Email Marketing Best Practices

Organising your email marketing should be a priority for 2014

You may have been sending emails for years now, but sending emails and getting them to be actually opened and read are two completely different things.

• Is your database organised?
• Do you write your emails or newsletters with a goal in mind?
• Do you set clear targets writing to your clients?
• Do you monitor open rates or responses?

Here are 5 simple tips to help kick start your email marketing programme and get those emails open, read and responded to in 2014.

1. Exciting Subject Lines

Not all your emails have chances of being opened. How can you boost the chances of your email being actually opened and read? Work on your subject line. Make them short, interesting and catchy. Throw in compelling information that will not be easily ignored. Make it as specific as you can. You only have a few words to use so use them wisely.

2. Write to One, not All

Try to sound personal in your emails. When you write, always write your email to just one customer or client. Speak in a friendly and warm tone. Portray yourself as a person who can be connected with easily. Don’t sound distant and cold! Don’t try to sound like it is another mass email sent to your 2000 clients email list. Write personally, and receive a personal response!

3. Keep it Short

Whatever the subject of your email is, try to be as brief as possible. Your contacts are busy people and they don’t have enough time to carefully read through long drawn-out emails where you’re writing the email to inform them about your next webinar and it detours to how much you value your new car!

4. Always Have a Clear Call to Action

Have a clear call to action in your email. Write with a goal in mind. Decide exactly what you want the reader to do, and show them the action you want them to take.

Whether you are offering a free download or it’s a free voucher coupon,  make it easy for the reader to see what you want them to do, and encourage them to do it!

5. Use an Email Marketing Platform

Collecting subscriptions using a third party software will help you control your email marketing lists, and will help you monitor your open rates and responses. Online solutions such as Aweber and Mailchimp allow you more control over your lists, helping you create a more targeted email marketing experience for your database.

Your email marketing directly affects your business; Mastering best practices of writing emails and ensuring they are read will help you achieve your marketing goals and increase your direct response rates.

Do you have any email tips to share? Please share below in the comments section…

WordPress

So how can you have the website you dreamed of, at little or no cost, with a fully integrated CMS (content management system) and thousands of ready to use, free or paid templates?

Every business owner knows the importance of having an up to date website. You may also know that getting a new website developed for your business can incur great costs not to mention the money you pay each time you want to update your site.

Well, in case you haven’t heard, WordPress is the way to go! In fact my site, and many sites I have built for clients are all powered by WordPress.

If you want a website that features;

• Thousands of free site templates
• Seamless social media integration
• Standard blog format and integration
• Professional, mobile responsive templates
• Awesome Media Library and gallery formats
• Built-in Comments system
• In-built Search Engine Optimization

Then WordPress is the easiest way to get up and running. When it comes to easily manageable blogs and Websites, WordPress is a fantastic tool to use.

This tutorial series will go more deeply into WordPress later– how to use it for your business website and for your marketing.

Today’s post will look at what WordPress is, it’s basic functions and how it works.

WordPress Lets You Create Your Blog and Website

WordPress is a content management system that allows you to create a blog or website easily without having any technical training.

People may create blogs for different topics ranging anything from a web design and development to cosmetic and baby product reviews.

Blogs are a great addition to any website, and very important for content marketing and keeping in touch with your audience.

Not only can you create and maintain a blog with WordPress it also allows you to create fantastic websites ranging from very simple, basic personal or business websites right through to very complex e-commerce and membership sites.

Once you have installed WordPress , it’s very easy to set up your blog or website. You can fix your basic site settings instantly. You can easily add new content to your blog or website.

In addition to the standard features offered by WordPress, there are hundreds of plugins and widgets – little snippets of code – that can  greatly add to the functionality of your WordPress website.

When you install WordPress it comes with two free themes. You can choose to use these, search for other free templates available or you can look to buy other themes that are right for your business niche.

With WordPress it is very easy to manage your blog or website; add or remove content whenever you want, create a new article or blog post, add images, remove images, create new pages or posts. With a hosting account and a domain name you can start creating your first WordPress website instantly!

Watch out for new posts in this category as we explore WordPress more deeply in later posts.

Turning Your Business Ideas into Opportunities

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If you’ve decided to go brave, take the plunge and become self-employed, then the next step is to identify new business opportunities that are open in your industry – one that you can build and model your business. With the right entrepreneur mindset it is not difficult to spot new business opportunities, especially in today’s world of technology and the internet changing our lives in revolutionary ways like never before. Here are some techniques that you can use to spot new business opportunities quickly and then respond to them.

Indeed, this isn’t just for start-up businesses, the techniques discussed below can also be used to revamp or remodel your current business, helping you keep up to date and refresh your products or services.

1. Keep an Eye on the Markets

The first and probably most important trait of a successful entrepreneur is to keep a close eye on the market. Constantly observing the markets, analyzing new trends, and exploiting new opportunities as they hit the scene. By closely monitoring the changing markets and responding to change whenever it occurs by tweaking your original business idea, you will be able to identify exactly what the new industry or marketing you are entering is looking for.

This means that to identify a successful business idea, you need to ensure you are ready and responsive to change; don’t wait for others to react. Whenever you see a new trend – pinpoint what people are looking for and how you can adapt your business or idea to fit this new model and satisfy demand. This sometimes means you are one of the first to take the leap into a new market or trend, but if you’ve done your homework and researched it’s longevity thoroughly, you can easily profit from your new opportunity.

2. Solve People’s Problems

Another tried and tested way to identify new business opportunities is to identify a problem and then come up with a solution. You can start with yourself: there is a particular product or service that you have had a problem with and you would like to have changed in a certain way.  Thinking like this will introduce you to a whole lot of useful business ideas that you can use.

3. Follow Other Successful Businesses

While it’s great to have an original business idea it is not fundamental to the success of your business to go against the grain! You can establish your business like all the other successful businesses out there – just build on it by identifying a problem that exists in that current market and create a product or a service that addresses and solves the issue. After all the existing businesses are successful because there is demand for the product or service!!! Think about making improvements, changing certain aspects of a product, speeding up services such as delivery or recurring subscriptions.

Summary

So here are a couple of ways you can get new ideas and find new business opportunities. The most important point that underlies the whole process is to be responsive to change to be able to react in a positive manner, turning your business model into a worthwhile and up-to-the-minute product or service.

Do you know of any other ways to identify new business opportunities? Did you go through this process when you modeled your business? Please share below…

Blogging is both fun and exciting but it can become a tiring and time-consuming process at times while trying to offer a unique and interesting experience to your audience; however, it can be made much simpler and easier by using some blogging tools that have been created specifically for bloggers. Below I have collected some of the top blogging tools available from the internet.

1. Content Idea Generator

Content Idea Generator is a Google document which has been created by the guys at SEO Gadget. You can make a copy of the document here. This document gives you a wealth of information related to your niche/industry.  It allows you to run keywords associated with your niche and returns top searches based on your keywords. The information returned is more than enough to give you an inspiration for your blog’s content. The search returns include top searches from Google news, Bing News, Digg, Reddit, YouTube and so on…

2. Diigo

Diigo is a social bookmarking site that allows you to bookmark and tag web pages. It is a great tool for all those bloggers who need to keep track of their desired articles for later reference.  Not only that you are also able to add notes to your bookmarked content. It also supports mobile phone devices such as iphone, ipad etc.

3. Disqus

Disqus is one of the most powerful blogging tools. It provides you with everything you need to build a community around your blog, and to maintain a powerful commenting system with a much better threading in the latest version than in the older one. It also allows you to up-vote and down-vote comments. The posts and comments are connected with each other in a neat and clean manner; also, you can place related articles at the bottom of a post and have a look at the top commenters at a glance.

4. Focus Booster

Focus Booster is a tool that is used by many bloggers to gain focus and increase their productivity. They have both a desktop and a web application available. Based on the principles of the pomodoro technique , the application provides a simple timer with a sleek design to enhance your concentration and focus.

The principle behind the tool – the pomodoro principle – “uses a timer to break down periods of work into 25-minute intervals (referred to as “pomodoros”) separated by breaks and is based on the idea that frequent breaks can improve mental agility”.

5. Alltop

Alltop lets you in on what is happening around you by collecting headlines from top sites and headlines. The site provides an insight into all the topics which can be of interest to us – all in one place.

6. Trapit

Trapit is “the world’s most advanced personalized content discovery application” – as they call themselves. The app lets you set up “traps” for various topics – from very broad categories to niche information – and then it aggregates articles related to your selected keywords from around the web.

Trapit “learns” from your explicit and implicit actions in order to deliver the most relevant content.

7. Photo Pin

Photo Pin is a source of free images for your blog; the photos come from creative commons. The tool makes it very easy to browse photos and to download them in multiple sizes.

One of the cool features of the app is that it gives you the attribution link to the image in HTML so that you can insert it into your blogging editor for attribution.

8. PopSurvey

One of the most important aspect of blogging is to keep your audience engaged and to understand their interests. As a blogger you need to get insights into what your target is talking about.  PopSurvey is a great survey that lets you carry on surveys on your blog to help you better understand your customers. The tool also provides you with custom reports to help you understand and evaluate your audience’s responses.

9. After The Deadline

After The Deadline is a great tool that helps you avoid grammar and spelling mistakes. It is available as a browser extension as well as a WordPress plugin. It is a great language checker for the web that comes with contextual spell checking, advanced style checking and intelligent grammar checking. Say goodbye to all those ‘arghhhhhh’ moments when you see that you have made a mistake after you have published your blog post!

10. Google Keyword Tool

The Google Keyword Tool is a must for every blogger and their mother! It lets you enter search phrases and lets you see how much traffic that particular phrase gets for over a month. Also it gives suggestions on better search phrases based on the keywords that you have entered.

These are only some of the cool blogging tools; there are hundreds of such tools and apps available which will make blogging much simpler and
easier for you.

Are you a blogger? Are there any tools you are using that you would like to share?

source:http://wpmu.org/

When it comes to blogging, WordPress is probably the most powerful and easy to use content management system that is available to create and maintain your business blog.

WordPress’ excellence comes not only because it is free but also because of the large number of themes and plugins available out there which add greatly to the look and functionality of WordPress powered websites and blogs.

There are literally hundreds of fantastic plugins – snippets of codes – that are available – a great number of them being free of cost – and can be downloaded from the WordPress website.

These plugins have an extensive usefulness because they fill in the gaps of both styling and functionality in WordPress. The great thing about using plugins is you need very little knowledge of coding or web development to turn your business website or blog into anything from a superbly designed, functional website through to a supercharged e-commerce store!

Below is a list of 7 highly useful plugins for your business blog:

1. Yoast SEO

The current hot topic for every business owner when discussing their website is “SEO” – search engine optimization. Yoast lets you optimize your page titles, images, meta descriptions etc. very easily.  Every small business that is running a WordPress powered website should install an SEO plugin, and ensure they are optimizing posts and articles from day one, helping increase their search engine visibility.

2. Akismet

Spam is everybody’s enemy. If you have enabled comments on your blog there is every possibility you will be getting hundreds of spam comments. Akismet provides a simple and easy solution to filter out all those unwanted spam comments.

3. Gravity Forms

WordPress falls behind on its functionality to create and manage forms easily. Although it is paid, the Gravity Forms plugin enables you to start creating forms instantly from scratch, it is well worth the price. Gravity Forms lets you create great-looking forms in a matter of seconds after which you which you can start emailing your customers, and collecting their details.

4. NextGen Gallery Plugin

NextGen Gallery Plugin is the most popular gallery plugin, according to WordPress. It provides a powerful solution for uploading and managing galleries of images as well as single images. The plugin comes with a wide array of options for setting up and maintaining image galleries on your site easily.

5. BackupBuddy

This plugin is one of high importance. You should be backing up your site on a regular basis, especially so if your site undergoes regular changes. In order to avoid losing your entire site unexpectedly it is important to have control over your backups. The BackupBuddy plugin lets you create a backup of your entire site – widgets, themes, plugins, files and databases.

6. ShareBar

With the ShareBar Plugin you can easily integrate social media functionality into your content. It adds a vertical box to posts which contains links/buttons to different social media sites. It’s very easy to set up and it enhances your sites ‘share-ability’ factor for visitors.

7. Google Analytics for WordPress

The Google Analytics plugin enables you to track incoming traffic and links your WordPress site easily. It provides a powerful solution for monitoring your site’s visitors and will give you statistics to assist you with targeting your audience. It also helps you find out popular pages, performance of your landing pages and conversions.

These plugins will add  great functionality to any WordPress site. There are thousands of other plugins that can assist you with setting up your website. Of course, some plugins are paid but when compared with the additional functionality they bring to your site they are definitley worth the cost. Do you think these plugins are useful for your blog? Do you know of any other useful plugins? Please share below.

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Business Networking is fundamental to the success of any business. While building your own business you need to know people who can help and advise you on key factors of your business. The end goal of better business networking is to build connections with people online and offline – on every available platform out there. Every entrepreneur needs to develop strong relationships with experienced people in his niche who can guide him on necessary decisions in his business. Check out these five tips to help you in a better and more beneficial way.

(1) Make the Effort

Accept invitations to all suitable occasions. Show interest. Really make the effort to attend whole heartedly. Don’t go to the event with low expectations – don’t arrive late and leave early. Make sure you arrive promptly and allow enough time to communicate with people before the event is in full swing. It is at this time that you can start building real connections.

(2) Make a Plan

Make a plan and set goals as to how many new people you intend to meet and make new connections with at the event. It is better to focus on three or four solid connections at each networking event than to exchange hundreds of business cards that mean very little to you when you get home! Exchange your business cards with them, and maybe write a personal note for them on the back. It is also a good idea to make notes for the different people that will remind you where you met and what topics or opportunities you discussed.

(3) Don’t Love The Sound of Your Own Voice

You aren’t the only person under the sun who has to set the tone for the conversation by expressing your views about a particular topic. In fact, doing this results in everyone else simply clamming up. One-sided interaction will choke a conversation. If you really want engagement in a conversation you need to listen FIRST. Show respect, allow others to make their point, express their views and opinions. Don’t be too quick to respond; think through your response carefully.

(4) Always Ask Questions

Don’t hesitate to ask questions. Being not able to ask questions puts a big question mark on you getting the best answers. If there is an idea that you have been thinking or a problem with your business feel free to ask questions. By asking questions you will benefit from other people’s expertise. Always ask open ended questions to encourage conversation.

(5) Find Relevant Business Networking Groups

Online business networking groups are another great place to build connections. They provide a virtual platform to reach out to new people and expand your networking horizons. Here are some of the resources:

• LinkedIn With well over 200 million professionals LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network. It lets you grow your professional network, discover business opportunities and all the news and insights you need.
• Meetup Meetup is a social network that lets you connect with people who share the same interests and who live near you. There are a variety of group categories to choose from and join.
• BNI BNI is the world’s largest referral organisation with over 150 thousand members worldwide. BNI works on a system building powerful networks through referrals.
• Chambers of Commerce The BCC is a high-profile business network which has chambers spread all over the UK. Their mission is to “make the Chambers of Commerce an essential part of growing business” and they achieve it by “sharing opportunities, knowledge and expertise.”
• Ryze Ryze is another place where you can make quality business contacts ,get advice and tips and make deals for your company.
• Xing Xing allows you to “find useful business contacts as well as work assignments and projects.”

Once you have a proper business networking strategy in place you are sure to make more useful connections and get much better results from the events you attend. The key is to search out the relevant events in your niche, target the type of person you need to build connections with and then aim to start a business relationship with them. Really emphasise the benefits of your products or services and network, network, network!!!

As Robert Kiyosaki puts it,”The richest people in the world look for and build networks, everyone else looks for work.”

Having your own business is exciting, fun, exhilarating and rewarding; however, a great business idea and a business plan is not the only recipe to a successful startup. Any wise entrepreneur should look much further ahead and try to avoid the most common mistakes made in the early stages of business.

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It is so easy to lose sight in those early days; by positioning yourself and mapping out those initial stages, you can be sure to save time, money and start up pains.

Here are a few tips to guide you on your way and help you avoid ‘Start up Syndrome’.

(1) Take Your Time

As soon as you recognize your business idea, you must never just run in there and take the bull by the horns. Before you make your move, consult with professionals in your industry and talk to friends and family about the feasibility of your business idea. You should never overlook the need for objective criticism from those more experienced than you. It is better to fail to start than to start to fail. Question the viability of your business idea before you actually take any practical step and ALWAYS ask advice if you are unsure.

(2) Don’t Lose Focus

It’s better to do three things right than to do ten things half right. When you’re starting out you need to set priorities and goals for yourself and your business. If you become too innovative from the outset with almost all the business processes before your business is even off the ground you will end up having a brand new set of ideas for virtually anything that comes your way and no action plan or results. Too many ideas – even good ones – may slow your productivity down and prevent you from reaching your goals. Aim, Set and Fire!

(3) You Aren’t the Only One Who Can Do It!

Many entrepreneurs are likely to fall into this trap: the only-I-can-do-this syndrome. Just because you have a good idea it doesn’t mean you are the only person on the face of the earth who has to supervise its realization from start to finish. You need other people to split your goal into easily achievable chunks.  By properly delegating responsibilities to carefully selected individuals you can expedite your journey to the business goal you have set for yourself. Never be afraid to ask for help.

(4) Stop Re-inventing the Wheel!

If there is a simple way to do something, then do it. Don’t map out the next grand master plan for the simplest of tasks. Many business people often lose sight of their goals getting bogged down in the simplest of tasks such as administration, record keeping and invoicing. We live in the digital age. Make the most of software and tools available online to help you with your day to day tasks. Embrace it. Don’t be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st Century!!!

(5) Never Be Afraid to Follow Your Dreams

With love, care and attention, your business will grow and flourish. If you have an idea or a dream, then don’t be afraid to start researching and planning and aiming for whatever it will take to get it off the ground. Being scared of making mistakes often costs some people a lifetime of wondering and wishing. Wondering and worrying never made anyone rich, or any business successful. Deep down, you will find the correct path for your business, so start turning those dreams into a reality.

Given the way our lives have been revolutionized by the World Wide Web, for the majority of the entrepreneurs setting up an internet home business offers the promise of a new dream fulfilled.

Today loads of people are scaling up their online hours to establish a powerful and influential presence on the web and supplement their income with their laptop and an internet connection.

If you have decided to venture into setting up a home business then here are 6 steps you need to consider:

Business Plan

Most successful business ventures start out by creating a business plan. It helps you stay focused and on track while you are setting up. You will need to consider a number of factors that are of key importance to your business; your target market, your competition, your price points, marketing strategy and funding requirements for your venture. You can write out a plan yourself or you could use an online tool like enloop to do that.

Target Market

Something you really must do before you start your home business is find out if there is a market for your idea. Once you define your market, you will want to find out how big that market is and if it has reached saturation. Try working with your service, product or offering to mould it to suit your market, and make sure you have something worthy of the sale! If you see that there is already a very huge competition in the particular niche you have decided to work in, you will need to narrow it down to cut out the competition and help your business stand out from the crowd.

Financing Your Business

Next come the finances. You have to figure out how much you will need and how you will finance your business. If you don’t have the initial funds to get the ball rolling, bank loans, credit cards or overdrafts are the most common options people use to cover the shortfall. You could borrow money from your friends or family – perhaps you could offer them a share in your business, or arrange a repayment method. It goes without saying that your aim is to find the most comfortable and cheapest option to finance your home business startup.

Your Home Office and Office Supplies

Next on the list is to start setting up your workspace – your home office. It’s important to have an area in your home which is closed off from the rest of the house through partitions or dividers.

A separate room in your home is ideal but not essential. Any enclosed space that you could distinctly call your office is fine. Of course, you will need to a PC or a laptop or possibly both. If you will be travelling for business, it may be best to have both a PC for the home office and a laptop for portable work. Also, you need to have a good internet connection and a separate phone line for your business.

You also need to buy other necessary office supplies for your home business like furniture, a fax machine, printers, toners, stationery, and computer accessories and so on. Try to minimize costs by choosing a cheap office supplies provider. Memo Etc is a great example of a provider as they offer excellent office supplies at very low cost.

Your Website

Then comes your website. Depending upon the features that you want your site to have it could cost you from £500 to £15,000. Your website should be professional and everything should correspond to your unique business idea. You should update it constantly with original and valuable content related to your niche. Also you will need to set up business email addresses, for example, something like adminxyz@onlineservices.co.uk .

Marketing

Finally, with everything in place you will need to tell people about your service or product. Your very first priority is to utilize all the free marketing strategies available. First, email your friends and family and tell them about your new business venture. Ask them for referrals. Create business pages on different social media platforms and share interesting content about your product or service. Add it to local business directories as well Google and Yahoo business directories.

As for paid advertising, Google PPC advertising can be a cost effective way to advertise because you only pay when someone clicks through to your site. Also you could consider creating an affiliate program and use affiliates to build your business by leveraging their exposure in your niche.

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A recent article published on Forbes.com by Lisa Arthur claims that online retail sales are growing at approximately 10 times the rate of brick and mortar. This has resulted in retailers flocking to get their online share of the retail industry. Like never before, people are opening shops online for all kind of items; food items, electronic and digital products, cleaning and washing items, clothing and footwear, auto parts, accessories and so on.

So far so good; despite the growing number of people jumping at the online retail industry to grab their share what that needs to be debated is what is best for you in case you have decided to open a retail store: online or offline.

To start off we will look at the cost of opening a retail storefront as compared to an online one. Generally it costs less to open an online store as compared to opening a brick mortar storefront. You don’t have to pay any rent or utility bills for your store. You will not incur any costs decorating your store and buying signage etc. You need not hire additional staff as in the case of a physical staff. All you have to pay is for your domain name, website hosting and any other web related services.

A retail store front can do better for luxury or high price items, for example; cars, jewelry, antiques etc where the buyer will physically want to see and feel the item before making the decision to purchase. For these items a retail front could appeal more to buyers and hence more profit can be generated on single item sales.  With an online store you can have a more extensive selection of categories on your to sell, and can keep costs lower by passing on savings in overheads and other offline shop front expenses to your customers.

The target market with a retail storefront can be quite limited, and can make marketing efforts more difficult outside your local area, while the opportunities for marketing an online store are vast. This is because in the case of a traditional brick and mortar store your marketing is only limited to your local area, and online, you can pretty much advertise anywhere in the world and reach new customers in the comfort of their own homes.

With an online store, your horizons expand considerably. With the traditional store you are confined to the space that you have rented. You cannot change how your store looks every day. It is too costly to rebrand your store once it is done; but with an online store you can do that in minutes with the click of a mouse. However, one point to note here is that the customer loyalty with your offline store is stronger as compared to an offline one. These real life connections can be more beneficial to your business as opposed to email lists!

Finally, the competition! With an online store you will be faced with huge competition for virtually any items that you want to sell because when you decide to sell some item(s) online probably there are a dozen companies out there selling the same and they are well established!

On the other hand with an offline retail storefront you can carry out full research and due diligence and set up your business in a place where competition is lower and the footfall supports your requirements.

With tablets and smartphones making their way into our lives very fast, consumer behavior is changing unpredictably. Whether it is a leap into online retailing or an extension of a physical store on the internet retailers must respond to the change!

If you are planning your first store, take time to consider the pros and cons of online or offline commerce. Make sure you have mapped out the costs considerably and are sure you have taken into consideration the costs of opening before you go live!

In case you have decided on setting up a brick and mortar store you will certainly want to keep expenses to the minimum. You can cut expenses by lowering your marketing budget and making use of all the free of cost resources available out there on the internet. As a brick and mortar shop you yourself are obviously not tied to other brick and mortar shops for basic necessities such as shop fittings. Shop around online and cut down those costs yourself, impress your customer afterwards with a grand storefront and with the right mix of tactics you might even need a line of barrier ropes to guide the masses.

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Many small business owners are reluctant to hire an accountant for their business. They shy away from hiring an accountant for fear of the fees associated with professional accounting advice.

Some business owners believe that hiring an accountant is redundant and that they can handle all their accounting themselves.

However, after taking into consideration the financial damage that can be caused if a non-specialized person tries to deal with the complexity of tax, finances etc., it is clear that employing a good accountant is imperative to your business success.

So while it is a good idea to save money by painting your office, collecting your newly printed cards from the printer service or going out to distribute your latest promotional leaflets yourself it isn’t always a good choice to try saving money by doing all your accounting work yourself.

Why hire a prefessional accountant? Here are some important reasons:

1. Advice on Startup

If you are starting a new business an accountant will guide you on your business plan and tax issues pertaining to setting up a new business. They will guide you through the initial maze of company structure, personal assets and tax management, including book-keeping.

2. General Bookkeeping

A certified accountant is trained to maintain all financial records and to produce accurate financial reports. To create these reports, a certain amount of paper work is needed to be kept in a certain way, depending on your business structure. This financial bookkeeping is essential both from both a legal and business point of view.  Your accountant will advise you on the best way to keep records in order to create reports and financial snapshots of your business. The reports will help you better understand how your business is doing over a particular period of time and what measures you need to take in case any issues are identified.

3. Compliance with Government Legislation

Government legislation is complicated; also it is constantly changing. A certified accountant is familiar with all the intricacies of tax and corporate laws. He will make sure that you aren’t breaking any tax related rules that could land you in trouble and jeopardize the welfare of your business.

4. General Business Consulting

Besides maintaining financial records an experienced accountant can offer you consultation on cash flow, price control, inventory management etc. This expert consultation can help you in making right and timely decisions for your business. Also an expert accountant can offer advice on appraising viability of future projects and possible adjustments for losses or gains.

5. Advice on Tax Planning

Apart from tax reporting, a good accountant could offer expert advice on how to maximize tax deduction. Because they know tax laws inside out they could guide you on what to claim and what not to claim; this is especially beneficial to small and home-based businesses which are not fully aware of tax rules and legislation.

6. Save Time and Money

Irrespective of how well you understand figures, an accountant will better advise you on finding ways to save extra money. He will also save you lots of time and the hassle of keeping track of all the figures. The extra money your accountant saves you can then be spent on things in your business you are good at!

From the above you can see just how important it is to have your own accountant for your business in order to run it smoothly and successfully. You can also consider outsourcing your accounting. There are online accounting services you can hire for your business. This means that you can outsource you whole accounting process to a service provider and let them worry about the nitty-gritty of it. Best Online Accounting is an excellent online accounting service provider. Founded by a group of experienced chartered accountants the company provides a variety of accounting solutions and lets you choose the one that best suits your criteria.