Networking is vital to a small businesses growth. Typically, small businesses owners rely on their existing networks for initial customers. In addition, small business owners will try to quickly expand their networks in hopes of generating new customers. While this push to increase business contacts is understandable, small business owners should be careful to not alienate contacts. Here are some simple guidelines to professional networking:

The purchase agreement outlines detailed terms and conditions of a transaction. These items include (i) Purchase Price Terms, (ii) Escrow, (iii) Representations and Warranties, (iii) Provisions of the contract that are crucial, (iv) Special Considerations, (v) Indemnity, and (vi) Post-closing covenants / restrictive covenants.

Email marketing might be a good way for you to generate traffic for your website. However, before discussing email marketing, let’s first look at laws governing spam to ensure you don’t break any laws.

The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 specifies requirements that marketers must comply with in order to be in compliance. Failing to adhere to these laws could be costly as each violation cf the requirements below is subject to a $11,000 fine.

• False and/or Misleading Headers - email’s “From,” “To,” and routing information – including the originating domain name and email address – must be accurate and identify the person who initiated the email.

• False and/or Misleading Subject Lines - subject line cannot mislead recipients about content/purpose of emails.

• Must have opt-out method - must provide return email address or way for recipients to specify that they no longer want to receive emails from you.

• Commercial email be identified as an advertisement - must include clear content denoting that the email is an advertisement and that recipients are able to opt out. And, it must include sender’s valid physical postal address -

In addition, commercial emailers may also be punished for pulling email addresses from websites that have explicitly specified that the email addresses listed on the website may not be used for sending emails.

Now that you are aware of the requirements around email marketing, let’s move on to discussing email marketing and its advantages.

Email marketing provides several advantages:

• Distribution at Low Cost - ability to reach large audience that would be otherwise in accessible.

• Ability to Track (aka Measure Profitability) - given that you are able to track the number of recipients opening, clicking through and purchasing from email campaigns, it is easy to calculate a precise return on investment and profitability on customers.

• Ability to Test on Small Scale - you have the ability to start off with smaller email campaigns to test success across various factors and recipient characteristics (e.g., demographics).

DMA: “The Power of Direct Marketing: ROI, Sales, Expenditures and Employment in the U.S., 2006-2007 Edition”, Direct Marketing Association, October 2006.

Key parts of a successful email marketing campaigns include:

• Appealing Subject - given the proliferation of spam and email marketing, many recipients will screen emails based on the subjects of the emails.  Therefore, you should strive to have a subject that grabs recipients’ attention.

• Good and Clear Content - your email campaigns shoud be targeted to specific recipient characteristics (e.g., demographics) and thus, your emails should also have content that is geared to these specific characteristics.

• A Call to Action - your email needs to have clear statement of what you want/expect the recipient to do.

There are a couple key metrics to monitor to help judge the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns. A few are discussed below:

• Cost of Renting / Buying Names - how much did it cost in total and per email for your email campaign.

• Number of Opens - how many recipients of the email actually opened or viewed the email. If you aren’t getting a lot of opens, potentially your email is being considered spam by recipients and simply deleted without recipients opening it.

• Number of Click Throughs -how many recipients of the total number of emails sent are actually clicking through your link in the email to view the offer or promotion.

• Number of Users Unsubscribing - how many recipients clicked to unsubscribe from your newsletter, email campaigns, etc.

• Number of Purchases (if applicable) - how many email recipients actually made a purchase.

• Average Purchase Amount (if applicable) - for the recipients actually purchasing through the link in the email, what is the average spend per customer.

• Estimated Profit / Purchase - average purchase amount less the cost of the campaign/user and the cost of the goods your are selling.

This is an example indication of interest (IOI) for users to review.

Buyer LLC is pleased to submit this indication of interest to purchase Specialty Retailer, Inc. (the “Company”) in an asset transaction. Based on our discussions with the management team and the information provided, we believe the Company is a good fit with our investment criteria - to invest in growing companies with scalable management teams and infrastructure. We have a strong track record investing in specialty retail companies and are excited about the opportunity Specialty Retailer represents. We believe our background and years of experience building retailers both through organic initiatives and acquisitions makes us a valuable partner in achieving the Company’s strategic growth plans.

If you are starting an e-commerce business or a brick and mortar store, you will likely need transaction processing services.  Many providers exist so the actual process of securing a provider and understanding how things work might be a little confusing.

• If you want to gain a better understanding of transaction processing, here’s a good entrepreneur’s guide to merchant accounts.

• If you are only interested in obtaining a provider at a good rate, we suggest you go to TransFS. It’s a comparison shopping marketplace for small businesses.

There are several different tasks an accounting firm or auditor performs for a company. Typically, accounting firms or auditors review a company’s financial statements on an annual basis. The three types of review are as follows: (i) Audited, (ii) Reviewed and (iii) Compilations.

First it’s important to note that the quicker your website is up and running, the better. By having your website up sooner vs. later, you are giving google, yahoo, miscroft and other search engines the chance to start indexing your website as soon as possible. Even if your website is not perfect, you will be better off in the long run.  Several factors that affect your search ranking include:

• Content

• Meta Tags

• Keyword Tags

• Links - incoming and outgoing

1. Content

• Subject Focus - If your website is only about chocolate chip cookies, you likely will have a good chance of being ranked higher when a user searches for chococlate chip cookies because most of your content will all be related in some fashion to chocolate chip cookies. 

• Unqiue Content - People want to get unique perspectives and learn from various sources - all with different opinions.  it’s important to try and generate fresh and new content.  It will help you establish loyalty with your visitors. 

2. Tags

• Title Tags - a title tag describes the content for a given page. A title tag should contain the keywords for the given page. You should strive to keep title tags to ten words or less.

• Meta Tags

  • Description - approxiately 200 characters (be careful - 200 characters NOT words).

  • Keywords - This should be approxiately 30 words and be the words you think best represent the content on the page as well as the terms that search engine users may search on.

3. Keywords

• Aggregate Keyword Density - be careful not to overuse keywords in the body text of your pages. The percentage of keywords / total words should typically be 5% - 20%. Note that the percentage varies by topic. We will be posting another article soon on this topic.

• Individual Keyword Density - again, be careful not to overuse each keyword in the body text of your pages. The percentage of each keyword / total words should typically be 1% - 6%. Note that the percentage varies by topic. Again, we will be posting another article soon on this topic.

4. Links

There are two types of links - inbound links and outbound links.

• Inbound Links (aka Incoming Links, Backlinks) - These are links from other websites to your website.

  • From Trusted Sources - Search engines value inbound links fairly highly because they are hard to fake, especially inbound links from trusted and popular websites.  Some examples of highly trusted websites include Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia. Be careful of link farms though. These could actually hurt your traffic.

  • Anchor Text - visible hyperlinked text on a page.  This should be on descriptive and relevant to the link. For example, if you are linking to a link about SEO Optimization Factors, a potential anchor text option would be:

    • “You should try to learn more about SEO optimization so you can drive website traffic.” In this example, the “SEO optimization” is the anchor text.

  • Link Stability - Once again, links farms are bad and generally create turnover in links. By having a stable base of links, it helps to validate that your website isn’t just linking to link.

• Outbound Links - These are links from your website to other websites.

  • Link Stability - By having a stable base of outgoing links from your website, it can help your ranking. You should avoid linking to link farms because this will hurt your website in search rankings. And, make sure you test your outgoing links to make sure they are still active.  Users will get annoyed with clicking a link and having it not work. 

5. Trust

A trusted website lets search engines know that the content it is crawling is of high quality. Once again, this is something that is hard to fake. Therefore, websites that are highly trusted such as Yahooor Google are able to simply setup a new page for some keyword and be ranked within a few days. Not sure about you, but I’m not that lucky. It takes a lot of time and investment to build upyour website traffic.

An employment agreement is a formal employment agreement that addresses key terms and conditions of a person’s employment. It’s also commonly referred to as a senior management agreement or SMA. The following issues are usually addressed in an employment agreement: