Blogs are easy way to communicate with the customers, and employees. From past few years, blogs are continuing as one of the effective channels of communication when compared to other advertising channels. Blogs for business can help to strengthen relationships with targeted audiences. A blog can help in as many ways, from a business perceptive.Reasons why a small business needs bloggingSmall businesses need to be more effective in building a potential and loyal customer base when compared to large businesses. Blogs helps in increasing the consumer base. • Building customer relationships: Blogs are very helpful to increase the brand loyalty in customers by engaging with them through blogging on their favorite topics. Regularly updated blogs can help businesses in making readers to visit the website on regular basis. This may steadily enhance the business opportunities of the organization. Blogs became easy and effective medium to make the customers to join in discussions, providing tips, insights, etc., about the products and services of many businesses.• Blogs at workplace: Employees can write their opinions, views, and recommendations for any developments in the business. Blogs helps small businesses for effective cross-functional communication with employees. Companies can create internal blogs within organizations where project members and employees update project information along with reports without having to waste time for interaction and responses for minor updates.• For brand awareness: Small businesses can easily update their recent achievements in products and services in blogs and can create awareness to the customers about them. With regular reading of blogs, customers can know the latest developments in the business. Blogs help small businesses to create brand awareness for the products or services they offer.• Better communication: Blogging for small businesses facilitate to increase the integrity in the organization with the easy communication process between the employees and the management. Blogs are also created to attract the readers of targeted markets. Companies update their respective blogs frequently with opinions and reviews of customers along with their new achievements in their products and services, and make them visible to almost everyone online. Blogging enables the small businesses to stay in business, to connect with its customers, clients. This can indirectly help to increase their sales. Blogging can make your customers relate better to company on a personal level. Blogging is a great way to set your company apart from the group of small, and home based businesses through Internet.
Archive for February, 2010
Blogging for a Small Business
Category Small Business
Getting Legal Support Jobs Online
Category Legal
Most legal firms are very particular about the quality of legal support staff they engage – people like the paralegals who complement the works of the lawyers, receptionists who welcome the clients and secretaries who type the various legal documents as they become necessary. The law firms realize that the quality and success of their practice might ultimately depend on the people they engage in these capacities – than on anything else. And based on this understanding, many legal firm administrators are willing to go to almost any lengths to ensure that they get the right people for these jobs. It is therefore not surprising that the lawyers and other legal firm administrators are always on the lookout for any forum through which they can gain access to the very best staff for their operations – and the latest such forum is the Internet.
As it turns out, more and more legal firms are posting their legal support jobs online – and the Internet is indeed the place to find a job if you are, for instance, a legal secretary, a paralegal professional or a legal receptionist.
Most legal firms post their vacancies on the public online job forums – because with the exception of the very top legal firms, most are relatively smaller operations and their websites don’t get that many visitors. In any case, the nature of the legal business is that it can only deal with so many clients at a time- and therefore it might not even be desirable for them to want to attract the masses.
Take note however, that many online job forums may not have specific sections for jobs in legal support. Instead the jobs could be found in various other sections – like for instance, under the section for receptionist jobs. Even if a particular online job notice has a specific section for such jobs in legal support, there is still a chance that a law firm (in a bid to reach the widest possible audience) could post its vacancy for a receptionist under the section on receptionist jobs – rather than on the section for jobs in legal support. In the case where the law firm is looking for a person proficient in a particular language, they could post in the section for ‘language jobs.’ Thus if for instance an international law firm with clients in France is looking for a legal secretary who is proficient in French, they might post the job in the section for language jobs on the online job notice board– rather than on the sections for jobs in legal support or secretarial jobs you would otherwise expect such a job to be posted. The moral here is that it pays to widen your search.
Needless to say, you need to ensure that you are dealing with a credible online job notice board, as a few could be hoaxes. In most other professions, people are advised to look at the websites of the firms they want to work with for vacancies but as noted earlier, the online job forums might be the best places to check for jobs in legal support. It is worth noting, however, that the more prominent law firms do indeed tend to have a ‘careers’ section on their websites, and this is also one of the places you can check for the jobs in legal support. But then again, competition for jobs in legal support in these prominent legal firms tends to be rather stiff and their standards and expectations can be what many people consider a bit too high for them – though on the other side, their salaries and benefits tend to be commensurate.
Small Business Adviser: How to Get a SBA Unsecured Small Business Loan in a Troubled Economy. Part1
Category Small Business
We are all listening attentively about lenders on the radio, television, newspapers, and the Internet of promises to be “small business friendly”, “small business oriented”, wanting to be your “personal small business advisor” and a panoply of packages taking care of all your business needs. What small businesses really need is money, not personal hand caring services. So is there anyone out there really making small business loans? Yes. If you know where to look you can find one.
You can generally categorize banks into: 1) 10% that are actually making small business loans now and are serious about doing so, 2) 70% who will talk to you directly and indicate they are not making small business loans at this time because of the economy, and 3) 20% that slap you on the back, invite you in, and readily take your application. It is the latter group that gives us the most heartburn. It is not unusual after the initial review of your application papers for a bank represented to signal you have a good chance. Overjoyed, you begin to make plans, including executing contracts and receiving quotes for inventory, raw materials, or merchandise. Two months later, after the fourth loan committee review, you get a call that they have decided not to make the loan. The reason has little if anything to do with credit. It is typically something that was never been mentioned before and after reflection, it seems like an excuse not to make the loan in the first place.
Loan brokers such as myself are victims of the same misleading behavior. I cannot tell you how many banks have looked me in the eye and said: “Sure, we are making lots of loans. For unsecured loans of $75,000 to $150,000, we just need a credit score above 680, in business for over a year and a half, and decent financials. Real estate security is not required. We would love to entertain your applications.” Right.
What they really do is pour over the applications and pick 1 out of 100 that has the following fantasy credentials: a platinum credit score that Bill Gates would be proud of and which could support a small country, gushing positive cash flow, little competition, executed contracts stacked high on your desk, then a booming market niche. In other words, someone who doesn’t need the loan in the first place. You know the old adage: banks only give money to people who don’t need it.
It is simply psychology 101. Banks are filled up with loan officers and they have to show they are busy. If their boss walks into their office and sees nothing on their desk, they might be laid off. They have to show they are busy earning their salaries, which means receiving applications and going through the review process. It’s gotten so bad that the other day we had a client whose grandfather helped found the bank, whose father was best friends with the president, and who had received two successful loans before. Even he was turned down. Nor do they tell you the large SBA commercial loan department job layoffs of employees throughout the nation.
To prevent being too caught in this trap, look your banker in the eye and ask these questions:
1) “Tell me honestly. I don’t want to waste your time or mine. I know the credit crunch is quite depressing and there is really no secondary market. Are you actually entertaining small business loans at this time or should I wait.”
2) “How many small business loans have you personally made in the last 30 days?”
3) “What are the loan terms of the last three loans you made, including interest rate and monthly payments, for the amount of loan I am seeking?”
4) “How long will it take before I get a definitive answer?”
5) “Can you briefly describe to me the process I have to go through to get the final approval? Will you be the one making the final decision? What other people superior to you or committees will make that decision?”
But do not despair. There actually are real live prime lenders out there making small business loans. They just need to know where to look. In the next article I will discuss if such loans are available to startups.