How to Start a Business: A Step-by-Step Guide

Right now, aspiring entrepreneurs all across the country are planning their paths to business ownership. It's a journey that requires a lot of hard work, and many people end up failing. But if your company survives, the rewards of entrepreneurship are well worth the obstacles you'll face on the road to success.

If you think you're ready to start your first business, here's a step-by-step overview of what you need to do to make it happen.

1. Brainstorm ideas

2. Build a business plan
3. Assess your finances
4. Determine your legal business structure
5. Register with the government and IRS
6. Select your technology
7. Purchase an insurance policy
8. Choose your partners
9. Build your team
10. Brand yourself and advertise
11. Grow your business

Brainstorm ideas

Every new business starts with an idea. Maybe there's something you're really knowledgeable and passionate about, or perhaps you think you've found a way to fill a gap in the marketplace. Wherever your interests lie, it's almost guaranteed that there's a way to turn it into a business.

Once you've narrowed your list of ideas down to one or two, do a quick search for existing companies in your chosen industry. Learn what the current brand leaders are doing, and figure out how you can do it better. If you think your business can deliver something other companies don't (or deliver the same thing, but faster and cheaper), you've got a solid idea and are ready to create a business plan.

Another option is to open a franchise of an established company. The concept, brand following and business model are already in place; all you need is a good location and the means to fund your operation.

David Silverstein, a global business consultant and CEO of operational strategy consulting firm BMGI, cautioned would-be entrepreneurs against starting a business just for the sake of being a business owner: You need a viable business model, not just an idea, he said.

Build a business plan

Now that you have your idea in place, you need to ask yourself a few important questions: What is the purpose of your business? Who are you selling to? What are your end goals? How will you finance your startup costs? All of these questions can be answered in a well-written business plan.

A business plan helps you figure out where your company is going, how it will overcome any potential difficulties and what you need to sustain it. A full guide to writing your plan can be found here.

Assess your finances

Starting any business has a price, so you need to determine how you're going to cover those costs. Do you have the means to fund your startup, or will you need to borrow money? If you are planning to make your new business your full-time job, it's wise to wait until you have at least some money put away for startup costs and for sustaining yourself in the beginning before you start making a profit.

While many entrepreneurs put their own money into their new companies, it's very possible that you'll need financial assistance. A commercial loan through a bank is a good starting point, although these are often difficult to secure. If you are unable to take out a bank loan, you can apply for a small business loan through the Small Business Administration (SBA) or an alternative lender. 

 Startups requiring a lot more funding up front may want to consider an investor. Investors usually provide several million dollars or more to a fledgling company, with the expectation that the backers will have a hands-on role in running your business. Alternatively, you could launch an equity crowdfunding campaign to raise smaller amounts of money from multiple backers.

You can learn more about each of these capital sources and more in our guide to startup finance options.

Determine your legal business structure

Before you can register your company, you need to decide what kind of entity it is. Your business structure legally affects everything from how you file your taxes to your personal liability if something goes wrong.

If you own the business entirely by yourself and plan to be responsible for all debts and obligations, you can register for a sole proprietorship. Alternatively, a partnership, as its name implies, means that two or more people are held personally liable as business owners.

If you want to separate your personal liability from your company's liability, you may want to consider forming one of several different types of corporations. This makes a business a separate entity apart from its owners, and therefore, corporations can own property, assume liability, pay taxes, enter into contracts, sue and be sued like any other individual. One of the most common structures for small businesses, however, is the limited liability corporation (LLC). This hybrid structure has the legal protections of a corporation while allowing for the tax benefits of a partnership.

Ultimately, it is up to you to determine which type of entity is best for your current needs and future business goals. More details about the different business structures can be found here.

Register with the government and IRS

To become an officially recognized business entity, you must register with the government. Corporations will need an "articles of incorporation" document, which includes your business name, business purpose, corporate structure, stock details and other information about your company. Otherwise, you will just need to register your business name, which can be your legal name, a fictitious "Doing Business As" name (if you are the sole proprietor), or the name you've come up with for your company. You may also want to take steps to trademark your business name for extra legal protection.

After you register your business, the next step is obtaining an employer identification number (EIN) from the IRS. While this is not required for sole proprietorships with no employees, you may want to apply for one anyway to keep your personal and business taxes separate, or simply to save yourself the trouble later on if you decide to hire someone else. The IRS has provided a checklist to determine whether you will require an EIN to run your business. If you do need an EIN, you can register online for free.

Regardless of whether or not you need an EIN, you will need to file certain forms to fulfill your federal and state income tax obligations. The forms you need are determined by your business structure. A complete list of the forms each type of entity will need can be found on the SBA website. You can also find state-specific tax obligations there. Some businesses may also require federal or state licenses and permits in order to operate. You can use the SBA's database to search for licensing requirements by state and business type.

Select your technology

Just about every business today needs a solid set of tech tools to operate. Some will be more tech-heavy than others depending on the industry, but at the very least, you will likely need a powerful and reliable business laptop or smart device to help you keep things organized.

There are a lot of different factors to think about when you're looking for business technology. Since many key business functions — accounting, invoicing, point-of-sale software, presentations, etc. — can now be managed via mobile apps, you might be able to get away with just a smartphone or tablet. For more complex business functions, you'll want to consider a computer with strong security features, storage options and performance speed.

For those who want to operate their business on a smart device, think about whether you'll need a separate phone or tablet for your professional apps and data. For instance, you could route your calls through a third-party app on your existing phone so you don't need to give out your personal cell number. However, if you use the same apps for business and personal purposes, it might be easier to separate them so you don't accidentally share information with the wrong audience.

If you're thinking of purchasing a new laptop for your business, check out our guide to the best business laptops.

Purchase an insurance policy

It might slip your mind as something you'll "get around to" eventually, but purchasing the right insurance for your business is an important step that should happen before you officially launch. Dealing with incidents like property damage, theft or even a customer lawsuit can be costly, and you need to be sure that you're properly protected.

Gyawu Mahama, social media and marketing manager at small business insurer Hiscox, said to choose insurance that's tailored to your specific business practices to ensure you're not paying for more coverage than you need.

"As a small business owner, you don't need a once-size-fits-all insurance plan," Mahama said. "Coverage doesn't have to cost a lot. General- and professional-liability insurance coverage for a sole proprietorship can be purchased for a few hundred dollars a year."

If your business will have employees, you will, at minimum, need to purchase workers' compensation and unemployment insurance. You may also need other types of coverage depending on your location and industry, but most small businesses are advised to purchase general liability (GL) insurance, or a business owner's policy. Mahama said GL covers three basic categories: property damage, bodily injury, and personal injury to yourself or a third party.

If your business provides a service, you may also want to consider professional liability insurance. It covers you if you do something wrong or neglect to do something you should have done while operating your business, Mahama said.

Mahama advised checking in with your insurance provider throughout the year to keep the provider updated on any changes happening in your business.

Learn more about the types of insurance policies your business might need here.

Choose your partners

Running a business can be overwhelming, and you're probably not going to be able to do it all on your own. That's where third-party vendors come in. Companies in every industry from HR to business phone systems exist to partner with you and help you run your business better.

When you're searching for B2B partners, you'll have to choose very carefully. These companies will have access to vital and potentially sensitive business data, so it's critical to find someone you can trust. In our guide to choosing business partners, our expert sources recommended asking potential vendors about their experience in your industry, their track record with existing clients, and what kind of growth they've helped other clients achieve.

Ready to find a vendor for your business needs? Check out our reviews and best picks in Business News Daily's Find a Solution center.

Build your team

Unless you're planning to be your only employee, you're going to need to hire a great team to get your company off the ground. Joe Zawadzki, CEO and founder of MediaMath, said entrepreneurs need to give the "people" element of their businesses the same attention they give their products.

"Your product is built by people," Zawadski said. "Identifying your founding team, understanding what gaps exist, and [determining] how and when you will address them should be top priority. Figuring out how the team will work together ... is equally important. Defining roles and responsibility, division of labor, how to give feedback, or how to work together when not everyone is in the same room will save you a lot of headaches down the line."

Brand yourself and advertise

A great startup idea won't do you any good if people don't know about it. Before you start selling your product or service, you need to build up your brand and get a following of people ready to jump when you open your literal or figurative doors for business.

A company website and social media profiles are practically essential for any small business in today's world. Create a logo that can help people easily identify your brand, and be consistent in using it across all of your platforms. Use social media to spread the word about your new company. You can even use social media as a promotional tool to offer coupons and discounts to followers once you launch. Be sure to also keep these digital assets up to date with relevant, interesting content about your business and industry.

For more information on creating an effective marketing plan for your business, visit our guide here.

Grow your business

Your launch and first sales are only the beginning of your task as an entrepreneur. In order to make a profit and stay afloat, you always need to be growing your business. It's going to take time and effort, but you'll get out of your business what you put into it.

Collaborating with more established brands in your industry is a great way to achieve growth. Reach out to other companies or even influential bloggers and ask for some promotion in exchange for a free product sample or service. Partner with a charity organization and volunteer some of your time or products to get your name out there. In this article, Business News Daily offers some suggestions for rapid growth.

Starting a business can be risky and challenging, but armed with the proper tools and information, you can put yourself on the path to entrepreneurship.

Source www.businessnewsdaily.com

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Why Every Small Business Needs a Website—Your Company’s Most Valuable Marketing Tool

It’s 2017: If your small business doesn’t have a website, it may as well not exist. It’s common knowledge at this point that one of the first steps in establishing yourself in your field is to secure a website. But what comes next?

You need more than just a blank page with your company name on it. What should a small business website offer to provide visitors and business owners with the most value?

There are some basics that even the most traditional folks can agree on: A website should function the same way a Yellow Pages listing did back in the day. It must have basic information about your business, including the name, business hours (if applicable), and contact information such as an email address, social media handle, and/or phone number.

But as anyone with a smartphone or tablet or even basic PC setup can tell you, websites offer so much more than the basics now. But not every option is logistically feasible or financially productive for a small business website to use—meaning, what’s good for the Amazon or Best Buy site might not work for a home-based business.

What to Include on a Small Business Website

So what do small business websites generally offer? For that we turn to the 2017 Wasp Barcode State of Small Business Report, which has a section on digital marketing.

First, it should be noted that the number one marketing tool, cited by more than 1,100 small business owners and industry leaders polled for the report, is the website. Other tools include email, social media, word-of-mouth referrals, and even printed promotional materials—but the website is king.

Assuming you have a website, there are three things that at least 50 percent of respondents said their site offers visitors:

• Learn about goods or services we offer (65%)
• Get company locations, phone numbers, and email addresses (55%)
• Contact sales or customer service (53%)

The first two are obvious, as we mentioned above. The third shows an understanding of what consumers expect in a website: a way to complain, or otherwise voice their concerns, issues, or even express happiness with their product or service. Not giving customers an outlet to report back on their experiences is problematic in the internet era—because if they can’t get their issues resolved by going directly to the company, they’ll use social media, review sites, and other outlets to air their grievances.

Advanced Web Tactics

In addition to the basics, the following responses were given by at least a quarter of all the respondents:

• Watch videos (36%)
• Get our social media links (34%)
• Apply for a job (30%)
• Learn about our employees (28%)
• Buy goods or services we offer (28%)
• Schedule appointments or register for events (27%)
• Read our company blog (24%)

These are what you might call more advanced tactics. Giving visitors the option to watch videos, learn about employees, or read the company blog has two major benefits: One, it creates opportunities to bond with customers, giving them a personal investment in the state of the company; two, it increases the “time on site” (TOS) and click-through rate, both of which have a positive effect on the search engine ranking of the company page.

Additionally, adding the means to either buy products or register for appointments or events is a great way of letting business come to you. Brick-and-mortar stores with no e-commerce component can only conduct sales or make appointments that lead to future sales during regular business hours and with locals, but having an online store means you’re open 24/7, and your customer base is suddenly only limited by where you can ship (and third-party companies exist to help facilitate e-commerce and shipping, if you don’t want to handle it).

Finally, the apply for the job option is another way of being passively active. You aren’t limited to receiving applications and resumes during business hours only—and you can widen your net of potential applicants greatly as well.

To round things out, here are the rest of the responses:

• We do not have a website (8%)
• We do not provide options or services for visitors to our website (4%)
• Other (2%)

Why a small business would create a website and then not provide any options or services for visitors is a bit perplexing—it may be more counterproductive than having no site at all. While an air of mystery might lend itself to a movie plot, it’s simply not recommended when running a business. You want customers to know they can trust your brand, and you impart that trust by providing information, value, and service.

More Ways to Add Value to Your Website

If your small business website has all of these options and you’re looking for still more ways to add value to your page, consider these ideas, which can contribute to increased TOS, customer retention, bigger emotional impact, and more (via Wasp Barcode):

• Map of your location—This can be helpful to put your business in context of the surrounding area and help less technologically-inclined folks find you.
• A photograph of what your business looks like, inside and out—Another good way to increase trust and to put your business in context.
• A brief company history—What prompted you to start your business? How did you grow into what you are today? The answer to these questions on an “About Me” or “About Us” page keeps customers engaged.
• Links to professional organizations you belong to—Any credentials you may have go a long way towards establishing that your business is tried and true.
• Customer testimonials—Better than just linking to your Yelp page (although that doesn’t hurt), a curated list of positive customer testimonials is thought to be “the single best way to get more results from your site.”
• A coupon, discount or incentive—This may fall under “goods and services,” but an online discount that encourages visiting the store itself is how you motivate people from being passive browsers to active shoppers.
• Email sign-up forms—Email marketing is one of the most popular and effective marketing tools out there. A pop-up form that encourages signups is a great way to grow your email list and to communicate with customers more directly.
• Basic SEO tactics—A website isn’t as effective in pulling customers if you don’t do search engine optimization. This includes unique title tags, meta descriptions, and headlines that are both catchy and informative.
• A fast, mobile-friendly website—More people than ever are accessing the web from their smartphones, which means your site should be easy to navigate in mobile form. Non-responsive (another word for non-mobile-friendly) sites are tiresome to use; ditto for sites that take more than a couple of seconds to load. Talk to a web developer for more information on this if need be.

If you don’t think a website is that important to the success of your small business, hey, it’s your business—you do what you want. But for those that recognize that we are entering a digital age, where the vast majority of people (as much as 97 percent) look to the internet in some form or fashion before buying an item or visiting a store, it’s time to provide as much value online as you do off.

Start stocking your page with these options and see the kind of return you get.

Source www.allbusiness.com

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Wrong Page Ranking for an Important Keyword? Here’s How to Fix This [Infographic]

Let’s assume that your site has ranked for a keyword you’ve aiming. This is brilliant news, right?  Of course, it is!  But what if the page that is ranking finishes up being unrelated.

You certainly met something like this when you googled something – the first few outcomes that came up looked feasible, but for other reason, one of the top labels didn’t look like a good fit. If the page doesn’t reply to your query, that means the wrong page is ranking for that particular keywords, and it is generally not intentional.

This is not a good sign, because if the page presented does not effectively represent the query, then

1. It can adversely affect your click-through rate and conversion rate and traffic because of an unsuitable title or description.

2. Receiving the wrong page and not finding relevant things, your newly-arrived persons are likely to jump out from your site without converting.

So, what should you do? Here’s the thorough process to analyse, recognise and fix the issues as soon as they arise.

Recognizing the wrong ranking pages

Sometimes it’s impossible to regulate each and every of your site’s ranking pages. And at times you just don’t have any information about the site. So, to initiate, you need to analyse if there are any wrong page issues to be fixed.

Just choose how many keywords you’d like to review. Analysing all pages ranking for your 1500 keyword queries are something you maybe can’t afford and also don’t need. So, we’ll choose only the inquiries those are vital and the ones that can drive you the most traffic.

• Detect your most valuable Google queries.
• Check which pages rank for your most important queries.
• Analysis the ranking pages to see if they are the ideal pick for the queries.

Detecting the fundamental issue

Now from where to improve, let’s grasp how you can do that. And meanwhile there can be a number of reasons that cause the problem, you need to go through them step by step.

1. Are there any technical/quality problems that inhibit the preferred page from ranking high?

You have a proper page to match the query but it still doesn’t rank may be because:

• The page is blocked from search engine bots.
• The page has insufficient/low quality/poorly optimized content.
• The page has not enough external links.
• The page has not enough internal links.

2. Do you even have a page that exactly matches the given keywords?

If you don’t have an enhanced page to rank for the keyword, Google will rank the most appropriate selection it could find. Hence, you probably know for sure if there is a proper web page on your site.

3. Are the page rankings being cannibalized by another page of yours?

This can be the possible issue, in Google’s senses, a sum of your sites pages are related to the same query and most probably the ranking capability of the right page is overcome by another, less appropriate but more influential page of yours. Now that we’ve spotted the case of page and to avoid cannibalization here are the some possibilities you have:

• Re-point internal links
• Request some external link deviations
• Re-point redirects
• Take away keywords and related terms

Maintain safe future of your website

Now, all of the above practices will help you detect and correct the page ranking issues. Now your next step would be to consider an appropriate keyword planning for your site and get into the routine of observing not only rankings but your ranking pages also.

1. Keep on monitoring

However optimizing your pages according to a well-organized keyword map will decrease the probabilities of a wrong ranking page encountered in Google but, sometimes things just don’t go as considered. Though now that you have your keyword map set up, you can easily distinguish the wrong page issues.

2. Construct a keyword map

Keyword mapping is the method where you choose which pages will be optimized for each of your keywords.

On the one side, a keyword map helps you escape from more cases of cannibalization and confirm that the keywords are used steadily, and all your landing pages rank for the relevant keywords. On another side, it also makes it easier to notice page-specific issues.

3. Quality Backlinks using Social Media

For many years, link building was crucial for search-engine position. With integral authority, social media sites are the flawless platform to create the high-quality link-backs your website essentials for particular keywords.

Content that’s shared through links across social media helps search engines understand how to rank your website for exact keyword phrases. So, you should aware of how to use Social Media to improve your online presence.

Thus, this is the procedure you can use to make the most of your current Google rankings, increase your website traffic and conversions rate. Do let me know if you have any follow up question on this.

Source www.shoutmeloud.com

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Boosting your seo by helping googlebot

What’s the secret to Google loving your website and indexing it? The secret is to steer crawlers to the most important and useful pages of your site and ignore those pages with little value to searchers. You may think that you want Google or Bing to index every URL of your website but you could be preventing it from crawling your most important pages by using up your ‘crawl budget’ on poor or irrelevant pages.

What is ‘crawl budget’?

When Google’s crawlbot (or Bing’s for that matter) comes to your website, it has a finite amount of resources to spend on accessing your website’s pages; after all, Google has millions of other websites to crawl that day too.
Your crawl budget can be determined by the value or quality of your website already, including but not limited to the quality of backlinks to your website. I won’t speculate on more factors here, but there are some good research pieces on the web where people have tried to identify these factors.

Why control access?

Give important pages priority

By controlling where Googlebot is allowed to crawl within your website, you are increasing the likelihood that important and valuable pages will be crawled every time Google visits your website.

Examples of these could be your product or service pages, blog post pages or even your contact details page. All of these are pages you want to have ranked highly in the search results so users can find this information quicker.

Ignore pages that don’t need to be ranked

There will be pages of your website that have no need to be indexed in the search results. These include pages that a user wouldn’t typically look for in the search results but perhaps will browse to whilst on your website. These could be your privacy policy page, terms & conditions page or your blog tag or category pages.

How to help Googlebot access the right pages of your website

There are a number of different ways in which you can help Googlebot access your website. The more of the following you can adjust or implement, the more control you should have over Googlebot or Bingbot.

Robots.txt file

The first thing to look at is setting disallow rules in your robots file for all pages, folders or files types on your site that do not need to be crawled. Upon visiting a site, the first place a crawler will look at is your robots.txt file (provided it is always located at http://www.mydomain.com/robots.txt). This will help indicate to various crawlers which parts of your website it should not attempt to crawl. You can set rules depending on what crawler bot you want to control.

NoIndex tags

To help prevent certain pages from being indexed, it is also recommended that you add the NoIndex tag to the header code of those pages. Once added to a page, you should test these tags by doing a ‘Fetch as Google’ request on the URLs in Google Search Console.

Up-to-date XML sitemaps

Although Google won’t take your XML sitemap as a rule of which pages to crawl, it takes it as a hint – so make sure it’s up to date to help reinforce which pages of your site it should be indexing.
Remove any old pages from your site and add any new pages.

Fix internal links

Googlebot will follow links it finds in your webpage content so make sure you aren’t going to waste its time by letting it crawl links to missing pages. Use a crawling tool such as Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider tool to find these broken internal links and fix them at the source.

Page load times

Googlebot will need to load each of your pages when it visits them so by reducing the load time of each you can allow it to crawl and index more pages within the same overall time. There are a number of free tools available to help you analyse and improve site speed.

Site Structure

A good site structure is an underrated method of helping Googlebot crawl your website a lot easier. Clearly categorising page content and not hiding pages away too deep in your site structure increases the likelihood they’ll be found by the crawler.

The SEO Benefits

If you’ve managed to implement some or all of the above recommendations and tested them using the tools mentioned, you should begin to see some changes in crawl stats shown within Google Search Console.

Here we’re looking for the number of pages crawled to be similar, or just over, the number of actual pages on your site in the first blue graph. The reduction in kilobytes downloaded (in red) should mimic the reduction in pages crawled if you previously had lots of pages being crawled.

Below is an example of a site with a significant number of URL parameter issues in which Googlebot crawled up to 12,000 URLs when in fact there were just a few hundred actual pages of the site. Through the application of URL parameter rules and the other factors mentioned above, the number of pages crawled became much more consistent and realistic.

Google is crawling your useful pages each time, the rankings of your pages will be more likely to change frequently, and most likely for the better. Fresh content will get indexed and ranked a lot quicker and time won’t be wasted from your ‘crawl budget’.

Source: www.koozai.com

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