I love to help people whenever I can so I try to share my tips and tricks for various things that affect business and life in general. My tips for today are for saving your business money. I know this is a topic that is important for everyone and sometimes the solutions for saving just seem impossible. Believe me I know how you feel! So with the price of gas and the way the economy is going now a days and the heat of the Political Conventions I thought I would share some of my tricks on how I manage to save in the office.

Go Paperless – Yes that’s right – one of my green tips saves you money too! Send an email and save .42 cents on a stamp. Send checks electronically via your bank or Quickbooks and save another stamp! Pay your bills online – you can do that for home and work! Send electronic statements in email from Quickbooks or PayPal or create your own statement in Word or Excel (there goes another stamp!). Try not to print your emails too. The less you print the less paper you have to buy, the less supplies you have to purchase in order to store all your printed items too.

Have a Video Conference – Are you always stuck traveling someplace? Try to set up a video conference instead. If you have a webcam there are plenty of services that you can hook up to like Webex.com, Videoconference.com and Skype.com. If you don’t have a webcam they are easy to get a hold of and usually range in price from $9.99 to $199.99. These are also great green options as the less flights that are taken the less of a carbon footprint from airplanes!

Get A Travel Agent – Yes you are reading right! Sure there are plenty of great travel websites that can save you a couple of dollars but nothing is better then a travel agent. A travel agent usually charges a fee anywhere from $35 to $100 but it is worth the investment. The secret with a travel agent is that they develop relationships with the airlines and hotels that is not possible for the average traveler to create. Those relationships equal savings for you! A travel agent usually has access to unadvertised sales and/or discount prices that you would not be able to find on a travel or airline website. And if you are someone whose travel does not always go as planned – making a change can be easier and usually cheaper than a travel website. Your travel agent will also be much easier to reach in an emergency then a travel website and in an effort to get repeat business they are dedicated to you having a good trip.

Free / Low Cost Software – Software is a fortune now a days. But if you are a small business or entrepreneur; the free software version of some programs is just as useful as the pay versions. There are free versions of Quickbooks, eFax, Adobe Acrobat, and countless others. If you are just starting up this is a great way to save some money. The free versions may not have all the features of the paid version but they are pretty useful nonetheless – and when you are trying to keep your overhead down useful is good!

Buy Used Office Equipment and Furniture – Not only is it cheaper but again another green option! Besides Craigslist and eBay there are also companies that sell (and buy in case you want to unload some stuff) used office equipment. Check out websites like officeguild.com or officezone.com. A few extra tips – sometimes you can buy the floor sample of an item at large chain stores like Staples and Office Depot. Also, if you have a membership to BJ’s, Costco or Priceclub – they always carry office supplies; even registers sometimes! Be sure to check them out too and save yourself a few dollars.

Go Virtual – This is a new feature of business that I am happy to be a part of. Going virtual not only saves you money but it also saves you time which equals money when you are a business owner. If you are a small company, non-profit or a start up – hiring a virtual assistant can save you money on overhead. It can also help you to get those tedious little things done that I am sure you hate doing and free you up for the more productive things that make your business grow and flourish. It helps with customer service too – imagine the benefit of having a quicker response to customers and clients!

If you’re looking to sell your website, than optimizing your site for key word density and content is key. However, if you’re thinking about purchasing a website at SecondWind Marketplace, you may want to do a little due diligence and look for a site with a number of well established inbound and outbound links. Typically these sites have been around a little longer than a newly established site and provide a move value, but this should be a crucial step before making the leap to website ownership.
You would think having a number of inbound links to your site would be better, right? Well, sort of. You could literally spend at eternity getting a million incoming links that only counted for .001% towards your websites ranking, however links coming from other pages that already have a number of  inbound links or are completely irrelevant to your site’s content really do not count very much towards your sites overall search engine ranking.
If you’re looking to create the best quality links, we recommend links from a page or domain that:
1.

Are highly related to your content.
2. Have few outbound links.
3. Have a high Google PageRank (we’ll talk about this in a minute)
4. Is from an authority and a quality site in your industry.
Now, before you think about adding a comment, pages having a high number of outbound links but have content highly related to your site, such as directories can still have a positive effect on your popularity.
Therefore, you will still want to spend your time acquiring quality inbound links. There are several ways you can do this:
# Create a terrific site with great content – other sites will naturally link to you.
# Request links from other related sites.
# Establish relationships with other people in your industry (suppliers, wholesale retailers, industry certification sources, etc.) and ask for links back from their site.
# Actively participate in forums – After all, meeting new people virtually and making more friends can’t hurt!
# Write industry related articles (like this one) and allow other people to backlink.
# Write press releases and distribute them freely or through a paid press release service that will distribute your news and links across the web. We recommend 1888pressrelease.com.

Your outbound links should link to quality, authoritative sites.  Always link outward when appropriate and choose wisely using keywords in your anchor text. If you have a page about car insurance prices, and another on the car insurance policies and another on the car insurance resources, link between them and within your content using your keywords in your anchor text. This not only helps people visiting your site, but helps search engines see “quality groupings” of related content. Keep in mind search engines care who you link to, and they do assume that “like minds think alike.” So just don’t link to anyone, and don’t swap links with just anyone who asks.
Now, as a seller what tools can use to verify the information before listing your site on SecondWind Marketplace? Well, there number resources you can use, we recommend checking out the following:
Yahoo! Site Explorer
Yahoo! Site Explorer is a great tool to check out the number of inbound links to your site. However, before you do so you will need to create a Yahoo! Account and upload a verification key or by adding a META tag to your homepage. Once this is completed just click on the Explore button to view the results.
SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer
SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer is a link popularity and Back link verification tool. To use the tool, visit the site and just type the page’s address and hit Get Link Data. The site will display a number od information tabs including page authority, domain authority, link root domains and total links.
There are two things to love about this option. First, the person can compare the site’s links with others, especially to those of potential competitors. As a seller, this may give you some insight into page rank and traffic. Second, there’s no need to register.
However, the free version of SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer will only generate a record of 1,000 links. If you wish to gather a more extensive list, upgrade the membership to Pro for only $ 99/month.
Google Webmaster Tool
As previously mentioned Google has an excellent back link checker and is a little more robust and. This tool is even available with the Google Toolbar. After creating an account, Google’s Webmaster Tool can analyze search data, check inbound and outbound links and even tell if there are errors with your sitemap. All of these features (and more) make optimizing you site much easier.

Recently there has been a lot of chatter going round about a term that was coined by Andrew Cavanagh. This term is “Offline Gold.” Basically what this all boils down to is selling your internet marketing knowledge and skills to brick and mortar businesses. But the question is, “Is this Fool’s Gold or Real Gold?”

The answer to this question depends upon a couple of things. One is your ability when it comes to internet marketing. The second is your ability to sell to someone face to face. This is the main reason that some marketers report great success, but many more report total failure. Unfortunately, all the internet marketing knowledge in the world is useless if you can’t sell water to a fish. This article is going to go over the biggest reasons why mamu Internet marketers fail when approaching offline clients.

First and foremost, many would be offline gold marketers go in without a plan.

They think they can just walk into a store, ask the owner if he has a web site and then, when he says no, give him some sales pitch about how he can make all this money by just having a site online. Many times they take the sensationalist approach when they meet a business owner. Promising them the world. It takes a little more finesse than that if you want to succeed in the offline consulting market. You actually have to form relationships and be subtle in your approach. You will have far greater success if you start out in casual conversation and show interest in that person’s business. If you can show genuine interest in their business the relationship grows much faster.

Eventually, your prospect will ask you what you do and that’s when you can tell him that you are an internet marketing consultant.

Many times they will ask what that is and that is your opportunity to educate them NOT sell them. Be honest. Tell him the REAL benefits of having a web presence, specifically for HIS/HER business. Generally you don’t have to make a sales pitch if you simply educate them on the basics of internet marketing. Just like online marketing you give away value to gain trust and build relationships. When this happens you will make sales. Guaranteed! I do it all the time.

Now comes the part that no one wants to admit to. It’s quite possible that you just suck in a face to face meeting. It could stem from nerves, fear or any other reason but that fact remains that you just can’t sell in a face to face meeting. There are ways to overcome this. You can write out a script, you can interview and hire salespeople to make the sales for you. You can partner with someone who can sell while you do the online magic. There are plenty of ways to succeed in the “Offline Gold” market.

The most important thing is to have a plan. Never go into any endeavor, business or otherwise blind. Always have a plan A and a plan B. Know how you’re going to open, how you’re going to close and everything in between, if you have things mapped out ahead of time, things will take care of themselves.

Much of the information that is being sold specifically to the “Offline Gold” market, just like their online counterparts, make is seem easy to make a 6 figure income. And just like many of the online products happen just like that. Approaching offline clients, contrary to popular belief, is NOT easy. It’s a lot different interacting with real people, who have real faces than it is to interact with the faceless names online. However, once you get used to actually talking to people, I believe it’s one of the best ways to make a living with very little work on your end.

So my answer to the question, “Is it Fool’s Gold or Real Gold?” simply depends on your state of mind. Can you sell face to face, if not can you hire or partner with someone who can? Are you willing to put in the effort required of any business endeavor? Do you truly care about helping your clients succeed. These are questions that only you can answer. But as for me, I say, “There’s GOLD in them thar hills!”