Business Plus Baby

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In the past fifty years, more farms have gone under due to running costs and debt than they have because of drought, plague and pestilence combined. The reason for this is as simple as it is horrendous; farmers just don’t have it easy when it comes to making a profit. This is because running a farm is tainted by the high costs of equipment, taxes, land and labour. However, there is a reason why farming is the world’s largest industry, and that is because there are ways to succeed. To put it to you bluntly, your best chance of improving profits it to cut your overheads, and all that requires is knowing where you have the most control.

Read on to see our top tips on how you can increase your profits:

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Stop Owning And Start Leasing

The benefits of leasing your agriculture equipment are becoming more and more impossible to ignore, especially in this day and age where technological advancements rapidly improve over a twelve-month period. That is where leasing really becomes attractive; it allows you stay up-to-date with the technology used to run your farm, making your operations far more efficient, timely and cost-effective. Another benefit worth mentioning is to do with working capital. Having such a large chunk of change tied up in equipment is a risk and one that massively limits your options and your ability to react to the market. The final thing worth mentioning is the additional costs surrounding ownership of farm machinery, of which there are many; storage, maintenance, tax, fuel, payment-plans and labour. These can add up real quick.

Storage Poses An Opportunity

A huge amount of profitability in agriculture comes from storage abilities. This isn’t just because satisfactory storage goes a long way in protecting expensive machinery but also plays an important role in keeping crops and produce in prime condition so that it commands a higher price at market. Of course, there are three main things to concern yourself with when it comes to storage and they are all solved by the use of steel, as you will see by reading Armstrong steel reviews. You see, my using pre-engineered steel storage barns, not only are are you saving yourself money, you are also going with a material that is durable, meaning the longevity of your structure is better. Not only that, but steel is stronger than the alternatives, meaning there is no need for support columns, maximising the space you have.

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Use Tax Section 179 To Your Advantage

They say you can’t leverage taxes in your favour, but that isn’t quite the case within the agriculture industry, especially if you are leasing your equipment. This is because Section 179 of the tax code states that you can write off 100% of your leasing expenditure on their taxes as a deduction. Thanks to the fact you don’t own leased equipment, which means it cannot be viewed as an asset of your business, the Alternative Minimum Tax Rule won’t affect your tax filings either. It is well known that some tax benefits allow businesses to significantly reduce the amount of tax they owe, which is why the Tax Man has created a threshold for how much you can actually write off, but the whole leasing of equipment move simply goes around this. So, yeah, by decreasing what you owe you can easily reduce your overhead.

Photo: India 7

Link building is one of the best strategies if you want boost the level of interest in your business, increase traffic or expand the reach of your company. Through link building online, you will connect with companies and websites, hopefully earning the interest of their clients and encourage them to visit your own site. There are various ways to link build online so let’s look at a few of the best tactics and perhaps a few of the worst.

Can You Buy Links?

While it is possible to buy links for your sites and essentially pay companies of websites to link to your site, it’s dangerous. Google claim it is a breach of their policies, and if you are caught doing this, you will most likely earn your site a Google penalty. You can read all the Google policies on https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/ Ultimately, this could bring your business crashing down in the rankings, and it might take you a while to recover. If you are able to recover at all…

Instead of buying links you should try and attract people to link to your site naturally. To do this, you need to focus on adding high-quality content to your website. There are various ways to approach this. You can create the content yourself, or you can hire a company to create it for you. Ultimately, hiring a professional company might be the best option here. With a pro, you can make sure you have high-quality content that is specifically written to target clients and websites for link building purposes.

What About Guest Posts?

Guest posts are a great way to link build online. Your first step is finding the right sites to target for guest posting purposes. There are a variety for you to choose from, so it’s important that you make the right decision. Resources like https://www.guestposttracker.com/blogs.php are great for this because it means that you can search for blogs that allow guest posts by category or even domain authority. Don’t forget, sites with greater domains are going to be more valuable for you.

If you want to search for blogs yourself for guest posts, you are essentially looking for a ‘work with me’ page. Work with me pages encourage the options of sponsored content, paid for marketing and mutually beneficial partnerships.

Joining In The Convo

You might find that there are sites online where there are discussions in comment sections packed full of potential customers for your business. Immediately, you should be thinking about ways to use this as a link building opportunity. But you have to be careful here. Most sites simply spam links to there websites in the comments with vague suggestions about how the site could benefit the users in the discussion.

You need to be more subtle than this if you want your link building tactic to be effective. Instead of simply posting a link, join in on the discussion make relevant points and connect a link to your site with a solution to the issue that they could be discussing. Do this, and you’ll have an excellent chance at users clicking on the link.

We hope you find these link building tactics beneficial and use them to boost your marketing campaign.

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Dion Hinchcliffe

As a business woman, attending conferences is part of the job, or at least it should be if you want to maximize your exposure, gain new clients and network with the kinds of people who can help you do and be more.

Unfortunately, a lot of people just hate conferences. They find them boring and uncomfortable, and they just don’t know what to do to maximize the potential of their attendance. If you’re one of those people, here are some conference tips to help you ace your next event, and hopefully even enjoy it!

Set a Goal

For every conference you attend, you should have a goal in mind. If you know why you’re going to the conference and what you hope to achieve by being there, it will be a lot easier for you to focus and get things done. Goals could be as simple as increasing your brand’s visibility or networking with successful people in your industry – they don’t have to be complicated – but you should always have them.

Stay at the Venue

If the conference is being held at a hotel, you might be tempted to stay elsewhere, so that you can escape from the event at the end of the day and just relax, but it’s a much better idea to stay at the venue. By doing so, you will run into a lot of the speakers and attendees in the corridors, and these chance meetings could lead to very lucrative conversations. You’d be surprised how often deals are struck in the corridors after events have wound down for the day!

Create Marketing Materials

Before you head to a conference, you should have a range of marketing materials printed. Lanyards from this company, business cards from this company, brochures, and catalogs, and even small items you can giveaway like reusable coffee cups and stationery will all help you to increase your visibility during the event and get more people interested in buying from you. Just make sure that you work out a sensible budget for marketing before you start printing, otherwise, you might blow your whole conference budget on cards and pencils.

Announce Your Attendance

Before the event, it’s also a very good idea to announce your attendance. Let your customers, clients, suppliers and anyone else who may be interested, know that you will be attending the conference via email. Encourage them to come and visit you at your company’s booth (if you have one), invite important contacts to lunch and generally try to get people excited about the event, so that they will actually show up!

Do Your Homework

If there are particular speakers or guests you’d like to connect with at a conference, for goodness sake, do your homework! Read their books, bios, business sites and anything else you can get your hands that will tell you a bit more about them. That way, you can impress them with your knowledge and, with a bit of charm, ensure that they enjoy talking to you.

Choose Events Wisely

If you’ve ever attended a conference before, you will know that there are dozens of panel discussions, talks and demonstrations on offer. You can’t attend them all, so you need to, ahead of time, sit down with the schedule and work out which events are most worthy of your time. These might be events that you know a supplier you’re interested in working with is going to attend or a talk by someone who’s advice you would like. Work your schedule around attending these events, and you will be able to maximize your gains at the event.

Be Professional

This should go without saying, but a business conference isn’t a mini vacation. It might be being held in a beautiful location at the weekend, but it is still work. So, although you can still have some fun while you’re there, you must maintain a professional demeanour. Dress appropriately for your brand, be polite and avoid doing anything that could show you in a negative light and put other attendees off doing business with you in the future, such as getting drunk and doing something stupid.

Act Like You Want to Be There

Even if the conference you’re attending is the most boring event you’ve ever been unfortunate enough to participate in, it pays to put a smile on your face, fill your voice with enthusiasm and avoid acting like a grouch. No one will want to talk to you if you look bored, annoyed and like you’d rather be anywhere else. Happiness is infectious, and if you can stay happy, you will attract a lot more interest than the other business people who are obviously counting down the hours until they can get home.

Know Your Stuff

When you’re at a conference, you really do need to know your stuff. You’re likely to be asked a lot of questions about your work, your business and your brand and if you can’t answer them easily, you probably won’t convince any new clients to jump on board. So, brush up on those areas of your business that you perhaps don’t deal with day to day before you go and you’ll be even more impressive.

Be Confident

So many people attend conferences within the aim of connecting to a specific person/people, but once they get within few feet of them, they chicken out and give up on the approach. If you want to make connections, do deals and grow your business via conferences, you can’t do this. You need to put all of your fears aside and be confident. I mean, what’s the worse that can happen? They might politely brush you off after a few moments of conversation. So, what?

Turn It Off

Finally, when you’re at a conference, the only screens you should be looking at are the ones being used to broadcast talks and presentations. If you’re forever looking at your phone or checking your emails, you will not appear to be engaged or approachable and will make far fewer connections as a result.

Are you a regular conference attendee? What tips do you have to make events work for you?

Aside from profit, there are a number of features that a thriving business will have. If you’re considering purchasing one whether it’s a bar, a café or a childcare centre for sale, there are a few tell-tale indicators that you should keep an eye out for. Read below for the signs you should look for when you are trying to spot a successful business.

Prosperous businesses are not accidents. Even if there is a sense of a company striking it lucky with an ingenious product or opportunity, they well seldom remain so buoyant unless they’re managed properly and sufficiently plan for the future. A big part of this process is the ability to self-reflect and review current ways of doing things to foster a continuous cycle of improvement. This can refer to change as a response to an issue or situation, but can also include the willingness of a business to engage in proactive renewal.

An indicator of this is an ability to deal with failure. In reality, failures of varying degrees with be inevitable in business, but rather than simply trying to rectify an often innocent mistake, a well-run business will have the ability and framework in place to dissect ‘what went wrong.’ This need not be a hugely formal process, but at the least it should mean that the workplace is able to identify the conditions that lead to the failure and determine if there’s an area of incompetency that may need addressing.

A successful business will often has a strong online following and user friendly website. Some smaller businesses may not have the IT infrastructure that corporations enjoy, but in general you should still be able to find some mentions of them online in forums, reviews, or marketplaces such as Etsy, Ebay or other sales platforms. Simple things like spelling mistakes or clunky websites that don’t quite calibrate to all screen sizes may not indicate that a business is unsuccessful, but are a window into the ability of staff, or more importantly, the ability of the management who would ultimately sign off on public communications.

Of course, depending on the industry and also their location, thriving businesses may not have a website at all, and in this instance it can pay to do some word of mouth research or begin an online thread on a local community page or Facebook group for people’s opinions of a specific company.

A final way to get an indication of a business’s success is to refer to the basic principles of supply and demand. There is a degree of risk taking when predicting whether something will resonate with potential customers, but a company with a sound risk management plan in place should have ways to mitigate exposure. If a business is providing a niche product or service which the market does not sufficiently cater to, chances are that it’s a winner. However, the caveat on this is whether or not there is adequate demand for the item or service in question.

Image credit: PourquoiPas

 

Are you a working at home mom (WAHM)? Do you have to juggle your businesses needs with taking care of, and spending proper time with the kids? If so, then it can be pretty tough to have the time to ensure your customers are happy all of the time. So, to help you with the mammoth task here are a few tips on how to please your customers. Something that is, of course, essential to making sales and building a good brand.

Customer service

The number one thing that you have to get right if you want your customers to be happy is customer service. OK, this may sound a little counter-intuitive because most people only go to customer service when they are not happy to get help or have a moan. But bare with me, however, because I am about to show you how it plays a role in the satisfaction of your customers, and so the reviews they leave, as well as the likelihood that they will purchase from you again.

ZeroTolerance

In the real world of business, things go wrong. Orders are shipped incorrectly, websites overcharge people, products get damaged in the mail. You cannot avoid this, but what you can do is ensure that you are available and empathetic when this does happen. As well acting quickly to rectify the situation. That is why customer service, whether it’s by phone, email, or chat box is vital to pleasing your customers. As it’s an excellent way of solving any issues and recovering your customers’ good favour.

Target marketing

Target marketing is another way of pleasing your customers because it’s all about appealing directly to them. That means your advertising and product are all designed with a specific audience in mind.

By specialising in this way, you are much more likely to create a positive association for your customers with your product, as well as grab the attention of the specific group you are attempting to get to buy it.

To use target marketing to its best advantage; get some specific advice from posts such as six effective target marketing strategies from theprauthority.com. Remember too, that it all rests on identifying who your product is for, then tailoring your message and that platform on which you promote it to them.

Fast delivery

Something that can make customers super happy is offering fast delivery at no extra cost. We are all part of the instant gratification generation, where we can download products like books, music, and games in a few seconds.

To keep pace with this, if you are shipping a physical product ensure that you use an expedited shipping service like the one available at dhl.com. Customers will love that they don’t have to pay extra for this serve and that they can expect their product in a short time.

Easy Returns

Likewise, allowing for easy returns is something that is bound to please your customers. You can find out how to do this at entrepreneur.com. This is because they know if they purchase a product and change their mind, or buy the wrong thing they can easily send it back and get a refund.

Of course, this also helps you close the deal as well. As customers will worry less about making a purchase beforehand.