Self Employed Success

Sorry to rain on your parade, but have you heard the news?

The United States Postal Service announced that the cost of a first class stamp will increase to .42 on May 12. No, it’s not deja vu. You are correct in your remembering that postage rates were just increased in May of 2007. Inside sources tell us that we can expect to see postage rate increases every year.

The increase includes not just first class stamps, but postcards and packages as well.

This affects your e-commerce and marketing in a big way:

• Now is the time to re-think your own information product pricing and delivery structure. Ebooks and downloadable audio files might be the way to go to reduce your costs. Yes, there are always security and theft concerns with selling e-products, but you have to weight those concerns against the rising cost of producing and shipping physical products.
• E-commerce shoppers love “free shipping.” But what will that cost you in the future? Will you have to raise the price of your products to offset the new shipping costs?
• It may also be time to re-think your physical mailing campaigns versus email campaigns.

For those who think, “I’ll just use FedEx or UPS,” remember that those costs will continue to rise as well.

A few weeks ago, we were discussing whether submitting your articles to article banks is seen as duplicate content, and whether the search engines would penalize your site and/or specific website pages based on this information.

According to Google’s webmaster site:

“Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites, Google will always show the version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you’d prefer. However, it is helpful to ensure that each site on which your content is syndicated includes a link back to your original article. You can also ask those who use your syndicated material to block the version on their sites with robots.txt. ”

So it seems that Google DOES see syndicated articles on article banks as duplicate content. While they may not penalize your own site for this, putting your article in the article banks probably won’t increase your SEO rankings either. In addition, the search engine may show, in their search results, your article on the article bank’s site instead of on your own site.

On the plus side, having your article show up in the search results often can lead prospective customers back to your site. I’m not abandoning my plans to syndicate my articles, but I will be creating two versions of the same article to avoid the duplicate content problem: a long one to put on my own site, and a short one to put on the article banks and on my blog. Taking the extra 15 minutes to shorten an article seems like a worthwile investment of my time.

One of the biggest challenges to starting or expanding your business is finding financing. Yes, you can check with your local bank or credit union. You can use your credit cards (though I wouldn’t recommend this method!). You can borrow from family or friends. You can use your savings.

But if these methods don’t work, here are three places you can borrow from other people:

http://www.prosper.com/

http://www.lendingclub.com/

http://www.zopa.com/

More and more, individual people are willing to pool together to lend money to each other. You simply indicate how much you want to borrow and what interest rate you’ll pay, and individuals can pledge money towards your loan. Read the rules and information on each site to determine which one is best for you.

Here’s a great blog entry for all small business owners, from Marnie Pehrson:

Everything I Needed to Know About Personality Types I Learned in Little League Basketball

Good insights!

What’s more important?

• Learning about how women buy
• The product or service you are selling

(Hint: the answer is #1.)

In order to grow your business, you must understand women’s lifestyles and what are their specific wants, needs and desires.

In this two-session teleclass, you will learn:

• What women buy — and why
• The number 1 thing you must do in your marketing to women
• The 10 (HUGE) mistakes we make when marketing to women
• The keys to creating a woman-friendly website
• How to market to women without alienating men
• What women want and need from a shopping experience
• How to re-write your marketing copy so that it’s inviting to women

Click here for more class details about Marketing to Women.

This teleclass meets one hour each week, for two weeks.

• Feb. 21
• Feb. 28

All teleclasses are 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM eastern. The teleclass will be recorded, so if you can’t attend live, you will be able to download the recordingst to listen to at your leisure.

Registration fee: $67 for the two-week class

Click here for more class details about Marketing to Women.

o