- (www.SmallBusinessFire.com – a .COM domain name)
A domain name is a name that you register with a domain name registar company (normally for a yearly fee). A domain name is the URL or Uniform Resource Locator, which you type into the address bar within your browser (ex. Internet Explorer or Mozilla FireFox). The domain name that you choose is not permanent and you can change who your registar is at any time after 60 days. The domain name will become the information that will allow internet browsers to retrieve your website from your website host.

“What is a host?”

- A host is a company who works like a giant information storage facility for websites. A website hosting service allows you to store all of your website information on one of their servers and allows people to view it using your unique domain name.

“Free hosting?”

- Yes the internet does provide completely free hosting – with ads. The ads really are not that bad when it comes to most free online web hosting services. Yet there are still 3 major things you should be aware of before you decide to use one of the free hosting services:

1. Most free web hosting services have strict non-commercial use only policies

2. You normally do not have the option to use your own .COM domain name

   (some now offer the ability to re-delegate your domain to their service or register one thru their company. But be aware that if you ever would like to move your website to a paid hosting service….it is often very difficult to get your .COM domain transferred to your new service.)

3. Google DOES NOT favor websites hosted via free web hosting services.

   (I would have to say that this is due to the lack of options you normally have when it comes to the overall SEO tweaks that go into getting your site noticed by search engines. Others would add to it by saying that Google just doesn’t like them because it’s free.)

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Note: Paid hosting costs are minimal; you can pay per month, per year, or in some cases per multiple years. I would recommend Godaddy and Hostgator, they both offer some of the most reliable web hosting services and they both offer their services for low prices that really help save small businesses money, while building their online presence.

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With all of that being said, I would like to make it perfectly clear to everyone that I am NOT against free web hosting.
I just believe there is a time and place for this method of hosting to be utilized.

For example, many SEO/Internet Marketing techniques, strategies, and skills exist that require the usage of many different free webhosting services. One of the most effective SEO or Internet Marketing “secret skills”, that is used in order to rank a web site high in the organic search engine results (back linking), relies about 70% on the use of free blogging and webhosting services.

When it comes to creating your center piece (website) for your online presence, I would highly recommend looking into an inexpensive web hosting service that also offers domain registration (GoDaddy.com). Doing so will not only help you avoid many problems and road bumps that you can encounter using other methods, but it also ensures that you are effectively building a solid online presence for your Small Business.

Travis Gutierrez
Phoenix Small Business Solutions
Owner/Small Business Solutions Specialist

Obtaining an effective online presence could cost you less than 1 offline direct marketing campaign. Anytime you would like to send a new offer, a coupon, or company updates…you no longer have to pay for printing, paper, card stock, or postage. In turn with saving money, doubling your Small Business visibility, and increasing your profits; you will be reducing your contribution of unnecessary paper waste to your local trash “mountain”.

If you sell tangible items to your customers, you can easily market and sell those products to anyone in the world via the internet. There are many different avenues you can take to sell your products, but in my opinion, the most effective avenue is an ecommerce website. With your own ecommerce website, you can create an online store front for your customers and have an easily updateable ad that runs 24/7.

Small Businesses, who offer services, have the exact same opportunity to harness an effective online presence. For example, a graphic designer has the ability to show case his work, market his services, generate leads, and even have customers pay him online.

An effective online presence for you Local Small business could mean a lot of things for your overall success. Maybe it’s because the internet has evolved to be the #1 source of information in the world, or maybe it’s simply because it is an inexpensive way to do just about anything! But one FACT remains…if YOUR Small Business does not have an EFFECTIVE online presence…it’s greatly severing its chances to grow and compete in the 21^st century.

Travis Gutierrez
Owner\Small Business Solutions Specialist
Phoenix Small Business Solutions

These tactics are just ideas for stimulating your creativity. Read though these tactics and write them down, afterwards go sit down in a quite comfortable place and reflect these ideas onto your own Small Business. Once you have done this…don’t stop there…take your next step towards action!

Small Business Growth Tactics

Give great priority towards staying ahead of the curve

- In order to compete and grow your Small Business, you must realize that the world changes very quickly. It is in  your Small Business’s best interest to always seek out new ways to improve what you offer and make huge efforts to obsolete what you offer before your competition does it for you….making it even harder for your Small Business to grow and succeed.

Knowing when to be decisive

- The most effective small business leader knows when to be decisive. For example, when it comes to making a decision on whether or not to continue producing or providing something that no longer encompasses any signs of making any further financial sense, this type of decision needs to be dealt with decisively. No matter what the objections may be, “We have always provided that/those to clients” or “But this company is known for doing it that way”… laser focused and decisive actions must be taken.

Always ask

- You have spent money prospecting, advertising, and building relationships with clients. Don’t you think it’s worth your time to establish a means of communication between you and your clients to ask them what they would like to see your company produce or provide in the future? This will always result in the most 100% accurate assessments in discovering what your Small Business should be doing in order to achieve desired levels of growth. Remember…”Your clients ALWAYS have the answers!”

Don’t stop there?

- Ask your clients even more practical questions. Your clients are the receivers and the users of your products or services; make sure you ask them how they are using your products and services. What you will find is that many of your clients will have unique applications in which they apply your products/services. This will give you an inside look at the many diverse, unique and creative methods for marketing your products/services.

The All Knowing ______!

- Everything you need to know about your Small Business is easily accessible within the minds of your “All Knowing Clients”… So just ASK! You are shooting yourself in the foot if you are not already doing this. We must always remember that our clients are at the heart of our Small Businesses and without them we are nothing!   – “Just because you got the sale…doesn’t mean the relationship has to end there.” – Travis Gutierrez

The normal boundaries of a Small Business no longer exist!

- For some Small Business owners they are still bound to many out of date boundaries that have completely become diminished. There was a point in time when Small Businesses were bound to their local economies…and that was it. (Unless you struck a deal with some rich business owner who in turn offered your products outside of your local economy.) Today all of this has changed! Technology and the internet make it 110% possible to become a market leader almost overnight.  If you are worried that your Small Business will not survive a bad economy…GET ONLINE NOW! If you don’t do it effectively … right now … all of your competition will … and you will be left unable to compete.

E-Commerce

- If your Small Business fits this business model…I suggest you do it! Online sales have consistently been on the rise since 1999 … more people shop online at any given time than all of the people shopping in every mall in the US! Provide your customers/clients with a way to educate themselves, find solutions to their own problems, and even order your products with a few clicks of a mouse. Even if you can’t really SELL anything on the internet, making an effective presence on the internet, and providing your customers with unique/creative ways to learn and educate themselves should be a very high priority for your Small Business.

Take note and track EVERYTHING

- Your Small Business can only be improved upon if your business practices are noted down, tracked, measured, and audited on a consistent basis for their level of effectiveness. Share the results of this with all of your employees and/or partners whether they are good or bad.     *Note – Always remember to criticize poor performance privately and celebrate success publicly to ensure a healthy environment for everyone to continue towards success!

Challenges along the way

- There are never going to be 2 Small Businesses that are EXACTLY the same. With that, every Small Business will not be guaranteed the same path towards growth and success. Every Small Business’s journey will include many mistakes, surprises, road blocks, and opportunities. Knowing this, we must understand that this is all just the process of Small Business growth and there is not a single clear direction for growth that fits every single Small Business out there.

Take this knowledge, reflect it upon your Small Business, and take your next step towards the growth of YOUR Small Business!

The tactics provided below are only a third of what it takes to grow a Small Business. The other 2 pieces of the pie are creativity and action. A Small Business must stay creative and unique in order to receive opportunities for desired levels of growth. All of this is a good start…but even with opportunities for growth…without action you will never have a fighting chance of achieving and/or sustaining any type of Small Business growth.

These tactics are just ideas for stimulating your creativity. Read though these tactics and write them down, afterwards go sit down in a quite comfortable place and reflect these ideas onto your own Small Business. Once you have done this…don’t stop there…take your next step towards action!

Small Business Growth Tactics

Give great priority towards staying ahead of the curve

- In order to compete and grow your Small Business, you must realize that the world changes very quickly. It is in you and your Small Business’s best interest to always seek out new ways to improve what you offer and make huge efforts to obsolete what you offer before your competition does it for you….making it even harder for your Small Business to grow and succeed.

Knowing when to be decisive

- The most effective small business leader knows when to be decisive. For example, when it comes to making a decision on whether or not to continue producing or providing something that no longer encompasses any signs of making any further financial sense, this type of decision needs to be dealt with decisively. No matter what the objections may be, “We have always provided that/those to clients” or “But this company is known for doing it that way”… laser focused and decisive actions must be taken.

Always ask

- You have spent money prospecting, advertising, and building relationships with clients. Don’t you think it’s worth your time to establish a means of communication between you and your clients to ask them what they would like to see your company produce or provide in the future? This will always result in the most 100% accurate assessments in discovering what your Small Business should be doing in order to achieve desired levels of growth. Remember…”Your clients ALWAYS have the answers!”

Don’t stop there?

- Ask your clients even more practical questions. Your clients are the receivers and the users of your products or services; make sure you ask them how they are using your products and services. What you will find is that many of your clients will have unique applications in which they apply your products/services. This will give you an inside look at the many diverse, unique and creative methods for marketing your products/services.

The All Knowing ______!

- Everything you need to know about your Small Business is easily accessible within the minds of your “All Knowing Clients”… So just ASK! You are shooting yourself in the foot if you are not already doing this. We must always remember that our clients are at the heart of our Small Businesses and without them we are nothing!   – “Just because you got the sale…doesn’t mean the relationship has to end there.” – Travis Gutierrez

The normal boundaries of a Small Business no longer exist!

- For some Small Business owners they are still bound to many out of date boundaries that have completely become diminished. There was a point in time when Small Businesses were bound to their local economies…and that was it. (Unless you struck a deal with some rich business owner who in turn offered your products outside of your local economy.) Today all of this has changed! Technology and the internet make it 110% possible to become a market leader almost overnight.  If you are worried that your Small Business will not survive a bad economy…GET ONLINE NOW! If you don’t do it effectively … right now … all of your competition will … and you will be left unable to compete.

E-Commerce

- If your Small Business fits this business model…I suggest you do it! Online sales have consistently been on the rise since 1999 … more people shop online at any given time than all of the people shopping in every mall in the US. Provide your customers/clients with a way to educate themselves, find solutions to their own problems, and even order your products with a few clicks of a mouse. Even if you can’t really SELL anything on the internet, making an effective presence on the internet, and providing your customers with unique/creative ways to learn and educate themselves should be a very high priority for your Small Business.

Take note and track EVERYTHING

- Your Small Business can only be improved upon if your business practices are noted down, tracked, measured, and audited on a consistent basis for their level of effectiveness. Share the results of this with all of your employees and/or partners whether they are good or bad.     *Note – Always remember to criticize poor performance privately and celebrate success publicly to ensure a healthy environment for everyone to continue towards success!

Challenges along the way

- There are never going to be 2 Small Businesses that are EXACTLY the same. With that, every Small Business will not be guaranteed the same path towards growth and success. Every Small Business’s journey will include many mistakes, surprises, road blocks, and opportunities. Knowing this, we must understand that this is all just the process of Small Business growth and there is not a single clear direction for growth that fits every single Small Business out there.

Take this knowledge, reflect it upon your Small Business, and take your next step towards the growth of YOUR Small Business!

“If your imagination leads you to understand how quickly people grant your requests when those requests appeal to their self-interest, you can have practically anything you go after.” — Napoleon Hill

First and foremost, becoming an effective Small Business leader requires lots of self-confidence. Above that, a leader must be able to share that self-confidence with others and create confidence within everyone they encounter. Most people have the ability to become effective Small Business leaders, but they have a hard time building their superior self-confidence levels.

Below are some tips on how to build your effective Small Business leader self-confidence levels by taking action now!

Promote the Golden Rule by following it

- Treat everyone as you feel you should be treated. This will not only create massive trust levels between you and the people you desire to lead, but it will also aid in creating a comfortable environment for you followers. A leader who acts more like a dictator will lose more dedicated followers than they will ever gain.

Lead with VISION

- Followers need a reason to follow, a reason that is important to them and feels as though it will truly benefit them. Your job as an effective Small Business leader is to not only provide a reason…but to provide a vision to create reason. In order to fruit loyal followers from this vision you must provide clarity, understanding, structured levels of participation, and rewards to keep the vision tangible.

Radiate a feeling of importance to others.

- Followers can easily lose their enthusiasm and will surely take more followers with them. To avoid this from crippling your Small Business, you must make everyone feel important. Do not let your goals and decisions come across as being self-centered, you must ensure that you emphasize follower’s strengths and contributions towards the overall goals…and not your own.

Stay visible on the front lines

- In order to succeed as an effective Small Business leader, it is essential that you are visible in the day to day process of getting the job done. Talk to people down on the front lines, relate with everyone, take part in how business is being handled, and observe as much as possible. This will also lead you towards gaining new insights into your small business, thus leading to new opportunities to strengthen the bond between you and your followers. The bond that is necessary in a Small Business in order to achieve great things!

Never deny that you are wrong when you have made a mistake!

- Covering up your mistakes may seem like a good idea at first, but most followers will recognize this faster than you will EVER think. When someone suspects that you are covering up your own errors, they will then be more inclined to hide their mistakes too. This will cause many problems for you and your Small Business, one of them being a lack of trust leading to more secrets, thus leading to you not receiving all of the important information you require to make sound decisions.

Privately Criticize Your Followers

- Even if you believe it to be ‘constructive’ criticism…chances are…you will only be embarrassing and alienating those who follow you. Public praise on the other hand is a valuable asset in your arsenal. Not only does it make the ones you praise feel good about themselves (resulting in self-confidence and future achievements), but it encourages others to excel and achieve greater accomplishments.

Create Healthy Follower Competition

- When used correctly, competition can be a very valuable asset towards Small Business success. Setting team goals is a great path towards correctly accomplishing this. When setting up team goals, you must reward those followers who meet and exceed them (thus creating healthy competition). By implementing a fun competitive drive within your Small Business, you will have the ability to examine the group’s success and how they got there…but you will also get a perfect chance to examine the group’s failures. By understanding what is causing the group’s failure, you will posess a healthier insight towards successfully implementing solutions that will assist in less frequent group failures!

Travis Gutierrez — Phoenix Small Business Solutions
Owner/Small Business Solutions Specialist

And that’s just in the US.

Ecommerce sales from the US were $10 billion, and we only captured 30% of the global ecommerce market! So, how can you reach this growing number of internet surfers, and how can you capture some of that $10 billion spent in ecommerce?

First, you build it

The first step is designing a website. (Or have one designed for you) If your company already has business cards and letterhead, it’s best to have a website designed around them.  A matching corporate identity and website helps create effective branding for your small business.

The best website you can have is an uncomplicated one, with a simple layout and easy navigation. A nice, simple layout, with good graphics, balanced look and good color combinations is the #1 goal when designing a small business web site. Remember to use graphics sparingly and to optimize them for your website because internet surfers are impatient.  If your page loads too slowly they’ll leave.

Navigation should be easy to find and to use, and it should be consistent from page to page.  I’m sure you’ve left more than one site frustrated because you couldn’t easily find your way around their site.

Small business web sites aren’t static.  They evolve.  You need to start somewhere, and starting with an introductory web site is probably easiest.  All you really need to start is five pages.  You can always add pages later. (If you hire someone to employ your small business web design, you should have the site built with as much content as possible and make sure whoever you hire, builds your site with SEO in mind.) The important thing is to just do it—take the plunge and get it out there.

Your five pages could include an index, or home page, about us, services, contact and a sitemap.  The index page is your landing page.  Typically its design is a little more detailed than the others, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

I like to use CSS (cascading style sheets) for designing because it’s simply easier to build a web site and to edit its layout with CSS rather than just HTML (hypertext markup language) alone.  A change on a CSS sheet changes all the pages on your site at once.

Content is king

Once your site is designed, you’ll want to start thinking about content.  Design is very important, but it does little good to have a beautiful site without high-quality content.

Your small business home page introduces you and your company—who you are and what you do.  The about us page is usually used to give more detail than the home page about who you are, and your services page gives more detail about what you do.  You might wonder why you’d “waste” a page on a sitemap since you only have 5 pages, but sitemaps help search engines find all the pages in your site.

As far as content goes, more is better, up to a point.  Your pages should be content rich and informative, but they also need to be relevant to your small business.  If your visitor can’t figure out what your web site is about in just a few seconds, they may leave.

The internet was at first strictly informational, and that’s how it remains today.  Several times people have tried experiments using copywriting similar to direct mail sales letters, but they’ve all failed.  It seems as if people surf the internet more for information than anything else.  Knowing this will help you write pages people will want to read.

Attracting visitors

You could follow your instinct and just start writing, but wait.  There’s research you must do first, or your web site simply won’t be high enough in searches to be found.  Search engine optimization is far too big a subject to cover in this short article, but among other things, search engines find your pages based on keywords.

So, pretend for a moment that you’re on the other side of the desk.  If you were a customer of your own business, what words or phrases would you use to search for your product or service?  Ask friends and neighbors how they’d search for your product or services.

Remember that people generally don’t look beyond the first three pages for any search term, so if you’re not in the top three pages, your business is not likely to be found at all.  If there are millions of results for your phrase, you might simply need to make it more specific.

What you want to do is write your content around those words and phrases.  You don’t want or need very many—three or four are plenty.

Getting visitors to come back to your site again and again is relatively simple.  Keep your content fresh and lively, make sure it’s informative, and add to it often.

I hope you decide your small business needs a web site.  It’s the best way I know how to reach a wider target audience with the lowest investment and the highest ROI.

This is why it makes sense to have at the very least, a moderate understanding of how these major search engines actually do their jobs.

When you start learning about search engines, there are a few terms you need to come to grasps with.

• Spiders
• Crawl
• Index
• Links
• Meta Tags

Search Engines use spiders to index websites hosted all over the internet. When your website is successfully submitted to a search engine, the search engine’s spider will receive a request to then crawl and index your entire site. A ‘spider’ is an automated program that is run by the search engine and is specifically designed to index your web site using a complicated algorithm. The spider performs a few tasks when it visits your site, it reads the content, meta tags, and it follows the links that the site connects with. The spider then returns all of this information back to a ‘central database or directory’, where it is then indexed based on the spiders findings.

After your site is initially indexed by the search engine,  its spider will periodically return to the site and check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by a few things, one of them is simply the number of relevant content websites that link back to your site for the spiders to follow.

When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indexes.

One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword stuffing or spamdexing. Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page.

All of this and more comes into play when making attempt to rank your website in the major search engine’s organic search results.

- Travis Gutierrez

Read the article here: http://www.smallbusinessfire.com/internet-standard

• Is your *LOCAL* SMALL BUSINESS ready to compete in a recession?

“Patience, persistence and perspiration make an unbeatable combination for success”

–Napoleon Hill

If a Local Small Business truly wants to succeed and survive during harsh economic times, they must equip themselves with the most effective tools and ensure they are ready to compete in the heart of the 21st century.

Phoenix Small Business Solutions is the very first service provider of its kind. Part of what makes us so unique is the fact that we are a Local Small Business, and we are 110% dedicated towards servicing our Local Small Business Community. We are located in the Atascocita, Texas – Kingwood, Texas – Humble, Texas – Houston, Texas area.

Phoenix Small Business Solutions is a premier Marketing and Business Development service provider. Our Local Small Business community now has the ability to receive the results, the customization, and the dedication they deserve when they need solutions. Being a Local Small Business ourselves, gives us an advantage over most of our competitors…because we understand your needs, we understand your stress, and we know what a Small Business budget looks like!

Stop wasting your hard earned money!

• Cookie cutter marketing solutions offered by directory services and other large companies are not worth your money!
• With Phoenix Small Business Solutions you are guaranteed a custom Small Business Solution that is tailored for you! Providing you with the right tools, services, and motivation – we are here to help you ignite your Small Business Fire!

Get the service you deserve!

• Small Business owners work hard. They deserve the value, the resources, and the quality service that any larger business would receive.
• With Phoenix Small Business Solutions we become your partner TODAY! Even before you do business with us, we begin to offer you value and useful information to help you and your Small Business succeed. With our Free Small Business Resource page, our online Small Business Workshop offers, and our Free Small Business Strategy Analysis…you can rest assured that Phoenix Small Business Solutions will deliver you the value and the quality YOU DESERVE!

“It is lit­er­ally true that you can suc­ceed best and quick­est by help­ing oth­ers to suc­ceed.” — Napoleon Hill

A helping hand during uncertain times…

Browse our website to learn more about us, make use of our Free Small Business Resources, sign up for our news letter, and keep up to date with our Small Business Workshops.

Experience the premier services offered by Phoenix Small Business Solutions.

We are your partner, your friend, and your neighbor…..and we are all in this TOGETHER.

Take action today…the longer you wait…the further away you push your dreams!

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“Don’t wait. The time will never be just right.”

- Napoleon Hill

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Send us an e-mail or give us a call today.

Phone: (281)764‑1164

E-Mail: Support@smallbusinessfire.com

Your first step towards Small Business Success Starts Now!