five email marketing tips to help boost your sales.

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Business owners need to constantly learn in order to be successful. Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned entrepreneur, resources like business experts, books, tools and exercises can help you shape your strategies and cultivate sustained success. Here are some suggestions from members of the online small business community for resources and tips that can help you build a successful business and life.

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It is not a one-time undertaking but an ongoing process that must be revisited throughout the life of any business. In fact, nearly half of all CEOs launch a company reorganization during their first two years on the job.

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As a small business owner, it can be a point of pride to watch your dreams translate into equitable profits. However, the road to success has many potholes to avoid and expressways to take — if you recognize them in time.

With the vast array of personal finance knowledge out there, it can be tricky to figure out which advice is the best fit for small business owners. Ten members of Forbes Finance Council weighed in with their own personal wealth management tips to help you keep your personal and professional finances in good shape.

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The holiday season is already in full swing. And, I believe, you would have already pushed all the right buttons, at all fronts, be it your website pages, social media pages, marketing emailers and all, before things might get too hot to handle for you.

However, a checklist will always come handy, I believe. It will not only keep you on your toes but will remind you of the pending activities that might need your attention, now or later on.

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The holidays puts everyone in a celebratory mood — or almost everyone. For small business owners, the celebration may be tempered by stress over unpaid invoices. My business is lucky: Lots of our clients are scrambling to issue payments before year-end to finish off their fiscal years. But for other small businesses, freelancers and entrepreneurs in the B2B world, getting paid this time of year is an ongoing struggle.

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Establishing a strong social media presence can mean big business for your small business. But if you don’t have dedicated resources to devote to it, or you don’t have much time to spare, you might find it tough to gain traction. Use these nine social media tips to boost business and grow your brand.

Set Clear Goals

No matter how eager you are to start using social media for your business, take the time to set clear goals before you begin. Try setting SMART goals — specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely — to guide your social media strategy.

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Most working class Americans are employed by companies that either require or offer retirement savings options in the form of a 401(k), 403b), or pension plan. Because these contributions are automatically deducted from the employee’s paycheck, saving for retirement tends to be a rather painless process. Over time, the cumulative effect of regular monthly contributions leads to a nice sized nest egg that can be used in the retirement years.

But for entrepreneurs, the story is a little different. With no steady paycheck or employer-sponsored plans, many of these hardworking individuals forgo retirement contributions.  And though it may not seem like a big deal in the early years, this misstep can prove to be dangerous and irresponsible as entrepreneurs age.

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Get out your pink paint. Or your coral, or yellow or teal. By the time you finish reading this column, you’re going to be painting one wall of your small business a color that will pop on Instagram.

Why? Because Instagram is today’s powerhouse social media site for consumer businesses. And if you give customers an inviting way to post to Instagram, they'll advertise your business for free.

A few years ago, if you wanted to reach retail consumers, the social media site of choice was Facebook. While it may still work for reaching certain demographics, many consumers – especially female Millennials – love Instagram.

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Many successful entrepreneurs were inspired to start their businesses after noticing a hole in the marketplace that needed to be filled, whether it was Bill Gates creating an operating system for home computers, Pierre Omidyar starting an online auction site, or Elon Musk building a reliable electric car.

But what happens when you want to jump feet first into a marketplace thats already crowded? We spoke to the entrepreneurs behind a wide-ranging group of successful companies in some of the most competitive digital spaces -- from butchers to home brands to eco-friendly cleaning products -- to get their insights into what makes a business that lasts.

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SBDC Centers offer free consulting and free or low-cost training. (Find yours here.) Their results speak for themselves: SBDC clients grow sales by an average 18.1%, which is 4.3 times the national average. March 20th is SBDC Day, and to celebrate, we assembled some tips from their experts.

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Smart companies are not just those that have intelligent leaders. They also have systems, tools and proper planning in place that allow every department or function to run together seamlessly. To become a smart company, you need to integrate smart ideas into every facet of your business. Here are some tips from members of the online small business community.

Manage Your Website Effectively
Your website is one of the most important tools your small business has. To manage it effectively, you need access to the right tools. In this WP Buffs post, Brenda Barron provides a full explanation and walk-through of GoDaddy Pro, so you can see if it may be helpful for your business.

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Ranking a business website higher enhances its chances of gaining a lead that could ultimately turn into a new business sale. To rank, a website higher needs quite a few steps and does not happen overnight. Let’s figure out the five most common and impactful professional SEO tips that a CEO insists upon.

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Regardless of your industry, if you want to thrive, then you need to network. Although you already know the catch: How can an entrepreneur or founder possibly fit networking into their already hectic schedules? Here are 11 tips to resolve the networking issue when you're crunched for time.

1. Make networking a habit.

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As is common in many aspects of life, there are lessons we learn that we wish we’d known sooner. When it comes to being a small business owner there are insights you can only gain from gathering years of experience. That is why it’s important to surround yourself with people that know things you don’t.

Here are a few tips from successful small business owners.

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Eleni Gianopulos spent more than 15 years selling her handmade sugar cookies to a famous gourmet grocery chain. Then Dean & DeLuca stopped paying its bills. By January 2018, Gianopulos, founder and owner of New York City-based bakery Elenis Cookies, realized that she might never be paid for $86,000 worth of 2017 custom holiday orders.

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If you run a small business for a long time, you will probably need to navigate through a lot of major changes. Members of the online small business community are very familiar with these shifts. From getting started to deciding when to retire, here are some valuable insights for making big changes in your business.

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Chances are good, few habits need more of an overhaul right now than your sleep routine. You probably picked up a few bad sleep habits during the cold, dark winter and any additional stress you're facing is helping the situation, says Brown University associate professor and medical doctor Katherine Sharkey.

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Understand the Challenges Your Customers Are Facing
Before you can market during any period, you need to be able to solve a problem for your customers. During a pandemic, the problem you are solving may change. So you have to be able to communicate that. Part of this is just understanding the current climate. It is probably safe to say that many small business customers are hurting financially. Some may also be in a hurry to receive specific types of items. By understanding your market and staying up-to-date on news in your industry, you should be well versed on the basic challenges that might impact your strategy or talking points. However, Perkin also recommends surveying customers however possible so you can quantify how many of them are struggling in specific areas. Once you know the problems your customers are facing, you can work backward to create your marketing communication strategy.

Learn How to Communicate with New Customers
In fact, you may need to pivot all or part of your business strategy in order to stay afloat during the pandemic. For example, Marran pointed out a UPS client that previously sold pet costumes, but has recently shifted into manufacturing face masks and PPE. This is likely to be a temporary change. But they still need to shift their marketing and communication strategy toward hospitals and B2B customers, rather than focusing on the consumers they normally serve.

1. Develop a professional mobile-friendly business website.

Your website must be professional and should provide a rich experience and the feel of your brand to users. Here are a few tips to make your website professional and SEO-friendly:

• Use your business logo and branding on your website.

• Make sure your website is mobile-friendly (more than half of local searches are mobile searches)

• Your website should load in less than three seconds.

• Use a clean, minimal design, and avoid fancy styles.

• Your website must be well structured and easy to use.

Many business owners waste too much money creating a professional small business website. But there is no need to waste too much money on a business website. You can create a professional website for less than $500. So do not waste more money on website design, but invest that extra money in SEO.

2. Identify profitable keywords.

The success of an SEO campaign depends on the targeted keywords. Thats why you need to choose the right and profitable keywords for your small business. All keywords are not equal; some keywords could have high search volume but not profitability, while some could be profitable but have small volumes.

Also, focus on long-tail keywords because they are easy to rank and more profitable than short keywords. The profitability of a keyword depends on the nature of the keyword. For that, you need to understand the intent behind that keyword — why a user is searching that.

For example, when a person searches ice cream on Google, they want to know about ice cream, which means it has informational intent. But when a person searches for best choco-milk ice cream near me, the person wants to eat ice cream. This will be a profitable keyword for you to target.

3. Create a separate page for each product.

I found that many small businesses list all their products on one page like the homepage, but this is not a good practice. If you want to get more profit from your local SEO efforts, then you should create specific pages for each product. That way you can rank higher for each product page for multiple keywords.

For example, if you have a clothing store website, then you need to create separate pages for each product, such as one page for jeans and another for shirts. Also, you can create further subpages, such as jeans> men jeans> blue jeans. This can boost your rankings and revenue and reduce your efforts.

4. Use schema.

Structured data is helping Google better understand webpages. That’s why it can help you rank higher and get the advantage of other SERP features like featured snippets, knowledge graphs, etc. Product schema, local business, FAQ and others are must-use schema types for every business.

The coronavirus pandemic has placed tremendous stress on the American economy. More than 55 million Americans have filed for unemployment, and more than 100,000 small businesses have been permanently shuttered, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Though the news seems dire, these changing times could present an opportunity if you are a hopeful entrepreneur.

Whether you have been planning to start a business for years, you have been laid off and are looking for new opportunities or you are moving your existing business in a new direction, now might be the time to figure out how to start a business.

1. Focus on the positive
2. Hit the reset button
3. Never give up
4. Network

For small businesses,traditional marketing can be expensive and difficult to maintain. Inbound marketing can level the playing field and give even the smallest business a chance to stand out and grow.

Why use inbound marketing?

1. It is cost effective
2. It helps build customers trust.
3. It increases brand awareness and boosts your online presence.
4. It can improve your marketing decision making
5. You can craft customer-focused content.
6. Inbound marketing provides two-way communication.
7. It helps bring in organic traffic to your website

Staying tuned in to the pulse of your industry is key to becoming a successful entrepreneur. Public groups, online forums and the like are among the most valuable resources for gathering and contributing industry information. But if someone is looking for in-depth insight into their business niche, locating the right groups where this discussion occurs is the first step. T

(EMAILWIRE.COM, November 01, 2024 ) Artificial Intelligence Chipset Market size was valued US$ 20.76 Bn in 2023 and the total revenue is expected to grow at 40% from 2024 to 2030, reaching US$ 218.85 Bn. by 2030. The AI chipset market is experiencing rapid growth, driven by increasing adoption...

Turn Off Grid LinesIf you want to turn off grid lines in LO Calc:Tools > Options > LibreOffice Calc > View > Visual Aids > Grid Lines > Hide

Get the distinct values in calc

1. Select the column (or the list of data) that you want to process
2. Data > More Filters > Standard Filter
3. From Options choose "No duplications".

That's no easy feat even for an old navy man such as John McCain. He says bloggers are old enough to fight his damn wars but not enough to speak our mind.

Think Progress notes McCain's attack on the blogosphere:

When I was a young man, I was quite infatuated with self-expression, and rightly so because, if memory conveniently serves, I was so much more eloquent, well-informed, and wiser than anyone else I knew. It seemed I understood the world and the purpose of life so much more profoundly than most people. I believed that to be especially true with many of my elders, people whose only accomplishment, as far as I could tell, was that they had been born before me, and, consequently, had suffered some number of years deprived of my insights…It’s a pity that there wasn’t a blogosphere then. I would have felt very much at home in the medium.

In 2000, John McCain called Rev. Jerry Falwell an “agent of intolerance.” Yesterday, in a naked attempt to broaden his political base, McCain delivered the commencement speech at Falwell’s Liberty University. McCain’s hypocrisy was noted on many blogs. He returned the favor in his speech at Liberty by attacking the blogosphere.

McCain’s lurch to the right begs the following question: Could it be possible that Republicans are also saddled with shitty consultants?

Related links: daily fisk, news, us-news, in the news, news and politics, politics, political, john+mccain, blogging, blogosphere, humor, fisk

Whether you're a recent graduate going to college for the first time or a returning student, it will soon be time to get to campus – and payment deadlines for tuition and other fees are not far behind..... IRS Back-to-School Tips for Students and Parents Paying College Expenses

You may not be thinking about your tax return right now, but summer is a great time to start planning for next year. Organized records not only make preparing your return easier, but may also remind you of relevant transactions, help you prepare a response if you receive an IRS notice, or substantiate items on your return if you are selected for an audit. Tax Time Stress: IRS offers Tax Tips to Reduce Tax-Time Stress

To play RealAudio clips from this site, use the excellent and free VLC player. Works great on smartphones, too.

Long Term Life Tips: Top 5 Regrets People Make on their Deathbed:

An astonishing “top 5 list” blog comes to us via longtermtips and I’m pleased to say I’m pretty sure I won’t have any of these regrets when my time inevitably comes.

By Bronnie Ware (who worked for years nursing the dying)

For many years I worked in palliative care. My patients were those who had gone home to die. Some incredibly special times were shared. I was with them for the last three to twelve weeks of their lives.

People grow a lot when they…

Go read. It’s worth it. Then think on it.

तपाईंको कम्प्युटरको Speed बढाउने १० Tips हरु

१. सर्बप्रथम कम्प्युटर खोल्ने बित्तिकै कुनै पनि Application चाँड चांडै नखोल्नुस्, पहिला राम्रो सँग PC लाई Bootup हुन
दिनुस्।

२. कुनैपनि Application बन्द गरी सके पछि आफ्नो Desktop लाई एक पल्ट
Refresh गर्नुस्| यसले
तपाईंको कम्प्युटरको Ram
मा जम्मा भएको Unused फाइलहरु Remove हुन्छ।

३. आफ्नो कम्प्युटरमा सके सम्म Wallpaper को Use नै नगर्नुस् र यदि गर्नुनै छ भने ठुलो साइजको Image लाई Use नगर्नुस् ।

४. आफ्नो Desktop मा धेरै
Unnessesary Shortcut हरुलाई नराख्नुस् र सके सम्म Desktop लाई Clean
नै राखनुस् । Desktop
मा फोटो तथा Music को फाइलहरुलाई पनि Save नगर्नुस्।

५. RecycleBin लाई बेला बेलामा Empty गरी राख् नुस्। तपाईंले Delete गर्नु
भएको फाइलहरु Recycle Bin मा जम्मा भई राखेको हुन्छ र तपाईंको कम्प्युटरको Harddrive को ठाउँ यसले लीइ राखेको हुन्छ।

६. Temporary Internet files लाई बेला बेलामा Delete गरी राखनुस् ।

७. आफ्नो कम्प्युटरलाई प्रत्येक २ महिनामा Defragment गर्नुस्। यसले तपाईंको कम्प्युटरको Harddrive मा धेरै
खाली ठाउँ बनाउछ र Program हरु Fast
चल्छन ।

८. आफ्नो कम्प्युटरलाई जहिले पनि २ वा २ भन्दा बढीमा partitions गर्नुस् र सके सम्म Software हरुलाई दोस्रो वा तेस्रो Drive मा Instal गर्नुस्। सके सम्म C Drive लाई खाली नै राख् नुस् ।

९. जब तपाईंले नयाँ Software हरु Install
गर्नु हुन्छ त्यो Software को Tray Icon लाई Disable गर्नुस्, यि Icon
हरुले तपाईंको कम्प्युटरको RAM को Use गरी राखेका हुन्छन र कम्प्युटर Slow हुन सक्छ र Software का starting the application automatically Option
लाई पनि Disable गर्न नभुल्नु होला । यस्ता Option हरुलाई तपाइले
software हरु Install गरी सके पछि उक्त Software को Tools मा गएर पनि Disable गर्न सक्नु हुन्छ।

१०. आफ्नो कम्प्युटरलाई धुलो बाट पनि सके सम्म बचाउनुस्, किन भने धुलोले
तपाईंको कम्प्युटरका Cooling Fan हरुलाई जाम गरी दिन सक्छ यसले कम्प्युटर अनावश्यक रुपमा तातो हुन सक्छ र कम्प्युटर
Slow Down हुन सक्छ ।

यि १० वटा साधारण Tips हरुलाई बिचार पुर्याउनु भयो भने तपाईंको कम्प्युटर तुलनात्मक रुपमा पहिले भन्दा धेरै Speed
मा चल्न सक्छ। "

4IP Ipswich 'Your Local Station for Better Entertainment'

Ipswich Airport (IATA: IPW, ICAO: EGSE) is a former airfield on the outskirts of Ipswich, Suffolk England. It was known as RAF Nacton when No. 3619 Fighter Control Unit of the Royal Auxiliary Air Force were based there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipswich_Airport