Luckiest Contest

If you own a home-based business, you may have found that you are spending more time working and less time with your family, the reason you started a home-based business in the first place. So how does one find balance when trying to juggle a family and a business?

You can successfully balance your home and business but first you have to realize what you can and cannot do. Then you need to organize yourself so that you complete your daily tasks more efficiently. The key to finding balance is by first controlling your time.

The first step is to get organized. When you begin each day knowing what you need to accomplish and how you are going to do it, you will get more accomplished without excess stress.

A schedule is crucial to your success at work, but even more necessary if you expect to have any time left for family obligations.

Realize that you cannot do everything in one day, and when it is time to quit, leave your desk and give your family time the same importance as your work. While you cannot schedule family time as specifically as you can business matters, you can have a time that you quit work and stick too it. All the pressing business matters and unfinished projects can wait until the next workday. You will find that when you make a schedule for each and every day, you will have fewer unfinished business matters at the end of the day.

Here are some ways to use your time more effectively:

Prioritize. Write down everything that needs to be done and then prioritize the list.

Keep it simple. Don’t make everyday tasks harder than they have to be. Learn the quickest, easiest way to deal with the task and do it that way every time.

Where are you going? If it’s your first time driving to a new location, get directions. A big time waster is driving aimlessly around trying to find a place that you thought you knew how to get to. Instead, take 5 minutes to check out MapQuest.com and get driving directions.

Are you done? When you are organized you know what’s been done and what still needs to be taken care of. Using a to-do list is one of the easiest ways to keep track of your tasks.

Declutter your office. If you don’t need it, want it or use it. Why have it? By eliminating clutter, you not only free up space but the time it takes to move all that unnecessary stuff around because it’s in your way.

Eliminate unnecessary interruptions. A pet peeve of mine is to be half way through a time consuming project that requires my complete attention (ie: working with financial papers) and the phone rings, someone barges in and “needs” something done right now. For times like this, let your voicemail/answering machine take your calls, give family members a 20 minute warning ahead of time so they can get all their questions, requests and so forth out of the way before you begin. For smaller children give them a quiet activity that they can do while you are working.

Handling Mail. When going through the mail have a wastebasket next to you so you can toss any junk mail that you may have. Better yet, toss it at the post office before you leave! Buy stamps by the roll and envelopes in bulk.

Plan your attack. Whether you are shopping for groceries, clothes or office supplies, you need to make it as quick and painless as possible. Instead of making short shopping trips every day, plan on doing all of your shopping once a week or if possible twice a month. Make a list of what you need and where you have to go to buy it. Know your route and plan to do shopping for non perishable items first and end with groceries all while trying to avoid backtracking. Only buy what’s on the list! As much as this hurts me to say – if you don’t have shoes on the list, stay out of the shoe section.

Prepare in advance. Mornings will run a lot smoother if you set out the kid’s school clothes, hair accessories, shoes & backpacks the night before. This is true of business tasks too. At the end of the work day, set out anything you know you will need to have the next morning. If you make all your calls first thing in the morning, leave yourself a pen, paper, any account information and the rolodex out so it shaves off a few minutes the next morning.

Ask for help. If your business has grown to the point that you can no longer handle it alone, you may want to consider outsourcing certain jobs or hiring a virtual assistant. You can have routine jobs or special projects completed by others and for a reasonable price. Virtual assistants are great at doing all the tedious, time consuming tasks that take up so much of your time.

You can balance your home and business lives if you get organized, manage your time wisely and set realistic goals as to what you can accomplish in one day.

Melody Spier is a work at home mom of two teens and the owner of Ballyhoo Virtual Services a Virtual Assistant business catering to women in business. She specializes in online marketing and promotion with article and press release submissions, blogs as well as many other services. You can contact Melody by visiting http://www.BallyhooVA.com or by email Mel@BallyhooVA.com

This article describes various points to consider when designing letterheads and stationery as part of a complete business identity package.

It is important when you design your letterhead that you make sure that the design does not interfere with the letterhead’s purpose. For instance, if a dark design falls in the middle of the letterhead it will interfere with the readability. Also make sure that there is adequate writing space between the header and footer. We suggest the following information on your letterhead: telephone number, fax number, email address, website address, mailing address, name and title if appropriate, brief product listing or company summary, slogan and logo. You can imagine that including more information will create an overly cluttered letterhead leaving less space for you to write your letters!

Your letterhead’s design, paper stock and ink colours should compliment your envelope, business card and other printed materials. This is best achieved by the design work all coming from the same designer and the printing all being completed by the same printer.

If you are a trading as a UK Limited company some information must be displayed on your letterhead by law. Your full corporate company name, company registration number and registered address must be clearly displayed. If you name one director on the letterhead, you must include all of the director’s names.

When trading as a sole trader or partnership and you are trading under a name other than that of the owner(s), you must display the names of the owner(s) and an address, for each, at which documents can be served.

For more information on the regulatory requirements relating to business stationery in the UK, read: Setting up in Business, A Guide to Regulatory Requirements (URN 99/833), this can be ordered from the DTI Website: http://www.dti.gov.uk.

Finally! Remember to double check your design for accuracy before it gets printed. Nothing looks more unprofessional than spelling mistakes in your company information. Your printer cannot be held responsible for type errors in the design.

Written for Goodprint Ltd, providors of instant online letterheads and other business stationery.

I’ve always wanted to write a headline like “10 Lessons Guaranteed to Improve…”. You see these all the time and they attract an incredible number of readers and eyeballs…but then I almost changed my mind. Usually, when you read through the article you discover that the “lessons” are generally a sales blurb for the company.

Like me a few years ago, I’m sure that what you really want are some very specific tips on what you can do, today, to make your hotel website more prominent in the Search Engine Results Pages (or if you like acronyms, the SERP’s). So, not to disappoint you, here are 8 sure fire, practical things to do including, at the end of this article, a final tip that always produces results.

1 – Make your web site the default for your browser and on all the PC’s at your hotel

Why I hear you ask? So that every time you or one of your team open a browser, you are confronted with your Home Page…when was the last time you really looked at your website?. Pretty soon you will begin to get bored with the way it looks or the content…as do your customers! And you will do something about it…our research has proven that web sites that regularly update their content do much better in the SERP’s than static sites. Plus, regular visitors to your site will also gain a good impression and sales conversion levels will go up too.

Follow closely with me as we are going to do this NOW…Open your favourite browser, enter your URL (www.yourwebsite.com) in the address bar, click go. Once your web page has loaded, click on Tools at the top of the page, select Internet Options. A dialogue box will open and on the General Tab you should see Home Page…now click on Use Current (the instructions are very similar for the Firefox browser)…your website will now load every time you open a browser. And suddenly its profile has become much more important to you…

The other interesting thing that will happen is that your team members will also start to give you suggestions and feedback on your website…they too will see it every time they open a browser. Many will start to write material or supply images from events that you can include on some sub-pages…and your website will come alive.

2 – Get your competitors to tell you the keywords you need to know

Ah…thought that would get your attention. Next, you need to discover the keywords that drive online business in your city or region…there are a few ways to do this, but here is an easy one. Go to Google or your favourite Search Engine and search for “your destination” and “hotel” (eg New York hotel) and look at the results in the first page. Click on the top one and when the page loads, right click in a clear space on the page. Notepad should open and you will be able to see the code that actually writes the page that you were on.

Somewhere near the top you will see some coding called “title”, “meta name=”keywords” content=, and “meta name=”description” content=…unless they have been particularly sneaky, you should be able to see an indication of the words that the webmaster thinks are important to include on the page to enable Search Engines to find it.

Do this for the next three or four sites on the Search Engine listing and you will start to see a pattern emerge…great isn’t it? Don’t you love it when the competition starts telling you how to improve your SERP ranking?

3 – Open a Google Adwords or Yahoo! Search Marketing account.
Now that you have some hints as to what your keywords should be, you need to build on this list. We use more sophisticated tools but both Google and Yahoo! Search Marketing have keyword tools that will suggest additional keywords based on the ones you have uncovered so far. Eventually, this account will let you produce ads for the “Sponsored Links” part of their pages (we’ll tell you more in another article)…but for now we are just going to utilise their keyword tools.

Go to the Google Home Page for your country. Below the search box click on Advertising Programmes and then click on Google Adwords and then click on the Sign Up Now button…now is not the time to chicken out, be brave.

This will be the best $5-10.00 that you have ever spent. You will be stepped through setting up an account…when they ask you to enter some keywords, just put in a couple of the ones you have already identified. They will also ask you to build an ad; use your property name as the title, and just say something nice in the following two lines…you won’t be ready to publish yet but you have to go through the motions to get access to the tools.

4 – Start building your own keyword/phrase list
Now click on the Tools or Keyword Tools tabs or buttons and you will be lead through how to find even more keywords based on the ones you already have. Using common sense and some discussion amongst your team and perhaps even a guest or two, build up a list of your preferred 20 keywords/phrases.

5 – Put your keywords in the title area of your website pages
The “title” area of a web page, as the cleverer of you have already discovered, is that blue band at the very top of the screen when a web page is loaded…that’s right, with the white text in it. Search Engines place significant emphasis on the text that they find in the title bar.

Ask your web designer to put some of your keywords in the title of your home page. The most important words at the beginning followed by a nice destinational comment that repeats the destination name and the word hotel a second time (eg San Diego Hotel :: leading luxury hotel in San Diego – The Classique Towers Hotel)…do not “stuff” the title full of too many of your keywords or repeat them more than two, or at the most, three times.

Do not start with your property name…if you must put your property name in the title, put it at the end. Search Engines add the most “weight” to the words at the beginning of the title. Now, work you way down your keyword list putting different keywords on different pages, thus creating a different keyword emphasis for each page and add the same keywords into the text on the page.

By the way, did you notice that the title is what most Search Engines display in the SERP’s? That’s also why the title needs to be well written as searchers will judge whether to click on the link based on what they read on screen.

Are you still with me?

6 – Look at your web site statistics EVERY day
Every day…this is one of the easy ones. Wherever your site is being hosted, they are bound to provide you with at least a basic statistical summary of how many visitors you get to your site per day (not hits, visits), how many pages were viewed and other data. This is usually available online with a login.

Make it a habit to log in and view your statistics every time you start your work day. Should your web hosting service not provide statistical data then move your site to one that does…if you are serious about building traffic to your site and online revenues then this is as essential as you knowing last nights results or next months room holdings.

Nearly there…

7 – Finding out the number of sites that link to your page
Links to your page from other web sites are like votes for your page. In simple terms, if all other content between your site and another is equal but they have better or more links, the other site will be delivered ahead of yours in the SERP’s. The number, theme relevance and quality of links to your site are given significant weight by the leading Search Engines.

To find out how many links there are to your site currently, go to Google and in the search box type in link:www.yourwebsite.com (for Yahoo! and MSN use linkdomain:www.yourwebsite.com). Do it for all three because you will see a difference in the results. Each Search Engine looks at links differently, hence the variation in the number of Inbound Links displayed.

Whatever the number is, you need to double it over the next six months…slowly but surely. If you add too many, too quickly the Search Engines get wise and start to dampen the effect of your new links. And please, do not sign up to one of those “We can add 10,000 links to your website in One Day for $29.95!” …they add you to crap, spammy sites and your inbox will be full of junk in a day. Plus, even if they do add so many links, it’s likely that the Search Engines will either drop you from their listings or just completely discount the links because rapid link growth is seen as being not “natural”.

So, how do you build links? There are lots of ways but my favourite “in house” way is to pay your Conference and Events team $20 for every client that they get to link to your website. Conference and Event clients are usually pretty happy to link because your site will save them answering a bunch of questions about the venue on their own site. The success rate is about 50.0% so if you have 10 events a week, that’s 5 links from high quality sites per week or 250+ a year. Within a couple of months you will start to see your site moving up the SERP’s. “$20!” I hear you stammer? Make it $50…it’s worth many, many times that in terms of SERP rankings and revenues.

Ah ha! I feel a disclaimer coming on…they say that free advice is worth exactly what you pay for it. The elements I have described here barely scratch the surface of what is usually needed to boost you online revenues, but, the way I look at it, it’s a start…someone very famous once said “A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.” …welcome to your first 8 steps.

“But Keith, that’s only 7 essentials for building online revenues!” you say! OK, so you think I can’t count, but if you have made it this far, you are now way ahead of 80.0% of hoteliers. Would you like to be in the Top 10.0% of hoteliers and be seriously starting to grow your web revenues past 10, 20 or even 30% of your total revenues? Well, with suitable apologies all round, now is the time for that commercial…

8 – Register now for our “Hotel emarketing 101″ workshops.

“Hotel emarketing 101″ is a one-day workshop focussed on Hotel Search Engine Optimisation, Search Engine Marketing, Online Media Options and Hotel Website design, development and construction for building online revenues. With speakers from Hotel Marketing Workshop, Google, Beyond Interactive and Binary Business these essential emarketing workshops will be held in May 2006 in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne. Visit www.hotelmarketingworkshop.com for a brochure or to register online.

And now that the “commercial” is over, go on…start working your way through this list…and start seeing the results.

Keith Paulin is the General Manager of Hotel Marketing Workshop (http://www.hotelmarketingworkshop.com). Like many hotel marketeers in the industry Keith “landed” in hotel sales and marketing after commencing his career in hotel operations. Keith has worked in senior marketing roles both within the industry (Hilton, Regent, Hyatt, Accor) and in other industries (HP, Lion Nathan, Shell) and has formal qualifications in Marketing and Business Management. Hotel Marketing Workshop works with chain and independent hotels delivering tactical, practical hotel marketing strategies at property level that work and, just as importantly, they assist with expert implementation. Keith has a very strong interest in the world of e-commerce, Search Engine Optimisation and Search Engine Marketing and a clear track record in producing on-line results in hotel internet marketing.